The Cuckoo's Child by Margaret Thompson Page B

aisle. Mum, I saw, was checking the outfit Holly’s mother was wearing, a strained-looking apricot sheath with a floating chiffon tunic, accompanied by a matching tulle hat like a meringue. “Could have done with a size larger,” she whispered, “and that hat does nothing for her, does it?” Dad smiled vaguely and you fidgeted in the front pew.
    Then the noise died and the organ played and Holly came down the aisle with her father, and you turned to watch her with such pride and longing in your face that I could have wept on the spot except that Neil winked at me and for a while he was the only person there.
    What do you remember most about your wedding now, Stephen? You were probably too nervous to register the vicar’s mistake just after the Dearly Beloved bit—perhaps you were still waiting for someone to yell, “I object!” from the back and missed him addressing you both as Michael and Tiffany. I heard Holly’s mother gasp, and Holly looked at you, but it was Neil who set him straight. I wonder if you’d have been really married if nobody had corrected him?
    There was one seriously bad moment. Holly’s five-year-old nephew was a pageboy, dressed in a kilt and a black velvet jacket. I looked at him and saw Daniel and was nearly unseamed by the torrent of regret. But weddings are good for tears and nobody even noticed.
    By the time you walked back down the aisle with Holly on your arm, your stunned look had evaporated, and I don’t think you stopped smiling for the rest of the day. Your grin is there in all the wedding photos and echoed in all the faces pressing around you both. It continued through the reception at the church hall, through the lame speeches and Holly’s brother having one too many Scotches and trying to do the limbo under a table, through the screeching feedback from the microphones as the band set up, through the garrulous uncles and gushing aunts, one of the cousins fainting in a corner, and the pageboy throwing up in the bushes by the front door.
    For part of the time, Neil was busy with best man stuff, and knowing nobody, I could sit quietly and watch. It fascinated me to see this large family in action, to see the ones who would always be the organizers clutching arms, drawing people together, sending them on errands, jollying the shy ones, and carrying glasses and plates to the elderly. And I saw how easily you seemed to be assimilated into this throng of strangers, and how readily people talked to Neil. Even Mum was deep in conversation with a woman who could have been her sister, and Dad was standing in a knot of men with loosened ties, face flushed, drinking beer. Only I seemed disconnected and I wondered, not for the first time, why I had such a talent for isolation.
    And then the dancing started, and Neil walked the length of the hall to collect me, saying, “Your turn” in my ear as we swept into a waltz and collided with Holly’s Mum and Dad, and the rest of the reception folded in on us, became rhythm and warm contact, the soft slide of fabric on flesh, Neil’s breath mingling with mine, and utter surrender to contentment and the climate of love.
    As we drove away together afterward to return to Sechelt, Mum and Dad and many of the other guests crowded round the car, waving and smiling, banging on the trunk and tying ribbon to the aerial, as if we were the newlyweds, off at last on the honeymoon we had never been able to afford when we got married.
    And the mood lingered so that when we got to Hope, we looked at each other, and without a word turned into the Swiss Chalet car park and fell, laughing, into each other’s arms on a creaking, hollowed bed while the traffic whined by outside, unregarded.

NINE
    Eleven years passed after Daniel disappeared.
    Sounds like a fairytale, no? They always have those incantatory phrases, usually involving a magical number—a year and a day, seven years of bad luck, a