Page 7 of Hell Bent
Showtime.
It felt morelike two hours, but finally, I was in my dress, wearing the diamond tennis necklace Ned had given me the night before and wishing it didn’t look like it belonged to a rap star. Why does everybody want diamonds? They’re not colorful. They’re not cheerful. They’re kind of hard and cold, aren’t they? Whereas, say, garnets are warm and deeply colored and as beautiful as rubies, at least to me, and plain old gold is the prettiest of all. A simple garnet pendant on a gold chain is more my style, and it’s even my birthstone! Butwhen I’d suggested it to Ned, he’d looked horrified, just like he had when I’d said I didn’t need a big ring, so here I was. My big honkin’ diamond ringwitha ring ofextra diamonds around it residing in my mom’s purse, and a chain of diamonds around my neck.
Which, yes, is ungrateful. This wasn’t feeling like my best moment, character-wise, and as I had no interest in being a bridezilla, I was going to stop. Right now. Just stop being weird and ungrateful and grumpy, like a little girl being taken to the symphony in a scratchy dress. A feeling I knew very well.
In good news for my character, my grandmother was here, transported by my dad, and she always brought perspective. Fifteen minutes with her to figure out why I was so grouchy and get my head turned around. That would work. And, ungratefully again, not having my mother hovering and probably silently despairing over my veto of eyelash extensions—“even very natural ones? Why ever not?”—would help, too.
My mother went to the door, hesitated, turned back, put a hand at the side of my face, which was nice, and said, “The next time I see you, you’ll be getting married.”
“Not our little girl anymore,” my dad said, settling my grandmother into a chair.
In the movies, the woman would have said, “I’ll always be your little girl,” but I’d actually never wanted to be anybody’s little girl, so that wouldn’t have been true. I said, “Still your buddy, though,” and my dad smiled and looked like he might be tearing up.
When the door closed behind my mother, though, something happened. Or didn’t happen. I kept on being in a sort of fugue state. Not literally—I hadn’t lost my memory—but minutes would go by before I’d come back to myself with a jolt and realize somebody had been talking and I hadn’tregistered it. Everything felt like it was happening far away, and I didn’t know what to do with my hands. I couldn’t touch my face or hair, I couldn’t sit down, and I was itching in the weirdest places. My cheek. My forearms. I rubbed them against the waist of the dress, and my dad said, “Your mother told me to tell you not to touch your dress.”
I didn’t say, “I’ll touch my dress if I want to,” because you aren’t supposed to snap at your parents on your wedding day. I also didn’t say, “If I’d bought the lace tablecloth, it would at least be good for scratching my itchy arms.” I looked for my phone, but it wasn’t there. Of course not. My mother was holding it for me along with the ring. I asked my dad, “What time is it?”
“Twenty minutes until we go downstairs,” he said. “Nervous? Want some champagne? What your mother doesn’t know won’t hurt her.”
I took the glass he handed me and took a sip, then set it down. My grandmother looked at me from her parchment-wrinkled, ninety-four-year-old face, the bones more cleanly defined than ever, her blue eyes still startlingly vivid, her hair a beautiful silver-white and tucked back into a chignon as usual, her posture still almost perfect. Imagine a petite, aging prima ballerina, and you have my grandmother. She said, “Can I ask you to take a walk around the hotel for fifteen minutes, Niles? Alix and I need some quiet time.”
“Oh,” my dad said. “Of course. I’m surprisingly nervous myself.” Suave as ever in his dinner jacket—bespoke, not off the rack, because my parents spent a fair amount of time at charity functions—as he headed out the door.
“Now,mein Schatz,”my grandmother said in her British- accented voice, relic of the long-ago governess from whom she’d learned English, “tell me what’s wrong.”
“Nothing,” I said. “Nothing important. I’m feeling a little odd, but I imagine everybody feels like that. Didn’t you?”
“No,” she said. “But then, I was considering my alternatives and thanking my lucky stars. And I wasn’t expecting true love.”
“Well, there you are,” I said. “I don’t have enough desperation, I guess.”
She was silent a minute, then said, “There are kinds and kinds of desperation. Living a life you don’t want could be desperate, too.”
“Right,” I said. “Compared to escaping the Nazis and Russians and living in bombed-out buildings.”
“Not compared to that,” she said. “Forget about comparing and tell me.”
“Cold feet,” I said. “Which is good, right? It’s a big step, marriage. Youshouldbe nervous. But I’ve been with Ned almost three years now. I know him. He doesn’t try to quash me. He accepts who I am, and he’s kind. That’s what you said you loved about Grandpa.”
“Strong and kind, I said,” my grandmother answered.
“What, Ned’s not strong? He’s done well in his career. Very well. He’s a hard worker, he knows himself, and he accepts himself. Isn’t that strong?”
“In a way,” she said. “What sort of sense of humor does he have? I haven’t seen. And he doesn’t have to be a bad person, you know, to be the wrong husband.”
“Are you kidding?” I knew it was wrong. I loved my grandmother, but the prickly heat was rising, and all I wanted to do was wash my face clean of the itchy makeup and run my fingers through my hair. “Now you say this?Now?”
She didn’t say anything, just looked at me. When I didn’t go on, she said, “It’s your choice. Always.” Then she reached into her purse, pulled out the velvet bag inside, and handed it to me.
I held it in my hand, but didn’t open it. I knew what wasin there, so that wasn’t the problem. It was that I didn’t want to wear them.
My grandmother said, “I asked Elise if I could give them to you. Old lady’s privilege.”
“No,” I said. “They’re hers.”
“They go to the daughter at her wedding,” she said. “To the new hope. What is it they say? Something old, something new? These are old enough. They were created for Napoleon to give to Josephine. The final piece of the parure.”
“Wait,” I said. “What?”
