Not running this time—I was done running, or I told myself I was—but moving with a purpose, the heels picking their way across the parking lot and then off, because I was not walking onto a pier in heels, I was not, and I bent down and unstrapped them and left them by the car and walked barefoot onto the new-wood planks of Folly Beach Pier in seventeen pounds of ivorysilk like a woman who had completely lost the thread and was looking for it somewhere over the Atlantic.
The ocean hit me like a reset.
It always did. That was the thing about water—it didn't care what you'd done. The sound of it, the smell, the endless, indifferent motion of it, the way it just kept going, regardless. I had stood at this railing—or the old version of this railing, the one that was gone now—at various points in my life and let it do that to me. Reset. Recalibrate. Start the breath over.
I walked to the mid-point and put both hands on the rail and looked out.
Behind me, after a moment, I heard his footsteps on the planks. He stopped a few feet back. Giving me space. I registered that without turning.
The water was the color it got in March—darker than summer, a deep gray-green, running white at the tops of the waves, the horizon a clean line under a sky that hadn't decided yet what kind of afternoon it wanted to be. To the north, the shoreline curved. To the south, more of the same. Out there, nothing—just water and light and the kind of distance that made your problems correctly sized for about thirty seconds.
I breathed.
"I was supposed to be in Dublin tomorrow," I said. Not to him, particularly. To the water. "I've never been. I've never been many places, really. I've lived most of my life inside a ten-mile radius and told myself that was enough."
He came up beside me. Not close—a respectful distance, elbows on the rail, looking out the same direction I was. In my peripheral vision he was very large and very still.
"Is it?" he said.
"Is it what?"
"Enough."
I looked at him. He was looking at the water.
"I left my wedding," I said. "What do you think?"
And there it was again—that almost-smile, faster this time, like he hadn't managed to stop it. He turned his head and looked at me directly for the first time since the alley. Even behind the sunglasses, I felt the quality of it, the attention in it, the sense of being looked at by someone who was actually looking.
"I think," he said slowly, "that it takes something to do what you did."
"It took a complete loss of rational judgment."
"Yeah." He looked back at the water. "That's usually what it takes."
I stood there in my ruined dress with my bare feet on the new planks of a pier that had been blown apart and put back together, and I thought about a phone call I'd refused and a canvas in a studio on Wentworth Street and a plane to Dublin I would not be on. For the first time all day, I felt something that wasn't dread or grief or the nauseating clarity of an irreversible decision.
I felt, very faintly and with absolutely no idea what to do about it, like myself.
6
BROCK
The hell of it was, I was having a good time.
I couldn't have told you the last time I'd been able to say that and mean it. Somewhere along the way, good times had stopped being something that happened to me and turned into something I watched other people have from across a room, the way you'd watch a fire you weren't allowed near.
But sitting in that rental on the causeway out to Folly, listening to a woman in a wedding dress talk herself the rest of the way out of a life, I felt something loosen in my chest that had been clenched so long, I'd forgotten it could do anything else.
Because here was the thing I kept turning over. Who runs out on a wedding?
Not a crazy person. That was the first idea my head went to and I threw it out, fast, because crazy has a smell to it and she didn't have it. I'd sat across tables from genuine crazy, the kind that smiles wrong and means it, and this wasn't that. Her eyes tracked clean. Her sentences landed where she aimed them. She'd negotiated a ride out of a stranger she'd accused of being a pervert in the space of about ninety seconds, which is not themove of a woman who's lost the thread. It's the move of a woman holding the only thread she's got and refusing to let go of it.
No. Not crazy. Something rarer than that.
And the second thing, the thing I kept circling back to with something close to respect: I wasn't sure I'd have had the stones to do what she'd done. Walk out. In front of everybody. A big crowd of people in their good clothes and a church full of God and a family that had clearly spent money they didn't throw around, and she'd stood up in the middle of all of it and saidnowith her feet.
I'd walked into rooms knowing I might not walk out. I'd done it more than once. And I wasn't certain, sitting there, that any of that was harder than what it had taken her to turn around in that aisle.
