A Wedding in December_ A Novel - Anita Shreve [28]
“Guys,” she said, stopping short the question she knew was on Bill’s tongue. “Ready?”
The boys shrugged their chairs away and stood with their trays. Bill wiped up a spill and took his trash to the container. They would all travel on to the Berkshires and find their rooms at the inn. The boys would wear tuxedos, and Bridget would squeeze herself into her pink bouclé suit. Agnes and Harrison and Rob would raise a toast, and tomorrow Bill and Bridget would be married.
The two adults and two boys stepped out into the sunshine. Bridget felt soft air on her throat and at the back of her neck. She was relieved—so relieved!—not to feel sick at this moment. She took Bill’s arm, which he freely gave. Was there anything better, she wanted to know, than feeling well? Simply feeling well?
Harrison set out on foot up the slope behind the inn. The bare trees suggested winter, the warm air felt like spring, and it was pleasantly disorienting to have to remind himself that Christmas was less than three weeks away. He followed a well-worn path that meandered through birch groves and around rocky outcroppings and occasionally was steep enough to warrant a handhold. The sun bathed the woods, and, for a time, Harrison was entranced by the mild midwinter light.
The hill grew gentler as he climbed. He came to a stone wall that reached to his knees and was remarkably intact despite the appearance of age. He followed the wall for a time and was surprised to discover that it simply ended, giving no indication of what it had once enclosed. He turned and sat on its rough edge and saw that he had an exceptional view not only of the inn but also of the Berkshires in the distance. Perhaps the wall had been designed for this purpose.
He wondered where Nora was, what she was doing at that very moment. He remembered the image he had had earlier, of the first time he’d ever seen her up close. The way the picture had come to him with vivid clarity.
It was a Sunday, he recalled, and he’d been walking in the village as he sometimes did when he’d been studying for several hours and needed a break. Late October of his junior year, he thought, because there was the smell of burning leaves in the air. Unlike his roommate, Stephen, Harrison woke early on Sunday mornings and tried to get as much of the week’s homework out of the way as he could. Harrison was not a skilled sleeper, whereas Stephen had a knack for it, as, indeed, he had for nearly everything else. Harrison remembered Stephen hanging upside down from his bunk explicating Randall Jarrell’s “The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner” even though he’d only glanced at the poem. He recalled Stephen making the entire senior class laugh at his brilliantly timed jokes during his pitch to become class president—and this to a student body who valued cool and irony above all other qualities. He could still picture Stephen nodding respectfully, even eagerly, at a few words his father had to say about finding the talent one was truly good at and making something of it—pitcher of old-fashioneds at Dad’s side, glass in hand—Harrison having the sense that direct attention from father to son had been in short supply and was therefore all the more coveted.
So it had to have been before the Sunday meal, Harrison decided, that he took that walk. Yes, absolutely, because there was a short but steady stream of cars starting their engines and leaving the Congregational church. 11:15? Was Nora coming from church? Odd that he’d never thought of that before.
Harrison walked often then—on Sundays, occasionally at dusk after practice, sometimes in the early morning before his first class—not for exercise, because he had plenty of that with the mandatory sports at Kidd. No, it was more to clear his head and to be in nature. He had always, even at a young age, understood himself to be a lover of the natural world, and he had often wondered if he hadn’t gravitated to it to assuage some great loss—a longing for his father perhaps?—though he had not followed