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happened. When morning
came, she woke up with her consciousness rising effortlessly,
pleasingly, like a feather in a drift of warm air, until the
bone-jarring crunch of memory hit.
    Oh. That’s
right.
    Now misery sat
on her chest again, as heavy as solid rock. She couldn’t move. She
just had to lie here hugging it to herself, cradling it in her
stomach until the surprise wore off and it fractionally eased.
Eventually, she got out of bed with the stiff, fearful movements of
an old woman, and only knew she was alive because it couldn’t hurt
this much to be dead.
    The wedding
was off.
    Charlie had
gone back to New York, wearing his reaction the same way he wore
surgical gloves, neat and impersonal with no hint of the intensity
beneath.
    She wasn’t a
bad person, she just couldn’t stop herself from trying too hard,
because otherwise what was left? She owed it to everyone to try too
hard. She owed it to herself. To Billy. To Dad. Sarah couldn’t see
the extent of that inner pressure. Mom had no clue. She thought
that by now everything should be solved.
    The one person
Emma should have counted on to understand her had gone, and the
fact that Charlie didn’t understand her after all, despite the
matching stripes in their souls, was her own fault.
    The neat room
that she always slept in up here at the lake-house was crammed with
all the perfect things she’d made by hand for this day. Four
hundred white paper doves to hang from the trees surrounding the
church on invisible nylon filament, a hundred and twenty printed
wedding programs in hand-made dust jackets of champagne-colored
moiré taffeta, a hundred and twenty favor boxes with delicate
waistbands of thin gold and each guest’s name in hand-written
calligraphy.
    There had been
months of planning and decisions and work involved, squeezed in
around the enormous commitment of her hospital internship year. She
never could have managed it all if she hadn’t moved back home – the
first time she’d lived with her family for anything other than
short summer visits since Billy was born.
    For twenty-two
months the wedding had been the place her thoughts automatically
tracked back to, her mental elevator returning to level one. She’d
crammed the guest list with three generations of cousins and
friends and work colleagues from her side and Charlie’s. She’d
quested exhaustively for the right reception venue and had settled
on the beautifully restored Victorian-era Craigmore Hotel, sitting
on its own island in Lake George with the Adirondack Mountains
dreaming in the background, classy and just beautiful.
    How could such
a perfect wedding not happen as planned?
    Charlie.
Charlie.
    And why had
she thought a perfect wedding would help?
    Out of bed,
she took a shower, washing away a little of the old woman feeling.
When she turned the water up hotter it seemed to do some good, but
then she didn’t want to turn it off. Someone rattled the handle on
the bathroom door and she didn’t respond, just turned her face up
and let the hot water needles drum on her cheeks and her nose and
her chin.
     
    After so much
guitar the previous night, Dad still had music in his head in the
morning, just as Sarah had predicted. It came out in snatches and
hums while he brushed his teeth and made coffee. It was his usual
unconscious and creative free association, this time on the happy
theme of weddings. “Going to the chap-el, and…”
    Sarah kept
saying, “Dad! Change the tu-une, please!” in a sing-song voice that
was meant to warn him, but five minutes later he would be at it
again, half under his breath.
    “Nice day for
a – ” Jaunty beat, emphasized with head movement. “ – white
wedding.” And then for some reason, some obscure line about
twenty-four years living next door to Alice, followed by the entire
tragic narrative contained in Leader of the Pack.
    The weather
taunted them, but no-one mentioned it. Early cloud threatened rain,
and there came the sound of thunder, but