“Andthenwhat?”
“And then nothing.” He shrugs. “Taylor came home from wherever she was, and life went on, and the next year they got married, and the rest is history.”
“But what about Juliana?”
“Well,nothing,” Jack says slowly, “until the wedding.”
“What happened at the wedding?” Taylor and David had been married at OceanCliff, the most spectacular of the spectacular places to get married in Newport. “Besides the fact that my mom almost had a panic attack.” While a lot of the world had been canceling weddings that fall, David and Taylor’s had managed to go on. Taylor wasn’t about to be undone by a pandemic. Aside from that, David’s new financial status unnerved Nicola’s mom. To see this child whose diapers she’d changed, whose Easter eggs she’d hidden and night terrors she’d banished (their parents traded kids back and forth like baseball cards), surrounded by such opulence—it didn’t sit right with her.
(The fact that Taylor’s mother was absent for so much of her life didn’t sit right with any of the Carrs. Not that that was Taylor’s fault.Of courseit wasn’t. But the Minnesota Carrs wondered: Wouldn’t a motherless childhood manifest itself in some ways that nobody could predict? The fact that Taylor’s mother appeared at the wedding with a man nearly two decades her junior and did not seem even to have the good grace to feel sheepish about it—that must signify something too, although none of the Carrs could say what.)
“Notatthe wedding. The night before,” explains Jack. He relates the rest of the story. He bought a good bottle of bourbon and he brought it to the hotel room after the rehearsal dinner. As David’s best man he was going to stay with the groom-to-be, while Taylor and her maid of honor slept in the bridal suite. Taylor wanted the traditional no-seeing-each-other-before-the-ceremony wedding eve. The rest of the wedding party and any guests who had traveled were scattered elsewhere throughout the same hotel or in other hotels in Newport.
“We were at the Howard Johnson,” says Nicola. “Most of Newport was beyond our budget.”
“Well, no wonder.” Jack restarts the infuriatingly hot tracing of her elbow. “I would have remembered you if we’d been at the same hotel.”
The idea of bringing back the bourbon was that David and Jack would have a toast, hang out a little, get to bed. David was happy with an early night. He wanted his beauty sleep, he said.
So Jack poured them each a drink and they settled back, David on one of the beds in the suite, Jack stretched out on one of the two couches. It was a big suite. They turned on the TV and watched whatever movie came on. One of the Bourne movies, Jack thought, though he couldn’t remember for sure which one. David was half watching and half scrolling through his phone. Mindlessly at first, then suddenly he sat up and made a little strangled noise.
“What’s going on, buddy?” Jack asked. “Everything okay?”
David didn’t answer; his gaze was glued to the phone. He reachedover to the nightstand, where the bottle of bourbon sat. He poured, filling his glass nearly to the brim. He drank.
“Whoa,” said Jack. “You’ve gone beyond fingers now. You’re looking at an entire hand. You want to slow down? You’ve got kind of a big day coming up tomorrow.”
David shook his head and drank more, and after a while he said, “I can’t do it. We should call someone.” His movements had become erratic, unconsidered. He reached for the hotel phone as if to put the receiver to his ear but instead knocked it off its base. “Who should we call?” David asked Jack, the night before his wedding in his suite at the OceanCliff.
“Call someone why?” Jack asked.
“To tell them the wedding is off.” David was slurring by then.
“Come on,” said Jack. “That’s just the alcohol talking. You don’t want to do that.” He looked carefully at David and watched a variety of emotions cross his face: bewilderment, discord, maybe even a flash of grief. He looked, Jack tells Nicola, like a little boy who’d lost his mother at the shopping mall. Full of consternation and angst.
“Did he show you what was on his phone?” Nicola is trying to square this backstory with the fairy-tale wedding she’d attended the next day.
“He didn’t.”
“Never?”
“No.”
“Then what?” Nicola is nearly breathless. Here are David and Taylor, married all this time, and here is Felicity, proof of their union. Nicola knows the end of the story. But she doesn’t know the middle.
Then, Jack tells her, David flopped back against the pillow, his arm covering his eyes, and the next thing Jack knew David was sleeping deeply. Snoring.
“Well, did you look at his phone after he was asleep? To see what was going on?”
“Nicola!” Jack fixes her with a stern look, or maybe a fake-sternlook. “Does the wordprivacymean anything to you?” She’s momentarily flustered until he grins and says, “Obviously I tried, but it was passcode protected.”
“What do you think it was?”
“The passcode?”
“The thing on his phone!”
“I know what it was, now.” He pauses, maybe for dramatic effect. It works. It’s very effective.
