Hugh and—and Isobel, and everything else. Tell me the truth. If you mind at all, even the smallest bit …”
She left the sentence dangling, of course. No possible way she could articulate that terrible alternative.
I opened my mouth to tell her what I ought to tell her. What I meant to tell her, what I thought I felt, true and deep, bottom of my heart and all that. What a good daughter should say at a moment like this, as her mother stands before a shimmering dreamworld, waiting to enter. What Mama’s violet eyes implored me to say.
I thought of something, just then, as my mouth hung open and the words formed in my throat. I thought of the moment I crawled into her bed after we learned about Daddy, into her hot, tiny bedroom that stank of July, and how bleak those violet eyes had seemed to me then. How wet and curling the lashes around them. She was hardly more than a child herself then; not just physically young at twenty-nine, but childlike. That’s the word. In those days, Mama was one of God’s childlike people, and I offer that as a compliment. Oh, she was clever, there was nothing diminished about her intellect. I guess I mean she was childlike in spirit, the way we’re supposed to be and never really are, lamblike in her innocence, and my father’s death was probably the first time this faith had betrayed her. I remember thinking I’d heard the cracking of her heart in the way her voice cracked and broke as she whispered to me in that terrible moment, and when I embraced her soft, small body, I embraced her more as a sister than a daughter. When we slept at last, we curled around each other for comfort. So it had gone on for seven more years. We had read each other’s thoughts and dreamed often in each other’s beds. We’d laughed and wept, we’d shared books and clothes. When we went to the seaside for a week each summer, everybody just assumed we were sisters, the especially close kind of sisters, by the way we giggled and ate ice cream and gamboled hand in hand in the surf.
So as the old lie formed in my throat, I recognized its untruth by the sting of bile, by the stiffness of my vocal cords as they labored and labored to give birth to the words. And then this gust of fury blew through my chest, stealing even the breath I needed to say them. I thought wildly, like a premonition, This is the end, not the beginning. We’ll never stand like this again, we two.
But my God, I couldn’t actually say such a thing! Not while her enormous violet eyes begged me to say something else. But I couldn’t say those words either, so I just placed my two hands on her cheeks, atop the veil, and kissed her, and in that instant the right words came to me.
I said, “Daddy wouldn’t have wanted you to pine away the rest of your life.”
She nodded frantically. “He was so good.”
“Don’t cry, Mama. Here, have some champagne.” I turned for the silver tray on the dresser, loaded down with bucket and champagne coupes of crystal etched in trailing leaves, and I refilled my glass and Mama’s. Before I handed hers over, while I stood there holding them both in my fingers, fizzing sweetly between us, I said, “You really love him, don’t you?”
“I do, Miranda. I truly love him.”
I gave her the glass and clinked it with mine. “To true love.”
Before I could sip, a soft knock sounded on the door, and Isobel slipped inside the room without waiting for an answer. She wore an identical dress to mine, pale blue and full-skirted to just below the knees, off-shoulder sleeves overlaid by sheer organza. Sweet floral cap nestled in her hair. “Everybody ready in here? Your groom awaits impatiently. Oh my! Don’t you both look lovely. And champagne! Wait! Don’t start without me!”
She rushed to the dresser and poured herself a glass, which finished off the bottle and nearly overflowed the wide, shallow bowl of the coupe. She smelled of cigarettes and flowers and champagne, and when she raised her glass, her eyes glinted with either mischief or wine, I wasn’t sure. “What are we toasting, girls?” she said.
“To true love,” I said.
“Oh yes. To love!”
We clinked and drank, giggling a little, and through the crack in the door came the sound of violins and a dignified cello. Isobel put her arm around Mama’s shoulder and whispered something in her ear, and there was something so intimate about this gesture that I turned my head and stared through the window at the sea, at the Flood Rock lighthouse erupting in the exact center of the frame. A sailboat beat lazily across the channel behind, and in the violent sunshine, the whiteness of its canvas hurt my eyes.
7.
A CERTAIN NUMBNESS gripped me as I followed Isobel down the aisle between the rows of white chairs. I fixed my eyes on Mr. Fisher’s shiny gold head, his hands twisting behind his back, and when a gasp seized the air behind me, as everybody caught sight of my mother in her lavender wedding dress, I heard it down the same narrow tunnel as I heard the Figaro wedding march, rendered delicately by a string quartet in the corner of the room.
Mr. Fisher shared no such reserve. Unable to stop himself, he turned to watch his bride approach, and you should have seen the way his face lit up when he glimpsed her. Oh, they were most certainly in love, the two of them. Even the minister couldn’t help but grin. Mama’s own parents were dead, there was no one to give her away, so she just put her own hand into Mr. Fisher’s hand when she reached him, an act of flagrant self-determination, while I stood to her left and watched the minister’s mouth move. Took Mama’s bouquet of small pink roses when Mr. Fisher required her other hand as well. I don’t remember a single thing anyone actually said. When I think about that wedding today, I remember the pastel colors, the smell of all those flowers, the scrape of impatient chairs, and the dampness of the minister’s lips as he married my mother to Hugh Fisher, amen.
8.
MANY HOURS AFTERWARD—I won’t bore you with the details, I mean a wedding’s a wedding, right?—afterward we slouched on the edge of the dock, Isobel and I, swinging our legs above the twitching sea. A bottle of champagne sat between us, mostly finished. Overhead, a high and brilliant moon illuminated our identical pale blue dresses, illuminated the water and the line of the horizon, illuminated Flood Rock and the stocky lighthouse that thrust from its center.
“The way he carried her aboard.” Isobel shook her head slowly, drunkenly, because she had swallowed twice as much champagne as I had, and I’d swallowed a great deal, I’m afraid. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything half so romantic as that.”
“Isn’t it traditional?”
“Across the threshold of a house, Peaches. Not a yacht.” She had a little trouble with the word threshold, but it came out all right in the end. Peaches had first appeared sometime around sunset, as we started the second bottle of vintage Pol Roger that someone had carelessly left out after the last guest had departed. You’re just as sweet as peaches, Miranda, she told me, filling my unsteady glass, and I guess that’s how nicknames happen, isn’t it? In a strange new world like this, you need a new name, and someone gives you one. Peaches. Because she thinks you’re sweet.
“Well, it was an awfully big yacht,” I said. “Almost as big as a house.”
“Yes. Almost as big as Vanderbilt’s.” She paused solemnly. “Do you know how he used to describe a yacht?”
“No.”
“A hole in the water, into which you pour money.”
“You’ve
