Drenched in Light (15 page)

I checked the clock, just now blinking eight a.m. “All right. I’ll be by your place at nine, and we’ll head to the mall. We can look at dresses, and pick out bridal registry stuff at Dillards, and anything else you want to do. Sound good?”

“Sounds great.” Her voice held a new enthusiasm. “This’ll be fun.”

“All right, get out your shopping shoes,” I said, feeling more positive about the day. Bett and I needed sister time, especially now. “See you at nine. Bye.”

By nine a.m., I was pulling up in front of Bett’s apartment. Jason walked her to my car. “Take it easy on her,” he said as he opened the passenger door for her. “She’s kind of woogedie this morning.”
“Woogedie”
was one of my mother’s synonyms for generally under the weather. Where the word came from, no one knew, but when we were peaked, depressed, or slightly ill, Mom would check our foreheads and say, “Oh, are we feeling a little woogedie today?” Joujou felt woogedie a lot, and usually the cure was extra doggie treats.

“I’m fine,” Bett said with a sigh.

Leaning through the passenger window, Jason kissed her, then flashed me a smile and mouthed,
Woogedie
.

I nodded and his blue eyes twinkled beneath a mop of dark hair that was already neatly combed at nine a.m. Jason was adorable at any hour, always charming, always perfectly groomed and dressed, and cheerful. No wonder he was such a great salesman and moving up in his career—it was impossible not to like him. He even had a way of making light of Mom that was sweet, rather than cruel. It was cute that he’d adopted “woogedie”.

“I saw that,” Bett complained, sounding uncharacteristically petulant.

Her bad mood rolled off Jason like water off a mallard. “I love you.” He kissed her again, not so quickly this time.

Leaning away, I raised a hand to shield myself from the PDA. “Eeewww, I can leave if you need me to.”

Bethany giggled and Jason drew back sheepishly. “No way. Because then I’d have to go on the wedding shopping extravaganza. By the way, anything’s fine with me. Silk flowers, real flowers, long dress, short dress, no dress.” Snapping his lips shut, he grinned at Bett, and she flushed. “Oops, did I say that out loud? Anyway, I’ll take care of the tuxes and the rest is up to you two. All I want to do is marry my girl.”

Bethany started to tear up, and I sighed wistfully. Jason was incredibly sweet, completely smitten. He and Bett were a perfect match. She deserved him, and all the happiness they could find. Even when Jonathan and I were engaged, he never looked at me the way Jason looked at Bett.

Jason closed the door and we watched him walk back up the sidewalk as I put the car in gear. Hands in his jacket pockets, he strolled along, looking up at the clear February sky like he hadn’t a care in the world.

“You know you’re incredibly lucky,” I told Bett as we backed out of the parking space.

“I know.” She sighed through her tears. “He’s amazing.”

“And he loves you like crazy.”

“I know,” she said again, her lips trembling into a wan smile.

“Then stop crying.”

Pulling a leftover napkin from the console, she wiped her eyes. “Oh, all right,” she huffed playfully, choking on the tears. “It’s just the hormones. He knows that. This morning I had a breakdown because I knocked over a glass of soda. I cried for twenty minutes. Dad says Mom was like this when she was pregnant.”

When she was pregnant with you.
I felt the familiar pang of alienation, like a splinter wedged between my ribs.

Blowing her nose, Bett wadded up the napkin and tucked it in a discarded bank envelope in the door pocket. “Jason says as long as I’m not like this after the pregnancy, it’s OK.”

We laughed and talked about the wedding as we headed to the mall. It felt good to be with Bett, shopping, giggling, talking, finally spending time together doing normal things. We discussed baby nurseries as we passed the infants’ and children’s departments at Dillards. In the bridal department, I made a joke about maternity clothes, and Bett blushed and shushed me. By the time we moved on to the mall’s bridal registry, Bett was tired of discussing her life and wanted to talk about mine. Telling her about the strange turn of events last week at my job, I was struck by how reassuring it was to have someone listen with interest, rather than tell me I couldn’t handle having a job.

“It sounds like you’ve really stepped into the middle of something,” Bett observed with a wry smile. “Those stuffed shirts at Harrington had better watch out. They don’t know who they’re dealing with.”

I hugged her around the shoulders as we stood near the mall’s gift registry computer, waiting at a polite distance as a young couple used the touch screen to sign up for baby gifts. “Maybe we should sign you up for baby gifts, too, while we’re here,” I whispered, and Bethany hip-butted me sideways a few steps. “It was just a thought.”

“Miss. Manners would have a cow,” she joked. The phone rang, as if on cue, and both of us descended into gales of laughter. Giggling and sputtering, Bethany answered. It was Mom, of course. When Bett told her we had selected a maid-of-honor dress at Dillards, Mom wanted a complete description. Snatching it out of the basket, I held it in front of me as if I were Vanna White, modeling the periwinkle creation complete with its protective plastic covering.

Bethany proceeded to describe the dress the way a newspaper article about the wedding would read. “Julia Costell was seen looking lovely in a strapless gown of periwinkle organza, with a sky blue satin underlayer and coordinating organza shawl in periwinkle blue, fading to delicate summer sky around the edges, and showing the faintest hint of tasteful iridescence, so as to . . .” Bethany must have caught the surprised, horrified look on my face, because she stopped talking midsentence. Following my line of vision, she turned slowly toward the touch screen center, and realized what I had comprehended only a second earlier. The people standing arm in arm at the computer weren’t just any couple. It was Jonathan and his new wife, the one he fell in love with at first sight, only a couple of months after we broke up. They looked blissfully happy, registering for baby gifts.

We stood staring at each other, frozen in place, before Jonathan spoke. “Hi, Julia.” His voice was soft, sympathetic, the careful tone people use when they see a cancer survivor out and about after chemo. Obviously, he knew what had happened. His sister had probably heard about it, since she was a dancer as well. Jonathan and I had first met through her.

I stood there, still clutching the dress against myself, feeling thin and lifeless, like a scarecrow with hollow eyes and a knobby body lightly stuffed with dry grass.

“Hi, Jonathan.” My voice seemed to come from somewhere outside. I tried to force a smile, but nothing happened.

Bethany jumped to the rescue. Slipping the dress out of my hands, she set it in the shopping basket, saying, “Let’s put this down until we get done with the computer.”

Jonathan glanced speculatively from the computer to me. “Wedding registry?”

“Bett’s getting married the seventeeth of March,” I choked out, wishing I could shrink down to the size of one of Harrington’s ladybugs and fly away. I looked at Jonathan’s wife, cuddled happily on his arm, and my life flashed before my eyes.
That could be me. Married, settled, one half of a whole. . . .

“We’re expecting,” she bubbled, and Jonathan winced, as if she shouldn’t say that in front of me.

Expecting a baby,
completed the list in my mind. Regret stabbed hard, and I wanted to cry. Jonathan met my eyes in a way that told me he saw every pathetic thought. His face filled with sadness and sympathy. His wife, the future mother of his child, tightened her grasp on his arm.

“You look good,” he said, and she blinked up at him, holding her eyes wide afterward.

I suddenly felt sorry for her, sorry for myself, sorry for all of us. One minute, you’re happily registering for baby gifts, and the next, you’re face to face with your husband’s anorexic/bulimic ex-fiancée. Modeling a maid-of-honor dress. And then, the first thing he says to her is,
“You look good.”

Irony didn’t come any more twisted than that. “You do too.” I pasted on a smile. The performance was under way. Time to shut out all the personal issues and dance. “Both of you. Congratulations. I know you must be really excited.”

“We are.” Jonathan’s wife smiled, and he smiled with her, feeling free to glow about the baby news, now that it was obvious I wouldn’t collapse into a sobbing heap on the floor.

“It was good seeing you guys,” Bethany added, with a nervous little wave that said,
Nice knowing you, but move along now. Enough of this uncomfortable reunion.

Jonathan took advantage of the opportunity to exit. “Take care,” he said, catching my gaze with an earnest look, the one he always used when he said,
“I love you.”

Had he? I wondered. Had he really loved me? If he had, how could he have found someone else so quickly? Eight months ago, we were engaged. “I will,” I said quietly, as they started away. “You too.”

I stood watching Jonathan walk out of the store with his arm around his wife, the soon-to-be mother of his child. The farther away he got, the more his step lightened, as if my presence were a weight he was throwing off, piece by piece.

The pieces landed all around me, and I stood in a circle of the wreckage I’d created—trapped on an ordinary day in the mall.

A
fter a weekend of serious shopping and an intense powwow with all wedding-involved parties, including the parents of the groom, the wedding plans were starting to solidify. I entered everything on the computer, so that Mom could track every detail of the wedding process via spreadsheet on
cyberweddingplanner.com
. Before heading off for my Monday-morning commute, I showed her how to use the Web site.

Mom was impressed that nuptials had moved into the electronic age. “I had no idea you knew how to do this kind of thing,” she said, standing over my shoulder in Dad’s cluttered home office.

“Do what?” I asked.

“Put things on the Internet. You know, all of this computer business.”

Everyone knows how to use the Internet these days,
I thought, but I said, “We did Web pages and PowerPoint presentations all the time in college. It’s part of the curriculum. In fact, we even teach Web design and basic programming at Harrington.” Just for fun, I brought the Harrington Web site up on the screen. “The students in the Web-design class actually create and maintain the school home page as part of their coursework.”

“Really?” Leaning close, Mom investigated the photo collage of dancers, musicians, theater performers, and student artwork. “Well, isn’t that lovely?”

I felt a note of pride—not because I’d had anything to do with the Web site, but because for the first time Mom was showing some interest in my job. “The kids do good work,” I went on. “I’m thinking of having them help me put up a Counselor’s Corner, with some parent information pages, family counseling and communication suggestions, drug prevention information—things like that. Drugs are, apparently, a bigger issue at Harrington than anyone realizes.”

“Well, that’s nice.” Once again Mom was zoned out. She was staring wistfully at the picture of a young ballerina dancing as the Sugar Plum Fairy in the top right hand corner of the screen. “Isn’t she lovely?” Leaning forward, she traced the dancer’s outline with her finger. “I wonder who she is.”

Obviously, she’d forgotten I was anywhere in the room. These days she would never have intentionally admired anything dance-related in front of me. “Don’t know,” I muttered, and she jerked away from the screen.

“The costume, I mean.” She tried to cover up her moment of guilty reminiscence. “It’s lovely. I wonder who designed it.” As if her interest were merely from a design perspective—unrelated to the fact that her daughter, the dancer she was so proud of, was now a middle school counselor and recovering bulimic.

“No telling. The kids get those pictures from the yearbook archives. It could be anybody.” I bit my lip, clicking the back button to return the screen to
cyberweddingplanner.com
. “So, you see how to enter the dates and times in here, right? When you’re finished, click create over in the left-hand corner, and it will put everything into a spreadsheet for you. You can print daily or weekly time lines, have the computer give you pop-up reminders of appointments, generate to-do lists, things like that. It’s really simple.” Pushing back from the desk, I stood up, purposely turning toward the door and away from her. I was afraid that if she saw my face, she would read something into it and one or both of us would end up with hurt feelings again.

“I’d better head for work, if I’m going to take the dress by the cleaner this morning.” During our Saturday-evening wedding powwow, my sister had admitted that her dream really was to wear Mom’s wedding gown. Bett had even tried it on so that Mom could mark it for fitting and hemming to accommodate Bett’s shorter stature. It fit surprisingly well, but was in desperate need of restoration. The next order of business was to have it cleaned and altered, assuming we could find someone who could do the work in time.