Mary and O'Neil Page 0,53

I am back in the summer, I will come to your wedding.

It is just a few months later, but already those days in Twig seem like a distant memory. Is it the same for you? The mail is slow here, and the phone is impossible, so I have heard almost nothing from home; so perhaps that’s the reason. But I also know that our year there was like no other—it was like a year outside of time—and I’m glad we were together, to know that it happened.

She wrote this in a coffee bar, late on an October afternoon. She told him about her roommate, and about her classes and friends, and the way the trains were always on strike and it was always warm; she wrote him of her life. When she was done she sealed it without reading it, bought a brightly colored stamp from the young woman behind the counter, and slid it into the postbox by the phone. On the busy street the sun fell over her, and for a moment she stood still, tasting autumn sunshine. She closed her eyes, hiked her bag up high on her shoulder, and that was when she felt it, one last time: the lightness. It blossomed inside her and widened, like the rings on a pond, suffusing every thought, and she knew what it was, that it was a child. Then it was a second, and then a third, so that she knew that in her life she would have three, two girls and a boy. Motorbikes sped past, laughing students, tiny weaving cars; but their voices, their eyes—all seemed far, far away. She knew that people had stopped and gathered around her; someone had taken her by the elbow, in case she might fall. She stood on the street, on the old stones of Florence, her eyes closed, one hand touching her chest where her heart was, and felt the spirits of each one of her children, not rising but falling; they came from above. Then a fourth passed through her—different than the others, for it was a presence of great hesitancy, both there and not there—and she knew who this was, too. Good-bye, she thought, good-bye, and she turned from everyone and hurried down the street of the ancient city so they would not see her weeping.

GROOM

May 1991

THE MORNING HE IS to be married, O’Neil Burke—thirty, orphaned, a teacher of ninth- and eleventh-grade English—awakens first at 3:00 A.M. to laughter and the bright crash of glass on pavement, again at 5:00 when the sun is rising, and once more at 8:00, when he lifts his head from the pillow, moist with the sweat of his hangover and uneasy dreams, and looks out the window by his bed in the old hotel. Two floors below he can see the parking lot, his friends’ cars, the sweeping lawn, splendidly green; beyond that the stand of hemlock and white pine ascending the steep hill. By his own car someone has dropped a beer bottle, and he remembers the sound of it breaking, and his friend Connor’s voice, cheerfully drunk, barking, “God-damn!” The air is still and moist, the sun warm for a morning in late May this far north, and the windows of the cars are glazed with Vermont’s heavy dew. O’Neil hears the slap of a screen door, and while he watches, a woman exits the rear of the hotel and crosses the lot to her car, a new sedan that is probably rented. It is Simone, one of Mary’s friends from high school; O’Neil hadn’t met her until the night before, at the party in the hotel bar. She has already dressed for the wedding, in high sling-back heels, a pale green dress open at the shoulders, and a wide straw hat with a silk flower and red ribbon, forked at the back and trailing in the swing of her rich blond hair. The hat, O’Neil thinks, looks good on her, though it wouldn’t look as good on most women, and because she is wearing high heels, her trip across the uneven pavement of the lot takes some time, as if she knows someone is watching. When she reaches the car she keys the trunk and removes a large white package done up with a bow, the same red as the ribbon of her hat. Holding the package, she lifts her face and sees O’Neil watching her from his second-story window, and waves. Or, perhaps it isn’t O’Neil she