London Is the Best City in America

He nodded his agreement, clearing his throat. “But because of the blackout going on here right now, obviously this isn’t the best circumstance to get married, and so we’re not going to be doing that today.”

He was so backward in how he said it that you could have missed it. If you weren’t paying close attention, you might have still been waiting for the ceremony to start. I wondered if part of Meryl was waiting herself, her hand wrapped so tightly around the orchid, tighter than the one holding Josh’s.

Josh kept his eyes on her though. And eventually she looked back at him—believing him. Believing that this would turn out okay. I think it gave him courage, because he kept going.

“Obviously, we’ve been together forever, and we love each other very much. This is just a little shift in plans I’m talking about now. Not a cancellation or anything like that. Just a postponement, really.” He tried to laugh. “Until a day when we can actually see each other.”

Which was exactly when the lights came back on.

It was just a flicker at first, a blink, but then the whole room lit up like a jammed highway, bright and unquestioning: chandelier light floodlighting the candlelight, wall lamps now bright and gauzy against lanterns, half-light becoming full light, the regular world back in colorful 3D.

And standing there, under the fiercest spotlight of all, was Josh. What the light revealed about Josh. Meryl must have been looking for it first, but then we all were, and there was no denying what was on his face—a look of total and utter despair.

“Meryl . . . ,” he said.

But it was too late. The orchid fell out of her hand—almost in slow motion—the flower falling to the floor. “Postpone yourself,” she said, as if that made any sense.

I put my face in my hands.

“Tell the truth, Josh,” she said, still only looking at him. Her face right in his, moving in closer. “You keep talking about the lights and circumstance and every other half-truth you can think of, but you said you were going to get up here and tell our families the truth.”

He didn’t say anything at first. No one did. What was there for us to say, anyway? The newly shining lights almost made them seem on a stage, performing. It seemed like this wasn’t happening in real life. I had been absolutely prepared for Josh and Meryl to fall apart now and not prepared at all, which was the only reason I could even be sure that it really was happening.

Which might be why I looked up behind them. To that one stained-glass-window garbage-bag sculpture, the light still peeking in between the bags’ creases. Which was when I noticed one of the bags covering the window—one of the bags on the bottom tier, water dripping into it, heat beaming onto it—wasn’t exactly like the others. It was fatter, misshapen.

It had a bright blue drawstring tied in a double knot on the top of it.

It was my bag.

My tapes. My tapes cooking inside! It was like I could envision them in there—curling into themselves, shriveling and cracking irrevocably. And I could envision the rest of it: how, in the chaos, they never made it up to my parents’ hotel room. How my father must have taken them out of the car, intending to take them to the cool suite, but he was needed for something, he got side-tracked and dropped them here. And then, for all the wrong reasons, someone placed them in the window with the other garbage bags, a sacrifice, to take in all of the heat, all of the day’s relentlessly boiling sun.

“Oh, my God!”

The words came out of me in a primal way, in a voice I didn’t really even recognize as my own, until I saw everyone turning toward me, shocked. Josh included. He, of course, thought I was responding to what was happening to him. How could he know anything else? How could anyone begin to imagine it would be happening twice, at once, both of us losing everything we had been holding on to so tightly? The two of us losing exactly what we had been most afraid to lose, that thing we kept plugging ahead with, the main excuse we’d used again and again, to not let ourselves change in the ways we needed to most.

Josh’s and my eyes met, and I could see it. He wanted me to say something. He wanted me to say something else to break the silence. He wanted me to say something else to save him.

And when I didn’t, he started to. But before he could, there was movement all around. Dr. Moynihan-Richards stood up to his full five-foot height, ready and eager to come to his daughter’s aid. Watching him, Michael stood up also. Then Bess, straightening her dress as she went. All of them were ready to pounce if they needed to—this family who was just about to join ours, now permanently against it. Which was when we all stood up also: Berringer first, ready to help Josh, my father. My mother. When I stayed seated at first, my eyes still garbage-bag-bound—drawn tunnel-like to the blue string—my mother reached across my father and pulled me up by the shoulder until I was at full height too.

I took one last look at my bag of tapes, crushed into the window, and then focused on the issue more presently at hand. Ready to conquer Mrs. Moynihan-Richards if the situation called for it.

I could take her.

But this—this next part—this is what I try to hold on to most. For a moment, Josh stopped looking at Meryl, and turned instead to look out at all the rest of us, everyone in the first row, and everyone behind us, if not in apology then in announcement of what I already knew. If someone were to blame here, it was him. He knew it better than anyone. He understood it.

And in his acknowledgment, I stopped needing to. To blame him, that is. Everyone else would make sure to do plenty of that. I was going to need to do something else. Meanwhile, outside, the hotel-world was starting to come back: the hum of the resurrected air conditioner and a hundred appliances that must have been left plugged in before the chaos—blow-dryers and printers, one loud stereo. In trying to stay cool, we hadn’t closed the door to the ballroom, so we heard all of it. The phones ringing and elevators running, and right outside in the ballroom foyer, a girl screaming to her friend or her family or someone else she thought she knew, still a little too far out of her reach—who had taken something from her that she was trying, desperately, to get back. In just one more minute, she’d realize she couldn’t.

And my brother said, “I can’t do this.”

part five

This is how it ends?

Of course not. No. This is how it begins.

—Sadie Everett

Well.