lightly over her exposed wrist. The touch was both captivating and excruciating. After a few seconds, Leah opened her eyes.
Brooke was kneeling before her on the porch. She stopped the tickle-touch but left her hand on Leah’s wrist, lightly encircling it between thumb and fingers. “Are you O.K.?”
Leah, still focused on Brooke’s touch, recalled how her sister would hold her wrist firmly but gently as they navigated downtown or walked to the pool when they were young. She slowly, almost dreamily, shifted her attention from Brooke’s touch to her face just a few feet away. Backlit by the brilliant day, it was hard to make out Brooke’s features. The face seemed an inscrutable mask, hidden and ominous. But gradually it came into focus as she narrowed her view and excluded the brightness beyond. She nodded—I am O.K.
Brooke grinned. “That’s good. I thought I’d lost you for a minute.”
Leah shook her head—That will never happen.
“Good.” Brooke stood into the backdrop of glare, releasing Leah’s wrist as she raised both arms toward the sky. “Let’s go get lunch. Onion says he’ll fry up some conch for you to try.” She bounded down the two steps and out into the sun.
After the briefest of pauses, Leah stood and followed.
A Beginning
Raising the wedding gown’s sash did better hide her sister’s sixteen-week pregnancy. Had Leah been prone to challenge Brooke, she might’ve asked why it mattered. All the carefully chosen guests—most of whom had made the long drive from home and waited in line for a turn on the small ferry to cross to the island, except for Onion’s family—were well aware of Brooke’s condition and one could argue that trying to hide it only accentuated the hypocrisy of the white dress and prissy wedding.
But Leah was not prone to question her sister, on this or any point. The face she saw reflected in the mirror, partially screened by Brooke’s brown hair gathered atop her head in cascading curls perfectly arranged this morning by Marybelle—Onion’s aunt and the island’s only hairdresser if you didn’t count that recent Yankee immigrant Sue Howell who had the gall to put the words trained and licensed on her salon sign—the face Leah saw in the mirror had eyes that were slightly stunned and a mouth partially open in mute acquiescence.
Brooke looked up from studying the sash’s positioning and her gaze crossed Leah’s stare reflected in the mirror and hung there for the longest of moments. In that silent exchange the two sisters acknowledged the twining of their lives that went so far back neither could remember a time before it existed, a weaving of experience that made them seem two appendages of the same body, the same head, the same heart, not a condition they talked about but one they lived, had always lived. In that silent exchange they granted a depth of love that knew no bottom.
Brooke smiled and Leah returned that smile with a rare beauty and grace that had already melted the hearts of so many (including Paul, though Leah had politely declined Brooke’s offer to invite him), would melt those of countless others as she ventured further outward into the world, at college and beyond. Leah would always be loved. “Now be a dear and clip those loops so no one knows we raised the sash,” Brooke directed.
Leah looked at her blankly.
Brooke shook her head in another familiar gesture. “The sash loops, Lee! You can use the nail clippers from the make-up kit.”
Leah walked over to the lounge’s sideboard and rooted around in the make-up box till she found the clippers at the bottom. She knelt beside Brooke, found the loop on her sister’s left side, held it out and carefully nipped the thin thread where it attached to the dress. Without standing she slid around to Brooke’s other side, found that loop from amidst the folds of fabric, and clipped it. Then she made the mistake of looking toward the mirror from her kneeling position. From that angle she saw her sister’s whole figure, head to toe, saw her as the beautiful bride she had practiced many times in childhood—sometimes in doctored robes and dresses and veils, sometimes in make-believe attire—but always practice, always make believe.
But not today. Today, Brooke was a real bride. Today she would be joined to another in a union that necessarily precluded her sister. It was a new vision but not yet a painful one. Leah had long known it was inevitable, if perhaps it had come sooner and in a way she could not have predicted.
In that vision Leah felt not loss nor loneliness—it was too soon for that. Brooke was still here, wasn’t she? But in that vision Leah did feel something, shaping itself as a question more than an emotion, though the emotion of wonder and amazement did drift in around the edges, the periphery of this question: How did this happen? That was enough for now.
Brooke turned and pulled her sister up from kneeling, tucked a loose strand of Leah’s blond hair back in place behind her ear, and ran her long fingers gently over Leah’s lightly rouged cheeks (a rare use of makeup). Then she kissed her sister’s forehead and said, “Now let’s get this thing over with before I run out the back door and swim to the mainland, wedding gown and all.”
Leah laughed then led the way out of the lounge and toward the small church’s sanctuary. She was after all Maid of Honor, had to precede the bride down the aisle by a generous distance.
The End
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