I took in a breath. “Is that why you always take a million pictures of me?”
She nodded, looking very pleased with herself. “And guess what else? He’s never posted a picture, and he doesn’t follow anyone else. He doesn’t even have a profile pic. I am the one person he follows.”
I tried to process the idea of Ian using Instagram. “He saw the picture you took of my scars?”
Kit nodded very slowly.
“And the one this morning in the airport?”
Kit nodded again. “Assuming he checks his phone.”
“So he might know we’re headed to Europe.”
“He might.”
“So much for a stealth attack.”
“The upside is,” Kit went on, “it makes it easier to find out where he lives.”
“How so?”
“When we get to Scotland,” Kit said, shrugging, “we’ll just message him for his address.”
I nodded at her. “It’s almost too simple.”
Kit patted me on the head. “Almost.”
*
EVEN BEYOND THE white terror of flying, I was nervous about the travel in general. At home, I’d developed routines and ways of doing things that had lifted my confidence. In Europe, I had no idea what to expect. We had researched everything online, of course, and I had a folder of printouts in my carry-on bag. You can call ahead for a ramp to help you board the train from Brussels to Bruges, for example, but you can’t just show up and demand one. I’d also made sure to find a hotel with rooms on the ground floor I could get to. Kit had wanted us to take a boat tour around the canals, but we learned in advance that none of the boats in town could accommodate wheelchairs.
We were as prepared as we could be, but nothing could have prepared us for the actual experience of being in Bruges. It was like a fairy-tale city. None of the normal twenty-first-century clutter, like neon signs or billboards. Just medieval stone and brick buildings with turrets and gables, a town square with a Gothic church, and chocolate shops, and cobblestone streets. And the canals! Every few blocks, stone bridges arched over the quiet water below.
Not to mention all the swans.
All my prep was worth it. There were tricky moments of travel—like when we boarded the train and found it packed with people, shoulder to shoulder—so full, folks had to move to the next car to make room for us, and Kitty sat on my lap in the chair to make space. But, in general, it wasn’t as hard as I’d feared. I’d expected roadblock after roadblock, and humiliation after humiliation, as I tried to navigate a world set up for able-bodied, French-and-or-Flemish-speaking foreigners. But we got along with surprising ease.
We reached the hotel in the late morning, and our jet-lag guide said we only had to stay awake until 10:00 P.M., so we ordered room service—steak frites—and watched European TV. Before it got too late, Kit and my mom popped out to raid the chocolate shops, and came back with a full shopping bag of dark, milk, white, peppermint, and salted caramel chocolates in every shape under the sun, from hearts to starfish, and filled with creams and nougats, fruit purees, coffee, almonds, macadamias, and peanut butter.
Kit dumped it all out on her bed in a pile.
“You’ve lost your marbles,” I said to them both. “We can’t eat all that.”
“Sure we can,” Kit said.
“We’ll get sick,” I insisted.
“Not me,” Kit said. “I’ve spent years building up a tolerance.”
In the end, we ate it all. The more we ate, the more it felt like a challenge we had to win. We really did make ourselves sick. It was impressive debauchery. Afterward, my mom and I had to lie green-gilled on the bed, and Kit threw up in the bathroom.
“I think I’m just dehydrated,” she said, climbing into her rollaway bed by the window.
But in the morning, Kit was sick again.
“Maybe I picked up dysentery in the airport,” she said. The nausea got better by midday. By evening, Kit was exhausted—but luckily nothing worse.
When it was time to get dressed, Kit lay on her rollaway like a corpse.
“You’re fine now,” I tried to insist, as she adjusted the cool rag over her eyes. “You haven’t barfed in four hours. You and Mom need to get going.”
But Kit, her voice froggy, didn’t open her eyes. “I don’t think I’m going.”
“Um,” I said. “You have to go! This was your crazy idea!”
“I do not feel good at all,” Kit said.
My mom clutched her purse. “Maybe we should just skip it,” she suggested.
“You’re not skipping,” Kit said.
“Well, I’m not going by myself,” my mom said.
“Mags can go with you.”
“I wasn’t invited,” I said.
“Go as me,” Kit said. “We RSVP’d for three.”
“But they don’t want me there.”
“Nonsense,” my mother said. “It was an oversight.”
I looked at Kit, who really did look awful, and then I looked at my nervous mother, who also looked awful. Kit clearly wasn’t going anywhere. But no way was I making my mom go alone. I sighed to my mom. “Get me Kit’s dress.”
It was red—a “your-life-is-ruined crimson,” Kit called it—and strapless, and kind of fifties-looking, with a crinoline underskirt. I worked my way into it while my mom fussed and tried to help. I also—fuck it—wore the new lingerie. I did my hair. I put on all the new makeup Kit had bought me, including red lipstick. I thought about wearing a scarf to cover my burn scars before deciding that would look worse.
Taking one last look in the mirror, I stopped to wonder if I should leave Ian’s not-quite-formal-enough necklace on, before deciding of course. I’d be needing the word “courage” tonight.
Then I forced my mom out the door.
We were doing this.
Honestly, in the face of all the other things we’d survived this year, how hard could it be?
*
THE WEDDING CHAPEL was not far. Just around the corner.
My research had assured me that Bruges’s terrain was very flat and that the cobblestones would be more of a nuisance than a barrier—both true. I also knew from my research that the chapel itself was right on ground level, so I could wheel in with no trouble. What I didn’t know, until we got there, was how very tiny the chapel would be.
Seriously. It was like a little Christmas ornament.
Standing around outside, in a large crowd, were all the guests who couldn’t fit in the building.
Surely, there were other churches that could have held us all. Surely, Evelyn Dunbar had not overlooked a detail like the size of the venue. But the longer we stood there, surrounded by others who couldn’t get in, and craning our heads for glimpses of the action, the more it felt like Chip’s mom—perhaps in a grand gesture of triumph to the watching world—had overbooked the wedding on purpose.
“Do you think she knew we wouldn’t all fit?”
“I suspect she did,” my mom said, nodding. “Better an overflowing church than an empty one.”
We found a place in the stone churchyard to wait, but there was no place for my mom to sit, and so we were at different altitudes, not even talking, and I spent the next half hour watching her worry her hands at her waist.
“Why are you doing that?” I asked after a while.
She looked down. “Doing what?”
“Twisting your hands around. Are you nervous?”
“I’m not twisting my hands around,” she said, stopping.
That’s when I looked up to see that she wasn’t peering toward the church like everybody else. She was searching the crowd.
That little moment right there made me glad I’d come all this way. She had something important to do, and I was helping her do it.
Ten more minutes went by. Then another ten. Finally, my mom decided to go check in with the usher standing at the door to see what the holdup was.
That’s how we got separated. She disappeared in that direction, cutting right and left through the crowd—and she hadn’t been gone five minutes before the church bells started ringing. Before she could come back, the chapel doors pushed open, and the bride and groom came striding out.
Of course they did. This was a wedding! Their wedding.