A Wedding in December_ A Novel - Anita Shreve [101]
And, oh God, just the crying itself was a kind of personal horror, wasn’t it? Should she excuse herself? Josh handed her a handkerchief, and she tried to smile in his direction, but it was no good. Her body, rhythmically convulsive, would not calm down. Her face would be a ruin, and her eyes would not recover for hours—she would have to dunk her face in ice water to clear them.
But Agnes couldn’t stop crying, because now she was thinking about Halifax and all the people who had died there. She pictured the woman pinned under the beam, her chest crushed. That woman would have been a mother. Of course she would have. Or the ten-year-old girl who had lost her family. Imagine—to experience that bright light and then to wake to a hellish universe in which you were utterly alone. And then there was that poor man propped against a dead horse, his child lifeless in his arms. Would the shock of the event obliterate pain? Could a parent’s pain ever be obliterated?
Agnes would never know. Agnes would never be a mother. She was forty-four years old, and already her periods were irregular, sometimes two and three months apart. Jim’s wife, Carol (such a cold, cold name), was a mother twice over—her children grown now, one in college, one just out. Jim had once said that he might leave Carol when both children were through college (earlier, it had been when both children were out of high school, but, as Jim had pointed out, that clearly wouldn’t work: where would the children go when they came home from school on vacations?), but Agnes doubted that Jim would ever leave his wife. Even if he did, it was too late for children, wasn’t it?
So a child was out of the question.
Agnes glanced around her. Nora was sitting with Harrison. Nora had never had a child. Carl had already had his children, he’d said. He would not entertain thoughts of another. Rob and Josh would not have their own children unless they adopted. But they all had, or had experienced, something Agnes did not have. Steady companionship. A wife. A husband. A lover with whom one lived. Agnes and Jim had shared motel rooms and cottages, but never for more than three days at a stretch. What would it be like to come home with groceries in a bag to find Jim sprawled on a couch, reading the paper? To wake up morning after morning and see his long back as he bent to put on his shoes? To fold herself into him whenever she wanted to?
. . . union of a man and woman in marriage . . .
And that was another thing Agnes would never have. A wedding. Never a public celebration of herself and Jim. A thing so commonplace and yet so utterly impossible for her. She shook her head. The self-pity was endless. Pathetic, really. And utterly useless. What good did it do to cry over something she could not have? None whatsoever. All she could hope to accomplish would be to draw attention to herself and thus have to invent a plausible explanation for her tears. She hardly knew Bill and Bridget as adults, though she liked them well enough.
(Agnes had a sudden and horrifying thought. Would Bridget misinterpret the tears, thinking Agnes was crying because Bridget might die soon?)
Agnes blew her nose again and sat back against the pew. Josh removed his arm and gave her leg a little squeeze. He stood, and Agnes was confused. Was the ceremony over? She watched as he turned to the assembled. He seemed to collect himself, and Agnes thought that he would speak the way people spontaneously did at funerals. A little weird. A little nervous making. Josh was not one of them, really, for all his kindness.
Instead of speaking, however, Josh began to sing. It was an aria, Agnes thought.