Cancel the Wedding (34 page)

He stormed to the front door, grabbing his overnight bag on the way. “You are a lying, damaged bitch and I'm glad I'm getting rid of you.”

The door slammed behind him knocking a picture off the wall and shattering the glass as it hit the floor.

I stood there for a long time staring at the vacancy of Leo. He was just gone. Out of the house, out of this town, out of my life. How had things spiraled so horribly out of control? Leo hated me, really and truly hated me. I had honestly thought he didn't care about me enough to hate me. I cleaned up the broken glass and then wandered out to the back deck to catch my breath. I could see Logan sitting in one of the chairs down by the water.
Oh no, how long has she been stuck out there?

I walked down the path to the lakefront where she was sitting. I tapped her on the shoulder. “Hey, kiddo.”

“Hey. How'd it go?”

“It was pretty horrific, actually.” I sat down next to her and stared out over the water.

“I figured. When I got back to the house I could hear you guys fighting through the door so I thought I'd just wait down here.”

“I'm sorry.”

She shrugged that off. Even a teenager knows how hard it is to go through a breakup. Logan glanced up at the house. “Where'd Leo go?”

“I'm not sure.”

When I closed my eyes all I could see was that look on Elliott's face when the word “fiancé” came out of Leo's mouth. His eyes went from Leo, to me, to the bag in the hall. I just kept seeing it over and over on some masochistic loop in my mind's eye.

I sat up. “You can go up to the house, Lo. I'll be right back.”

“Where are you going?”

“I need to talk to Elliott. He stopped by and said he had figured out everything. About Mom. But then he saw Leo and . . . I need to go find him.”

I practically ran to his house. I hoped he would be there. But if he wasn't then I would try the office, the dock, the coffee shop. I would just do a hard target search of the entire town until I found him.

I ran up the steps of his front porch and then stopped for a minute to catch my breath. I knocked and waited. I knocked again. I was getting ready to leave but I could feel that he was there. He was inside; he just didn't want to talk to me.

I opened the door and let myself in. “Elliott?”

He was sitting on the couch, his hands clenched into fists in his lap. He didn't look up at me. “I don't want to talk to you.”

I moved over toward him slowly. “I have to explain.”

He glared at me. “Explain what?”

I opened my mouth to speak but he cut me off.

“Explain why you lied to me? That you led me to believe you were free to be with me when you weren't? When were you planning on telling me that you were engaged?”

I said, “I'm not engaged anymore.” My voice sounded meek.

He stood up and started yelling, jabbing his finger toward my face. “That's not what I asked you! I asked you if you were planning to explain why you
lied
to me!”

I wasn't feeling the least bit meek anymore. I moved into the room with the same angry pointing finger. “Don't yell at me! It was complicated! You don't understand—”

“I
do
understand, goddammit! I was in the same position! But I never lied to you about it!”

How was I supposed to explain this? “I owed it to Leo to see him and talk to him first. He deserved that.”

“And what the hell did I deserve?”

“I was trying to be fair! It was complicated. And you didn't even know anything about me or my life! It isn't fair of you to think I had some obligation to tell you everything.”

He screamed, “Don't pull that shit! It was a lie of omission and you know it. How could you not tell me about him?”

“Don't get on your moral high horse with me! You dumped your girlfriend of four years for some girl you didn't even know! Who does that?” I was grasping at straws with that, but I was emotionally wrung dry and I couldn't think of anything better. “Would it really have been better for me to break up with Leo from hundreds of miles away before I even knew what this was?”

“Yes!”

“That wouldn't have been fair to him.”

“And how was this fair to anyone? I ended things with Amy because I had feelings for you. That's
not
immoral. Lying to me, lying to that poor bastard that was engaged to you,
that's
immoral! You're right about one thing though. I don't know you.”

He turned his back to me and I took a deep breath trying to calm myself down. I couldn't remember a time in recent history when I had been so furious, not even the scant minutes ago when I was breaking up with my fiancé. I thought, vaguely,
Huh, so this is passion.

I tried to keep my voice even so this could be a conversation instead of a brawl. “Goddammit, Elliot. You're not being fair.”

He spun around, facing me again. His face was red. “I don't have to be fair! I'm pissed off! Honesty is the only thing I really care about and you just destroyed that before we even got started.”

“Destroyed?” Had I destroyed it? Us? What were we anyway? My mind was reeling. “Stop it! I picked
you
!” I couldn't think with him yelling at me like that. “You completely blindsided me. Meeting you . . . I was already trying to reconcile the way I was feeling about Leo when I just . . . I was overwhelmed by these feelings for you. I didn't know what to do! I didn't know what to tell him. I didn't know what to tell you. I was—”

“You didn't tell either one of us anything! Is that who called the day you threw your phone in the lake? Dammit, and you've been lying to my face this whole time.”

“Jesus, you are completely overreacting. I wasn't lying to you to be deceitful and you know it. I felt stuck in a situation and I needed time to figure it out.”

He crossed his arms and stood his ground, glaring at me. “Was this whole thing just some kind of joke to you? Some kind of time-out from your life? Did you think you could just come down here and do as you please, say whatever you want, act however you want, and then leave when it's over? Not giving a shit about the destruction you left behind? Is this some kind of mother-daughter thing? This secret life bullshit?”

That felt like a blow to the face and I flinched. “Fuck you, Elliott.”

I stormed back to the house trying not to cry. I was not very successful in that endeavor. Elliott was being too goddamn unfair. Acting like a child. I wasn't lying to him! Well, I was, but not to be hurtful anyway. Dammit. What did I expect to happen?

I got to the house and went to my room and lay down on the bed. I could hear the water running in the bathroom. Thank goodness, Logan was in the shower. I would have a good hour before I had to speak to another human.

I had blown up Leo and pushed away Elliott. All I needed to do now was get fired from my job so that I could complete the trifecta of ruining my life. I felt physically beaten. I had a headache from the back of my neck all the way around to my forehead.

The water turned off in the bathroom and I put the pillow over my head. And I cried. I tried to cry for Leo but if I were being honest I was crying for Elliott. I felt like I had just lost something that I didn't know how much I desperately needed. Until it was gone. Life works that way sometimes. Because life revels in the idea of being a bitch.

Logan came out of the bathroom and asked, “Are you going to tell me what happened with Elliott?”

I propped my head up on the pillow and sniffled. “We got in a fight.”

She looked at my red, tear-stained eyes and said, “Duh. I meant about Grandma.”

I had completely forgotten that Elliott had said he had figured it all out. I went out to the main room and looked around. I found the pile of papers that he had dropped when he popped in and ran smack into my fiancé. That memory made me feel a little bit sick at my stomach.

I gathered up the papers and read through them. I was so shocked by what I was reading that I had to keep starting over again at the beginning. Without even realizing that I was speaking I kept saying, “Oh my God.”

Logan was getting anxious. “What is it!”

I put the papers down and looked up at her stunned. “He figured it out. Everything.”

Logan's eyes grew wide. “Figured what out?”

I handed the papers to Logan so she could read through them too. I said, “About the lake. Why she wanted to be buried in the lake. We had the right idea but the wrong dates.” I picked up my phone and as I dialed Georgia I noticed that Logan's wet hair was dripping all over the printouts.

“Goddammit Lo, be careful!”

Georgia had already answered her phone. She heard me yelling at Logan and scolded me over the phone line. “Do not curse at her, Olivia!”

For Christ's sake.
I didn't even respond to that. “What time will you get here tomorrow?”

She said, “I'm not sure. Maybe eight?”

“Can you make it earlier? Like six?”

“Why?”

“Because when you get here . . . we're digging up a grave.”

I couldn't get any sleep that night. Every time I closed my eyes there was some new horror looking back at me. It was the look on Elliott's face when he saw Leo. Or the realization on Leo's when he saw Elliott. It was my mother, ghostly white, floating alone in the lake while her house burned down on the shore, red and gold flames licking the sky. Or the body of Oliver bloated and tinged blue being discovered in the muddy reeds. It was George, frozen in time, with that same adoring smile again and again as he looked at Janie's face.

I woke up early the next day and sat on the porch watching the sun slowly move across the surface of the lake.

Logan finally woke up and came out to sit with me. “You feeling any better today?”

“No. Not really.”

“It'll be okay, Aunt Livie.”

Ah, the ignorance of youth. “I'm sitting here thinking that it would have been difficult for me to handle things any worse than I had. Truly.”

“I don't know. You could've slept with Jimmy or something. That would've been a scandal. Or you could've found out that you and Elliott were actually related, but like not until it was too late.” She snapped her fingers, the ideas coming in fast now. “Oh! Or you could have discovered that you were pregnant, but not known who the father was.”

“You are seriously not allowed to watch daytime television anymore.” I stood up to get to work. “Come on. Let's get all of our stuff organized before your mom gets here.”

While Georgia was driving down to Tillman, Logan and I spent the day going through all of our research so that it was laid out in a logical timeline. I had been sending things to Georgia as I discovered them so she had seen just about everything. But it had come to her piecemeal and now, now I wanted to get it straight in all of our minds.

Our timeline was embellished with all of our evidence and printouts and pictures that had been on the Wall of Discovery. Logan and I had everything arranged on the dining room table in chronological order. I had just finished copying the yearbooks that Elliott had found because those had to be returned to the library. Elliott. When I thought of him I felt such a heavy sorrow that it was making me physically ill.

Logan and I were waiting outside for Georgia by the time she finally drove into Tillman and pulled up to the rental house. We were sitting together on the front porch tapping our feet, anxious for her to arrive. All Georgia knew was that in the time we had been out of her sight her rule-following, completely neurotic, straightlaced little sister had dumped her fiancé, consorted with some strange man named Elliott, and was planning to rob a grave after sunset.

Things had gotten a little weird.

She had a worried look on her face as she got out of the car. It was the same look she carried around when our mom got sick.

We ushered Georgia into the house without letting her have a second to stretch her legs after the long drive. I closed the door behind her and she took my hand, stopping me.

“Olivia, are you okay?”

“We can talk later, not now.”

She ignored that. “Are you and Leo . . . officially over? Do you want to talk about it?”

Everything that had happened with Leo seemed like a million years ago. I could feel it telescoping into my past. I was tired to my bones about it. So no, I didn't really want to tell her about it. To relive it. To have to rehash eight months of doubts, six hours of conversation, and five spectacular minutes of shouting. But I knew saying nothing was not an option.

I said simply, “Yes, it's over. Officially. You could probably hear him screaming at me from the highway.”

She had a confused look on her face when I said that. “I thought it would be a bit more cordial. More mutual. I think he'd been feeling the same way, Livie.”

It had all been so very civilized, so amicable, but then I threw napalm on it in the form of an unexpected visit from Elliott. I was not faring well with unexpected visits. I didn't feel like explaining everything to Georgia so I just gave her the shortest version of events I could muster. “Leo was here at the house and Elliott dropped by. It was bad. They both . . . It was bad.”

Georgia looked slightly horrified. “Oh no. I didn't see that one coming. If I had known Leo was going to fly down here I would've warned you. Is he still here?”

“I doubt it. Look, we don't have a lot of time. We need to be out of here when it gets dark in a few hours and we have so much to show you first.”

She wanted to ask me more about it but I wasn't answering. I dragged her over to the dining room table where she began to linger over the timeline, slowly following the events of Janie's life as we had them laid out. It started on the left with the birth certificates of our mother and George. Then the years flowed by with the school photos, our grandmother's death, and newspaper articles, some notes here and there from the stories Florence had shared with us. Georgia would stop at an article, something she hadn't seen before, and read through it. Logan stood at her shoulder following her mother's progress and answering questions as they came up.