“Tell me,” I say. “What has she done? I can’t believe you really think she’s a witch.”

But they have moved on by this time, talking about whether or not some girls they knew in high school are going to be at the party we’re all going to. Somebody named Layla is going to shit when she finds out that Noah is engaged without checking with her.

I look out the window at all the passing houses—big mansion-type things with huge lawns decorated with white twinkly lights wrapped around the tree trunks, and Christmas trees illuminating the windows. Boughs of holly, fa la la la la. So genteel, so rich.

I wonder if I’ll ever really fit in here.

Funny, I think later, how you can meet a random handsome guy in California at a party, and he tells you he once wrote movie scripts and one almost got accepted but then didn’t, and he tells you that he’s now teaching school, and he loves kids and he loves to go snowboarding in the mountains in the winter and later, in bed, after he’s managed to do amazing things to you, he tells you just how much he wants to help people in the world, and you can’t believe how moved you are at the way his eyes change when he tells you that, how much depth he has, and you find yourself falling in love with these pieces of him that he shows you—and then later, much later, after he’s moved in with you and bought you a deluxe garlic press and a pair of amazing turquoise boots and has written a song for you that he plays on his guitar, you go back to his hometown with him and find out that, oh my God, he’s the somewhat spoiled son of rich people who let him get away with murder and who don’t seem to automatically care about you, except for one ancient aunt no one else seems to like.

You see that he contains so many contradictions. And that you will have to make peace—and you will—with these people who are going to be your in-laws, and you will learn to please them. But you also know that after that night, you will look at him completely differently, and that one of the new things you’ll know about him is that it’s a miracle he survived his childhood and arrived intact at your heart.

And yet you still love him to pieces.

But in the days that follow your return home, you wonder why he won’t answer your questions about his Aunt Blix without rolling his eyes, and why he’s slightly disgruntled that you invited her to the wedding without checking with his mom first. He changes the subject, and you change it back, and he sighs and says, “Oh, she didn’t get the money she wanted, and so she moved up north, and got weird. She looks at everybody like she can see straight through them, down to all the layers of bad stuff.”

And you say something about how she maybe admires the so-called bad stuff (you make air quotes for this), and he wonders why you’re so obsessed with his Aunt Blix, and you say that you’re not obsessed. And you’re not.

But you do wonder why in your spare time, when you’re not thinking of anything else, you’re having a conversation with Blix in your head. You’re wondering if she’s right that love is the true expression of everything in the universe, and if the sparkles you see are real. You’re telling her that she’s wrong about you—that you’re not up for a big life and surprises; you just want ordinary love and happiness with her grandnephew. A house in the suburbs and three children.

And somehow, in a way you can’t explain, you know she’s not convinced in the least. And that just by knowing her, you’re walking into something that’s bigger than you are, that might even turn out to be some kind of mystical crazy thing you’re never going to be able to explain to anyone. Like the time you went to the planetarium show and looking up at the stars that represented billions of light-years, you felt like a little point of pulsating light, a flicker in the universe, but something that was meant to exist.

And maybe that’s why I have a headache.

THREE

MARNIE

Five months later—after weeks and weeks of wedding preparations, dress buying, invitation writing, venue selecting, all of it mostly orchestrated by my mom and okayed by me via telephone and Skype—I sit in the little room off the side of my parents’ hometown church in Jacksonville, Florida, the room where in the normal universe the beautiful bride is to wait with her happy attendants, and I watch while everything in my life falls apart in slow motion.

Noah has not shown up for the wedding.

He is now forty-seven and a half minutes late, which, as I keep explaining to anyone who will listen, is still going to be okay. He will come strolling in. He will.

He could even send a text message that says something like Hey! I’m at the Episcopal church! Where is everyone? And then I’ll say, Ha ha ha! Wait! Not the Episcopal church! We’re getting married at the Methodist church a block away! And we’ll both type in a smiley emoji, then he’ll speed over, and it will all be fine.

But so far nothing like that has happened.

So far what is happening is that I am sweating my head off in this torture chamber with my sister, Natalie, and my two childhood friends, Ellen and Sophronia, and I am wearing a dress my mother picked out for me, a dress that I now see makes me look like a gigantic white upholstered chair, and my tongue has become this dried-out, fat piece of meat sitting in my mouth, and my hair is pulled so tightly back in a bun that it actually hurts my forehead, and my feet are swelling to twice their normal size, and it is approximately ninety-seven thousand degrees in this windowless room, and my sister and my two attendants will mercifully not look at me because they are so embarrassed for me that all they can think to do is stare into their phones until the world ends.

From the sanctuary, I hear the organist playing the same three chords over and over again. I wonder how many hours she would go on playing those chords, and how she’ll know when to stop. Whose job is it to call off the wedding anyway? Maybe it’s like a death, and the minister and my father—and probably me—will all look at our watches and one of us will say, “Well, this is it. I’m calling it. Four thirty-four. Wedding’s not going to happen, folks.”

Ohgodohgodohgodohgod. Noah is never late to anything unless an airline is involved, and so this means that he’s either dead, or else he and Whipple are now on their way to some fabulous adventure that girls can’t be part of. In which case I will have to hunt down my supposed-to-be husband and kill him.

What if he’s dead? What if any moment now a police officer shows up and leads me down to the hospital, and I have to stand there in my wedding dress, hysterically weeping, while I identify his body?

I unpin the veil and start clawing my pulled-back hair out of its restraints.

“No,” says Natalie. “Don’t do that.” She comes over and sits next to me, her eyes damp and luminous. She is six months pregnant, and maybe because she’s carrying the future in her body, she is lately a bit hyperconcerned that the world might not turn out to be a predictable, rational place. She always looks like she’s about to cry. Two days ago she picked me up from the airport when I came in from California for the wedding, and when a Prince song came on the radio, honest to God, she had to pull the car over because she was crying too hard to see. All because Prince shouldn’t have had to die, she said.

“There’s going to turn out to be a reasonable explanation for this,” she says now in a high, wavery voice. “Maybe the bridge is out. Or maybe the tux shop was closed. Text him again.”

I laugh. “Seriously, Nat? The bridge? The tux shop? Seriously?”

“Text him again.”

So I do.

Hi my luv monkey . . . how’s it going?

Nothing.

Can’t wait to see U! #marriedtoday!!!!!

Crickets. Five minutes later, I write: You up? LOL!

Unbeknownst to Natalie, I make a deal with the universe: if I put down my phone and don’t look at it while I count to one thousand, then when I pick it up again, he will be typing. The three little dots will be blinking at me, and he’ll say he was on his way, but he just had to save somebody’s life, or there was a hurt dog in the street and he had to find the owner, and he is so, so sorry, but who could leave a dog who was hurt?

I count to eight hundred and forty-eight, and then I say, “Forget this,” and I write in rapid succession:

WTF?? R U OK?

Noah Spinnaker, if you don’t get here soon, I am going to FREAK OUT AND PROBABLY DIE!!!!!!!!

Pleasepleasepleasepleaseplease.

Just please.

My father, all dolled up in his father-of-the-bride tuxedo, peeks in the door.

“How are you holding up, Ducky?” he asks. He hasn’t called me that since I was ten and begged him to stop, so I know he is losing it.

“She’s coping, okay?” says Natalie. “Maybe somebody needs to go and look for this son of a bitch and bring him here.”

We’re all stunned into silence.

I can see my dad thinking, Uh-oh, pregnancy hormones, and then he looks at me and says, “Um, Noah’s great-aunt is out here, and she wants to know if she can have a word with you.”