Eve’s Wedding Knight

Her rueful laughter bumped against his fingers. Electric charges ran up his arms and into his chest. “I don’t think he’s very happy right now. I just wish…” The laughter ended, and then she whispered, “I just want it to be over.”

He held her still, her face framed upside down in his hands, and stared down…down into her eyes. She gazed steadily back at him for a long, unmeasurable time…just time enough, it seemed, for him to play back over all the moments of his life from the very first until this one…the very moment when it seemed almost inevitable that he would kiss her.

Time enough to relive all the missteps and wrong turns he’d taken, all the blind alleys and deep waters he’d stumbled into. Time to review his failures and broken dreams and the reasons for them. To remember who he was, and why for him, some things, no matter how much he wanted them, simply were not possible.

“You’re a civilian. You don’t have to do this if you don’t want to,” he said in that cracked and gravelly voice he was learning to accept as his own. “If you want to call it off-”

“No! No…” Her lashes drifted down as if she felt utterly exhausted, and she said in a soft, dead voice, “This is the only way. I know that. I want to finish it.”

“All right then.” Exhaling through his nose, Jake pulled his hands away from her neck and straightened slowly. He felt stiff and achy in every joint. “You’ll go to your sister’s for Thanksgiving?” He waited for her nod. “Okay. Unless something comes up in the meantime, that’ll be our next meeting.”

She lifted her head and her eyes followed him as he came around to the front of the tub. “You’ll be there?”

He almost smiled, but in the end just snorted again instead. “Do you seriously think we’re gonna let Cisneros anywhere near your sister unless we’re within shouting distance? Of course we’ll be there.”

“But bow-it’s clear out in the country, there’s going to be people all over the place-”

“Waskowitz-” he squinted up his eyes in an exasperated grimace “-let us worry about that, okay? That’s our job.” He walked to the door and paused with his hand on the knob. ‘“We’ll think of something. Or you will. If you do, just…talk into a bug. We’ll hear you. And if we come up with a plan, we’ll give you the signal. Which is…?”

She bobbed her head impatiently. “The appointment’s been changed. I know, I know.” She suddenly looked overheated and cross. “Okay, so…I guess I’ll see you on Thanksgiving.

“Oh-do me a favor, will you?” She stopped him as he was going out the door. “If you see Marcie out there, ask her to come get me out of this…blinkin’ tub? I’m starting to prune.”

“Will do,” said Jake solemnly. He closed the door and leaned against it for a moment, eyes closed, breathing hard. If he hadn’t been in so much pain, he probably would have laughed.

Somehow the weeks passed. Not that there was any lack of things for Eve to do-as Sonny had pointed out to her more than once, and with exasperation, Hilton Head was a veritable playground, at least for the privileged. But golf and tennis, two of the island’s principal attractions, were obviously not available to her, and if the truth were told, wouldn’t have appealed to her even if she hadn’t been wearing a neck brace.

It was also true that the recent surge of development had produced a plethora of shopping and dining pleasures, ranging from touristy T-shirt and souvenir shops and every kind of fast food known to mankind, to the finest champagne, candlelight and caviar restaurants and upscale malls anchored by the likes of Saks Fifth Avenue. Plus, just across the bridge on the mainland were the new factory outlet malls-small cities of stores that could swallow up shopping enthusiasts for days at a time. But Eve had never considered either food or shopping to be forms of recreation; she shopped when she needed something and ate when she was hungry. These days, thanks to Sonny’s attentiveness to her every need, she seldom fell into either of those categories, and as a result, was losing weight at a rate that would have alarmed her, had she not been too miserable to notice.

She spent her days walking the beaches in search of shells and sand dollars, strolling the miles of equestrian and bicycle trails through resorts and golf courses, staking out man-made ponds and lagoons in hopes of spotting one of the alligators that gave a whole new meaning to the term “water hazard.” Sometimes she wandered into one of the few remaining pockets of undeveloped land, where modest and ramshackle frame houses squatted stubbornly beneath century-old live oaks on real estate grown valuable almost beyond the comprehension of the people who lived there-for these were people who did not measure the worth of their land in money.

Once in a while Eve caught a glimpse of one of the few black people left on the island, descendants of the Gullah people who had been Hilton Head’s original owners, working in a yard or walking down a shaded back road. They didn’t return her waves, and who could blame them? To them she was just another of the mainlanders who’d invaded their island, bought them out, fenced them off and made them unwelcome in their own land.

They couldn’t know that Eve understood them. That she knew what it was that made them cling to their land so obstinately, in spite of pressure and hostility, skyrocketing taxes and offers of money beyond their wildest imaginings. She knew that, simply put, this was home. Their place of belonging.

She envied those people, and when she passed their homely little houses she sent up silent cheers of encouragement, and vowed that if ever she did find her own place she would hold on to it as tenaciously.

Sometimes she stopped at the edge of the marshes to watch the sun go down in a red blaze of glory, and alerted by distant honkings she would catch the breathtaking descent of geese as they settled into their night’s refuge. It was at times like that that she felt the familiar wave of longing that was almost like grief. Why? she would cry out in silent anguish and bewilderment. Why?

As always, she reminded herself that she was the luckiest of women. She had been privileged to see so much of the world, and so much that was wondrous and beautiful. But why was it that the more fascinating, awe-inspiring or poignantly lovely something was, the sadder it made her feel? Watching a glacier calve or finding a hermit crab in a tide pool, she would gasp first with the wonder of it, the bright, sharp stab of joy. And then, as she looked in vain for someone to share the joy and wonder with, feel instead the creeping ache of loneliness.

With Thanksgiving approaching, she felt more guilty than ever for feeling sad. As she had that day in the church garden in Savannah, the last day, it seemed to her now, of innocence, she thought of all her many blessings with a fervent, almost superstitious thankfulness. She was the luckiest of women. And if her place of belonging had thus far eluded her, and if beauty made her sad because she had no one to share it with, she could at least give thanks for the beauty. And she did-oh, she did.

She did wonder, sometimes, if there might be a connection between those two things-the search for her place, the longing for someone to share her soul’s secrets-but when she tried to pin down exactly what the connection was, it eluded her; it was like trying to remember the details of a dream. Though lately she’d had the feeling that she was coming closer to the answer, that it was hovering out there, just beyond her reach.

So intent was she on trying to grasp it, that she failed to notice the refrain that played constantly now in the background of her mind. Or perhaps she’d grown so accustomed to it that, like music in a shopping mall, she hardly heard it most of the time. Oh my God… it went. My God… it’s Jake… it’s Jake.

It was Thanksgiving Day. Dinner had been served and consumed, and in its aftermath, on her way back to the kitchen with her hands full of dirty plates, Mirabella nudged Summer in the ribs with her elbow. “He’s making himself right at home, isn’t he?” she muttered, sotto voce.

Summer looked lost for a moment, then, following the jerking movement of Mirabella’s head toward the living room, where an assortment of male bodies in varying degrees of somnolence and gastric distress were sprawled in front of the television set, said, “Oh, you mean…”

“Sonny. Our sister’s fiance, Mr. Cheesy Las Vegas himself, making like one of ‘the guys.’ And did you notice the way he oiled himself through dinner, complimenting every mouthful and oozing charm from every pore? Just about ruined my appetite.”

“Oh, Bella.” Summer sighed. “Don’t be so judgmental. Maybe he really is nice. Did you ever think of that? He does seem genuinely crazy about Evie. Isn’t that what counts? It doesn’t really matter what we think.”

“It wouldn’t,” Mirabella huffed in a fierce undertone meant only for Summer, as the sisters unloaded their burdens into the already crowded sink, “if I thought for one moment she felt the same way about him. If I thought she was happy. ”

Summer cast a troubled glance over her shoulder at the bustling, noisy trio of Starrs-Jimmy Joe’s mother, Betty, his sister, Jess, and Granny Calhoun-discussing the disposition of heaps of leftovers on the kitchen table. She lowered her voice to a barely audible murmur. “You don’t think she’s happy?”