Brian, in bed, tries to see the ceiling of the guest room, which seems bigger than his whole apartment. Their apartment. “If Mom pushed a little harder, I’d have been born on the first day of spring,” Peter had often told people, so cheerfully that few listeners failed to hear the larger sadness behind it.
Every word Peter spoke stayed with Brian, and echoes down the hallways of his mind on nights like this. Most nights are like this. He swings his feet to the floor.
At the other end of the house, Terence wakes. The clock’s azure digits tell him it’s 1:38 a.m. his wedding day. Beside him, Julia dreams. Holes have burst in her Google office and sand pours through. Merry Roma laughs – merrily! – and shouts for more buckets.
Terence does not know why he insisted on March 22. Julia wanted the perfect ceremony; the shadow of Peter, she feared, would fall upon Terence all the wrong moments. It might, he knew. To marry on his brother’s birthday seemed to him at times like a tribute, and at times like a betrayal.
He sits up, carefully. Since Ed Bob and the limpia, Terence’s fright-filled dreams have lessened. Auntie M&M’s voodoo may have helped, too. We live in California, he thinks. We should believe. Auntie Em, I’m home! Staring at Julia’s nose, lips, chin, Terence wonders if he is home, really, or ever will be.
A week ago, after the rehearsal dinner at the French Laundry in Yountville, a plump hypnotist from Berkeley, the friend of someone Julia knew, cornered Terence. “The unconscious runs your life, and it can’t hear the word no,” she told him, swirling her drink. “It’s like Google. Punch in a term, and it brings you results. Thousands, if you choose the right term.” Most people, she said, pay no attention to the influence of “the man behind the curtain.” They suffer more.
Larry twitches in the corner, and burrows his dog nose into Julia’s suede jacket, which lines his oval bed. She gave Larry the jacket as a wedding gift. In sleep he can smell her perfume – Guerlain Eau de Shalimar – on the collar, and behind his eyes flare yellow and cream; he hears music, which is Julia’s laughter as Terence held her down on the sofa yesterday, tickling her. Larry feels something low in the slope of his chest, an ache or question that will never fully reach his dog mind.
When the hypnotist went New Age on him, Larry stalked away. “Time is non-linear. Everything happens at once, but our minds have been trained to know only sequence. They can be untrained. The greater Mind is non-local … ” This was too much, even in California. How could everything that happened not have happened one event after another? Who else would he be?
Terence eases off the mattress. In the kitchen he finds boxer-shorted Brian, spooning peanut butter out of the jar. “I’m afraid,” Terence says, before he can think of anything else, “that I am doing the wrong thing.”
Outside, two teenage boys pause beside the Beast, which Julia parked at the curb. Terence left his bike sideways on the garage floor – would he ever grow up? – and she had no time, last-minute calls to make. “Dude,” one boy says. “That’s a Lexus?” The other boy jingles a ball of keys and envies the sedan’s finish, gleaming under the streetlamp. Stalled down the street is his 1999 Toyota Camry; he fingers the jagged, potentially paint-ruining teeth of its key. “IS F,” he says, in the same tone he would order a Whopper. “New.”
Brian, leaning against the counter, smacks away the last of the peanut butter. “Or maybe you are just plain afraid,” he says. “I know someone who wouldn’t be.” But everyone is afraid, Terence thinks, even those who hide it. His mother did push – pushed to hold the family together that first year, to keep this his father’s fatal heart attack from having its effect on her own. Then she let herself be pulled. Maybe Terence let himself be pulled, too. The men blink at each other in the dark. Wedding less than 13 hours away.
The boy touches the car’s hood. An ache rises in him to possess this impossibly beautiful thing, and a question: Could he ever? He twirls the key ring like a six-shooter. He can almost hear the long, crazy, up-and-down scrape – like an EKG readout – he would make along the side of the sedan. In the end, he can’t bring himself to do it.
Terence can. On the appointed day, he and Julia marry in the velvet hills of Napa Valley, mustard plants blazing, in the season of bud-break for grape vines. There is a big white tent, a salsa band, and many people with fast feet for darting Larry to dodge amongst. A square of cake lands in the grass. The icing tastes better than Larry expects, though is he not a dog who, like most, eats whatever falls.
Julia and Terence stay together. Google proves challenging – not all paper airplanes and set-aside time for daydreams, but a great maternity plan. She has one child (boy, Peter) then another (girl, Emily). Both adore their father, whose cardiovascular health remains fine. Merry Roma becomes Julia’s friend. Julia tells her the bucket dream.
Terence restarts, finishes and publishes his dissertation on cannibals. His editor at the university press talks him into a much longer and more dignified title than “Why They Didn’t Eat Me.” No one reads it.
Except for those preserved by photography, which a great deal escapes, most events of the wedding day are forgotten over the year years. One sticks with Julia: the moment when, easing away in the 416-horsepower Beast – Julia driving, of course – to their New Orleans honeymoon, “Just Married” painted on the acoustic back windshield, she touches the dashboard, then Terence’s knee. She feels wonder and gratitude. For this engine. Their search.
