Borrow-A-Bridesmaid (28 page)

I take a deep breath. “It doesn't matter. What matters is the truth. Telling Charlie the truth.”

“My mom doesn't even know.”

Why would her mom know about her affair? I shake my head.
Must stay focused
. “Look, whatever motives you had don't matter now. This lie will be like the princess and the pea. Always there, lurking beneath the mattress, making you feel awkward and lumpy and . . . miserable!” Not my best speech ever, but I'm running out of time.

“How did you know?” She presses her fingers against her temples. “There's no way you could know!”

She really thinks she was that subtle? I sigh. “It wasn't hard to figure it out; I know, Susan knows. Even Anna.”

Holly lets out a half-gasp, half-sob. “Anna knows?”

I nod.

She covers her face with her hands. “Mom's going to kill me.”

I frown. “It's not about her. It's about you and Charlie.” I lower my voice. “Please. Tell him the truth.”

Rachel flips her makeup case shut with a snap. “I have no idea what either of you are talking about, but you're boring me to death.” She gestures at her sister. “You're pregnant. Secret's out! God! What are you going on about now?”

I stand to my feet and put my hands on my hips. I'm tired of subtlety. “She cheated on Charlie. With the veg—with Blaine. The preppy neighbor guy.”

Holly's hands drop from her face. She's looking at me like she has no idea what I'm talking about. She thinks she can hide it even now. Unbelievable.

Mark reaches for Holly's hand. “Is it true?”

“No!” Holly shakes him off and whirls on me. “You don't know anything! About anything!”

Undeterred, Mark reaches for Holly again. “If you two are going to start a family—”

Rachel is laughing. “Always something up your sleeve. You'll do anything for attention—”

“Shut up!” Holly's shoulders rise to her ears, and she puts both fists against her forehead. “Shut up, shut up, shut up!” The fists hit her forehead with each incantation.

Rachel, Mark, and I fall silent and move a bit farther from her.

“None of you knows anything! About anything! You want to know the big secret? Fine. Fine!”

She's quaking. Pressure seems to be building inside her, moving from her ankles slowly up to her ears, gathering momentum. And then from the rumbling volcano bride comes the exploding lava revelation.

“There's no baby! Happy?”

The floor seems to dislodge under us, and then we're plummeting.

Thirty-Two

M
y jaw opens and closes a few times. I feel like a mini-golf obstacle, a giant head whose mechanical mouth waits to deflect golf balls. Holly's golf ball of truth bounces off my teeth a few times before rolling into my throat and sticking. It hurts. I can't swallow, and no words can get past the obstruction.

Holly's not moving, either. She looks part relieved and part terrified.

A movement from the other side of the room jolts Holly and me out of our mutual trance. Rachel is doubled over, her torso shaking violently. I step toward her in an unthinking urge to comfort, but she tips up her face to reveal unadulterated glee. “This is too much,” she says between bursts of laughter.

Mark shakes his head, breaking his own trance. He crouches next to Holly and puts a hand on her bare shoulder. Neither of them speaks. He drops to his knees and opens his arms. She collapses into him, her cheek landing on his pilfered boutonniere. One of her tears drips between the rumpled petals. To the soundtrack of Rachel's manic laughter, Mark rocks Holly back and forth, making low soothing noises.

Outside the door, Lena says to an unidentified party, “Yes,
yes
. Hurry up!”

I could escape from this whole scene. When Lena breaks in and sees Mark, she'll go apeshit. I could slip through the nursery door unnoticed and out into the sunny August day.

It's the thought of Charlie, waiting at the end of the aisle for the supposed mother of his child, that drives me to pose in supplication at Holly's feet. Part of me wants to wallop her for this lie—and all the times she's hurt him—but her expression tells me that her internal whipping boy is already enduring a beating.

Holly tightens her grip on Mark. She looks like she wants to say something, but the words condense into tears. The dancing princess charm trembles along in a frenzied pirouette.

“You need to tell him,” Mark says.
Tay-ull
him.

His words startle her, and she puts her hands over her eyes, sobbing harder. “I can't, Daddy. So many people.”

Lena is deep in Holly's brain, nestled between layers of gray matter as if between armrests of an inflated pool floatie, sipping a martini. Letting years of brainwashing do their work.

But Lin is nestled deep in mine. I pluck him from the folds of my own gray matter, where he's shaking his head at stacks of disheveled memories in my hippocampus (“Might we scrapbook these?”). I hand him a dossier on the current sitch, and his eyebrows lift. “Isn't it clear? You have to go get Charlie—just not the way you might have hoped.”

Peering up at Holly, I tug ever so lightly on one of the beaded dress folds. She peers back at me between her index and middle fingers. One watery blue eye.

“Just sit tight,” I say. “Take some deep breaths, and I'll go get him.” I don't have a plan, per se, but let's cross that crevasse when we come to it.

“Try a different key!” Lena's voice is so clear, it sounds like she's already in the room. “Oh, hell—give me that!”

Holly drops her hands and stares at the rattling doorknob. Definitely a fire on the other side.

Mark pats her back, nodding encouragingly. “It'll be okay, Hollypop.”

She starts rocking back and forth, her dress rustling rhythmically as she recites her mantras: “You don't understand. I can't. Charlie will kill me. Mom will kill me.”

Mark's back straightens at the mention of his ex. “This is your
life
we're talking about. Don't let her make this about—” His voice softens. “I know better than anyone. You can't start this thing off with a lie. Your life and your happiness are worth more than one damn campaign season.”

Holly looks up at him. “Not according to her.”

A key fumbles in the keyhole, and I take Holly's hands. “This is insane. I'm going to get him.”

The key turns, and the door opens onto the landing. When her mother enters the room, Holly's face transforms. A quick cast change: Holly's timid understudy is instantly replaced. Her face hardens into a rictus of determination. She looks more like her mother than ever before. Mark seems to notice this, too—he gets to his feet.

Lena pulls the door closed behind her. Her calm, deliberate movements are blood-curdling. The movements of a sleeping beast just waking. Her eyes widen for a nanosecond before she narrows them at Mark dispassionately. The way you'd examine a petrified specimen under a microscope. An unsavory specimen from a different geologic era.

While Lena is distracted, I put my body between her and Holly. Mark stands nearby as a secondary shield.

Lena turns slowly from Mark to me, putting her right hand on her hip. How much did she hear? “I need to speak with Holly. Alone.” She says this in the same tone of voice she might use to dispatch an intern for a ream of paper or a cappuccino.

Everything about Lena is terrifying, including her height and alarming shoulder pads. I picture the shoulder pads buffeting me like boxing gloves. Cue the slow-mo shot of my skin rippling from a hit to the jaw, a trajectory of blood making a perfect rainbow arc onto Mark's wrinkled lapels. It's much easier to say no to her through a keyhole, but I will myself to say it now. “No.”

Lena perches her left hand on her other hip. Winding up.

She tries another tactic, looks past me to Holly: “Clean up your face. We've got ten minutes before you walk.” She says it like she's referring to a plank, not an aisle.

I take a deep breath and put my hands on my hips, mimicking her power pose. For an interminable moment, we hold a statuary staring contest. Until Inner Lin looks up from his scrapbooking and jabs me with a pair of pattern-edged scissors. “She's not walking,” I say. “She has something important to tell Charlie.”

Lena's upper lip flares. If this were a bad kung-fu movie, someone would dub her with an overdramatic grunt. She locks her eyes on Holly; she appears to be reading the secret as if it's spelled out in the lace patterns on Holly's dress hem. And then she smiles at her daughter. A smile with a threat encased in it. A smile that says,
I'll deal with
you
later.
Then she turns to me, cocking her head. I'm to be dealt with first. “There seems to be some confusion about why you're here.”

“I'm a bridesmaid. I'm here to help Holly.” I need a better slogan. And nunchucks.

She smiles. “You're a sad-faced little nobody. Do you even know what a bridesmaid is? The origin dates back to biblical times. Jacob's wives brought their maids with them when they married. In those times, a maid meant a handmaiden. A servant. So, let's sum up, shall we? You're here to do whatever I tell you. If Holly needs help with her basic bodily functions, then that's what you do.”

Lena assesses me with her eyes. This is a familiar look. A look that says,
You are nothing, and you will always be nothing.
It's the look Billy gives me when I get his coffee order wrong. The look Sal gave me when the register was short five dollars. The look Holly's Botoxed shower guests gave me when I ventured too close with my tray of fig tarts.

That's when it hits me: Every conscious and subliminal message from bad bosses, bad boyfriends—they hurt all the more because I believed those messages. As if each offender stood in line over the past months, taking turns pressing their thumbs on an already deep and purpling bruise.

Tears well in my eyes. How easy it would be to listen to this message, too. To nod, to step aside, to take the path of most pain but least resistance.

But Inner Lin has relocated to a conference room, projecting a slide show of other messages I've received: Charlie telling me to write again. Alex saying the only good thing to come from her broken engagement was gaining me as a friend. Stacey's tearful gratefulness when I reunited her with her mom. Maddie shouting, “You got this!” as Alex and I jabbed right, then hooked left.

I feel a levee beginning to break. Each time I swallowed, said “Yes, sir,” “It'll never happen again,” or “I'm sorry, Sal”—each act of meek compliance was a sandbag lodged against an angry tide of gathering salt water. Lena's glare stirs the water, tempting it to rise above the barrier.

Lena turns to Rachel. “Why don't you take Piper outside for some fresh air?” Rachel smile-grimaces, stepping toward me.

A flood of biblical proportions breaks through the levee. “No! I will not be moved!”

Lena's lip flares again. She looks unimpressed.

“You thrive on that, don't you, Lena?” I feel like I'm talking to every boss who's trampled on my soul this year. I conjure a big glass of metaphysical crotch lassi. “Putting people down. But you'll never be truly successful, because you don't really
see
people. You see how you can use them.” I gesture at Holly. “You don't see that your daughter's in some real pain. You're ready to put her through an unhappy marriage because you don't want to call off a ceremony in front of people who might donate to your campaign. Lady, congratulations: You've sold your soul. If you keep going down the path you're on, you're going to wind up in the gubernatorial mansion, old and alone, with no one to help with
your
basic bodily functions.”

I take a deep breath. The room comes back into focus—sharper than it's ever been before. I don't know what I'm expecting to happen next: Maybe she'll fall to the ground in a faint. That's what would happen if this were a nineteenth-century Gothic novel.

The delivery would have been better with nunchucks.

Lena checks her watch. “Clean up your face,” she says to Holly, turning away from me as if I merely sneezed rather than poured a boiling kettle of wrath on her head. When Holly doesn't respond, Lena turns to Rachel. “Clean up your sister and get her ready.”

Rachel rolls her eyes but obliges.

“Holly!” I say, but she's staring into the mirror as Rachel dabs at her cheeks with a wedge-shaped foundation applicator. “Holly.” I prepare to hold the wrath kettle above the bridal veil. It will spare no one today. “If you don't tell him, I will.”

Holly's eyes meet mine in the mirror. Despite the tears still fresh on her cheeks, her eyes have hardened. “I don't know what you're talking about.” I look to Mark for help, but he just shrugs. He looks exhausted.

My heart plays racquetball inside my chest. All I can think about is Charlie, adjusting his tie, clearing his throat, smoothing his lapels. Sure, he'll find out about the baby sooner or later, but by then it'll be couched in lies. Who knows how she and Lena will spin it? This might be my one chance.

I make for the nursery door, hoping Lena will be too focused on Holly to see me slip out. But a moment later, I'm eye level with the shoulder pads.

Lena looks over my head. “Mark, do you want to walk my daughter down the aisle?”

I hear him exhale behind me.

“Do you want to walk my daughter down the aisle or not? I'll keep it very simple for you. It's a yes-or-no question.”

Mark sighs, and I hear decades of pain in that one breath. “This ain't right.”

“That's not what I asked. I asked if you want to walk her down the aisle. And if you do, you'll help me take care of this.” She nods at me, then cocks an eyebrow at him. A long, dramatic eyebrow cocking, like the raising of a theater curtain.

I glance from one to the other, giving the rest of the room a quick inventory for alternate escape plans. I could go for the window, but it's too high for me to reach, and I have this horrible image of Lena snatching my ankle and sinking her teeth into it as I'm about to escape. Anything I can think to do won't work. Point out the window and say, “Oh my God, the Goodyear blimp”? Sucker-punch her in the gut?

“Mark? You've got about ten seconds to make up your mind.”

Rachel is frantically sweeping strands of Holly's hair back into its chignon. Upstairs, the processional starts on the organ.

Mark glares at Lena. “You want me out, you'll have to make me.” He takes Holly's arm. “You sure about this?” She puts her hand into the crook of his elbow and pulls him toward the door. I try to follow them out, but Lena mirrors my every move, blocking my body with hers.

“Rachel!” Lena keeps her body pressed against mine and turns her head toward her oldest daughter. “The key.”

My arm shoots to the counter, but Lena and her shoulder pads contain me while Rachel snatches the key from its spot next to the Goldfish. I try faking left, then darting right, but Lena easily blocks me. She totally missed her calling as a linebacker.

In unspoken agreement, Rachel and Lena switch positions—Rachel body-checks me while Lena presses a button on a radio-like box affixed to the wall. As she does, the sanctuary mikes are amplified into the room in real time. “So you can follow along,” she says almost sweetly.

Lena slips through the door while Rachel shoves me backward hard enough to knock the wind out of my chest. I barrel toward her, gasping, but I'm not fast enough—as soon as I reach the door, it closes in my face. I grab for the handle only to hear the lock slide into place with a definitive click.