The Whole Thing Together

by Ann Brashares

  It was strange, it was wonderful to have a counterpart.

  —

  Ray couldn’t remember what Sasha looked like even minutes after he’d seen her. That was why it hit him so hard this time. He was flappable. He was flapped. He worried if he so much as turned a corner, he’d lose her again.

  Last time, casually clothed in a darkish hallway, the shape of her seemed partly a function of his heated imagination. Back then she was still a stranger with a stranger’s possibilities.

  This time he just gaped, a violent deadlock of desires and inhibitions. Her delicacy and roundness and slenderness were a story justly told by her pale green dress—told better than his overheating brain could muster.

  She was talking to Jamie’s sister. He could barely look at her, but he couldn’t look anywhere else.

  The inhibitions were not quite holding up their end, were they? He tried to concentrate on what he was saying to Mr. Folkes, their neighbor on Eel Cove Road, but he kept losing track. Mr. Folkes was largely senile, so they, at least, were decently matched.

  Sasha/Ray, is that really you? Can the yin of my yang really look like that? Make me feel like that?

  An eerie breeze blew across the patio, across the pond. Robert walked by and looked him up and down, and Ray’s inhibitions got back in the game.

  —

  Just before the party started, Emma had tentatively begun to eschew the whole idea of the trial. She’d had a perilously delusional thought: What if this is actually fun?

  She’d felt confident in her peach-pink dress. Jamie had kissed her passionately behind the hedge just before his family arrived. She’d thought, well, maybe it really was their party: to control, to enjoy.

  Her sisters had gone all out to make everything look pretty. Jamie’s parents seemed wholesome and friendly. At first.

  “Can you say something to the bartender? Don’t let him give my mother another gin and tonic, okay?” Jamie whispered to her urgently as he was drawn past by Grandma Hardy.

  Emma looked around. Susan Hurn was standing a few feet from the makeshift bar, tall lime-topped glass in hand, talking animatedly with Evie. Jamie’s father was standing by the pool with her father discussing golf or fishing or home repair or something. Her dad kept gesturing a large movement with his arm.

  The clouds to the west were distinctly gray, and an erratic breeze was starting to blow. Party guests were anchoring paper plates and napkins under glasses and bottles.

  Emma caught sight of her own mother standing near the house with an untouched plate of food, barely holding it together. Adam was in careful attendance. He felt the danger too, she knew.

  It worried her that the Hurns seemed to be snubbing Lila. Was it because of the stupid note on engraved stationery? Had Lila never responded? They must have sensed her hostility to the whole thing. “She’ll come around to it,” she’d overheard Jamie saying to his mother on the phone the night before.

  Emma dipped into the house and saw Quinn assembling her flower cake in the kitchen. Mattie, dressed like a pilgrim, relatively speaking, and uncharacteristically shy, was fixing up the buffet. The small contingent of Princeton friends had walked down to the pond.

  I wish this was over.

  She watched Jamie’s mother take a step toward the bar and order yet another drink from the pimply neighbor kid playing bartender.

  What was Emma supposed to do? Was she supposed to take the drink from her mother-in-law-to-be’s clenched hand? A woman with whom she’d so far exchanged all of five sentences? It seemed early in the relationship for intervention and tough love.

  Why didn’t he mention his mother was a lush? she thought uncharitably. There had been clues though, hadn’t there? If she’d been paying attention. If she’d wanted to ask. Had he wanted her to?

  Emma had always been an uncharitable person, fine, yet she’d never had an uncharitable thought about Jamie before this.

  She heard the dreaded clinking of fork on glass. Her father was keeping track of the sky too. This was uncomfortable, but a necessary step in getting the party over with. She cast a wary eye at Jamie. Here goes.

  Her father positioned himself in the center of the patio with Evie nearby. He clinked his glass again and guests began to drift over. Jamie set Grandma Hardy up in a sturdy chair and went over to check on his mother. His father had already found a seat for her. Jamie’s sister, Grace, looked apprehensive.

  You’re supposed to be the normal ones, Emma mused.

  Lila was still backed up against the house, a semi-willing participant. No one wanted to eat her bean salad.

  Mattie emerged from the house and steered a wide path around Lila. Quinn came out the sliding-glass kitchen doors carrying her cake, framed in wildflowers, the loveliest offering of all, and placed it on the buffet table. Sasha stood uncomfortably by Evie; Ray stood with Mr. and Mrs. Reese under the shade of the arbor.

  Jamie appeared at Emma’s side and reached for her hand. She saw the sweat stains down the back of his shirt and felt a wave of tenderness.

  “First, Evie and I would like to welcome our guests,” her father began in a loud, public voice. He reached over to wrap his arm around Evie.

  Emma cast an uneasy look at her mother. It didn’t help, her father putting it like that.

  “Especially the Hurns, who’ve come all the way from Ohio to be with us,” he went on. Her father didn’t seem nervous, exactly, but he did seem stiff. He talked on about how proud he was of her and Jamie for their commitment to each other and to the great institution of marriage blah blah.

  A bit of polite clapping came mostly from the old people in the group.

  “Emma, you are a beautiful and accomplished young woman.” He lifted his glass and she lifted hers in return. “Jamie, you are a credit to your family and a credit to our firm.”

  “Thank you, sir.”

  Usually Emma enjoyed praise of any kind, but this she could do without. Intimate praise for public ears never felt right to her. Anyway, it wasn’t for her and Jamie. It was mostly for himself and for the Hurns.

  “I raise my glass to you both.”

  There was a lot of clapping and glass raising and corny “hear, hear” kinds of things.

  Jamie’s father, Stewart, moved next to Robert. He cleared his throat, waited for quiet. “Susan and I would like to thank Robert and Evie for opening their beautiful home to us.”

  Emma waited for him to thank Lila and Adam, but he didn’t. He droned on for a while longer and finished with another groaner:

  “And we’d like to thank Robert for giving Jamie this great opportunity at Califax and an even greater opportunity to marry his daughter.”

  Robert laughed heartily in appreciation and a few other people laughed lightly in embarrassment. Emma could not even look at her mother. God, this was painful.

  Did the Hurns not understand the state of things here? That there was plenty of hostility between the two sides of her family without them getting in the middle and stoking it? Emma cast a desperate glance at Quinn.

  Quinn took a couple of brave steps toward the center of the group. “Excuse me, Mr. Hurn, I’m sorry to interrupt. But before you go on, I wanted to say that it’s also my—”

  Now it was too late. Lila put her wineglass down so hard on the table it smashed. All eyes switched to her. It was more effective than just clinking a fork.

  Lila didn’t even glance down at the pieces. “Stewart, you are mistaken,” she said, moving a few feet out from the wall. Emma couldn’t tell if Lila meant to be talking to just Stewart and Robert or to the whole assembly. “About several things.” She stood tall and her voice carried well enough to be heard. She was the witch come to curse the wedding. And yet Emma’s sympathy went with the witch at the moment.

  Jamie held tight to Emma’s hand. She felt frozen in place.

  “I’m not sure what Jamie told you, but this is not Robert’s house. My grandfather built it on land bought by his father. Yes, you are his guest, but you are also mine
. Robert doesn’t own this house and he doesn’t own Emma.”

  Jamie tried to say something, but Robert shut him down.

  Her dad was seething now, on the slim edge of control. It scared Emma to see him like this. “I’d like to explain,” he kept saying. He wouldn’t even look at Lila; he kept addressing himself to poor Stewart Hurn. Emma could feel the social distress around the patio as her dad started telling Mr. Hurn how he’d bought the house from Lila’s lout of a father before he defaulted and lost it to the bank. Were these poor guests supposed to be listening anymore?

  Emma barely heard the content of her father’s words. She heard the pent-up force of his anger, as though he’d been waiting twenty years to release it.

  Even Lila seemed to blench in the face of it, but she wasn’t going to bow out. “We were still married then. We bought it from him together.”

  Emma could not believe they were having this out here. Could they not control themselves at all? It was exactly what she’d feared and at the same time it was ridiculous and unimaginable.

  Now her father did turn to Lila, and Emma had to look away. The rhythm of her heart got behind and couldn’t catch up. There was bitterness and disgust in his manner, to be expected, but there were other parts too that proud public Robert couldn’t have wanted anyone to see. “Were we married? Really? You didn’t act like it.” Emma heard for the first time an unformed, naive kind of pain under his voice.

  Most of the guests were politely slipping away, Emma realized numbly. They were trailing down to the dock or into the house. It was too raw, too excruciating to watch.

  “Dad,” Sasha said quietly.

  Lila had both her hands on her throat. Her skin wasn’t the right color. “Why are you doing this here?”

  Jamie stepped into the charged space between her parents. Emma probably would have held him back if she’d been able to think right.

  His voice was controlled and quiet. “Let’s put this aside for now,” he asked, “in honor of what we hope will be a happy occasion in the future.” For Jamie, she knew, the impulse was always to do the right thing, and when that wasn’t clear, to do something.

  Emma looked to her mother’s face for a little bit of sanity, but she didn’t see it.

  “Please stay out of it, Jamie,” Lila said in a hard voice.

  —

  Sasha watched the thing in acute distress, looking up every so often at the suspenseful sky.

  She’d wanted to get away long before, but Evie was squeezing her hand so tight, she’d lost almost all feeling.

  Squeeze my fingers as hard as it hurts, she remembered Evie telling Sasha when she was little and had to get stitches or shots.

  She saw Jamie look from Lila’s implacable face to Robert’s boiling one, his posture rigid. And then Jamie turned his head to his mother getting up from her seat a few yards from where Sasha was standing. He just sagged.

  Sasha could only see part of Susan Hurn’s face, but could tell she was unsteady and furious. Jamie’s mother muttered a few heated things at Lila, and then one thing came through loud and piercing. “And don’t you dare tell my son what to do.”

  “Susan,” her husband muttered.

  “Fuck,” Jamie said under his breath.

  Now Jamie’s mother was fully up, waving her arm, accusing Lila of a lot of objectionable things. “Do you hear me?”

  Oh my God. Sasha cast another furtive look at Ray.

  Lila was too stunned to respond. Her dad’s anger was finally punctured, but it was too late. Sasha could have sworn she saw in Robert’s face a spark of compunction toward Lila. They’d reaped the whirlwind, all right.

  In that moment, Sasha hated them and pitied them. But Emma she loved. For Emma she felt worse.

  “Drunk bitch.”

  Sasha drew in a sharp breath. She heard silverware clatter to the ground. She couldn’t see who’d said it at first, but of course it was Mattie. Mattie, who had clearly been crying.

  Oh my God. Sasha put her free hand over her mouth.

  Jamie’s sister, Grace, was pulling on her mother’s arm. She was also crying.

  Susan Hurn shook Grace off, took a step back, and then shoved the entire buffet table over. China, glass, silver exploded onto the flagstones of the terrace. Party shrapnel flew. Pounds of lobster salad collapsed into heaps of bean salad. Rolls rolled and melon chunks skittered.

  Seconds and impressions tangled, but somehow Sasha and Ray had the same thought at the same time. Quinn’s cake with the flowers: cultivated flowers she had grown from seed and wildflowers she had carefully collected, arranged around and on top of the cake, fragile petals torn lovingly into batter. It had Quinn’s special magic in it. It was on the table and the table was going over.

  The cake seemed to fall upward into the air as the two of them ran to it from different sides of the table. Sasha had the discordant, slow-motion observation that the cake was not perfectly whole. It was missing one clean triangle of a piece.

  Sasha and Ray reached for it at the same time. But neither was fast enough to save it. Sasha watched in despair as the cake turned and fell; air and magic, sugar and butter deflated slowly onto the stones.

  Is this happening?

  Please don’t let this be happening.

  —

  Ray was too angry at his mother to be sympathetic to her. For the first time, Robert was trivial to him. He didn’t care about Jamie’s fucking psycho mother or the food on the floor or the broken glass all over the patio. Though if Jamie’s dad took one step closer to Lila, Ray would personally punch him in the face.

  He did care about Sasha’s faltering attempts at comfort. He cared about Quinn’s brave attempts to put herself between their idiot parents, so much better than they deserved.

  His spirit anguished over Quinn’s beautiful cake, now crushed under thoughtless fleeing feet, tracked to the four corners of the patio and beyond.

  Fine if their parents were working out some primal bitterness, but what had Quinn done? Why did Sasha have to watch this? Why did he?

  There was a fiery look of combat still burning on his mother’s face. He could catch fire himself and she wouldn’t notice. But Sasha’s lovely young body drooped with sadness. Why was it the people who had no beef suffered the most? Like all slow and terrible wars, it was fought and borne by those who had no grievance, the most innocent enduring the worst.

  Because we are the ones who want peace among the grown-ups, and they still want war.

  Why did it still have to matter so much to them? To him and his sisters and Sasha? Why did they have to keep loving these people, in spite of their selfishness and their flair for destruction? It would be better if they could just give up. Why did they have to count on them, even now? Would they have to go forward carrying on the same corrosive grudges?

  He looked at Sasha helplessly, the toppled buffet table still between them. She was holding Evie’s purse for some reason, standing bewildered and forlorn next to an overturned chair. Dark liquid stained a sash across her mint-green dress. Would she blame him for being on the other side of this disaster? He closed his eyes.

  He opened them in time to watch with relief as the Hurns exited around the side of the house. Jamie’s father hunched under some mixture of anger and shame; his mother’s steps were unsteady. Grace’s face was puffy with sorrow.

  Jamie made a final huddle with Emma, whispering in her ear before he left to follow his family. His family had to be settled somewhere. There was so much talking down to be done.

  How did you tuck all the pieces in so you could pack this into the past? They’d gone far beyond the place where you could try to pretend it hadn’t happened.

  Emma was picking shards of glass from the patio and collecting them into a wide wooden salad bowl. When she stood he could see the tears written in black mascara. What a fucking mess.

  But where was Quinn?

  Robert stood with arms thuggishly crossed by the front door, apparently waiting for Lila and Adam to go t
hrough it.

  Ray heard shouting on the front lawn. At this point he didn’t know or care whose it was. Cars scrambled across the gravel, down the driveway, escaping onto the smooth town road. Who wouldn’t choose to get out of here?

  Except they, the children, even grown, didn’t get to choose. That was the part that was most unfair.

  But no, they wouldn’t carry the grudges. Sasha looked up and met his eyes. She didn’t and wouldn’t blame him. He knew that.

  Of all the people in the world, he knew how she felt. She knew how he felt. They didn’t need to say anything to know it. In a strange way, they’d never had to.

  He wasn’t really thinking when he walked over to her. He had no clear intention in his mind when he stepped around the fallen table, over chairs and plates to be nearer to her. Her physical presence was still strange to him, but he reached his hand toward hers and she took hold of it. The two of them stood there in the middle of it, hands clasped, observing what was left of the kingdom.

  He didn’t really care who saw at this point. What were they protecting their parents from? Harmony, God forbid. Compassion and an unusual kind of love.

  Their parents didn’t deserve to be forgiven, and yet they would be. Where was the cure for that?

  The clouds finally decided to open to rain. It was a relief more than anything. It came down hard and heavy.

  Quinn watched the rain beat sideways into the pond, into the swimming pool. The steam rose from the ground and the sky came down to meet it.

  The rain washed the fallen food on the patio into a single creeping muck. Rain and tears united and returned to puddle, pool, and pond.

  Her bare feet sank into velvet wet ground. Her head went hollow when the fat drops splattered down on it. She turned her face up to the sky and let the rainwater bless her eyelids.

  Let the pain in. Give it a voice if it needs one.