The Wedding

Chloe Sherrill-Howell / V Mag at UVA

Lilah Castorini couldn’t remember the last time she put on a dress. The one she wore now had spaghetti straps and a cinched-in waist, the kind that made her feel as though all of her stomach rolls were being folded like a dirty heap of laundry. Her parents had dragged her to one of her cousin’s weddings on a day off from school. Quite frankly, she couldn’t remember exactly which cousin, all she knew was that she had heard either “Julie” or “Jenny” when her mother read the invitation aloud at the kitchen table earlier that week.

She and her family showed up late to the reception. They were coming from out of town, unfamiliar with the sprawling streets of downtown Detroit. When they finally arrived at the venue— the bride and groom had chosen a towering rooftop that overlooked the city —her mother snaked her hand around Lilah’s waist in an ironclad snare.

“I’m cold,” Lilah deadpanned. 

Her mother just smiled through clenched teeth.

Lilah’s older brother flounced away to find the nearest tray of food. Her dad asked her mother if she wanted to find Ronny, her third-cousin-twice-removed (“He just got a new job working in commerce!”),  and Lilah used that as an opening to slip away. She slunk to the edge of the rooftop, away from the crowd, and picked at the split ends of her cuticles. Down on the street below, she could just barely make out the shapes of three jazz musicians piping blues through their saxophones. The sharp trill of each note was like the calling of a bird.

Above her, the sky was a murky shade of indigo, the kind that forms when a toddler mixes too many watercolors at once. But stretched across the clouds, as if stolen from a savannah, was a single slash of crimson. 

It looks bloody, Lilah thought. Like a Scab.  

She turned over her shoulder and saw her parents mingling with guests in an assembly line fashion. Every time that her dad shifted his weight closer to her mother, she would bristle, wait a few seconds, then step a millimeter away from him, all while maintaining a perfectly pearlescent smile that would make the judge of a beauty pageant proud.              

At least I’m not a bride, Lilah told herself.

She searched the party for someone she could fixate on. At last, her eyes locked on the bartender, a lanky young man with gaunt fingers that curled around each wine glass as he handed them to sluggish guests. His eyes met hers as she emerged like a phantom in front of him. 

“Hello,” she said. 

“Hello,” he replied, and regarded her dubiously, partially amused. “Can I get you something?” He motioned to an array of bottles stacked in front of him, all of which glimmered translucently like orbed eyes severed from their sockets. She shook her head and stated simply, “I don’t drink.”

He nodded, as if he heard this all the time working as a bartender. “Well then, how do you know the groom?” Then he added, “Or the bride?” And Lilah found herself saying, before she could stop herself, “I don’t.” 

There was a long silence, punctuated by a bulbous man in a too-small suit who demanded that the bartender “fetch a bloody-mary” for some leggy blonde girl at his side. With a robotic detachment, the bartender attacked the faucets and levers in front of him, the bits and nobs that sputtered this way and that, until he set a blood-red drink on the counter with unproud finality. The man whisked his date away without another word, and it wasn’t until they left that Lilah noticed a bulged vein road-mapping across the bartender’s temple. He smelled sickeningly sweet, like wilted flowers on an un-sunned porch.                 

Without meeting her eyes, he murmured, “I like this song.” He hesitated. “Do you want to dance?” And when she stared back at him blankly he begged breathlessly into her ear— “Do you want to dance?”

Before she could respond, a hand slithered across her shoulder, and with an instinctive lurch she realized it was her mother. She leaned into Lilah’s ear and cooed, “You simply must see Hank and Nicole’s baby. You simply must.” 

And before she could protest, Lilah was whisked away, dragged through swarms of people who didn’t bother stepping aside when she said “Excuse me.” 

Sitting at a table was Nicole, a cousin that Lilah actually recognized. In fact, she quite liked Nicole. She and her husband, Hank, had let Lilah retreat to their basement to draw pictures in her notebook when they hosted a family dinner party two years prior. Nicole was petite and soft-spoken, the kind of person Lilah would’ve liked to have as a school teacher.

“Lilah!” Nicole smiled warmly. “My, how you’ve grown!”

Lilah mustered a smile in return. She usually hated when adults started conversation that way, but with Nicole, it didn’t feel so artificial.

“Have you held Abigail?” Lilah’s mother interjected. 

Lilah froze. “Uh…”

Nicole’s eyes widened. “Oh, you have to hold her! You just have to!”

And before Lilah could admit that she had never really been the best with children, or that she wasn’t even sure she liked children after she babysat for a stubby-legged second-grader named Cody this past summer who chucked mud grenades at the back of her head whenever she took him outside to play, her mother placed both hands on her back and thrusted her forward against her will. 

A nearby friend carefully handed Nicole a cocoon of blankets. Each fold of the fabric was meticulously embroidered with tiny pink strawberries. “Hello, darling,” Nicole sing-songed, and the cocoon began to squirm. Then— the doe-like whimper of an infant bubbled through the air. Lilah’s mother clapped her hand over her heart and swooned. Lilah, on the other hand, felt her stomach begin to churn. 

Nicole caressed the child with a brush of her fingertips. Her words came out in a hushed whisper:

“This is Abigail.” 

She looked at Lilah expectantly. At first, Lilah didn’t move. Then her mother prodded her forward with a dangerous glimmer of her eyes. 

Nicole handed her the baby slowly, making sure to support her head. Lilah swallowed hard and instinctively created a basin with her arms for the child to sink into. Nicole sat back in her chair and beamed. “See? You got it.” She glanced at Lilah’s mother, who smiled back proudly. Lilah fought the urge to roll her eyes.      

She glanced down warily, as if bracing herself for the letter “F” at the top of a math test. Then her eyes locked on the child’s immediately— Abigail’s eyes. They were wide and inquisitive, and suddenly Lilah couldn’t look away. She felt something bloom in her chest.

“How precious,” Nicole whispered.     

She repositioned Abigail on her lap, with one arm wrapped securely around her belly. The baby was plush like a wad of pastry dough, and suddenly Lilah felt the overwhelming urge to knead her with her knuckles until flour purged from her pores. Nicole smiled at Lilah, who smiled back without fully meeting her gaze. Abigail reached up and grappled for her hair with slippery fingers, as if trying to climb a bundle of vines. A giggle escaped her lips. It sounded like springtime.

Hank appeared at Nicole’s side. “Honey,” he cooed softly. “Julie needs your help mending her dress.” 

A stillness crept into the air. Nicole didn’t move. Her eyes flitted to Lilah, then down to Abigail. Lilah felt the pads of her fingers press deeper into the baby’s dimpled arms. 

“I’ll be here with her,” Lilah’s mother cut in. She flashed Nicole a reassuring smile. Nicole smiled back, but her feet remained planted. Before Lilah could say anything, Hank huffed in exasperation. “Honestly, darling. We can’t wait all day.” He turned over his shoulder and met Lilah’s eyes sheepishly, as if apologizing for his wife’s concern.

Nicole hesitated. Then finally, with the helpless glance of a deer, she let Hank steer her away.

Abigail flashed Lilah a gummy grin. She brushed her thumb across the bottom of the baby’s chin and smiled at the warmth of her body. 

“Okay, darling.” Her mother’s voice was laced with ice. “Let me hold her now.”

All at once, Lilah’s spine turned rigid. Abigail slipped slightly on her knee. The infant pressed her hands into Lilah’s chest, as if forcing open a door.

“What?” she whispered to the baby. “What is it?”

“Darling,” her mother repeated. “Give her here.”

She pretended not to notice. Abigail pressed her hands to Lilah’s chest again, then stretched upward, so high that she fumbled in her grasp.

“The sky?” Lilah whispered in her ear. “You want the sky?”

“Darling,” Mother hissed, and this time she tried to grab the baby. 

Lilah rose to her feet, holding Abigail with unflinching custody. Mother’s eyes darted left and right. Abigail whimpered, curling closer to Lilah’s heart. She nuzzled her chin into the baby’s bed of hair.

Then she began to walk.

“Lilah,” her mother called after her. “Lilah.” But she was moving too fast, oozing like ink through throngs of wedding guests. Lilah knew Mother wouldn’t run after her. She wouldn’t want to cause a scene in front of the other guests. No, absolutely not.

“Don’t worry,” she assured the child. “I’ve got you.” They drifted through the dance floor, past sweat-drenched men in tuxedos and women in too-tight bustiers, all of whom were jumping up and down without rhythm like an ocean of spilled marbles.

“Lilah!” a voice called. Her dad floated towards his daughter, a skewered cocktail shrimp in his right hand. “Where’s the restroom?” When she didn’t answer, his eyes locked on the baby swaddled in her arms, as if just noticing that she was there. Lilah tightened her grip.

With two more quick strides, she reached the row of dining tables that crowned the rooftop. Each of them was small, circular, and draped with creamy white cloth that glimmered like cake fondant. 

“See?” she whispered to the child. “Do you see it?” She pointed to the Scab. It was still there, emblazoned across the clouds. “Do you need me to get closer?”

A couple looked up at her from their table. She ignored them and stepped towards the edge of the roof. 

“See it?”

She tilted the baby’s head softly with her palm, until her eyes finally locked on the expanse of crimson. Abigail let out a sigh of wonderment through her dribbly lips. It was the same sigh that Lilah had made when she was a child, on the one year that her mom agreed to bake her a homemade chocolate cake for her birthday, and she reached her hand down from the kitchen countertop so that Lilah could suck a dollop of icing off her thumb.   

By this time, a crowd had begun to form. 

Except Lilah wasn’t aware of this until she felt the absence of music in the air. She turned over her shoulder and saw a flock of wedding guests slowly inching towards her, the same way a collapsed tidal wave reaches for a child’s toes on the shore of a beach. 

At the helm of the ship was her mother.  

“W-what are you doing?” she breathed.

Lilah was alarmed at her tone. Every guest seemed dumbstruck. Her mother’s eyes were filled with a terror that she didn’t recognize. Her dad, obviously not too preoccupied with finding the bathroom after all, was standing at her mother’s side. Even her brother was there, with half of his suit buttoned disproportionately so that one side of his collar was raised higher than the other. Lilah might have laughed if she hadn’t been so confused.

“Please,” her mother stammered. “Take her down.”

Lilah didn’t understand. Abigail had wanted to see the sky. So she showed her.

“Where is she?” a voice cried. “Where is she?” 

The crowd rippled, and all of a sudden Nicole was at the front. Her hand clapped over her mouth as soon as she saw her daughter.

“Please.” Her face was drained of all color. “Please, give her to me.”

Lilah glanced at Abigail. Her eyes, pure and pearlescent, were still on the Scab. A warmth flooded through Lilah’s chest like she had never known. 

“She wants to get closer,” Lilah replied. “You wouldn’t understand.” 

Nicole’s mouth crumpled. She implored,

“That’s my daughter.”

Lilah’s mouth pressed into a thin line. She stared at Nicole. Tears— big, gloppy, and monstrous— were streaming down her face. The other wedding guests stood in a lily-pond of dread, except for a single person in the very back, who seemed rather awestruck by the scene in front of him. It was the bartender.  

Then Lilah looked at her mother, who stood like a stranger. 

She let go of Abigail. The baby fumbled for a moment, then disappeared off the edge of the roof.

There was a bloodcurdling scream. Someone rushed forward and knocked Lilah to the ground.

As her head hit the pavement, she could still hear the crooning of saxophones from down on the street below.