Some Kind of Miracle (28 page)

H
ere’s how it feels to massage your cousin on the night before her long-awaited wedding: impossible, Dahlia thought. She’s so giddy she can’t lie still, can’t stop jabbering about the groom. She laughs for a while, and then the next minute she’s in tears, because she wishes her parents could be around to see her joy. And then she sits up and wants to chat.

“Dahl, you have to promise you’ll come to Boca every chance you get. Maybe once you get show business out of your system, you’ll come and live there, and Norman will fix you up with his doctor friends, and you’ll move in next door to us, and we’ll be together all the time.”

“Want to turn over on your back for the rest of the massage?” Dahlia asked her.

“I don’t want any more massage. I want to get into my pajamas,” Sunny said, sitting up on the table,
“and look at my dress again and touch it, and look at the flowers Norm sent me today and the card.”

Norman had taken a room for the cousins at the Hotel Bel-Aire, where the wedding would be held the next morning. In the room next door were his two daughters, Jennifer and Samantha, who seemed to take to Sunny right away, liking the romantic idea that she’d been their dad’s girlfriend of long ago. They would be Sunny’s bridesmaids. Kassie and Robin would be junior bridesmaids, and Louie’s little son, Michael, would be the ring bearer. Louie was giving away the bride, and Dahlia was the maid of honor.

“How am I ever going to fall asleep?” Sunny asked, slipping into the rose-colored silk pajamas Penny had bought her as a pre-wedding gift.

“You will,” Dahlia promised. “Eventually you’ll close your eyes and drift away till morning.”

Sunny sat on the turned-down twin bed leafing through a copy of
People
magazine, and by the time Dahlia had taken down the massage table, she was asleep with a smile on her face. For a long time, Dahlia gazed at her from the other twin bed, amazed at the circumstances that had brought them to this place tonight. Finally, with some wonderful ideas for a song that she wanted to write ringing through her brain, she fell asleep, too.

In the late morning, she opened her eyes to the sound of the blow-dryer to find that Sunny was already showered and wearing the slip she would wear under her wedding dress. Soon Penny and the children pounded on the door and filed in, all of them eager to see the bride and help her get ready. The girls
Were dressed in elegant lavender party dresses with pretty matching shoes, and Michael looked uncomfortable wearing a seersucker suit with short pants.

Dahlia didn’t like herself in the lavender silk suit Sunny had chosen for her, and she couldn’t believe she’d been talked into wearing the matching lavender shoes, but Sunny said she was afraid that if she left the decision to Dahlia, she would have worn jeans to the wedding. Oh, well, Dahlia thought, it’s Sunny’s wedding. I guess I don’t mind looking stupid for her.

By the time Louie knocked impatiently on the door to say that the rabbi had arrived, Sunny had redone her hair three times. Penny wove sprigs of baby’s breath into it, and then, leaving Sunny behind to do some last-minute touch-ups, the others marched out toward the garden, where Louie was waiting to give his sister away.

“I ought to sell her to this guy, not give her away,” he joked in a too-loud voice. “Her friggin’ royalties are gonna be worth a fortune.”

A few of Norman’s cousins were chattering to one another and to Penny. Joe Diamond was in the front row, and Dahlia felt panic and then embarrassment as she spotted Seth and Lolly sitting in the second row of white folding chairs facing the canopy. Lolly was wearing a long string of pearls from the jewelry box, wound around three times. As the rabbi took his place next to Norman, the guitarist Norman had hired began to play. Dahlia recognized the song as “Turn, Turn, Turn.”

Penny seated herself in the front as the procession began with Norman’s daughters, wearing matching
lacy lavender dresses, moving slowly toward the canopy, flanking their kind-faced father. Then five-year-old Michael bounced down the grass, grinning as he carried the rings on a pillow. Then came Kassie and Robin in their froufrou dresses. And, after a fluttering stomach made her want to bolt, Dahlia tried to maintain an even pace as she moved slowly along, hoping Seth didn’t think she looked dopey in that silk lavender cocktail suit.

Dahlia and Norman exchanged a smile when their eyes met, but behind his smile she saw the pain of all the intervening years that had gone by. She tried not to look at Seth and Lolly and Joe Diamond, but as she passed them, she thought she caught sight of Lolly clapping her hands together. Now everyone turned to look across the lawn in the direction from which Sunny, looking tall and stunning in her high heels, in contrast to her small round brother, clutched his arm as they made their way toward the canopy. She was a blinding and beautiful vision in her fitted white dress, with white pearls and a short white veil. Dahlia glanced at Norman and saw his eyes brimming with tears.

“Where you been all my life, gorgeous?” he asked softly as Sunny reached him. After everyone was in place, the rabbi began.

“Sometimes in this life, we have to take long and circuitous journeys simply to get back to where we began,” he said, smiling at Norman and Sunny. “But in the end God’s plan prevails, and what is
beshert
—which is a word that means ‘something that was meant to be’—inevitably happens. Norman had a
wonderful life with Celia, and their marriage blessed them with Jennifer and Samantha and many years of happiness. Then, after the painful and tragic loss of Celia, Norman feared he would never find a new love.

“Fortunately, God had a plan for him, and instead of finding a new love, he encountered his former love, who might not have been ready for a marriage to him all those years ago. But now, happily for both of them, after many of her own struggles, Sunny is ready and welcoming him to her side at last. All of us here are certain that this marriage of Norman and Sunny is not only blessed but was meant to happen at this time, at this moment, when all the other circumstances of their lives made them ready to be together at last.

“I believe that when two people love each other, the difficult moments are halved and the joyous events are doubled. So it will be for Norman and Sunny, who have turned a malediction into a benediction.”

A cool breeze whispered through the trees around the lush green lawn, and Dahlia was surprised at how comforted she felt by what the rabbi said, how peaceful she felt, even with her own life in such a state of uncertainty. In the last week, she had put her house up for sale because she wanted to scale down her expenses, she’d met with several music agents to try to find a good one, and she continued to write her own songs, which seemed to be getting better over time. She was determined to market them and find a way to make a living in the music business, and selling the house and moving to a cheaper place would help her to stay afloat in case her new songs didn’t find a deal.

Seeing Seth as she walked down the aisle had
thrown her. She didn’t know Sunny had invited him, or what she would say to him once the ceremony was over and the group assembled for lunch. Now she watched Sunny and Norman as Michael stepped up to give them the rings.

“Do you, Norman, take Sunny to be your wife?”

“I most certainly and unequivocally and deliriously do,” Norman said.

“That goes for me, too,” Sunny said softly.

“You may kiss the bride,” said the rabbi, and Norman lifted the veil from his beloved’s face and took her in his arms, and they kissed.

It was a kiss that brought the whole group to its feet, applauding and cheering for the ecstatically happy couple. And their bliss made all the guests hug and congratulate one another. Dahlia hoped that the mascara Sunny made her wear wasn’t running onto her face. She was about to search in the suit pocket for a tissue she’d placed there earlier, but she felt something sharp sting her on the leg, and she looked down. It was a paper airplane that had now fallen at her feet. She noticed as she bent down to pick it up that it had little flowers drawn on the wings in colored pencil.

“This is cute,” she said as she looked around and saw Seth and Lolly still standing back by the chairs on the lawn, and she knew that the airplane had come from them.

“Thank you,” she mouthed, nodding. Then Seth did some pantomime with his hands, trying to tell her something. But when she shrugged to tell him she
didn’t understand what he meant, Lolly called out, “Open it up!”

That was when she realized that inside the airplane was a note.

Dahlia looked back at Seth and Lolly, and neither of them moved as they waited for her to reply in some way. They were holding hands, standing near the flowered canopy, both of them looking so beautiful to her that she could never possibly get a word out. So instead she walked toward them with her arms spread, and when they saw that gesture, they ran to her, and the three of them embraced and held one another tightly.

“Does this mean you’ll marry us?” Lolly asked.

All Dahlia could do was nod and hug them again.

“And now,” Sunny called out as everyone moved toward a private room for the luncheon, “my cousin has to keep a promise she made to me when we were little girls—actually, we made it to each other. That we would sing a certain song we wrote at one another’s weddings.”

As Dahlia’s eyes adjusted to the dark, cool room, she saw that there was a small upright piano at one end of it, and she and Sunny sat down on the bench and played their song as they sang it together.

“Stay by my side forever. Stay by my side, my friend…”

And soon the rest of the group surrounded them, arms around one another, singing along.

“Our love’s a perfect circle. That means it cannot end.”

After Sunny and Norman left for their honeymoon in Norman’s rental car, Seth and Lolly offered to help Dahlia get her things out of the hotel room. Together the three of them walked across the grounds of the elegant hotel, with Lolly in the middle holding their hands.

“This will only take a minute,” Dahlia said. “I packed nearly everything this morning, and all I have to do is throw in a few last-minute things and I’ll be right out.”

When she opened the door to the room she and Sunny had shared the night before, a blast of air-conditioning made her feel chilled. As she walked
back toward the bathroom to gather her toiletries, her step was light, but when she entered the pretty, white-tiled room, she was jolted by what she saw. Sunny must have done it before she and Norman departed. The words Sunny had written on the hotel bathroom mirror in lipstick were a reminder that her health would always be a work in progress. Dahlia shook her head and smiled to herself sadly, put her cosmetics in her bag, and took one last look at the message. It said,