End Times (25 page)

“If the new holy Madonna of Carbon County needs you to do anything, it’s to celebrate her wedding.” Owen clinked his glass against Daphne’s. “May Mr. and Mrs. Doug Varley and their kid, the Second Coming, live long and prosper.”

“Well, here’s to Janie,” Daphne agreed. She took a tentative sip, and then another. The champagne was crisp and heady, and the bubbles fizzed tantalizingly in her throat. The only other time she’d had champagne was when someone at work had snuck a bottle of André into the back room on New Year’s Eve. Then, the cloying sweetness had given her an instant headache. But she felt like she could drink this all night.

“C’mon—let’s go check out the rest of this party.” Owen took her arm and steered her through the crowd, past the gift table piled high with presents in pearly paper and the carving station where chunks of beef and ham sat waiting to fill people’s plates. She knew she should tell him to let go of her, that he should go home before Doug realized his number-one rival had crashed his wedding. She would, in just a minute, she decided, taking another sip of her drink and realizing it was nearly gone. She’d demolished it in a couple of gulps.

“You want another?” Owen asked.

“I shouldn’t.” The champagne was already making her loosen her grip on her senses, preventing her from telling Owen to leave.

“Sure you should.” Owen steered them toward the bar for two fresh glasses. “It’s a wedding. Everyone’s celebrating. It’s okay for you to have fun, too.”

With a new flute fresh in her hand and Owen’s arm through hers, she watched the people of Carbon County celebrate. The way they clustered in circles and then spun off into new formations in their bright summer wedding clothes reminded Daphne of plastic jewels seen through the end of a kaleidoscope, an ever-changing pattern of color and light. But she was at the other end, looking in. The realization was sudden and bittersweet.

She turned to Owen. “I’ve been here for almost three months now,” she said softly. “And I still feel like an outsider.”

His eyes met hers, dark and serious. “I know what you mean,” he said. “I’ve always felt that way, my entire life. Maybe it was not really knowing where I came from, or wanting to win more than anyone else. But it always felt like I was on the outside, looking in.”

“Even on the rig?” she asked. It was where she felt most at home in the world, the tough work and long hours uniting the crew in an easy camaraderie. On the rig, it didn’t matter who you were or where you came from, whether you were running away or hiding something from your past, as long as you were willing to work.

“Even on the rig.” He nodded. “I like everyone, but I don’t really feel a connection to anyone. Except you.”

The sky darkened as the sun sank behind the mountains in a blazing tangerine orb, and fairy lights twinkled on one by one.

“You mean, because we’re friends,” she said uncertainly.

“No.” His face was a shadow in the velvety crush of night. “I mean—”

“Ladies and gentlemen, it’s time for the first dance!” The wedding coordinator’s shrill voice drowned in a screech of microphone static from the bandstand. “I’d like to announce, for the first time ever, Mr. and Mrs. Douglas Varley!”

The crowd erupted, and Daphne reluctantly drew her eyes away from Owen and to the center of the dance floor. Janie stepped forward, glowing like a Madonna. She seemed to glide without touching the floor, as if suspended in a golden web of well-wishes. Doug shuffled behind her, flushed and proud. The first strains of “From This Moment On”
drifted around them like tendrils of smoke. He took her hand, their bodies coming slowly together, the bulge of Janie’s stomach keeping them a safe distance like two sixth graders at a middle school dance. But their eyes were locked together, their faces bright and alive with love.

Daphne wondered what it could be like to feel that way about someone: so intoxicated, so in love, that you could overlook the bad stuff and see only the good. She had never understood her cousin’s attraction to Doug—had never understood any woman’s attraction to any man—but with her cousin swaying slowly on the dance floor, her friends and family dabbing at their eyes with Kleenex, and Owen by her side, she thought that maybe, just maybe, it could be nice to feel that way, too.

One by one, other couples trickled onto the dance floor, holding each other tight. Bryce spun Hilary under a spotlight, Vince guided Deirdre Varley in a stiff waltz, and Floyd whispered something in Karen’s ear that made her smile through her tears.

“Come on.” Owen tugged at Daphne’s arm. “Dance with me.”

“No.” She was terrified of how it might feel to be that close to him, to have his arms around her and her body pressed against his.

“Yes,” he insisted. The world went soft as he took her hands and led her gently to the edge of the dance floor, his eyes locked on hers.

“I don’t even know how to do this,” she said, a last-ditch effort to change his mind.

“It’s easy.” He lifted her arms and arranged them around his neck, the softness of his thick black hair brushing her wrists. Then he laced his arms around her back, drawing her into the heady world of leather and metal and grease that lived under his skin, in his veins.

Her body went tight, a shield against the sudden, unaccustomed contact. She realized she was trembling.

“It’s okay,” he murmured in her ear. “You don’t have to be afraid. It’s just dancing.”

She looked up at him, their noses nearly brushing. “But I am,” she said.

“Why?” His voice was fierce and serious now, his breath warm on her cheek. “I know you want this, too.”

He held her tighter, trying to still her shivering. Pinpricks of heat exploded inside her as she felt herself respond, pressing up against him, craving the touch of his skin. She knew she was too close to the edge, in danger of giving up everything she’d worked so hard to protect. But she wasn’t sure she could resist anymore. He was right—she did want this. And his lips were just millimeters from hers.

She closed her eyes, succumbing to the night, to his touch, to the threat of a kiss building between them. And then the song ended in a sudden, strangling cacophony of applause.

“And now it’s time to cut the cake!” The wedding coordinator grasped the microphone, scarlet wisps from her bun unraveling around her head.

Still trembling, Daphne disengaged herself from Owen’s grasp. She couldn’t believe she’d come so close, let things go so far. The world dipped and swerved around her, and she realized with disgust that she was getting drunk.

The caterers wheeled out a cart the size of a small sedan, draped in a bone-white tablecloth. It took five of them to maneuver it into place, and as they made their way to the center of the dance floor a series of
oooohs
and
aaaahs
arose in their wake. Once they’d skirted the crush of people, Daphne saw what all the fuss was about.

The cake was a perfect scale replica of the Varleys’ future house.

Candied stairs led up to a grand entrance etched in fondant, and the peaked windows were made of crystal-clear spun sugar. Frosted shingles and caramel gables sprouted from every surface, and it was surrounded by an elaborate English garden rendered in a dozen shades of frosting.

Janie approached the cake, laughing, Doug at her side. As the knife slid through the round turret at the top, Daphne realized with a sick shock that the elaborate celebration around her, the caterers and the champagne and the band that the Varleys had shelled out for so graciously, had nothing to do with their son’s marriage. They were celebrating their new wealth, their renewed status in town, and their ability to show off and throw fancy parties. Her cousin was nothing more than an excuse.

There was a sudden whoosh, and a mass of teal and magenta feathers plummeted from the sky, landing with a sickening splat on the peaked roof of the cake. Janie screamed and leapt back, the knife still in her hand. Frosting and feathers flew everywhere: into Janie’s eyes and down the front of her wedding dress, onto Doug’s suit and the band’s sheet music and the wedding coordinator’s sleek black skirt suit.

“What the—” Vince cried angrily. “Did that damn bird just dive-bomb our three-thousand-dollar cake?”

Janie dropped the knife and wiped frosting from her cheeks. Tears sprung from her eyes. She backed away from the cake, a look of horror on her face.

“It’s dead!” she sobbed, just as another bird plunged from the sky and into the center of the table closest to Daphne, breaking the oversize vase and spraying blood and water, glass and flowers across the tabletop.

Daphne stood glued to the spot, staring at the bird’s corpse as everyone around her scrambled back, screaming and cursing and knocking over chairs in their hurry to get away. The bird’s body was limp and cold, crisscrossed with lines of blood from the broken glass. A single onyx-colored eye stared back at her, unseeing, lifeless. Dread churned in her stomach, clashing noxiously with the champagne.

More screams rang out as another bird fell from the sky. And then another. They splattered onto the parquet dance floor, scattered the musicians, and plopped indiscriminately onto tables and chairs, each hollow thud more horrifying than the last.

“My chapeau!” Daphne heard old Eunice cry as a mass of pink feathers impaled itself on the spire of fake lilacs sprouting from her hat. Madge reached out a trembling hand to help, but a herd of children running full tilt and terrified away from the rainbow hailstorm of dying birds knocked the two ladies to the side. Snot and tears streamed from the children’s scrunched-up, scarlet faces, and their voices pierced the evening with a heart-rending wail.

It was as if the birds’ sudden deaths had broken the kaleidoscope, the colors running together and falling, breaking apart. The wedding guests rushed from one end of the property to the other, shouting and shoving, desperate to get away from the birds of paradise falling thick and fast from the sky, as if shot down by a malicious band of poachers with deadly aim. The dance floor became slick with blood, the air a riot of colored feathers, the scent of fear and destruction sharp and pervasive in the velvety night.

Daphne couldn’t make her legs work. Owen draped a protective arm over her shoulders as she stood dumbly, watching the birds fall in a rainbow blur before her eyes, watching her uncle Floyd whip off his fancy new suit jacket and cover Madge’s and Eunice’s heads, rushing them to the relative safety of the porta-potties. She watched Doug kick the dead birds away, swinging his fists like he was trying to punish them for dying on his wedding day, to punch them out of the sky. And she watched Janie crumble, sinking to the ground in a pile of tears and tulle, her opulent wedding dress streaked with a hideous tie-dye of scarlet blood and green frosting.

The sight snapped Daphne into action. She threw Owen’s arm from her shoulders and rushed to her cousin, her rubber-soled shoes mercifully sure on the slippery parquet. She felt her foot sink into something soft and gooey, one of the corpses, but she forced herself to ignore it and push on until she was at her cousin’s side, crouched next to her in a puddle of blood and feathers as the last of the birds hurtled to its final resting place in the curved, brass bell of the tuba abandoned on the bandstand.

Janie’s shoulders were trembling, her arms above her head in a bomb-shelter pose. Weak mewling sounds came from beneath her veil, like a kitten crying for milk.

“Janie.” Daphne wrapped both her arms around her cousin and felt the cold from her bare skin, the trembling residue of her fear. “It’s over now. It was just a freak accident. It’s going to be okay.”

Janie lifted her head. Her face was red and puffy from crying, her perfect, professional makeup job smeared across her face in thick, black streaks. “That was no freak accident.” Her voice was a guttural whisper, her eyes dark with terror. “That was a sign.”

IT went without saying that Doug was pretty hungover the day after his wedding. The whole thing had been god-awful, ever since his folks got that bee up their bungholes about him proposing, and then his mom wanted to plan the whole thing and his dad wouldn’t stop griping about the expense, being all “Why can’t Floyd put his money into his own daughter’s wedding instead of betting on this one-horse town?” And Janie was always bugging him about flowers or vows or whatever. Then there was the whole waste-of-time day itself, the parade of aunts who smelled like old carpet gurgling congratulations in his ear, the speeches about the responsibility of fatherhood (which, not that anyone asked, he was
so
not ready for), and then the icing on the cake—literally—those pain-in-the-ass birds dropping dead out of the sky.

Forget a honeymoon in Cancún, which was apparently not possible if your new wife was about to pop, or even getting a little wedding-night action. By the time they got to the presidential suite at the Holiday Inn, Janie was such a hot mess that all he could do was get her into the shower, trying to tell her it would all be okay and chugging Maker’s Mark from the bottle he’d cadged from the wedding’s bartender until she sobbed herself to sleep next to him on the bed.