“We’re already landing?” asked Asher.
“Yup. You made it.”
“You’re awesome. Thank you.”
“No. Thank you. For doing this. You’ll see. Promise will still be there when we get back.”
Cam looked behind her. Across the aisle, Izanagi sat next to Perry. They were playing some kind of dice game on their tray table, which was supposed to have been stowed away for landing.
Cam realized with sudden clarity that Izanagi wasn’t just another of Alicia’s flings. Cam hadn’t really given him the time of day because she didn’t need to. She had had a father and was at an age when she needed a replacement one less and less. She never thought for a fleeting microsecond to make a father figure out of Izanagi. But for Perry he was more than the annoying guy who left too many messages on the voicemail. To Perry, he was a person. A person who helped her with her homework and encouraged her to try out for the track team. To Perry he was exactly what she needed. And it gave Cam an idea.
It made Asher a little nervous when they couldn’t find the entrance to Promise right away. They had to circle the Dunkin’ Donuts block about three times before they finally found the opening in the bushes that led to the gravel winding path into town.
“See, Ash, still here,” said Cam when she saw the lighthouse and the bluff and the quaint little town on the docks. “The sun’s still setting behind the lighthouse, the orcas are still leaping from the bay, and the purple dandelions are still purple. Everything’s just the way we left it.”
“Except for that.” Perry pointed to a colorful fifty-foot-high totem pole standing on the front lawn of Avalon by the Sea.
“Ye . . . ahh,” said Cam. “But that might have happened anyway.”
They drove up to the house in Cumulus, and Cam and Perry went in to tell their mom and Nana that they’d returned. It was Asher’s job to clean up Izanagi and sneak him up through the tunnels and into the house.
“I don’t know about this,” Asher had said when they were still in the car. “I’ve seen your schemes go south before. Are you sure this will work? What if she says no?”
“She won’t,” Cam said. “I don’t think she will, anyway.” This was more than planting tomatoes. This made perfect sense. This filled all the gaps.
“You better hope not,” Asher said, pointing to Iz, who was desperately sketching his proposal out on the back of another Dunkin’ Donuts bag, “for his sake.”
“Hi, Mom!” Cam said as she walked in the front door.
Alicia was washing dishes and ignored them like Cam knew she would as they plopped their bags down in the foyer.
“How’s it going?” Perry asked.
Alicia just held up her talk-to-the-hand hand, and Nana sat at the table and shook her head back and forth. She couldn’t help herself from tsk-tsking just a little bit and then letting out a big sigh.
“Mom, we have a surprise for you,” Cam said.
Alicia turned around and leaned against the sink with her arms folded in front of her. She opened her mouth to speak and then changed her mind. She shook her head and continued with the dishes.
“Come on, Mom,” Perry said. She and Cam dragged her downstairs, Nana following close behind, to the rotating bookshelf that led to the secret passageway. Cam pushed on it, and the shelf spun around to reveal Izanagi. He was clean-shaven now, but still unpressed, holding a few purple dandelions as a bouquet. Asher stood behind him. He gave Cam a little wink as he joined her on the house side of the bookcase. Izanagi got down on one knee and said:
“Alicia, you are the love of my life. Will you marry me?”
Alicia stood silently, her head down with her hand in Izanagi’s for what seemed like an eternity before she finally whispered yes. She whispered it at first and then repeated it more and more loudly until she shouted it out loud. She hugged Izanagi, and they kissed. “I missed you so much,” she said to him.
“That’s what he was writing so furiously on the Dunkin’ Donuts bag?” Cam whispered to Asher.
“He was nervous, so we edited it down.”
“Good choice,” Cam whispered.
“Thanks.”
Alicia spun around to face her daughters. “Wait, I should ask the girls’ permission. What do you think, Campbell?”
“Mom, it was my idea,” Cam said.
“It wasn’t your idea?” Alicia asked Izanagi.
“No, it was his idea.” Cam jumped in. “I just encouraged him.”
Alicia held out a finger to Cam and said, “Don’t think this excuses you for what you did. You had me a nervous wreck, Campbell, and you kidnapped Perry.”
“And you stole my underwear,” Nana added. “What did you want with my underwear?”
“It’s a long story,” Cam said. “Sorry.”
“No matter,” said Nana. “We have a wedding to plan. This deserves a toast!”
They broke out the champagne. Her grandmother dropped a sugar cube into each fuzzy glass. They even gave a tiny sip to Perry, who stood between Alicia and Izanagi, giggling. “I think I’m a little drunk,” she said.
Cam looked at them from across the room and said distantly to Asher, “Look at what I made.”
“What?”
“I made a little family,” she said. She looked at the three of them laughing together, and she was overcome at once by sadness, because she felt so left out, and joy, because she knew they would thrive together, with or without her.
THIRTY-THREE
THE ITALIAN-JAPANESE-POLYNESIAN WEDDING WAS TO TAKE PLACE ON the front lawn beneath a Jewish huppah tied on one side to the fifty-foot Algonquin totem pole. Nana and Izanagi had been tag-teaming in the kitchen all week, preparing the sushi, teriyaki, sausage and peppers, lasagna, and a cannoli canoe, while Cam had the usual job of carving out pineapple boats for the Polynesian rice. Perry was in charge of the music; Asher, lighting, seating, and structures; and presiding over the service was Elaine, who was, not surprisingly, a certified minister and wedding planner.
This wasn’t the first party on the lawn of Avalon by the Sea. Almost everyone who got married in Promise got married here, so Asher simply had to roll the chairs and tables out from the secret passageways and set them up on the lawn.
Elaine was outside supervising the setup. She had brought Buddy and Bart along for a quick romp before taking them back to the kennels. Their strange friendship was a children’s book waiting to happen. They were both in their awkward stages and tripping over their too-big feet as they chased each other back and forth. Buddy would peck at Bart, stretching out his newly elongated and pinkening neck, and then run away, spreading his wings and taking big leaps that were beginning to approximate actual flight. Bart would swat at Buddy’s beak, rearing up on his hind legs to try to reach him. Then Bart would run away, tripping on the slightly sloping grass and tumbling into a furry heap toward the drop-off.
“Okay, that’s enough, you two,” Elaine finally said. She rounded them up just as Smitty pulled up with his kissing flamingo ice sculpture.
His temper at the lobster pound made it difficult to see, but Smitty was actually a big teddy bear. He carried his heavy creation over to Asher, smiling and chuckling through his thick hay-colored beard. “Be careful of the necks,” he said. They get a little fragile at the top.”
“That’s incredible, Smitty. Thank you,” Cam heard Asher say. She watched the whole scene from the windows of her widow’s walk. Her mom came up to join her and spread onto Cam’s bed the cranberry chiffon halter dress she had finished hemming.
“Do you ever think about your wedding?” Alicia asked.
“Yes, this is exactly how I envision it,” Cam deadpanned. “With the adolescent flamingo . . . and the totem pole, and, oh, look, the sixty-year-old ladies in muumuus.” Alicia had invited all the women from her Hula 101 class.
“Yeah. They’re going to do a little number. It’s sweet.”
“Yep.” Cam watched them practicing on the lawn, turning in small, cautious, old-lady s
teps as if afraid to break a hip.
“How do you envision yours?” Alicia took a hairbrush out of Cam’s suitcase and combed through Cam’s now shoulder-length black hair.
“Um, I don’t.”
“Not at all?”
“Nope.” It was true. Cam had never once fantasized about her wedding. Before her diagnosis, she dreamt about other things. Making a movie, perhaps. Winning an Oscar. Writing a book. Visiting Egypt. But a wedding seemed insignificant in her scheme of things.
“Even now that you’ve met Asher?”
“Can’t even begin to picture it,” said Cam.
“I guess that’s good.” Alicia ran the brush down the crown of Cam’s head. “I think some girls get so caught up in the wedding part that they forget about the marriage part, and they end up bonded for life to the wrong person. It’s not the wedding part that matters.” Cam watched out the window as Asher happily set up folding chairs and covered tables in gold damask linens. He would be the right person, she thought.
“Are you happy?” Cam asked.
“Yes, Campbell. Very. You were right. This is what I needed. Thank you. I’ll make it work this time,” she said as she finished brushing and turned Cam’s head so she could look in her eyes. Cam was happy, too.
“All you can do is the best you can do. And your best is always better than everyone else’s. You are an awesome mom,” Cam said. She had the intense feeling of missing her mom, even though she was right next to her.
“Well, that’s a dream come true,” Alicia said and kissed her on the forehead.
“Now it’s time for my dream come true. Every daughter dreams of walking her mother down the aisle.”
“Awkward?” Alicia asked.
“Yeah. But I’ll get through it. I have to face the facts.” Cam sighed. “You’re not my little girl anymore.”
Putting Perry in charge of music was perhaps a miscalculation. Her mom, flanked by Cam in cranberry and Perry in yellow, walked down the aisle to Katy Perry. Alicia looked beautiful in a simple cream eyelet dress. She had violets woven into her hair, and she held a bouquet of tiny yellow and cranberry orchids. Izanagi wore a simple gauzy brown short-sleeved shirt with linen pants and sandals. He was suddenly more handsome than Cam remembered. He was tall and broad-shouldered with a strong chest and flawless nut-brown skin and smiling eyes that glimmered when he saw her mother. Asher stood next to him at the altar and gave Cam a little reassuring wink.
Alicia and Izanagi smiled at each other, and Cam let herself daydream about their future. Snapshots moved through her head. The two of them dropping Perry off at college. Traveling the real, actual world, not the world of Disney make-believe. She saw them hiking with goat herders in the Himalayas of Nepal. She saw them posing on the Great Wall of China. Clanking two enormous beer steins together in Germany. She saw them aging, slowly, happily together in the photo album in her mind.
Then she tried to inject herself into their lives. She concentrated and used her strongest of strong wills to try and force an image of her twenty-one-year-old self sitting on the couch with them at Christmas. She tried to picture Izanagi uncomfortable in a suit at her Harvard graduation. She tried to picture the way her mother would look at her first grandchild as she counted his fingers and toes. The ideas came into her head, but the pictures would not come. The pictures were blank.
She focused instead on the present moment. The present moment was all that mattered, she reminded herself, and what was happening in this moment was good.
Elaine, thankfully, kept it short, not torturing them with any kind of a sermon, but getting right down to the nitty-gritty: By the power vested in me by the state of Maine, I now pronounce you partners for life. Then the party got going. Perry and her friends scampered around the edges of the lawn, giggling, spying, imitating, posturing, pretending they were adults, and trying to steal drinks from the bar. Asher kept giving them virgin piña coladas that they imagined were the real thing.
The catalog kids posed themselves here and there, like gorgeous colorful statues in the temple of preppiedom. Izanagi and Alicia danced almost the entire time, to whatever happened to spew itself from Perry’s iPod. When it came time to throw the bouquet, Alicia served it, volleyball style, to Elaine. She snagged it enthusiastically and then danced the rest of the evening cheek-to-cheek with Smitty.
The sun went down behind the lighthouse. The mother orca, whose baby must have grown up and left her, leapt solo out of the bay. Everyone ate and laughed and danced and forgot. They forgot about deadlines and checking accounts and college and job applications and divorces and taxes and the minutiae of living. They all forgot, except Cam, who was in the second-floor bathroom watching with crossed eyes as the mercury in the thermometer inched past 104.
“Cam!” Asher knocked on the door. “Are you okay? You’ve been in there for a while.”
“I’m fine,” Cam sang. “Just powdering my nose.” She rifled through the medicine cabinet looking for the Advil. She finally found some and swallowed four. The googly-eyed seashell frog from South of the Border was giving her an accusatory stare. “Shut up, I’m fine,” she told it.
“Hey,” Asher said when she opened the door. “Everyone’s going to the lighthouse. Want to go?”
“No. Why don’t you go, though? I should stay here with my mom.”
“Um, I don’t think she’s going to miss you.” Asher pointed out of the hallway window to the lawn, where Izanagi and Alicia were kissing against a tree.
“Gross,” Cam said. There was nothing worse than old people kissing.
“Yeah . . .” said Asher. “So, you want to go?”
“No, no. You go,” she said. “I’ll stay here and clean up.”
“I can help you. Or we can do it in the morning.”
“Asher.”
“What?”
“Just go, okay. I need some time alone.”
“Okay, babe,” he said. “That’s weird, but okay.”
“Okay,” Cam said. “Now go.”
When he was halfway down the staircase, he paused and looked back up at her.
“Go!” she said.
“Okay.”
She waited until he was out of sight to double over from the stabbing pain in the center of her gut.
THIRTY-FOUR
AFTER A FITFUL NIGHT’S SLEEP FILLED WITH TERRIFYING DREAMS OF earthquakes, volcanoes, and tsunamis, Cam awoke. She looked out the window to find her mother and grandmother sifting like refugees through the scattered detritus of the wedding: ribbons, dead flowers, little piles of rice, the melted puddle of the ice sculpture, plates of half-eaten cake.
Cam’s skin was on fire, but she knew if she could get to the Advil she could hide her fever for another day. She took some and then went back to bed and waited for it to kick in. She dug in the pocket of her cargo pants and found the little eyedropper of pink liquid morphine that she hadn’t used in weeks. For the hell of it, she squeezed three drops under her tongue. I will be in a delightful mood today, she thought. Like a crazy-eyed, homeless, psychotic vet from the Vietnam War, probably, but at least she would feel no pain. She was tempted to take a toke on her inhaler as well, but if her shortness of breath was caused by the tumors pressing against her heart and lungs, an inhaler was not going to help.
“Cam, you okay?” Asher called up to her from the bottom of her staircase.
“Yeah, come on up. There’s something I need you to help me with.”
Asher circled his way up the stairs. He wore brown plaid Bermudas and a soft brown T-shirt that showed the contours of his chest without being too obnoxiously tight. Asher the perfect.
Cam sat on her mattress leafing frantically through the pile of miracle mail that had found its way to her in Promise. She was looking for the little gray Hello Kitty envelope with Lily’s handwriting on it. She had a feeling she should open it now before it was too late. She shook the Harvard admission papers upside down, and finally the envelope dropped, corner-first, onto her bed.
&nb
sp; “I need you to open this,” she said.
“Are you afraid to get a paper cut?”
“No,” Cam said a little irritably. She wasn’t in the mood for jokes. “It’s from Lily. I need to open it, and I don’t want to be alone when I do.”
“No sweat. Let’s open it.” He sat down on the bed behind her, straddling her with his thighs.
She sighed and picked up the envelope.
He kissed her shoulder. “Go ahead, Cam.”
The envelope popped right open, the seal moistened from weeks of misty, salty sea air. Cam pulled out a folded-up piece of lined paper. It was Lily’s Flamingo List, torn from a spiral notebook more than a year ago. Lily had decorated it with black ink drawings of flamingos around the border, and inside she’d made neat check boxes to the left of every item on the list. Cam ran her finger over the ink as if reading Braille. She wanted to feel more of Lily, how she pressed the letters into the paper.
Most of the items on her list were checked off with a glittery, silver gel-pen check mark. Like:
* Go to Italy.
* Learn to paint.
* Skydive. (Wow, thought Cam.)
* See a Broadway show.
* Get Bono’s autograph.
Next to this last one was a note, “enclosed.” Cam shook the envelope and a movie ticket fell out onto the bed, an autograph scrawled across the back.