“I’ll help out however I can.”
She beams. “Oh, thank you! You won’t have to do much. Just walk a few steps, stand next to me, so that we can make sure everything looks right. Short and breezy, then we’re off to dinner.”
“I’d be happy to.”
“Wonderful! I’m so glad you’re a part of this, Romina.” She hugs me, tears fountaining. She’s been crying nonstop today—over the flower girl’s dress, because it’s tiny and cute, and over the sunshine, and the new earrings Daniel surprised her with for the bride’ssomething new.
A couple of hours later, Kristin has returned to check on our progress, making a sad sound over the place cards Alex has been working on. “What are these?”
“Place cards. I bought a downloadable template.”
“They didn’t have any with a salmon, white, and green design?”
He scratches his head. “You didn’t say you wanted that.”
“Those are my colors!” More tears. “Nobody cares about the colors except for me. Everything’s such a mess.”
“Sorry,” Alex says wearily, half dead from running around all day. I’ve put him to work snipping things from the garden whenever I need it, as well as packing wedding flowers into biodegradable cartons that are speedily filling up not only my work fridge and my home fridge, but the one in Luna’s apartment upstairs as well. “Do you want me to find different ones?”
“They’re fine, they’re fine. I’m sorry. Am I doing the bride-o-saurus thing? I didn’t think I’d become one of those people.”
“Bridezilla,” Trevor supplies, struggling with a heap of string lights that Kristin’s tasked him with untangling. She also bought the kind that blink on and off, but wants the lights to remain steady.
Kristin has a minor breakdown over the lights, which is only resolved when Daniel calls with his hourly update on tomorrow’s weather forecast: “Seventy-two and sunny! They’re saying less than forty percent chance of rain.” Her mood does a one-eighty.
“All right!” Kristin claps. “The pastor’s going to be at Half Moon Mill in twenty minutes, so it’s time to jet. Romina, are you ready?” She smiles beatifically at her son. “I’m sure Alex will give you a ride.”
He cuts her an evaluating look.
“Uh, sure.” I’m at loose ends already, and the prospect of sitting in a car alone with Alex has me even more flustered. “Just let me change real quick?”
I flee the sunroom, across the courtyard. I go tearing through my wardrobe, under my bed, in my closet. “Black shoes, black shoes, where are my black shoes?” I can’t ever find anything when I need it! And I swear Trevor has been stealing my perfume. This bottle was full a few days ago.
I track down my shoes, then forage for a nice pair of socks. I can tell that Aisling’s been rummaging through my stuff, because older clothes I don’t normally wear have turned up at the surface, like an archaeological digging site. Frog-patterned stockings. Fishnets. Socks with holes in the heels, but that I can’t throw away because I might teach myself how to darn them eventually. I sit down on the bed and begin yanking on a fancy white pair with silk polka dots in dove gray. The left sock has a weird lump in the toe.
I turn it inside out, revealing a much smaller sock, white with tiny pink hearts on the ankle. Small enough to fit in my palm. It’s stiff and crinkled from being scrunched into a ball throughout the drying process, my sock one of the Bermuda triangles where her miniature garments perpetually disappeared to. I stare at it, light-headed.
Adalyn.
Sometimes, I trick myself into thinking I’m all the way okay. I don’t know if such a thing exists.
After I moved out of Spencer’s house and he told me I’d never see her again, I turned avoidant, mapping my world around triggers: certain aisles in the store, songs Adalyn and I listened to during car rides, television shows. I was caught in a riptide ofreferences to parenthood that crashed from every direction—until I lost the girl who’d practically been my daughter, had there been this many Pampers commercials? Every car at every stoplight showcased a sticker family on the rear windshield with a passel of scribbled children.
I put in a great deal of work to recover, at least as much as anyone could recover from something like that. At the urging of my therapist, I coaxed myself to walk by purple bottles of Johnson & Johnson nighttime baby wash at the store, Garanimals onesies with colorful animals. I can’t avoid “The Wheels on the Bus” and tiny house slippers with bunny ears and washcloths (“Washclosh!”) and bubbles andI Can Learn to Readbooks forever. Reminders will always appear, because Adalyn was not a splinter that could be easily excised, leaving no mark. She is all over my heart; I could probably take any object in the world and find a way to connect it to her, I loved her so completely.
One day, a few months after I moved back home, Trevor brought strawberries into the shop. When I saw the plastic carton, I immediately stumbled back in time—Adalyn loved strawberries, had a permanent red juice stain around her mouth. Trevor tossed them up in the air to catch between his teeth, and the most wonderful, ordinary thing occurred: I threw another strawberry at Trevor’s while it was tumbling upward—a collision—resulting in both of them hitting Luna. I’d laughed, a shock of a noise I hadn’t heard from myself in a long while. From that point on, whenever I’ve seen a strawberry, the dominant link is laughter. One memory’s power superseding another. I’m not sure how long I’ll continue to remember Adalyn’s strawberry grin, but it’s been pushed further back, my brain rewriting over scar tissue with a scene that makes me smile.
This sock smells like Dreft detergent. I bought this, I washedit, I dressed her in it. Peeled it off a sweaty foot at the end of the day after I carried her in from the car, tromping over dandelions in a grassy yard, dead autumn leaves, snow, my boots crunching through the top layer of ice, Adalyn and I joined at the hip from before she could crawl until she was five years old. Sliding with her on the icy walkway, balancing my purse, a shopping bag, those legs kicking, mittens a lost cause. Into the laundry basket went the sock, into the washer, dryer, back onto her foot, then onto the floor of the living room, into the washer and dryer again, her dresser drawer, under the couch, at the bottom of her toy basket. I was eternally cursing how easily they’d vanish.
I can hearPeppa Pigblaring in the background while I’m on my hands and knees digging under the couch,Where’d it go?She crammed stuff under there on purpose. Half of a rice cracker, the whole set ofBlue’s Clues & Youtoys she couldn’t sleep without only last month. And there it is, in an alphabet bus toy. A thin pink line at the seam, the row of delicate hearts.
You are not going to fall apart right now, I tell myself harshly. Not over a wrinkled lump of cotton. But in my mind’s eye, I see my hands rolling that sock over a little foot. I hear a voice proudly saying,“Toes,”as a chubby hand reaches toward them.
“Toes,” I repeat encouragingly. “Nose. Where’s your nose?”
She points.
“Good job!”
