Page 38 of One Night Only
“Can you undress without vomiting?” I ask, only half joking as she breaks away from me, stumbling into the room.
She doesn’t answer and I follow cautiously as she heads for the balcony.
“Annie?”
There’s a reason Annie doesn’t drink often. She is a terrible drunk. Sad and sore.
When I see she’s not about to fall off the balcony I start working on her bedroom, pulling the covers back and getting her pajamas ready. At least it’s not an early-morning ceremony.
I wonder if I have time to get those extra-strong painkillers from Mick.
“Annie?” I call when she doesn’t come back inside. I peek through the balcony doors. There’s a small table and chair set to the side but she’s not sitting at it. She’s sitting on the ground, her back to the wall. Her knees are drawn to her chest.
“Come back inside.”
“I can’t do this.”
I hope to God she’s talking about undressing. I keep my voice light. “Having doubts the night before the wedding is a little bit cliché, don’t you think?”
She says nothing, resting her forehead on her knees.
I crouch beside her. “It’s normal,” I say. “And you’ve had a lot to drink but if you cry, you’re going to make it worse. You’re just dehydrated.”
“Everything’s going to change,” she moans, her voice muffled behind her hair.
“It’s not changing,” I say soothingly. “Nothing’s changing. You’ll be married. So what? You want to be married. And then you’re coming back to New York and everything will go back to normal and we can go for lunch and we can get drunk and we can have fun like we’re eighteen again.”
“Wecan’t.”
“Of course we can.”
“No.”She lifts her head; her eyes open wide as she tries to focus on me. “We can’t.”
And she says it so seriously that I shut up.
Her face crumples. “I’m not moving back to New York. Paul and I talked about it and we’ve decided to move to Dublin.”
Dublin?
“What are you talking about?” There’s a painful wrench in my chest. “You guys were always planning to come back.”
“I know.”
“Paul hasn’t lived in Ireland for years. Why would he make you move here?”
“It’s nothim,” she says, hiccupping. “It’s me.”
I shake my head, confused. “You’re going to have to help me out here, Annie.”
“I’m the one who wants to move. I asked him to.”
“But…why?”
“Because I like it,” she says with a little sob. “I like Dublin. I like Ireland. I like that it’s small and that people are friendly and I like the food and I like his family and we’re close enough to London that he can go over for work when he needs to. It feels right.” She looks at me mournfully, a mascara-stained tear sliding down her cheek. “I don’t want to a raise a family in New York. I want kids here and I want them to have little Irish accents.”
“Okay,” I say, my mind scrambling to come to terms with this massive change to my future. “Okay.”
“At least I thought that’s what I wanted,” she continues, so quietly I’m not sure I even hear her right. “But then you came and I realized how much I miss you and how I don’t have any friends of my own here. Only Paul. Even in London, all our friends areours, not mine. It’s like I have nothing of my own anymore. What if I’m making a mistake? What if I’m supposed to be in New York with you? I mean it’s all gone so fast.”
