Elin Hilderbrand - The Blue Bistro

He calls the hospital chapel and reserves it for two hours. He orders flowers from the gift shop near Admitting. They aren’t prepared to outfit a wedding, but they can put together a bouquet. One of the nurses in oncology plays the piano; Thatcher discovers her lunch hour is from one thirty to two thirty. He phones Father Ott who is staying at the rectory of St. Ann’s, then he takes Fiona’s hand. Her hands are so important to her for chopping and dicing and mixing and blending and stirring and rolling and sprinkling, and yet she’s always been so self-conscious about her swollen fingers and her discolored fingernails that he’s never been allowed to touch them. There’s a scar across her left palm from the day she picked up a hot sauté pan without a side towel. She went to the emergency room for that burn, and for the stitches she got when she cut herself while boning a duck breast-fifteen stitches across the tips of her second and third fingers. There are other marks and scars that Thatcher can’t identify; if he could, he’d ask her about each one.

She’s off the vent but her eyes are closed.

“Fiona,” he says.

She opens her eyes.

“We’re getting married at two o’clock.”

The words terrify him, because he knows that she’ll know what they signify. At the very end. If nobody else wants us.

Fiona’s lips are cracked and bleeding, and although it must hurt, she smiles.

In this ward of the hospital there isn’t much in the way of good news, but everyone is excited about a wedding. Thatcher goes back to his room at the hotel to shower, shave, and change, and he spends a full, precious five minutes considering the telephone.

Call Adrienne? And say what?

When he returns, the nurses have put Fiona back on the vent-just until she’s ready to go-and they have changed her into a fresh white johnny and brushed her hair so that it flows down over the top of the sheet. The gift shop has done a beautiful job with the bouquet of roses and Fiona holds it as they unhook her from the ventilator and wheel her down the corridor toward the chapel. Thatcher tries to be present in the moment, he tries not to peer behind the half-open doors they pass, he tries not to listen to the dialogue of the soap operas on TV. The attending nurse, a woman named Ella, chatters about her own wedding twenty-eight years earlier at the steepled Congregational Church in Acton.

“Do you have rings?” Ella whispers to Thatcher.

He has rings, expensive rings purchased that morning from Shreve, Crump & Low. As Ella and Thatcher wheel Fiona’s gurney into the chapel, he checks his shirt pocket for their delicate presence-two circles wrapped in tissue paper. The chapel is a brown room, dimly lit, with sturdy, functional-looking wooden benches and a large plain wooden cross hanging over the carpeted stairs of the altar. Father Ott waits there, all six foot six of him, in his flowing white robe. Oncology nurse, Teri Lee, a diminutive Korean woman, waits for Thatcher’s signal, and then she starts to play Pachelbel’s Canon in D. On this piano, in this chapel, under these circumstances, the music is plaintive. A third nurse named Kristin Benedict is sitting in the first row; she has spent a great many hours caring for Fiona, and what makes her even more special is that she’s eaten at the Bistro (in the summer of 1996, while she was on vacation with her husband). Thatcher has asked her to be a witness. Kristin is a crier; she sobs quietly as Teri plays the piano, as the gurney moves down the aisle, Thatcher on one side, Ella on the other. Once they reach the altar, the music subsides, Thatcher takes Fiona’s scarred hand and Father Ott raises his arms and proclaims in his resonant voice: “We gather here today in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.”

Thatcher crosses himself and out of the corner of his eye, he sees Fiona lift her hand and cross herself. She is smiling.

Father Ott leads them, briskly, through the age-old wedding vows. He is hurrying, Thatcher suspects, because no one knows how long Fiona will last without oxygen. Thatcher tries, tries, to stay present in the moment, and not to think of how Father Ott will, at some point, give Fiona the sacrament of Last Rites, he will anoint her with oil, he will whisper Psalm 23 into her deaf ear. Fiona’s parents are to land at Logan at six o’clock. Thatcher offered to pick them up but Mrs. Kemp doesn’t want Fiona to be alone, even for a second. Thatcher is shaking. Fiona will die, she will be cold to the touch, gone from Thatcher in every human sense, even though she is alive now-she is alive and he is marrying her and she is marrying him. They are getting married, honoring the thirty years that they’ve been best friends-through the chocolate swirl cheesecake, and the beer on the playground, and the day they bought the restaurant, and every moment in between and since.

Fiona is smiling. She takes a deep breath and whispers, “I do.” Thatcher slips a ring on her finger. It’s way too big and he’s crushed because he wants her to take the ring with her when she goes. She holds it in place with her thumb. Thatcher puts on his own ring; he swears he will never take it off. Father Ott bestows a blessing and they cross themselves again, but not Fiona; her eyes are glazing over, she’s checking out. But not yet! Not yet!

“You may kiss the bride,” Father Ott says. Teri Lee starts in with the piano and Kristin Benedict sobs and Thatcher kisses Fiona, his new wife, on her cracked lips. For the first time ever, he kisses her.

Adrienne doesn’t sleep.

She was able to wheedle only the most basic information out of Mario before he checked his watch and claimed he was late meeting Louis and Hector at the RopeWalk and left. The basic information was this: Thatcher was back, Mario had bumped into him at the airport, Thatcher asked if Mario had seen Adrienne and Mario said no. Thatcher asked Mario to find Adrienne and let her know that he, Thatcher, wanted to talk to her.

Talk to me about what? Adrienne asked.

He didn’t say.

This is not something she bargained for: Thatcher, here, on Nantucket, looking for her. The restaurant is gone, Fiona is dead, and Adrienne is most comfortable placing Thatcher in a similar category: disappeared, vanished, nonexistent. Easier that way to banish him from her mind. Not so easy now that she knows he is asleep (or not) on this tiny island.

She gets home from work at eleven thirty and sits in her kitchen with all the lights off contemplating a glass of wine. But no, she’s promised herself, no. She tries to read, she tries turning off the light and closing her eyes. She gets up and looks out into her backyard-the one big tree is swaying. It’s windy, but not particularly cold. She throws on a fleece and goes outside. She feels better being outside.

She rides her bike to Thatcher’s cottage, the cottage behind the big house in town. There is a light on. She feels like if she opens her mouth, something awful will come out. He’s right there, ten feet away, in that cottage, and she panics because she can’t face him, she can’t deal with closure; it will kill her, and those words are so wrong, so harsh in light of what he’s just been through, but they will kill her in a sense. Closure will destroy her fragile sense of okay-for-now. Seeing him will ruin every step toward healing that she’s made in the last month.

She rides her bike home and makes a decision. She has to leave. Tomorrow.

She spends the rest of the night packing up her clothes, her new pairs of beautiful shoes, the hand bell. Mack will not be happy that she’s leaving him with two weeks until the hotel closes for the season, but what else can she do? At first light, she writes out a note of apology and hops back on her bike. Cowardly girl, she thinks, quitting by note. She will never be able to use Mack or Thatcher as a reference. This is a summer that will be missing from her résumé. The summer that didn’t count. The summer that was a mistake.