HAPPY PLACE
KNOTT’S HARBOR, MAINE
A SATURDAY AFTERNOON. A wedding, only in the most technical of terms. There are sunflower bouquets for all of us, delivered right to the front door, and a cake that says Happy birthday, wicked pissah on it, surrounded in real, edible flowers. At Sabrina and Parth’s expressions, I shrug. “A lot of businesses won’t do wedding stuff.”
“Yes, but who allowed you to use wicked pissah in this way?” she says. “This,” Parth says, “is the best birthday I’ve ever had.”
He wears a suit that makes him look like James Bond On Vacation. Sabrina dons her sailing-chic look. The rest of us sport our Lobster Hut outfits, all rumpled from hard wear and tight from eating well.
The photographer arrives at three thirty to photograph us doing nothing much at all aside from sitting around the pool in semiformal wear, tossing out increasingly ridiculous names for Cleo and Kimmy’s baby.
When they’d told Parth and Wyn about the pregnancy, Parth had blinked, stunned to speechlessness, and Wyn had leapt to his feet and started laughing, eyes moving between all of us like he was waiting for a gotcha.
“Seriously?” Parth said. “There’s a baby in your body? Right now?” Cleo laughed. “Yes, it’s in my body.”
“This is . . . oh my god,” Wyn cried. “You’re having a baby!”
“Someone get the fainting couch,” Kimmy said. “Wynnie’s going down.”
He walked around the kitchen to hug each of them in turn, then looked at me, his eyes sparkling and clear, no fog. Like his first instinct when he felt joy was to check whether it had hit me too, to share it.
It made my heart soar and throb and burn with hope.
Now we’re all drinking champagne and sparkling cider in the sun and pressuring our friends to name their baby Kardashian Kimberly Cleopatra Carmichael-James while a paid professional snaps photographs of us.
The wedding officiant arrives at four.
By five, Parth and Sabrina stand at the edge of the dock, light glinting off their hair, eyes sparkling with tears, and promise to love each other always. Cleo and I wrap our arms around each other, our sunflower bouquets caught between us, and try not to sob.
By five thirty, we’re flinging ourselves off the end of the dock, shrieking with laughter, failing badly at DON’T FUCKING SCREAM, then pulling ourselves out of the icy water and running up to the warm comfort of the pool.
We order pizza—no one wants to leave the house, and Knott’s Harbor isn’t big on delivery—and eat it with Veuve Clicquot. We don’t talk about tomorrow, when we’ll say goodbye. To one another, to this house, to an era of life we wish could have lasted forever.
Right now we’re here.
When the sun starts falling down the sky, we bundle up and climb back down to the rocks to watch night settle. We build a fire, roast marshmallows. Sabrina burns hers to a charred crisp, and Parth patiently toasts his to golden brown.
When Wyn catches me shivering, he takes off his worn-out Mattingly sweatshirt—he’s always run warm—and yanks it over my head, smiling as he ties a bow beneath my chin. It smells like smoke and seawater and him. I never want to take it off.
We light the sparklers Parth found in the garage, and we write our names in the dark, impermanent but all the brighter and more blazing for it.
This is how I used to think of love. As something so delicate it couldn’t be caught without being snuffed out. Now I know better. I know the flame may gutter and flare with the wind, but it will always be there.
We talk about the night sky. We talk about the ghost of our old dorm building. The bright purple flowers that always erupted alongside the long road to Mattingly, and the broken eave over our New York apartment that let icicles grow into three-foot daggers. We talk about the things we remember, the things we’ll miss.
“We’ll come back,” Kimmy says. “Baby needs to know about the magic of Maine.”
“I don’t know,” Sabrina says. “Maybe next year, we go somewhere new.”
Wyn’s hand tightens on mine, like even the mention of next year might turn us to smoke.
And even that pain is a kind of pleasure, to feel so loved, to love so deeply.
We stay up until Cleo is nodding off against Kimmy’s shoulder and Sabrina can’t stop yawning, and then we say good night, like it’s any other night. Like tomorrow we might wake and start the whole week over.
When we close ourselves into our bedroom for the night, Wyn and I stand locked together in the dark, my hands against the back of his neck, his head bowed into my shoulder, breathing into each other.
My body has always loved him without reservation or caution. It knew so long before my brain did, and it still knows.
His neck, his shoulders, his waist, the soft hair that leads to his waistband, the jut of his hip bones. The smooth curves of his back and the tightening muscles of his stomach. Every piece of him I’ve thought about, dreamed of, longed for.
“Your fingers are cold,” he whispers, bringing my hand to his lips. “Your skin’s so warm,” I whisper back.
Slowly we undress, find our way to each other. We don’t pretend tomorrow won’t come but give ourselves over fully to tonight.
A tangle of limbs and blankets. Skin sliding against skin. Fingers gripping the backs of necks, the soft parts of hips, the hard muscle of thighs. “I love you,” he says into my mouth, and I wish I could swallow it, like
that would let me keep that sound forever, this moment forever.
My nose burns. My voice crackles. “Don’t say that.” “Why not?” he whispers.
“Because,” I say, “those words don’t belong to me anymore.”
“Of course they do,” he says. “They belonged to you before I ever saw you. They belong to you in every universe we’re in, Harriet.”
I close my eyes. Try to hold on to the words. They burn into my palms.
Before I knew Wyn, I could have been okay without him. Now I’ll always feel the place he isn’t.
Want is a kind of thief. It’s a door in your heart, and once you know it’s there, you’ll spend your life longing for whatever’s behind it.
He knots his hands with mine, telling me he loves me in every way he can.
Only once I’m half asleep, drifting off with my temple pressed to his chest, do I hear him whisper it one last time: “I love you.”
Through the gauzy layers of sleep, I hear myself murmur, “You.”
