The room was hot, too hot. I stood by the open patio door and looked out to the sea as the sound of voices swelled and chattered, muted, like the waves of the far away Mediterranean. Sweat adhered my tee shirt to my skin, almost cooling the weak tufts of breeze that wandered into the room. I watched as the bride’s hair was wrestled into a high structure and secured under a thick fog of fixative spray. Two curling irons, one wider than the other, rested in heat-safe metal cradles nearby where they radiated wavy lines of heat that distorted the mirror and brought a sheen to the bride’s face. Every few minutes, when the hairdresser turned on the blow dryer, the building’s power shut off and we had to wait for the administrator to come upstairs and flick the fuse. It was during one of the power outages that I felt the wave coming.
Grief is love with nowhere to go. That’s what someone had said at my mother’s funeral a few weeks ago. It didn’t feel like love. It felt like the stomach flu. It rose from my belly and charged into my chest, dragging my breakfast along with it. My throat closed. I heard a dull hum inside my head. I knew what was going to happen. And I knew I had to get out of that room before the bride saw the torment in my face.
I went down the graceful staircase and walked toward the bathroom where the bride’s sister appeared with her three-year-old on her hip. She stopped when she saw me, concern lowering her brows. I smiled, a ridiculous gesture, and waved my hand as if to erase the pain that sat plainly on my face. “I’m okay,” I said. “I’m fine. I just knew a few minutes.” I held my hand up and extended my fingers. Five minutes.
She nodded, and climbed up the stairs while I stood alone in the empty hallway with the weight of loss anchoring me to the floor.
In a moment, I saw the bride’s mother floating down the stairway with such speed and dexterity, it was as if her feet didn’t even touch the ground; her red blouse billowed all around her. She came toward me with her arms extended. Her fingers waggling, inviting me. Come, they said. Come to me.
“Ma mère,” I choked.
Her arms encircled my shoulders, and she pressed her body to mine. The sobs came like thunder, fast, and loud, and out of my control. She whispered something: I heard her voice but not her words. I felt her hands on my back, stroking softly. She held me like that while the storm consumed me. And when it passed, she took me by the wrist and escorted me into the Ladies’ Room where she turned on the faucet. She pointed to the water, and then pointed to my face, saying something I didn’t understand, but that I understood completely. I splashed the cold water to my swollen face, and when I stood, she looked into the mirror, at me, at us, and her face lifted into a smile. And there, in that moment, we became a family.