“Then I do.”
I laughed and sat up in our bed. I turned on the light on my nightstand. Celia sat up, too. We faced each other and held hands.
“I think you should probably perform the ceremony,” she said.
“I suppose I have been in more weddings,” I joked.
She laughed, and I laughed with her. We were in our midfifties, giddy at the idea of finally doing what we should have done years ago.
“OK,” I said. “No more laughing. We’re gonna do it.”
“OK,” she said, smiling. “I’m ready.”
I breathed in. I looked at her. She had crow’s-feet around her eyes. She had laugh lines around her mouth. Her hair was mussed from the pillow. She was wearing an old New York Giants T-shirt with a hole in the shoulder. Convention be damned, she never looked more beautiful.
“Dearly beloved,” I said. “I suppose that’s just us.”
“OK,” Celia said. “I follow.”
“We are gathered here today to celebrate the union of . . . us.”
“Great.”
“Two people who come together to spend the rest of their lives with each other.”
“Agreed.”
“Do you, Celia, take me, Evelyn, to be your wedded wife? In sickness and in health, for richer and for poorer, till death do us part, as long as we both shall live?”
She smiled at me. “I do.”
“And do I, Evelyn, take you, Celia, to be my wedded wife? In sickness and in health and all the other stuff? I do.” I realized there was a slight hiccup. “Wait, we don’t have rings.”
Celia looked around for something that might suffice. Without taking my hands from her, I checked the nightstand.
“Here,” Celia said, taking the hair tie from her head.
I laughed and took mine out of my ponytail.
“OK,” I said. “Celia, repeat after me. Evelyn, take this ring as a symbol of my never-ending love.”
“Evelyn, take this ring as a symbol of my never-ending love.”
Celia took the hair tie and wrapped it around my ring finger three times.
“Say, With this ring, I thee wed.”
“With this ring, I thee wed.”
“OK. Now I do it. Celia, take this ring as a symbol of my never-ending love. With this ring, I thee wed.” I put my hair tie on her finger. “Oh, I forgot vows. Should we do vows?”
“We can,” she said. “If you want to.”
“OK,” I said. “You think of what you want to say. I’ll think, too.”
“I don’t need to think,” she said. “I’m ready. I know.”
“OK,” I said, surprised to find that my heart was beating quickly, eager to hear her words. “Go.”
“Evelyn, I have been in love with you since 1959. I may not have always shown it, I may have let other things get in the way, but know that I have loved you that long. That I have never stopped. And that I never will.”
I closed my eyes briefly, letting her words sink in.
And then I gave her mine. “I have been married seven times, and never once has it felt half as right as this. I think that loving you has been the truest thing about me.”
She smiled so hard I thought she might cry. But she didn’t.
I said, “By the power vested in me by . . . us, I now declare us married.”
Celia laughed.
“I may now kiss the bride,” I said, and I let go of her hands, grabbed her face, and kissed her. My wife.
SIX YEARS LATER, AFTER CELIA and I had spent more than a decade together on the beaches of Spain, after Connor had graduated from college and taken a job on Wall Street, after the world had all but forgotten about Little Women and Boute-en-Train and Celia’s three Oscars, Cecelia Jamison died of respiratory failure.
She was in my arms. In our bed.
It was summer. The windows were open to let in the breeze. The room smelled of sickness, but if you focused hard enough, you could still smell the salt from the ocean. Her eyes went still. I called out for the nurse, who had been downstairs in the kitchen. I think I stopped making memories again, in those moments when Celia was being taken from me.
I only remember clinging to her, holding her as best I could. I only remember saying, “We didn’t have enough time.”
It felt as if by taking her body, the paramedics were ripping out my soul. And then, when the door shut, when everyone had left, when Celia was nowhere to be seen, I looked over at Robert. I fell to the floor.
The tiles felt cold on my flushed skin. The hardness of the stone ached in my bones. Underneath me, puddles of tears were forming, and yet I could not lift my head off the ground.
Robert did not help me up.
He got down on the floor next to me. And wept.