Nantucket Solstice, page 14
Alana’s chest caved in. Tears sprung to her eyes. “I didn’t.” She sniffed. “But it’s worse than that. I think the director was trying to manipulate me. It felt just like old times with Asher. And it totally destroyed my confidence. I haven’t been able to tell you because it’s all so embarrassing. That, and I don’t want you to think I don’t love you.”
Alana burst into tears, and Jeremy collected her in his arms and swayed with her as the fireworks blasted overhead. Alana could feel the steady beat of his heart through her entire body. She felt cocooned.
“I would be lying if I said I wasn’t hurt,” Jeremy offered quietly.
Alana felt her heart crack at the edges. “I know. I knew you would be.”
Jeremy kissed the top of her head and pulled her tighter against him. He sighed. “I know what it’s like to want something so badly. I know that it’s consuming.”
Alana sensed that he was talking about Notre Dame again, about a football career that seemed laid out for him, about a future that should have been his if it weren’t for that horrendous car accident and a night that had altered both of their lives forever.
“I don’t think I ever told you that I went there,” Jeremy said as he continued to hold her. “I drove all the way out to Notre Dame during that first season. You were already in the city with Asher, and my life was nothing. I was so depressed. Dead inside. I thought maybe a long drive would shake my sorrows out of me. I thought maybe going to Notre Dame would free me of something that was weighing me down. But when I got there, it was twenty-two degrees, and it was snowing. I sat way back in the stands, shivering as I watched the team that should have been my team lose by twenty-three points. I stayed through every minute, maybe as a way to punish myself.”
Alana could feel his sad smile. It was her turn to hold him tighter. “I’m so sorry, baby. I’m so sorry.”
“It’s okay. It was an important lesson for me,” Jeremy said. “I learned to put the past behind me that day. I still remember staying in a hotel in that little rinky-dink university town and flicking through the stations to watch reruns of Seinfeld. I knew you were off having this glamorous life, and I wasn’t sure if anything would ever happen for me. But I sat there and laughed myself to sleep. And in the morning, there was so much light spilling through the hotel's windows. I’ll never forget that.”
Alana and Jeremy continued to hold each other for a long time before they released their hug and walked hand-in-hand back home. There was an air of empathy, of understanding. When they reached the front porch, Alana squeezed his hand a final time and said, “I’m going to make sure Sarah is okay in this world. Nobody can mess with her.”
But Jeremy just said, “I think Sarah can already take care of herself,” with a smile. And Alana knew that he was right.
Chapter Nineteen
The weekend before Alana and Jeremy’s wedding was Sarah’s first performance in Manhattan. Alana and Jeremy drove down that morning, holding hands between the seats as they raced toward that glinting horizon where their girl was making her way toward stardom. Greta, Bernard, Julia, Ella, and Will were coming in separate cars; Scarlet was already in the city with her mother, Quentin, James, and Ivy, and Laura was going to stop by to see it later that week on her way to Nantucket for the wedding. It was clear that everyone in the Copperfield family took her artistry seriously; they wanted to make time for her. They wanted to let her know she was loved.
Jeremy and Alana parked right in front of Sarah’s apartment in the Lower East Side. “I can’t believe we got a parking spot,” Alana said with a laugh as she got out.
“Must be a sign of good luck coming our way,” Jeremy said.
Sarah bounced from the front door and hugged her father first, followed by her soon-to-be stepmother. Alana searched Sarah’s face for some indication that Sarah had learned about Alana’s failed attempt at acting but found nothing. She hoped that meant nobody would ever tell Sarah that Sarah would be allowed to play the role of Martha without guilt weighing her down.
“Let’s get bagels,” Sarah said, tugging them along and gushing about that week of “horrible but incredible” rehearsals leading up to today’s show. “And Pete already wants me to start learning my lines for the next play!”
“You don’t look frantic,” Jeremy pointed out. “But I would be.”
Sarah smiled and caught Alana’s eye. “I just wish you were around to run lines with me. I’m pretty sure you’re the only reason any of this happened.”
“That’s not true,” Alana countered, “and you know it. It was pure talent.”
Even still, Alana’s heart was warm as they floated through the streets and ambled into her and Sarah’s favorite bagel place. Jeremy wasn’t familiar with it, so they recommended their favorite flavors and cream cheeses and ordered big coffees. They sat outside at a picnic table and watched the early afternoon city dwellers, all of whom seemed up on the latest fashions the latest ways to wear their hair and makeup. Alana felt woefully behind. It reminded her of her years in Paris when she’d realized that fashion had shifted off its axis the slightest bit, and she had to buy an entire new wardrobe. But now that she was an islander, practicality was slowly taking over her life. That, and her love for Jeremy. When you loved someone that much, when they loved you—it meant you just didn’t care about the little details as much anymore. Recently, she realized she’d gained a few pounds, but because her wedding dress still fit like a glove, she waved it off. It was no big deal. By comparison, if she’d been an actress preparing for the stage, she would have absolutely panicked.
After bagels, Sarah sped off to prep for the big night ahead. This left Jeremy and Alana to their own devices before the seven-p.m. curtain. They wandered in and out of shops, looked in bookstores for summer reads, and again squabbled gently about where they might go for their honeymoon. They’d decided to wait until October or November when the island was grim and wet and cold. They wanted to squeeze this Nantucket dry of family parties and laughter on the beaches they loved the most.
Alana and Jeremy got ready for the performance at the hotel that had served as Alana’s second home for June. The receptionist greeted her like an old friend. “It’s been a while! We’ve missed you.”
Alana wasn’t sure if she’d missed this wildlife in the city. She’d genuinely adored the previous few weeks of calm, of walking around downtown with an ice cream cone, of trying out new recipes with Jeremy and calling themselves “empty nesters” even though, really, Alana had hardly officially lived with Sarah at all. There had also been final preparations to make for the wedding, which she, Ella, Julia, and their mother had done together. Everything was falling into place. Every detail was accounted for.
Alana changed into a dark red dress that showed a little more leg than a normal forty-seven-year-old might have, but she didn’t mind. That was who she was, and she didn’t want to feel sorry for it. Jeremy wore a suit that made him look extremely handsome, but the look on his face gave away his nerves. Alana kissed him with her eyes closed and tried to translate to him just how wonderful he looked, but he said, “I’m just a washed-up football player from a little island. I work in a basement and look at records all day.” Alana laughed and swatted him. “All the women in that theater won’t be able to keep their eyes off you.”
It turned out that Alana was mostly right about that. When they entered the foyer, multiple women turned to assess the beautiful couple. Their eyes turned from Jeremy to Alana and back again. They smirked like the models Alana had once known back in her twenties, models who’d wanted Alana’s career. But Alana’s smile was serene. She understood that what she had was something special; she also knew it wasn’t just surface-deep.
“Alana!” Julia called from the opposite end of the foyer, where she stood with the rest of their family. Their father was wearing the brand-new suit he’d gotten for the press tour for his most recent novel, and he looked dapper, like a Cambridge University professor. Alana and Jeremy went around hugging everyone until an usher announced it was time to go in. Alana slipped her hand into Jeremy’s and followed him down the aisle to the fourth row, where Sarah had reserved seats for the two of them. The other Copperfields were seated a bit further away but with excellent angles on the action.
The curtain came up to reveal the set that had a downtown street with a casino, a club and an old-world bar, plus shadows of horses and people in the background, as though it was a crowded time in a forgotten era. Alana gripped Jeremy’s hand as Sarah made her big entrance. The line was something Sarah had practiced hundreds if not thousands of times back in Nantucket: “It’s one thing to be deceived. But to be so heinously directed in a direction that seems wholly alien is another thing entirely! I will never forget that man for the rest of my life. I hate him.”
The audience laughed. Sarah had said it perfectly. She’d already won over her audience. For a little while, as the play went on, Alana allowed herself to fall into the magic of the play. She allowed herself to forget that that young woman up there was her darling Sarah. She was a character in this play; she was messy and entirely un-Sarah-like. Once, when Alana glanced over at Jeremy, she caught him crying. His cheeks were gleaming with tears. She squeezed his hand harder, enraptured with him and his sensitivity and the power of his love.
“That’s my little girl,” he said when it was over. “I can’t believe it. She did it.”
“She really did,” Alana said.
Chapter Twenty
This was Greta’s third wedding in less than a year. You would have thought she would have a handle over her emotions by now, that she wouldn’t wake up crying and rush to the bathroom to give herself a pep talk. “These are happy days,” she reminded herself as she ran the water and blubbered. “These are the days that remind you just how good it is to be alive.”
Greta brewed coffee downstairs and retreated to her study that morning. She’d agreed to host all of the Copperfield women starting at eleven o’clock sharp—with croissants and fresh fruit and cream and Scarlet’s famous mimosas, but first, she wanted to write for a few minutes. She wanted to drop back into Celeste’s world.
Greta wrote I’ve learned bits and pieces about Celeste’s wedding to Greg from phone conversations with Greg himself. He was all over the place after our first meeting and initially told me he wasn’t sure he was up to talking to me again. But he called me out of the blue in mid-July and said, “I want to tell you as much as you want to know. I want Celeste’s life to be recorded. Even the parts she didn’t let me know.” And so he told me, on the morning of their wedding, Celeste came to find him at his brother’s house and told him she couldn’t go through with it. She said she was sorry. Greg begged her to help him understand. She said she would if he promised to leave her alone. “Obviously, I was broken-hearted,” Greg told me on the phone. “I was completely in love with her, and I’d fallen for those two kids, too. I wanted to build a family with her. But I’ll never forget what she said. She said, ‘It’s all meaningless, Greg. All of it. Love. Life. I don’t know if I have the energy for any of it. I don’t understand what’s happened or what will happen next, and I’m terrified. I’m terrified I’ll let you down, or you’ll let me down, or we’ll fall apart for no reason at all.’ I’d never heard her talk like that, but it makes sense, based on what you told me, Greta, that she was a writer of fiction. That she had the heart of an artist. She was so upset. So I took her hand and said, ‘All I know is I love you. We can take this one day at a time. And there’s no way we’ll break each other’s hearts. We trust each other completely. And we’ll never lie.’ I really said that! And meanwhile, she’d never told me anything pertinent about her past. But she told me, ‘I want to be true and good to you for the rest of my life.’ And I genuinely believe she was. I believe we both woke up every morning and made decisions that made the difficult parts of reality easier for both of us. And I hate so much that she had to leave this planet so early. But I hope I made things comfortable before she had to go.”
Greta wept as she typed and cleaned herself up in the shower just in time for the girls to arrive. Alana was first. She wore a pair of shorts and a tank top and carried her wedding gown in its big plastic bag. “Uh oh,” Alana said before she hugged her, “It looks like you’ve been writing this morning?”
“Are my eyes still red?” Greta sighed and took Alana’s wedding dress from her just as Julia and Ella pulled into the driveway. “How are you feeling, honey?”
“I’m wonderful,” Alana said. She sounded mystical as she floated into the living room and sat down. The light beamed in from the window and cast her in a glow. “I hope you’re okay. Is the book taking too much out of you?”
Greta huffed. “You know how I am with writing. It has to take everything from me. That’s the only way I know how to do it.”
Julia walked in as she spoke and laughed. “You sound just like all of my writers.” She hugged her and added, “But you’re much better than they are, Mom. I would beg you to publish with me, but I know you have the Big Five publishing houses chasing after you.” There was no ill will behind what Julia said, and Greta smiled. She’d promised to publish a novella with Julia for next year—a short fiction piece about an older woman who handled the dramatic goings-on at an artist residency. She had plenty of inspiration after the past year or so of taking on artists. The list of crazy happenings was a mile long at this point.
The other Copperfield women and Sarah arrived soon afterward, and chaos reigned. Scarlet bopped around, passing out mimosas as Ivy passed out croissants with cream and sliced strawberries that tasted so tart and decadent that it was hard to believe Greta had picked them from a berry bush on that very island. Makeup artists and hairstylists arrived to do everyone’s hair, and Laura and Ella took over the LPs, spinning record after record to get Alana and the others in wedding mode, everything from Taylor Swift to David Bowie to Lana Del Ray to The Beatles. Greta fell from one conversation to another and insisted on having “very minimal makeup and very minimal haircare.” She just couldn’t stand to have too much crap on her face. And being surrounded by the love of her family made her feel beautiful anyway.
The wedding was set to begin at four-thirty that afternoon. A little after twelve-thirty, a crew came by to set everything up, including the floral archway beneath which Alana and Jeremy would say their vows, enough white chairs for the limited number of guests, a speaker system and tables for the heaps of food. Greta was thrilled that somebody else was going to cook for a change, but she had insisted on approving the catering beforehand. She wouldn’t have any shoddy food at her daughter’s wedding.
Alana put on her wedding dress a few minutes before four, and the Copperfield women went quiet with surprise. Alana was always a beauty queen regardless of what she wore, but the white dress had a startling effect. With her dark hair and dark eyebrows, she looked like a snow queen. Greta felt her eyes fill again. “You look beautiful, honey,” she said as everyone remembered they could speak and cried out their agreement.
The men were already here. They required no makeup, just a spritz of cologne and a bit of gel in their hair, and they were off. But when Greta stepped out on the back porch to see them all together, chatting in their suits and tuxedos, her heart skipped a beat. Bernard was standing near Julia’s husband, Charlie, smiling and chatting about something or other. It was probably about Charlie’s woodworking, which Bernard adored. Charlie had even made Alana and Jeremy a beautiful wooden chest for their wedding, which was a surprise that Greta had nearly spilled the details of to Alana a few weeks ago. She’d been able to clear her tracks. It was close.
Although Alana hadn’t opted for traditional bridesmaids, Julia, Ella, Sarah, and Greta served as her official “wedding attendees.” They hung back as the others found white chairs on the sand and then walked down the aisle slowly as the string quintet played “Pachelbel’s Canon.” Greta went last, following behind Julia. She looked every single guest in the eye and remembered how much she loved them and how much they loved Alana and Jeremy. And then she thought about Celeste on her wedding day, frightened out of her mind that something was about to go wrong. That the horrors from her past would come up and bite her. That they would hurt her children or Greg. But Greg had assured her everything would be okay. And wasn’t that what marriage was? Bernard was Greta’s intellectual equal. She loved his mind and his creativity. But more than that, she loved his heart. She loved his laughter. She loved cuddling up to him in bed and telling him little stories from her day. She loved drinking coffee with him. She loved that when he dunked himself in the ocean, he would always come up and shake his long hair like a scraggly dog. She loved him. And there was very little art in this world that could fully encapsulate what it meant to be in love with someone. Maybe that was what Celeste had figured out when she stepped away from art and writing. Maybe she reached total enlightenment in the form of making sandwiches for her children, flicking around on television and drinking coffee with Greg. Maybe she loved the ability to breathe more than the ability to think and think and think.
Greta held Bernard’s hand as Alana came down the aisle. Her eyes shimmered with the afternoon light, and Jeremy let a single tear fall. He took Alana’s hands in his as the pastor raised his hands and said a brief prayer over the couple.
Jeremy went first, “You came back into my life and flipped my world upside down. I had no idea what was in store for me and for us. But every single day has been an adventure ever since. I know who I want to laugh with and cry with, who I want to talk to every morning, and who I want to go to sleep beside every night. I know who I want to sing songs with in the car. And more than that, I know who will uphold my daughter and her life and her choices above everything. The fact that you’ve taken such good care of Sarah and me since you came into the picture floors me. I love you, Alana. I’m so grateful you want to be my wife.”
