A Wedding on the Beach

by Holly Chamberlin

  Mike reached out and placed his hands on her arms. “Do you feel okay?” he asked, a note of concern in his voice. “Do you have a sense that something’s wrong? A sixth sense, women’s intuition?”

  “No!” Marta clenched her fingers around the comb so tightly that her fingers prickled with pain. “Sorry,” she said. “I didn’t mean to raise my voice. Just, please, Mike, let me . . . Let me alone with this for a bit longer.”

  Mike took his hands from her arms. “Of course,” he said. “Whatever you want. You know best.”

  Did she? Marta managed to say, “Thank you.” She turned to the mirror over the dresser and stared unseeingly at her reflection.

  “I’m going to take a shower.” Mike took his robe from the hook behind the door and left the room. When he was gone, Marta moved away from the mirror and sat heavily on the edge of the bed. She knew he didn’t understand. How could he when she was being so uncommunicative? The poor guy probably just chalked up her strange behavior to a particularly aggressive assault of hormones. Those mysterious Female Troubles. That infamous unbalanced state of mind that made women unfit for high political office or for holding down major corporate appointments. Marta felt like hitting something, and not because her emotions were out of control. Her emotions were very much in her control and what she wanted to do with them at that moment was to destroy. The feminine destructive force was as real and as strong as the feminine creative force. And the sooner men understood that, the better.

  Marta got up from the bed, hurriedly dressed, and headed for the kitchen before Mike could return to their bedroom. She was not eager to be alone with him right then. She found Allison and Bess in the kitchen, leafing through the local papers. A bouquet of flowers from the garden sat on the island counter.

  “Do either of you have journals or diaries from years ago?” Marta asked when she had poured a cup of decaf coffee. “Like, from our college days?”

  Allison looked up from the newspaper. “Mine are in a storage unit,” she said. “When my parents died, I had to empty their house before selling it, so what remains of my childhood came back into my possession. Not that I have any plans on reading those old diaries,” she added. “I suspect the experience would be both painful and cringe-worthy. Anyway, why the question?”

  Marta took a sip of coffee and shrugged.

  “My stuff is still in my parents’ attic, where I stashed it years ago,” Bess said. “Until they sell the house—if they ever do—that’s where everything from my childhood will remain.”

  Allison smiled. “We hang on to the relics of our past, as if throwing them out would somehow—What? Blot out who we once were? Aren’t memories enough?”

  “Relics help trigger memories,” Bess said, “especially ones we might not otherwise recall so easily.”

  “Maybe we don’t need those particular memories triggered,” Marta pointed out.

  “What about your old things?” Allison asked Marta.

  “I never kept a diary or a journal. And I donated or threw out most everything else ages ago. I’m not the most sentimental person, but you know that.” Marta paused before going on in what she hoped was a nonchalant tone. “I was wondering. What did you guys feel about my not going to law school like I had planned?”

  “It was your decision,” Bess said after a moment. “I don’t think I felt anything about it.”

  “I was surprised,” Allison told her. “I always saw you as a lawyer in the making, maybe because that’s how you introduced yourself when we first met. Hi, I’m Marta and I’m pre-law. I wondered if you’d be bored not going on for a higher degree, but then I figured you’d never allow yourself to be bored. You’d find something else challenging to do.”

  Marta laughed; she was afraid it was bitterly. “And then I became a mom.”

  Allison smiled kindly. “See? I was right.”

  “You’re not having regrets, are you?” Bess asked.

  Marta laughed. “Like I’d welcome that sort of debt on top of what Mike accrued during his law school days? And for what? Long hours and difficult clients? Every Tom, Dick, and Harry you meet at a party asking for free legal advice? Being the butt of stupid anti-lawyer jokes? No, I have no regrets.”

  Marta put her empty cup of coffee in the sink.

  “Don’t you want any breakfast?” Bess asked.

  “No, thanks,” she said. “I’m not hungry.” She made her way to the back porch and from there down to the lawn. What a liar she had become. She couldn’t even tell the truth about something as minor as a desire for one of the raspberry muffins sitting prettily on a platter.

  Let alone the truth about an unwanted pregnancy.

  Chapter 24

  “Do you think she does regret not going to law school?” Bess asked when Marta had gone.

  “I don’t know,” Allison admitted. “It’s hard to tell what Marta feels or doesn’t feel. She keeps so much to herself and when she does talk she so often resorts to exaggerations or flippant remarks.” More so recently, Allison thought.

  Bess shook her head. “It’s just that she’s such a great mother. And even if she does feel the need for a change, she’s got all that mom experience to use toward building a career.”

  “The situation might not seem so positive to her,” Allison pointed out. Naïve, simplistic Bess. “And not all ‘mom experience’ as you call it is readily marketable, at least not without a lot of spin and convincing. Not that Marta doesn’t have it in her to elbow her way into public notice, I believe she does, but she might not think so, not after so many years on the sidelines as it were.”

  “Mike would help her,” Bess said firmly. “I know he would. He must have tons of contacts, and not only in the law.”

  “Maybe Marta doesn’t want his help—assuming, of course, she’s thinking about making a change. His support, sure, but knowing Marta, I think she’d want to do whatever it is she wants to do on her own. Remember how in college she was the only one of us who never joined a study group? She always went her own way.”

  “I remember,” Bess said. She glanced at her watch. “Almost eight thirty. I have to call Kara in a moment. Don’t forget to have one of those muffins,” she added as she dashed in the direction of the den. “They’re awesome.”

  Allison did help herself to a muffin, though she was unable to eat all of it, then headed down to the beach. She didn’t see Marta on her journey; who knew where she had gone? Marta wasn’t the type to wander aimlessly; at least, she hadn’t been in the past.

  Allison had been at the water’s edge for only a minute or two when a young man holding the hand of a toddler came into her line of vision. She watched as the man bent down so that he was face-to-face with the child as he spoke. The child squatted and splashed the water with his free hand. Allison’s heart contracted painfully.

  That day. That dreadful day. Chris had gotten to the hospital before the ambulance that had brought Allison. Tears coursing down his face, he insisted on holding her hand in the ER while doctors examined and nurses tended. It wasn’t long before it was confirmed that the baby had been lost. Within hours, Chris went from excessively solicitous behavior to an inability even to meet Allison’s eye, let alone hold her hand.

  One of the nurses, noticing Chris’s behavior, had tried to comfort Allison. “Men feel just as deeply as we do,” she had said, “but they have a hell of a time admitting what they feel, even to themselves.” She had smiled and patted Allison’s shoulder. “He’ll come around once you’re both home. You’ll see.”

  Allison was grateful for the nurse’s efforts at comfort, but the woman didn’t know that Chris was still grieving the loss of his younger brother, a death that had taken place over thirty years earlier but that in some ways felt as new and raw to Chris as if it had happened the day before.

  So, the following morning Allison and Chris went home. Allison, mourning her own loss, vowed to help Chris deal with his. In time, she believed, they would begin to heal and together, they would emerge fro
m the darkness as they had once been, a deeply devoted husband and wife.

  Things did not go well. When Allison reached out to Chris he flinched before accepting her touch. He went from sleeping with his back turned to her, to staying up very late into the night so that even at two or three in the morning Allison, half-waking from a troubled sleep, would find herself alone. Come morning she would discover him on the couch in the living room, his face a mask of tension, his eyes screwed shut, as if in his sleep he was battling a very great enemy.

  Chris went back to work immediately. He turned down all invitations to meet with well-meaning friends. Allison could only imagine how Chris and his father were behaving with each other at the office. They had always been rather formal. Now, they must be downright frigid.

  Allison returned to her studio. Answering clients’ calls, meeting the demands of a deadline, all of it was better than sitting alone at home, worrying about the state of her marriage, worrying about the state of her mind.

  The days dragged on. More often than not Chris claimed he didn’t want dinner. Allison found herself eating most of her meals alone. Gradually, she stopped eating any sort of regular meal.

  One afternoon, while cleaning out her desk, Allison came across a photo she had taken three years earlier when she and Chris had spent a week in San Francisco. It occurred to her, as she looked at their smiling faces, that maybe a vacation was what they needed. Getting away wouldn’t erase what had happened, it wouldn’t even cause them to forget, but it might give them the time and space to acknowledge together what had happened to them. It might allow them to bridge the dizzying gap that had opened so suddenly between them, a gap that seemed to be getting wider and deeper with each passing day.

  When Chris got home from work that evening Allison broached the subject. “It’s just that everything here is such a reminder of what we’ve lost. If we could just go somewhere new together and be on our own, maybe then we could . . . Maybe then we could talk and begin to heal. What do you think?”

  Chris had looked at her, stunned. When he spoke, his voice was almost unrecognizable, so filled was it with outrage. “How shallow and coldhearted can you be?” he asked. “You want to take a vacation? As if you deserved a treat after what you did!”

  Deserved? What did deserving have to do with healing? After what she had done? As if she had callously set out to put the life of their unborn child at risk?

  Allison could find nothing to say. There was much that could and maybe even that should be said, but she was incapable of accessing it.

  A few days after that dismal exchange Chris announced that he wanted a divorce. More, that he had already hired an attorney. Maybe the news shouldn’t have come as a surprise, given the domestic atmosphere of raw misery that had taken hold in the month since the accident, but it did. When the words had sunk in, Allison made the mistake—if an excusable one—of asking Chris why he wanted a divorce.

  “Because,” he said, his tone flat and cold, “I can’t get it out of my mind that not long before you got pregnant you told me you wanted to abandon our efforts. I can’t help but wonder if you didn’t get into your car that morning wishing there would be an accident that would solve your little problem.”

  It was the cruelest, most brutal thing anyone had ever said to Allison. “No,” she cried. “You can’t believe . . . I never . . .”

  But Chris went ruthlessly on. “I’m moving into my parents’ place for the time being. You can stay here. I can’t bear it one more minute.”

  Those words. I can’t bear it one more minute. Allison used the toe of her sneaker to dig a pretty white shell from where it was half buried in the sand. The bit that had been hidden was mottled with a greenish growth. Allison took a step away from the shell. As if she could have born for another moment the atmosphere of alienation that had come over their home?

  For almost two weeks she had absolutely refused to believe that Chris really wanted a divorce. She had gone through the motions of her days and nights, expecting a call from her husband, expecting him to appear at the door to their home, expecting a miracle.

  One afternoon the landline in the condo rang. Allison remembered wondering why they still had a landline. She answered the call.

  “Good afternoon,” a woman said. She spoke with a practiced professional voice. “My name is Meryl Moss and I’m an agent with Leafy Bough Realty. With whom am I speaking?”

  Allison told her, wondering how quickly she could end the call without being rude. She did not need a Realtor.

  “Good afternoon, Ms. Montague,” the woman went on. “The reason I’m calling is to enquire if you’ve chosen an agent to handle the sale of your property at Market Avenue.”

  “But the condo isn’t for sale,” Allison had replied promptly.

  “I don’t understand,” the Realtor went on. “I was informed that the property was for sale but that it hadn’t yet been listed with a broker.”

  Allison’s hand tightened on the phone. “Where did you hear that?” she demanded.

  “The property was discussed at our meeting this morning,” Ms. Moss said. “We were told the owners are divorcing and looking to move the property quickly. If I may—”

  “No,” Allison spat. “You may not.” With a satisfying slam, she replaced the receiver. Good old landline.

  She could no longer deny the inevitable. Chris was serious about a divorce.

  Allison turned away from the sight of the ocean and headed back to Driftwood House. How much longer could she remain silent, plagued by these loud and insistent memories, bound by that promise to Chris he had so unfairly forced her to make? For better or worse, she thought, not much longer.

  Not much longer.

  Chapter 25

  Bess had brought in dinner from Molly’s Family Pizza that evening. An easy meal with virtually no cleanup meant that by seven thirty everyone was gathered on the back porch to enjoy the sunset. Bess felt content and thought the others might be feeling the same, even Allison. But maybe that was her optimistic nature at work. She looked more closely at her friends. What was she missing about them all? What were they hiding?

  “We’ve had our share of adventures, and not all of them pleasant,” Chuck was saying to Nathan.

  Marta raised an eyebrow. “Who could forget the time Mike got lost in Mexico City!”

  “I did not get lost! We were all together at the Metropolitan Cathedral,” Mike said, looking to Nathan and to Dean, “and the plan was for Allison, Chris, and Marta to go to The Dolores Olmedo Museum to see the Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera collections, while Chuck and Bess went back to the Palacio de Bellas Artes to see some temporary folk art exhibit they’d somehow missed the day before, and then for us all to meet up after for lunch.”

  “And where were you going to be while the others were soaking up culture?” Dean asked, restraining a grin.

  “I was just going to wander around, see the sights. The problem came when I set out later to meet everyone where we’d planned to meet . . .” Mike put meaningful emphasis on those last few words.

  “And he wasn’t there when we arrived,” Chuck went on. “So, we sat down anyway and ordered lunch and still no Mike. And he wasn’t answering his cell phone—”

  “Turns out I’d left it at the hotel,” Mike said with a shrug. “But I was on my way to—”

  “The wrong restaurant!” Marta said with a laugh. “He thought we’d agreed to meet at some place called Casa Tito by the Palacio.”

  “That is what we said!” Mike insisted. “I remember it distinctly.”

  “When in fact,” Bess went on, “we’d said we’d meet at the Café Teatro!”

  Mike rolled his eyes, put up his hands, and surrendered.

  “By the time we all hooked up again,” Marta said, “none of us was in a very good mood.”

  “We had been worried,” Bess explained. “For a while we thought that maybe Mike had been mugged and his ID had been stolen and he had a head injury and was wandering around the
streets not knowing who or where he was.”

  “You thought those things,” Marta corrected. “The rest of us weren’t worried, just annoyed.”

  “Thanks a lot,” Mike said. “I might have been in trouble, you know!”

  “Sensibly,” Bess said, “Chris suggested we go back to the hotel and wait for Mike there. So, we did and that’s when Marta found Mike’s cell phone in their room. That solved one part of the puzzle.”

  “And finally,” Marta went on, “Mike showed up, looking all grimy and sweaty.”

  “I did not look grimy and sweaty,” Mike protested.

  “Didn’t it ever occur to you that maybe you’d gone to the wrong restaurant?” Nathan asked Mike. “Or that maybe something dire had happened to one of the others?”

  “Eventually. But without my cell phone I had no choice but to go back to the hotel and wait for word.”

  “Next time we’re putting a homing device on him,” Marta said, with a jerk of her thumb in Mike’s direction.

  Nobody laughed or made a comment. Bess thought Marta was being pretty harsh with Mike, bringing up the incident in the first place and then belaboring the story.

  “And who could forget the time Marta went into labor during our ski holiday in Colorado,” Allison said. “Thinking about it still gives me chills!”

  “I wasn’t due for almost three weeks,” Marta told Dean and Nathan. “Luckily, we weren’t far from civilization.”

  “I panicked,” Bess admitted. “I was a total wreck, like that character from Gone With the Wind, the one who cries out something like, ‘I don’t know nothin’ ’bout birthin’ no babies.’”

  Mike shook his head. “I never should have allowed you to leave home,” he said gravely.

  Marta’s face turned red. “Allowed me?” she demanded.

  “I’m sure he—” Bess began.

  “I mean,” Mike corrected, “I should have more strongly suggested you not travel.”

  Marta did not reply, just looked away from her husband.