Track 4. Because sometimes I lay awake wondering what you’re doing
Track 5. Because I wonder if you’re awake, doing the same too
Love,
Balloon Boy
X
Lucas throws his arms around me when I show up at the cottage, the morning before the wedding, his face melting with relief.
“You’re here,” he says. “God, Em, I’m so happy you’re here.”
Amanda looks relieved at the sight of me too, and Jean, although mostly constantly unreadable, gives me an unexpected long hug and says, “My boy can now relax, no?”
I don’t know if Lucas told them. I don’t know if they know we argued, or that he told me the truth, or kissed me. But I got on the ferry and researched buses in advance, to make sure I made it without anyone’s help. And I know, from now on, that things won’t ever be the same again with Lucas and me. Even if we put everything that happened that fortnight ago on the balcony behind us, which I’m sure in time we will, he’s about to get married. Something that will undoubtedly change the dynamic of everything between us forever. I might have loved him—and I still love him—but after finding out about Stacey, about Ivy and that text, and especially, more than anything, after that kiss on the balcony and how wrong it felt, it is what Rosie said. It is the idea of him, I am sure, that I am in love with. And I am ready to let that idea go. He is my best friend. That is everything. That is all.
* * *
The ceremony is being held in a classically beautiful room on the first floor of the hotel, with high ceilings and large windows. It is simple and elegant: everything Marie set out to do. Hydrangeas and sprigs of baby’s breath are wrapped in cream ribbon and pinned to the end of each line of chairs, and there is a play list of modern love songs playing quietly as we wait for the bride. Lucas and I stand beside each other at the front of the room as guests file in.
So nervous, he mouths, and I shake my head.
“No need,” I tell him. “It’s going to be amazing,” and he looks at me and smiles.
I thought I would feel devastation in this moment. The Emmie Blue on the veranda of Le Rivage would have sworn that right now, I would be swamped with crippling heartbreak. But I’m not. The only sort of negative emotion I feel is slightly sad, but it isn’t a jealous sort of sad, it’s that end of an era feeling; the sort of feeling you have when you’re leaving a job and you know so much that it’s for the best, but you’ll miss it. The familiarity. The routine of it.
I glance over my shoulder again. The room is filling up now, almost every seat full, a sea of hats and stiff, pressed suits. And that’s when I see him. Eliot, walking in beside Jean, who popped out for a cigarette some moments ago. Somersault. Somersault. My stomach reacts before my brain has fully acknowledged that he’s here. He walks slowly, nodding as Jean talks, and the sight of him, so tall, a smattering of dark stubble on his face, the sharp, dark gray suit he’s wearing, makes my chest ache. I look away, and even when he approaches the chairs reserved for Lucas’s family, in the rows behind me, I pretend I haven’t seen him; but from the corner of my eye, I can see he is staring at me. When I turn, he smiles gently, then looks away, striking up a conversation with his mum, beside him.
The ceremony is being translated from French into English, and although it is being done tastefully, it is taking twice as long. But now, the registrar, the British one who has a head like an egg, turns to us, and asks us if we know of any reason why Marie and Lucas shouldn’t marry.
I remember a conversation Fox and Rosie and I had once, when Fox jokingly said I should stand up in the ceremony and tell Lucas that I love him; that it should be me, and be carted off, like a classic Peggy Mitchell. My mouth lifts at the corner, just slightly, at the memory, but I say nothing now, of course. Lucas looks at me fleetingly, and smiles as nervous laughter echoes down the pews.
Moments later, Lucas says “I do” in French.
“I do,” says Marie in English.
And that, is that.
* * *
I’m not sure who taps the wineglass to get everyone’s attention, but all I know is that it is mere seconds before the entire room has turned to face me, standing at the top table beside Amanda.
The box is in front of me, on the table, and I am passed a microphone, and it is only now that my hands begin to shake. I swallow, clear my throat, bringing the mic to my lips. The speech I have written, and learned by heart, is on the table in front of me, in case I fluff my lines or forget what I’m going to say.
“Hello, everyone,” I say. “I hope you’ll forgive me for speaking entirely in English, selfishly, but also selflessly, because I speak French so horribly that I’m actually doing you all a favor.”
Laughter. A titter. Nothing like Rosie’s hysterical laughter when I practiced it on her last week. She acted like I was Lee Evans, live in her living room.
I take a big deep breath. Here goes nothing.
“My name is Emmie, and I am Lucas’s best woman. Yes, very twenty-first century, very millennial, so I am told, but something I am honored to be today, for one of my oldest friends.
“Lucas, I struggle to remember my life without you in it. We were sixteen when we met, and we met in a way people hardly believe when I tell them how. I let go of a balloon on my school field, and Lucas found it, miles away on a beach in Boulogne. He emailed me, and a friendship was born from that one singular hello across the ocean, of even more emails, letters, parcels, and eventually, real-life meetings. I also once sent him my French exam tape, which I am not entirely sure helped, considering the last time I asked for directions, I asked if the man I’d stopped had a complicated horse I could borrow.”
More laughter. Good. I look up to my audience and I see Eliot, on the table opposite. He’s sitting back on his chair, arms crossed at his chest, finger and thumb holding his chin. He watches me, a small, encouraging smile on his lips.
“If you get nervous,” Fox had said last week, “pretend you’re saying it in front of just Eliot. It’ll help.”
“Just don’t imagine him naked,” said Rosie. “Unless you want your vagina all aflame at the top table, because I’d bet my dad’s car on it that he’s hung. What? Don’t look at me like that, Fox, I don’t make the rules.”
“Some of you may know,” I continue now, to the sea of watchful faces, “but Lucas and I share a birthday, and through that, have shared every year, on our birthdays, together. Lucas is a bad and sickly drunk. Sorry, Jean, but your lost silk tie, the purple one, with the diamonds on it, is buried deep in a pot in your beautiful garden somewhere. I buried it. It was me. Sorry, Luke. Marriage voids the nondisclosure agreement.”
Jean bursts out laughing and points at Lucas, and Lucas hides his face as laughter fills the room.
“So, Marie, I guess you should take this as a warning to never lend clothing to your husband on a night out.” I look at Lucas. “I won’t be there to bury it next time.”
Lucas smiles up at me.
“Not to sound like I am reciting Lucas’s CV, here, but truly, really, Lucas, for all his faults, is a spontaneous, passionate, and driven man, the type that throws their heart out in front of them and runs after it. I stole that, by the way, I am definitely not that poetic.”