Ann Brashares - The Last Summer (of You and Me) (21 page)

He didn't think about his own appearance, but he checked Diana's, who was more beautiful than Monique and less challeng ing. He completely forgot about there being any bride until every one was standing up and she was sashaying down the aisle.

Now was the time. Everyone was standing and turning to the back of the church. He craned. He might have been the only per son looking in the wrong direction. And there she was. She had Riley on one side and her dad on the other. Or so he assumed. He could see only pieces of them. Judy was sticking halfway into the

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aisle with her little silver camera. Paul felt Alice's mother mortifi cation on her behalf. And as soon as he recognized this impulse toward sympathy, he snatched it back.

He wanted to think that Diana was more beautiful than Alice. He really did try. And it was quite possible that she was, to some objective eye. But he couldn't make himself think so, and that annoyed him. How could you will yourself to like one thing more than another? How could you change your tastes? He remembered Judy once saying that when she was a teenager, she discovered that chocolate made her skin break out, so she learned not to like it. It was one of those random things he thought of strangely often.

Riley spotted him and waved. Her smile was enough to change his mood. For a moment, he was a human being again. He waved and smiled a real smile back. He wanted to be her friend Paul, his best self. Not this maggoty, bitter version.

What would Riley think of Diana? She would think he was a faker and a half. If it were five or even three years ago, she would tell him that to his face, but now she wouldn't. That was kind of sad.

Riley had on a dress. The realization hit him slowly. She looked small and boyish but also pretty in her dress. Had he ever seen her in one? Was Riley finally entering the low-down world where the rest of them lived and blundered? He couldn't really picture her there.

Riley poked Alice. Paul saw it happen and held his breath. Riley pointed to Paul. What did Riley know? That meant Alice had to turn around. That meant she had to wave at him. Paul wanted to glower at Alice, but he found himself waving back, flattened, neu tralized and disappointed in himself. The point of this was to have

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some control. He put his arm around Diana. Alice looked at Diana. He didn't care about Immanuel Kant at that moment, or the dis tinction between appearances and things in themselves. He was glad he had Diana.

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Riley stood on the patio outside the reception with the smokers. Through the windows and glass doors you could see the blur of the party. Framed and behind glass, it made more sense to her. The colors and shapes made larger patterns on her eyes. Most of the people were indistinguishable, and their words and gestures blended into a single conversation, a particleboard of interaction.

Mainly, the person who stood out was Paul. It seemed all right not to have told him about her heart until she saw him. And then, suddenly, it didn't. She hadn't imagined she would see him here. It took her by surprise. And now it distressed her. Why hadn't she told him?

What if somebody else told him? She hated that idea. It would make her feel victimized in the way she most despised. The Coo leys knew, and so did a lot of other people. Her parents would assume Paul knew. She was unaccustomed to deception and the husbanding it required. The first lie led to others. Is that how she had gotten here?

Riley had been her best self with Paul. She had spent her happi est times with him. If she could stay the same in Paul's mind, then her real self was preserved, it existed in one place at least. When

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she was with him, even now, she could feel like the person she'd been before.

And then there was the question of Alice. In the beginning, Riley hadn't meant to push a secret between Alice and Paul, but that's what she had done. Maybe she had meant to. Maybe it was what she'd hoped for. Otherwise, why hadn't she set it right?

Now she and Alice were together, living back home again. Time was moving backward, it seemed, and the future was mostly forgotten. Was that what she had wanted?

She thought of the way Paul had looked at Alice in the church. She had never looked at anyone like that. Or been looked at like that, she suspected. She'd been pursued before, but her few roman tic entanglements had been brief and shallow, mostly entered out of curiosity or getting it over with. She had never loved anyone the way Paul loved her sister. Was she jealous? Jealous of Paul? Jeal ous of her sister? The thought made her cringe. She couldn't really think of Paul like that.

"It's the kibbutz effect," Catie Mintz, her friend from NOLS, told her once when she'd described her friendship with Paul.

"What does that mean?"

"Kids who grow up on a kibbutz together act like siblings. They almost never fall in love."

It wasn't the only reason, Riley knew, but maybe it helped explain why Paul always kept Alice at a distance, judged her harshly, ignored her when she most wanted his attention. Because he knew someday he'd want to love her.

Riley could not stand the thought of Alice and Paul commiserating over her. She felt the danger, in her dreams, all around her, of being

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sealed into the past. She was scared they were on the cusp of a life that wouldn't include her, and, like last summer, they would willfully keep her in ignorance. They were the ones who'd started the secrets.

She saw the turquoise green of Paul's tie through the faceted glass, and then Paul was standing with her.

"Did you take up smoking?" he asked.

"I don't love being inside with that many people. Now it's just as bad out here. I wish the smokers would get lost."

"I never saw you in a dress."

"I never saw you with a girlfriend."

"Well."

"Well."

Riley looked at the ground. She had to tell him. She needed to think of the right way to tell him.

"Hey, it's supposed to snow all day tomorrow. If it does, do you want to rent cross-country skis from Paragon in the afternoon? Remember when we skied up Fifth Avenue?"

She laughed. It was the last winter of high school. Paul was home from boarding school for Christmas break. She'd tried to ski off the back of a bus, and she 'd almost gotten flattened.

"What do you think?" His face was so much the same, so dear to her.

Her parents would die. Her heart would explode. Alice would kill her if she wasn't already dead. She couldn't tell him.

"I'll come," she said.

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Alice sat stiffly in the company of her mixed greens as the commodities trader to her left drank his third vodka and tonic and kicked her shin. It seemed an effort to make small talk, even with her father sitting across the table. She was so plagued by self- consciousness that she couldn't get up and talk to the people she knew.

How could Paul have come here with a woman who looked like that? It was so unkind. It was so distressing that he was here with a beautiful, fashionable woman, and she'd worn her mother's dress with the gold belt and the shoulder pads. She would have looked better in her grass-mowing outfit. Why had she done it? It was that perversity of hers, that self-negating guilt. She deserved every thing bad. She deserved to look bad while being so.

"Did you meet Paul's girlfriend?" Rosie Newell asked her, com ing around to her side of the table. Alice told herself that Rosie didn't mean to be cruel. Rosie had nursed her own crush on Paul for many years.

"Not yet," Alice said.

"She's gorgeous, isn't she?"

"Yeah," Alice agreed sourly. She was happy when Rosie went off to dance with the commodities trader. Let him kick her for a while.

Paul danced with his gorgeous girlfriend to a Latin tune. Alice wished he were a bad dancer, but he wasn't. Every person at her table got up to dance, including her parents.

Alice spent some alone time with her salad, chewing greens and wondering which dark bit of leaf would lodge itself between her two front teeth.

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Paul danced like a dream. He made loving eyes at Diana. He had moved on. He'd forgotten all of them. He'd left them behind. He was good at that. He could do it for years at a time.

And immediately, as though to negate her, Paul took a break from his gorgeous girlfriend and asked Riley to dance. Alice could see by his face that Paul had no idea anything was wrong. Riley looked happy and well, and Alice felt relieved to participate in the idea, for a few minutes at least, that nothing was wrong.

For the next song, Paul cut in on her dad to dance with Judy. It was sort of corny but the kind of thing Judy adored. Paul dipped her in the middle of the song, and her mother screamed in joyous protest. Okay, so he hadn't forgotten all of them. He'd just forgot ten Alice.

Alice saw her father coming toward her. Out of pity, he was going to try to get her to dance with him. But then she'd have to stand up and show her dress in all its 1991 glory. No. She grimaced at him before he could even ask. "Don't try to make me," she mut tered out of the side of her mouth like she was Clint Eastwood.

Alice felt hungry, but she couldn't make herself eat. She felt poor.

She 'd had one thing all her life, and though it had been a burden at times, it had also been her greatest gift. Paul had loved her. It made her special. It was bound up in her identity from the very beginning. Now she'd lost it.

Love was a rose, according to the song, and you weren't sup posed to pick it. Well, she'd picked it, and now she had the handful of thorns. Diana had the rose. Rosie had the drunken trader. Alice had the shoulder pads and a gold belt.

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Paul knew as he went for that sixth (seventh?) glass of wine that he would do something stupid. He drank it down eagerly and pro ceeded, right on schedule, to abandon the lovely presence of his lovely date. He walked over to the table where Alice sat. "Want to dance?" he asked her.

She didn't want to. He could see that. "Nice dress," he said, almost as a challenge.

She stood up. He knew how she hated to back down. She fol lowed him onto the dance floor.

He touched her remotely, directing her through a swing number with minimal swing. Her cheeks flushed awkwardly and prettily. "How's it going?" she asked.

"I sold the house," he told her a little too eagerly. To what extent had he done it just so he could say that to her?

There's no future, Alice. There are no hopes. Our lives overlap no more. It's all the past now, officially. He watched her so intensely for a reaction that it was hard to give these words of his much credibility.

She nodded. "That's what I heard."

Arg. She'd heard. What could he do for a fresh wound? "It's a good feeling to be done with the place finally."

She nodded.

What could he say? I'm going to get married. I never loved you. What was your name again? He was reckless and ashamed of him self at the same time.

How good it would be if she lost her composure. If only she

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would act like a baby, so maybe he didn't have to. If she would just yell at him or accuse him of something, what a relief that would be! But she didn't, of course. She never did. If she had, he wouldn't be in quite this tangle, would he?

He wanted to take his love back from her so badly. The old tech niques didn't work anymore. In fact, they'd never worked. How did you stop loving someone? It was one of the world's more bru tal mysteries. The more you tried, the less it worked.

If that dress she was wearing didn't help, then what would?

The song changed to a slow one. He should have let her go, but he drew her close instead. He smelled her and clung to her and hated her and hated himself. Now he had the added curse of know ing her under the dress. He put his hand on her lower back and held her tighter than he should have. He was wretchedly, pitifully hun gry for her. Why? What did she have that he needed?

He saw her eyes, shiny and round. She looked over his shoulder, straight past his head, but still he caught the dot in her eye.

He let her go and trod back to his table, aroused, frustrated, and miserable. He wondered about this night, this whole enterprise. Why had he come to this stupid thing? Who, exactly, had he intended to torture?

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Cryogenics

F or a while they thought Riley would have to have surgery to

fix the fused leaflets of her mitral valve. That went from being the bad news in the middle of November to a distant hope in the end. The aortic valve was almost equally damaged. They thought they could fix her arrhythmia with a pacer. But even that hope receded as the doctors found more damage, both residual and progressive.

Each time Riley came back from the doctor, she said, "Seems all right," and disappeared for a few hours. And each time, late at night, her mom would give Alice the full story, including her fears. She'd line up the new bottles of medicine: beta-blockers, anticoag ulants, antibiotics. All for a girl who loathed to swallow a pill.

Sometimes Alice felt that Judy's patient and her sister, Riley, were two separate people. "Every time they look, they see more

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damage," Judy said at the end of the year. "Surgery on one valve or another isn't going to fix the problem."

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They stayed frozen through January but alert and waiting. Riley was going regularly to the transplant center, and because of her age and the progress of her disease, she was near the top of the list. As the doctor explained, when her name came up and a suitable heart became available, it would all transpire in a matter of hours.

Riley was fitted with a beeper clipped to her pants at all times. It could take days or it could take months, her doctor said. And so they waited. While Riley went to and fro, Alice and her parents kept their eyes fixed on the beeper.

Once, in the morning, when Riley left it on the kitchen counter, the three of them stood staring at it as though it would jump off into their hands. "It's not a heart," Riley told them jokingly.