The Wedding - By Nicholas Sparks Page 0,20

be full of people who’d been left behind in life. The doctors and nurses told us that Noah was lucky since he had frequent visitors, but too many of the others spent their days watching television to escape the loneliness of their final years. Noah still spent his evenings reciting poetry to the people who live here. He’s fond of the poems of Walt Whitman, and Leaves of Grass was on the bench beside him. He seldom went anywhere without it, and though both Jane and I have read it in the past, I must admit that I don’t understand why he finds the poems so meaningful.

Studying him, I was struck anew by how sad it was to watch a man like Noah grow old. For most of my life, I’d never thought of him in those terms, but nowadays, when I heard his breath, it reminded me of air moving through an old accordion. He didn’t move his left hand, a consequence of the stroke he’d suffered in the spring. Noah was winding down, and while I’d long known this was coming, it seemed that he finally realized it as well.

He was watching the swan, and following his gaze, I recognized the bird by the black spot on its chest. It reminded me of a mole or birthmark, or coal in the snow, nature’s attempt to mute perfection. At certain times of the year, a dozen swans could be found on the water, but this was the only one that never left. I’ve seen it floating on the pond even when the temperature plunged in the winter and the other swans had long migrated farther south. Noah once told me why the swan never left, and his explanation was one of the reasons the doctors thought him delusional.

Taking a seat beside him, I recounted what had happened the night before with Anna and Jane. When I finished, Noah glanced at me with a slight smirk.

“Jane was surprised?” he asked.

“Who wouldn’t be?”

“And she wants things a certain way?”

“Yes,” I said. I told him about the plans she had outlined at the kitchen table before discussing an idea of my own, something that I thought Jane had overlooked.

With his good hand, Noah reached over and patted my leg as if giving me the okay.

“How about Anna?” he asked. “How’s she doing?”

“She’s fine. I don’t think Jane’s reaction surprised her in the least.”

“And Keith?”

“He’s fine, too. At least from what Anna said.”

Noah nodded. “A good young couple, those two. They both have kind hearts. They remind me of Allie and myself. ”

I smiled. “I’ll tell her you said that. It’ll make her day.”

We sat in silence until Noah finally motioned toward the water.

“Did you know that swans mate for life?” he said.

“I thought that was a myth.”

“It’s true,” he insisted. “Allie always said it was one of the most romantic things she’d ever heard. For her, it proved that love was the most powerful force on earth. Before we were married, she was engaged to someone else. You knew that, right?”

I nodded.

“I thought so. Anyway, she came to visit me without telling her fiancé, and I took her out in a canoe to a place where we saw thousands of swans clustered together. It was like snow on the water. Did I ever tell you that?”

I nodded again. Though I hadn’t been there, the image was vivid in my mind, as it was in Jane’s. She often spoke of that story with wonder.

“They never came back after that,” he murmured. “There were always a few in the pond, but it was never like that day again.” Lost in the memory, he paused. “But Allie liked to go there anyway. She liked to feed the ones that were there, and she used to point out the pairs to me. There’s one, she’d say, there’s another one. Isn’t it wonderful how they’re always together?” Noah’s face creased as he grinned. “I think it was her way of reminding me to stay faithful.”

“I don’t think she needed to worry about that.”

“No?” he asked.

“I think you and Allie were meant for each other.”

He smiled wistfully. “Yes,” he finally said, “we were. But we had to work at it. We had our tough times, too.”

Perhaps he was referring to her Alzheimer’s. And long before that, the death of one of their children. There were other things, too, but these were the events he still found difficult to discuss.

“But you made it seem so easy,” I protested.

Noah shook