Happy Place(103)

“I’m the one who lost those vintage Ray-Bans we used to share,” I admit. “God, that’s actually a huge load off.”

“Oh!” Cleo chirps. “I told that one shitty poet you dated that I was a witch, and that if he ever contacted you again, I’d hex him so his dick fell off.”

Sabrina touches her chest, evidently moved. “See, this is why you’re going to be a great mother.”

“I didn’t know you did that,” I tell Cleo. “If I had, I probably wouldn’t have told the same guy that my dad was in the mob.”

A laugh cracks out of Sabrina. “I have the best friends.”

“Best family,” Cleo says.

The ache in my heart is almost pleasant. It spreads through my limbs into my hands and feet, a heaviness, like love has its own mass and weight. “You know,” I say, “Parth’s not going anywhere either.”

Her gaze averts. “If you and Wyn couldn’t even make it work . . .”

I grab her face in my hands. “You’re not us,” I say. “You are so, so, so much braver than me, Sabrina.”

She rolls her eyes.

“I’m serious,” I say. “You can do this, if you want to.”

Her voice is a wisp. “I do want to. He’s the love of my life. I want to marry him.”

“Then let’s get you home,” Cleo says.

Sabrina swipes the tears out from under her eyes. “Let’s go home,” she says with an air of relief. As if, now that she’s made the decision, she’s unafraid.

On our way to the cars, Sabrina throws one last look back at the chapel, the trees below, the water out ahead.

She smiles. Like when she looks back at it, all she sees is the happiness of that day she spent here with her parents, rather than the pain of what came after.

Like even when something beautiful breaks, the making of it still matters.





36





HAPPY PLACE

KNOTT’S HARBOR, MAINE


A SATURDAY AFTERNOON. A wedding, only in the most technical of terms. There are sunflower bouquets for all of us, delivered right to the front door, and a cake that says Happy birthday, wicked pissah on it, surrounded in real, edible flowers. At Sabrina and Parth’s expressions, I shrug. “A lot of businesses won’t do wedding stuff.”

“Yes, but who allowed you to use wicked pissah in this way?” she says.

“This,” Parth says, “is the best birthday I’ve ever had.”

He wears a suit that makes him look like James Bond On Vacation. Sabrina dons her sailing-chic look. The rest of us sport our Lobster Hut outfits, all rumpled from hard wear and tight from eating well.

The photographer arrives at three thirty to photograph us doing nothing much at all aside from sitting around the pool in semiformal wear, tossing out increasingly ridiculous names for Cleo and Kimmy’s baby.

When they’d told Parth and Wyn about the pregnancy, Parth had blinked, stunned to speechlessness, and Wyn had leapt to his feet and started laughing, eyes moving between all of us like he was waiting for a gotcha.

“Seriously?” Parth said. “There’s a baby in your body? Right now?”

Cleo laughed. “Yes, it’s in my body.”

“This is . . . oh my god,” Wyn cried. “You’re having a baby!”

“Someone get the fainting couch,” Kimmy said. “Wynnie’s going down.”

He walked around the kitchen to hug each of them in turn, then looked at me, his eyes sparkling and clear, no fog. Like his first instinct when he felt joy was to check whether it had hit me too, to share it.

It made my heart soar and throb and burn with hope.

Now we’re all drinking champagne and sparkling cider in the sun and pressuring our friends to name their baby Kardashian Kimberly Cleopatra Carmichael-James while a paid professional snaps photographs of us.

The wedding officiant arrives at four.

By five, Parth and Sabrina stand at the edge of the dock, light glinting off their hair, eyes sparkling with tears, and promise to love each other always. Cleo and I wrap our arms around each other, our sunflower bouquets caught between us, and try not to sob.

By five thirty, we’re flinging ourselves off the end of the dock, shrieking with laughter, failing badly at DON’T FUCKING SCREAM, then pulling ourselves out of the icy water and running up to the warm comfort of the pool.

We order pizza—no one wants to leave the house, and Knott’s Harbor isn’t big on delivery—and eat it with Veuve Clicquot. We don’t talk about tomorrow, when we’ll say goodbye. To one another, to this house, to an era of life we wish could have lasted forever.

Right now we’re here.

When the sun starts falling down the sky, we bundle up and climb back down to the rocks to watch night settle. We build a fire, roast marshmallows. Sabrina burns hers to a charred crisp, and Parth patiently toasts his to golden brown.

When Wyn catches me shivering, he takes off his worn-out Mattingly sweatshirt—he’s always run warm—and yanks it over my head, smiling as he ties a bow beneath my chin. It smells like smoke and seawater and him. I never want to take it off.

We light the sparklers Parth found in the garage, and we write our names in the dark, impermanent but all the brighter and more blazing for it.