The Edge of Always

33

I couldn’t have asked for a more perfect day. The weather is perfect. The plans to get married that we didn’t make all fell perfectly into place. I called my mom up yesterday and told her meet us on the beach on Galveston Island. She made it on time, without having any idea why we asked her to be here.

I raise my hand above me when I see her, waving her toward us, and the second she sees us, she knows. Her face breaks out into the biggest smile, and it’s easily contagious.

“Oh, you two,” my mom says, stepping up to us, “I can’t believe you’re finally doing this. I’m just… I’m so…” Tears roll down her face and she reaches up to wipe them away, laughing and crying at the same time.

Camryn, barefoot and dressed in that ivory vintage gown she found at the flea market, wraps her arms around my mom and hugs her.

“Oh, Marna, please don’t cry,” she says, though I think it’s more of a plea because seeing my mom cry is choking Camryn up.

“Is anyone else coming?” my mom asks when she pulls away.

“You’re our exclusive guest of honor,” I say proudly.

“Yeah,” Camryn adds, “it’s just you and the reverend here.”

My mom moves around us to give Reverend Reed a hug, too. She has been attending his church for nine years—tried to get me to go a hundred times, but I’m just not the church type. But I thought who better to ask to marry us?

And while Reverend Reed is standing in front of us on the beach, holding his worn Bible in his hands and saying a few words, all I can see or hear is Camryn standing in front of me with her hands in mine. The breeze combs through her loose strands of hair, free from that golden braid over her shoulder that I love so much. I love her smile, her blue eyes, and her soft skin. I want to kiss her now and get it over with. I press my fingers gently against the tops of her hands and pull her a little closer. The wind whips through the long fabric of her dress, pushing it against her hourglass form. I hold in my smile when I notice a piece of hair fly into her mouth. She tries to covertly work it out with her tongue without drawing attention to herself.

Knowing she doesn’t want to create any kind of interruption, even for something as simple as this, I reach up and move the hair away for her.

I feel like we’re the only two people in the world.

When it’s time to say our vows, I know that neither one of us wrote anything down or had much time to think about what we wanted to say. And so pretty much the same way we tend to do everything, we just do it.

I grip her hands tighter between us and say, “Camryn, you are the other half of my soul, and I will love you today and every day for the rest of our lives. I promise that if you ever forget me, I’ll read to you like Noah read to Allie. I promise that when we get old and our bones hurt, that we’ll never sleep in separate rooms, and that if you die before me, I’ll make sure you’re buried in that dress. I promise to haunt you like Sam haunted Molly.” Her eyes are beginning to water. I caress the insides of her palms with my thumbs. “I promise that we’ll never wake up one day years from now wondering why we wasted our lives away by doing nothing, and that no matter what hardships befall us, I’ll always, always, be right here with you. I promise to be spontaneous, to always turn down the music when you’re asleep, and to sing about raisins when you’re sad. I promise to always love you no matter where we are in the world, or in our lives. Because you’re the other half of me that I know I can never live without.”

Tears pour from her eyes. It takes her a second to gather her composure.

And then she says, “Andrew, I promise never to leave you on life support and let you suffer when I know in my heart that your life is spent. I promise that if you’re ever lost or missing that I will… never stop looking for you. Ever.” This just makes me smile. “I promise that when you die, I’ll make sure that “Dust in the Wind” is played at your funeral and to never bury you where it’s cold. I promise to always tell you everything no matter how ashamed or guilty I feel, and to trust you when you ask me to do something because I know that everything you do has a purpose. I promise to be by your side always and to never let you face anything alone. I promise to love you forever in this life and wherever we go in the afterlife, because I know I can’t go on in any life unless you’re in it too.”

Pastor Reed says to me, “Do you, Andrew Parrish, take Camryn Bennett to be your wedded wife, to have and to hold, for better or worse, for richer or poorer, to love and to cherish, from this day forward?”

“I do,” I say and place the wedding ring I bought in Chicago on her finger. She gasps quietly.

Then he turns to Camryn and says, “Do you, Camryn Bennett, take Andrew Parrish to be your wedded husband, to have and to hold, for better or worse, for richer or poorer, to love and to cherish, from this day forward?”

“I do.”

Finally, I hand her my ring, because I’ve been hiding them both from her until this very moment, and she slides it on my finger. Pastor Reed finishes up, including those anticipated seven words—“I now pronounce you husband and wife”—and then he gives me permission to kiss my bride. It’s all we’ve wanted to do since the ceremony started, and now that we can, we find ourselves just staring at one another, lost in each other’s eyes, seeing each other in a different light, one so much brighter than we’ve seen it since the day we met in Kansas on that bus. I feel my eyes beginning to sting, and I scoop her up into my arms and crush my mouth over hers. She sobs into our kiss and I squeeze her around her back, lifting her bare feet completely from the sand and I spin her around. My mom is bawling like a baby. I feel like I might never stop smiling.

Camryn is my wife.