I felt myself hunch down, suddenly realizing in a new way that I was crashing Chip’s wedding.
I had nowhere to hide, but as the little stone churchyard flooded with strangers in sparkly gowns and tuxes, the photographer called all the important people off for photos.
An usher directed everyone else to follow a little side street to the reception, but I waited for my mom—who never came back.
I was not positioned well, down low in my chair. People I recognized walked straight on past without seeing my face, and all I could really see was belts and handbags.
Finally, I wheeled up to the church doors to ask after my mom.
“I’m looking for a woman in a green dress,” I asked the usher.
He shook his head. “There’s no one left inside.”
I looked around. Did she miss me in the crush? Did she go ahead to the reception, thinking I’d gone ahead, too? Was she waiting for me there, trembling and nervous? An image of my mother, twisting her hands through the reception, alone, appeared in my head.
Time to find her. I wheeled off, following the last of the migrating crowd.
*
IT DIDN’T TAKE long for me to lose them entirely.
My research swore that ninety-five percent of the streets in Bruges were manageable for wheelchairs, but this one street belonged firmly in the other five percent. These particular cobblestones were smaller and narrower, with deeper grooves between them. The “razor-thin” tires my dad had been so proud of on this chair were not exactly built for this terrain. In fact, I got stuck over and over—the wheel wedged between stones as I rocked back and forth, wrestling it out. Slow going. Frustrating. My hands got dirty. My fingers got pinched. At one point, the wind tangled the hem of the dress in the spokes.
Then the side street opened onto a better, smoother one, where I was able to pick up some speed and coast up over the crest of a stone bridge. That’s where I caught up with all the wedding guests. At a taxi stand. Which turned out to be for a water taxi. The kind I knew from the Internet couldn’t accommodate wheelchairs.
This was how we were all getting to the reception. Boats.
I stopped right there on the bridge and took in the scene. Two boats, filled to the brim with wedding guests, had just motored away from the dock, and a last boat was loading. Men in tuxes and women in gowns waited in a snaking line around wood turnstiles. I scanned the guests for my mom’s green dress, but I couldn’t find her. Then I eyed the boat. I might manage to board, if somebody would help me. But as I coasted over and arrived at the entrance to the taxi stand, I found a bigger problem: It was about twenty stone steps from the road down to the water.
Twenty steep, uneven, Escher-like stone steps.
I stopped still at the top. The steps were tall and narrow. I could navigate a curb back in the States, and possibly two low steps on a very lucky day, but not this. No way was I making it down this. Not without dying.
I watched couple after couple use their working legs and feet to walk thoughtlessly up to the boat and step in, and I felt a sharp stab of despair. What was I doing here? Kitty had bailed, I’d lost my mother, and now there was no way I could make it to the reception that I wasn’t even invited to.
I felt a funny little pressure in my throat, like I might cry.
I took a shuddery breath. I should never have come. Time to give up. Long past time, probably.
That’s when the boat driver noticed me.
“Est-ce que vous allez à la soirée?” he asked, in French.
He thought I was Belgian. How flattering! “Non!” I shouted back. “C’est d’accord.” No. It’s okay! High school French for the win. It didn’t often come in handy in Texas.
But the driver was already gesturing at the two guys on the dock, both of whom looked about seventy, and then they were both clambering toward me, up the steps with determination.
“Non, non,” I said, shaking my hands at them like I didn’t need help. “Mes jambons sont eclatés.” I was trying to say, “My legs are broken,” but I didn’t realize until later that I’d confused the word jambe, French for “leg,” with jambon, French for “ham.” I’d also accidentally switched “broken” for “burst”—and so I’d basically just told them that my hams exploded.
The two men paused to look at each other.
Then they kept coming. I clearly did need help.
Of course I wasn’t just a passerby in wedding attire. Of course I was a guest at this wedding. Just because I couldn’t make it down those steps didn’t mean I wasn’t going to.
Over my protests, one elderly but surprisingly strong dock worker lifted me and cradled me in his arms as if he carried women like this every day, and then we were off, teetering down the steps. The other guy folded up my chair and followed us, and before I knew it, they were stepping into the boat and depositing me there—in a seat up at the prow that faced backward toward the crowd.
Every other seat, as far as I could tell, faced forward—except the one I was in, and the empty one beside it. In the churchyard, absolutely no one had noticed me. Now, they all stared.
What could I do? There was no getting off. There was no changing seats. I stared back. I didn’t recognize anyone. My chair and my wedding-crashing self were stuck alone on a boat full of curious strangers. A boat that wasn’t going anywhere.
The taxi crew had switched back to Flemish, but I could tell that the driver wanted to leave, even though the dockworkers thought he should stay. He kept telling them to untie the boat, but they didn’t think they were supposed to. Finally, one of them dashed back up those lethal steps again to get a look around, and he called something down and pointed out of view.
Was somebody coming?
And then I saw.
Somebody was coming, all right.
The wedding party.
Twenty-eight
THEY GATHERED BY the bridge at the top of the steps to the taxi stand like a pouty spread in Vanity Fair, at the very spot where I had just been. I got my first good gander, and it was so strange to see all the guys who would have been our groomsmen—Woody, Statler, Murphy, and Harris—paired up with a flock of female strangers. Just as I thought that, a breeze rose up and caused all the bridesmaids’ gowns to billow in slow motion.
Then the group parted, and I braced myself for the appearance of the bride and groom. But the couple that appeared were not Chip and the Whiner, but instead, Jim and Evelyn Dunbar. Chip’s folks.
I had seen Evelyn several times since the day we’d fought in the hospital, of course. She was our next-door neighbor, after all.
But I had not spoken to her. Not once, in all this time.
At first, if she popped by, I hid. I felt like I couldn’t face her, and I gave myself permission not to. As time went by, I stopped caring about avoiding her. But by then, she and my mother had begun their secret rendezvous.
We didn’t work to avoid each other. It just happened.
After a while, my mother insisted that Evelyn had “entirely forgotten” our little “tiff” at the hospital. But I suspected that she’d long ago made me the villain of the situation: the desperate, broken girl who’d tried to manipulate her perfect son into giving up his perfect life out of guilt. Evelyn had never been the kind of person to face her son’s limitations head-on. She could be very selective about her facts.
Hence, the “omission” of my name on the invitation.
It was fine. I didn’t care. Except for one thing: She was coming my way, and I had no escape.
As she walked closer in her pale blue mother-of-the-groom suit and pearls, I wondered how she would react to the sight of me.
Not well, it turned out.
I have a theory that we are at our meanest when we feel threatened. People really seem to do their worst when they think you’re out to hurt them, or steal from them, or take something that’s rightfully theirs. And I could tell the minute Evelyn Dunbar’s eyes met mine that she immediately thought all of the above.