The Road to Amazing (23 page)

Otto lowered his phone. "Sorry, I'll
get back to work."

"Damn right you will," I said, "the
second you finish writing that guy back."

* * *

So the windstorm raged. It was
actually pretty awesome, especially since the Amazing Inn was
completely surrounded by trees and looked out over the water. The
branches of the fir trees shook and whipped, and we could hear
needles and smaller branches hitting the roof and windows.
Meanwhile, the water churned and swirled, with whorls and white
caps.

But it wasn't one of those
storms where you stand at the window and think, "Wow, just how bad
is this going to
get
?" It was bad — make no mistake — but the weather report
really had gotten it right once again. There were still even a few
boats out on the water.

As for the house, it was like the
opposite of a snow globe: all around us outside, everything was
wild and churning, but inside everything was peaceful and calm, a
little Bavarian village cheerfully preparing for the upcoming
festivities. We had a strict time-limit — the wedding was at three
— but everything was proceeding right on schedule.

Then Min came into the kitchen and
stood there for a second, not saying anything. Somehow I knew she
had something to tell me.

"What?" I said, instantly
wary.

"They had to close the ferries due to
the storm," she said.

"What?" I said. "But the storm isn't
that bad."

"I should have known," Min said. "I
guess they always close the ferries during high winds. They can't
maneuver the boats into the dock. I didn't think."

I didn't know what to say. Now my head
was the snow globe — the ordinary kind, with all my thoughts
whirling around inside.

"Do they know when the ferries will
start up again?" I asked.

"Not until the winds die down more,"
she said. "But there's another problem..."

"Just say it," I said.

"Well, the ferries have been stopped
for hours now, and it's Sunday, so there's already a big back-up of
cars who need to get back on the island."

"How big a back-up?"

She looked like she wanted to
sugarcoat it somehow, but she didn't: "At least four
hours."

CHAPTER
THIRTEEN

"So that's it," Kevin said. "The
wedding's off."

He was standing in the kitchen with
us, listening to Min explain that thing about the ferries. He'd
been holding it together all morning, acting perfectly calm, but
the camel's back had finally broken. Now his expression was dark
and brooding. Even so, his voice was surprisingly calm.

No one in the room said anything. They
just watched Kevin and me — mostly me. I think they were waiting to
see what I said, if I agreed with Kevin or not. Out on the deck,
the vinyl cover to the barbecue flapped in the wind. Meanwhile, in
my pocket, my phone vibrated — someone had texted me. I knew
without looking that it was someone coming to the wedding, that
they now knew that the ferry had stopped because of the windstorm
and they wanted some guidance on how to react. In other words, was
the wedding canceled?

Was
it canceled?
Kevin had already
spoken — we all knew exactly what he thought — but now I guess
everyone was waiting on me to confirm or deny it. To make a final
decision.

"Really?" I said at last, quietly. "It
doesn't have to be canceled. Does it?"

I looked around the room, at Gunnar,
Otto, and Vernie, even Ruby and Nate. They all made eye contact
with me, but never for long. They would look between me and Kevin,
then down at the counter. I could see them thinking, saw the words
on the tips of their tongues, but they hesitated. I think they all
sort of sensed that this was something Kevin and I needed to decide
for ourselves, and they didn't want to interfere.

Min, of course,
was
making eye contact
with me, staring outright. She had an opinion too, something she
thought was obvious, but it wasn't obvious to me. I'd already said
we should go through with the wedding. What else did she want me to
say?

"The wedding is supposed to start in
an hour," Kevin said. "Even if we delay it another hour, we can't
ask everyone to wait in the ferry line for four hours."

I thought about this. "The windstorm
can't last forever," I said. "Once it stops, once the ferry starts
running again, we have everyone park on the other side of the
water, then take the ferry over here as passengers. We can all run
shuttles, picking people up at the ferry dock in our cars and then
driving them here."

Min relaxed a little, not quite
nodding. Was that the problem — that I'd sounded so tentative
before?

Everyone's eyes flicked toward Kevin,
who pondered my words. It seemed to me like a pretty good
plan.

"There are sixty-one guests coming,"
he said at last, "and the ferry dock is at least a half-hour drive
from here. We don't have enough cars. It would take all afternoon.
And besides, we don't know how long it'll be before the ferry
starts up again."

He wasn't wrong about any of this. Now
everyone looked back at me — including Kevin.

This annoyed me a little,
being put on the spot. Why was it suddenly
my
responsibility to figure out a
way to make the wedding work? Did Kevin not
want
to get married? And why did
Kevin have the two of us discussing this in front of all our
friends? Why hadn't we gone off into the master bedroom again? Our
friends were great and supportive, and Kevin and I didn't have any
secrets from them, but this was for the two of us to decide. As it
was, we were clearly making them uncomfortable.

The silence stretched on and on, and I
felt my phone vibrate again. We really did need to make a decision,
if only so the people on the mainland would know what to
do.

So I said, "Okay, I guess the
wedding's canceled."

The second I said this, I
thought,
Wait! What about Uber?
We could wait for the storm to stop, have the
guests take the ferry over as passengers, but then have them take
Uber or Lyft up the island to the house. But even as I thought
this, I realized the whole plan was getting pretty damn
complicated, especially since we'd have to communicate it via email
and text to a bunch of old people who'd probably never taken Uber
before.

My pocket vibrated one more time, but
in the kitchen no one moved. No one was watching me now, not even
to look away when I tried to make eye contact. Min looked down at
the ground. This was actually worse than if they'd all been staring
at me with sad, pitying eyes.

I felt like I'd failed this huge test.
Seriously, it was like some evil wizard had forced me to choose
between two doors, with a hot knight behind one door and a
fire-breathing dragon behind the other, and I'd chosen the
dragon.

Actually, this was even worse than
choosing the fire-breathing dragon, because that would have been
random chance — that wouldn't have had anything to do with me. This
felt like it did, like I'd had an actual choice in the matter, but
I'd somehow made the wrong one. I could feel the disappointment
coming off my friends in waves.

But I
hadn't
made the wrong choice. Had I?
For one thing, it seemed to be what Kevin wanted. And, I mean, it
was wrong to ask your guests to do this long list of complicated
things to get to your wedding. Wasn't it?

The wind blew again, and more pine
needles skittered on the deck. The cover on the barbecue kept
flapping.

Kevin turned to go.

"Kevin?" I said, but he didn't stop.
He left the room like water slipping down a drain.

Finally, I met someone else's gaze. It
was Gunnar.

"I guess this is one thing that even
you can't help us with," I said, but he didn't say anything back,
because there wasn't anything he could say.

* * *

I expected to find Kevin in the master
bedroom (or en-suite bathroom), but he wasn't there. I looked
around the rest of the house too, but I couldn't find him anywhere.
Had he left? Where would he possibly go in the middle of a
windstorm? I stepped out onto the front porch to see if he'd taken
the car, but it was still parked in the lot.

The wind was crazy. The trees creaked
and groaned, their branches waving around me like those big
inflatable tubes you see at used car lots. It wasn't raining, but
pine needles and little branches swirled all around, finally
fluttering to the ground, making quiet little clicks when they
landed. The air was full of the smell of pine and pitch — not
surprising given all the branches and needles that had been ripped
from the trees.

My phone was still vibrating off and
on, but I couldn't deal with all that right now, so I flicked it
off for the time being.

I looked out across the yard again.
Through the swirl of the wind, I saw an opening in the trees — the
road that went off to Amazing. At first I didn't think anything
about it.

Then I thought,
Could Kevin have gone there?
But why?

I stepped back in the house and looked
in the closet, and saw his jacket was gone. I put my jacket on too,
then stepped outside. I didn't tell anyone where I was going, or
even that I was leaving.

I started out across the yard. The
needles still swirled around me, and the trees groaned, but I kept
walking. The air was warmer than I expected, and the wind was
somehow subtle too. It was like I could feel every little current
on my skin.

I reached the parking lot of the
Amazing Inn. There had been a layer of leaves and pine needles
before, but it was so much thicker now, almost like an actual
carpet. More needles whirled down around me, like snow. They felt
slick under my tennis shoes.

I headed across the parking lot to the
opening in the trees, the start of the road to Amazing, but
everything was so thick on the ground now that I couldn't see the
actual dirt at all. If I hadn't seen it before, I might not have
known it was even a road.

In front of me, the trees were still
swaying, their branches waving. But were they waving me forward or
warning me to go back? I didn't know. Was Kevin even here? There
weren't any footprints in the pine needles. And what was I going to
say to him if I found him? I didn't know those things
either.

I started down the road. All around
me, the pine needles clicked and clacked, and the trees
groaned.

We're really canceling the
wedding
, I thought.

Well, what choice did we have? We
didn't have any realistic way to get the guests here. And what was
a wedding without guests?

How did that make me feel? Weirdly, I
couldn't tell. It was like I was a fire, and my emotions were
smoke, and the wind was whipping them away before I even had a
chance to feel them. It was a bad thing that the wedding was being
canceled, I knew that much.

Around me, the forest looked different
than it had before. The first time I'd been here, everything had
been so still. I said it had felt like the forest was holding its
breath in anticipation of what was going to happen next.

It wasn't holding its breath anymore.
Now it was breathing in great big heaves, right in my face, and all
around me too, making everything move that could move. Now it felt
like the whole forest was in flux, like anything could happen,
anything was possible.

What did it mean if Kevin
and I didn't get married? Would we do it later? Try it again
another weekend with our friends in the spring? But how would we
afford it? And would anyone want to go through all this again? Or
maybe Kevin would take this as some kind of sign, and we'd end up
not getting married at all. But what would
that
mean? Would Kevin want to stay
together if we weren't married? Everything was moving around me,
and nothing was clear.

Now the wind shrieked through the
trees, and something thrummed off in the distance — the roar of the
storm overhead, maybe. A big branch crashed into the ferns to one
side. I know I said before that the windstorm wasn't supposed to be
strong enough to topple actual trees, but what the hell did I know?
I was starting to think I'd made a mistake coming out
here.

I thought about going back to the
house, but I was pretty sure Kevin had come this way before me, and
I needed to talk to him, even if I still didn't know what I was
going to say. So I trudged forward, down the hill, the air still
smelling so strongly of pine, my feet slipping on the slick carpet
of needles.

Everything looked so different. Could
I be lost? Had I accidentally gone down the wrong road, or not gone
down a road at all? Maybe I'd wandered from the road somewhere
along the way. Before, when everything was still and holding its
breath, it had been possible to see through the forest, but now
everything was obscured by the falling needles and swaying
branches.