Marrying Daisy Bellamy

She swung into a parking spot. “I’ll be in the studio by ten tomorrow,” she said. “I promised Andrea a sneak peek by next Saturday.”

“Geez,” he groaned. “Do you know how many hours I shot?”

“Actually, I do. It’s only a sneak peek. I like this bride, Zach. I want to make her happy.”

“Isn’t that the groom’s job?”

“She has four younger sisters.”

“I know. They couldn’t stay away from the camera.” He shouldered open the passenger-side door and stepped down. The glow of the streetlights turned his hair to amber.

“Maybe they couldn’t stay away from you,” she suggested.

“Yeah, right.” He was probably blushing, but in this light, she couldn’t tell. Zach had never been much for dating. Though he’d never admit it, he’d been carrying a torch for Daisy’s stepsister, Sonnet, since preschool.

“‘Night, Zach,” she said.

“See you tomorrow. Don’t stay up too late.”

He knew her well. She was usually pretty wired after an event and couldn’t resist loading the raw files. She liked to post a single, perfect teaser shot on her blog to give the bride a taste of things to come.

Her own place was an unassuming small house on Oak Street. She took her time letting herself in. One of the worst things about raising Charlie with a guy she didn’t live with was that she missed her son like mad when he was with his father.

She locked the door behind her, and the all-pervasive silence took her breath away. She’d never been very good with all-pervasive silence. It made her think too hard, and when she thought too hard, she worried. And when she worried, she made herself insane. And when she went insane, that made her a bad mom. It was a cycle that refused to end.

Maybe she should get a dog. Yes, a friendly, bouncy dog to greet her at the door with swirls and yips of delight. A funny, nonjudgmental dog that would completely distract her from the things she didn’t want to think about.

“A dog,” she said, trying out the concept aloud. “Genius.”

Wandering into the study nook, she took out a small deck of memory cards from the wedding and watched the images load, one by one. Some were familiar, shots she took at every wedding, because they were expected—the first dance, with the couple silhouetted dramatically against the night sky, the parents of the bride and groom sharing a toast. Others were unique, a pose or a look she’d never seen before. She’d caught the bride’s grandmother cross-eyed as she slurped down an oyster, the groom’s uncle making a rapturous face during a song, one of the bridesmaids visibly ducking to avoid catching the bouquet. And then there was one shot, the one she’d expected, that turned out to be transcendent.

It was the last-minute frame of the bride and groom hiking across the meadow, hand in hand. It told a story, it said who they were, it expressed them as a couple. Two together, linked by a handclasp that looked eternal.

Minus Jake, she reminded herself, opening the editing program. The pooping dog in the background would have to go. As she busily cleaned up the photo, she studied the gleam of light on the bending fronds of grass, the distorted reflection of the couple in the water, the unfurling emotion in the bride and the joy shining from the groom.

The shot was good. Better than good. Entry-in-a-photo-competition good, that’s what it was, she thought.

As the notion crossed her mind, her gaze flicked to a folder in the tray on the desk. That was where she was supposed to file her entries to the photo exhibit contest for the Museum of Modern Art in New York. The top entries each year would be placed on exhibit in the MoMA’s Emerging Artists section. The competition was the fiercest in the industry, because being selected would open doors and launch careers. Daisy was dying to submit her work.

However, the tray was woefully empty, the file folder like a barely cracked-open door showing only blankness inside. All the good intentions in the world, all the lofty ambitions, could not give Daisy the one thing she needed to complete the project and submit her materials. The gift of time. Sometimes she caught herself wondering when her life was going to finally be her life.

Pushing aside the frustration, she refocused on the bridal photo and quickly posted it on Wendela’s company blog, titling the entry, “Andrea and Brian sneak peek.” Sitting back and gazing at the shot, Daisy indulged in a private cry. She didn’t want people to know the sight of happy couples made her cry. She didn’t want anyone to see her need, her desire, her knife-sharp longing. Alone in the small hours of the night, she cried. And then she shut down her computer.

By then it was one o’clock in the morning, and she needed to get to bed. As she went around turning off the lights, she noticed a few envelopes on the floor below the mail slot of the front door. She bent down and went through the small stack. Fliers and junk mail. Solicitations, notices about neighborhood meetings. Coupons she would never use. And … a cream-colored envelope, addressed in a very familiar hand.

Her heart skipped a beat. She ripped open the thick envelope.

You are hereby invited to the commissioning of Julian Maurice Gastineaux as a Second Lieutenant in the United States Air Force ROTC, Detachment 520 at Cornell University on Saturday 14, May at 1300 hrs in the Statler Auditorium.

On the back, scrawled in that same familiar bold script, was the message, “Hope you’ll come. Really need to talk to you. J.” So much for sleep.

It was nuts, realizing a simple name on a piece of paper could send her spiraling through a past filled with what-ifs and paths not taken. Because Julian Gastineaux, soon to be Second Lieutenant Julian Gastineaux, was her own personal path not taken.

Two

Camp Kioga, Ulster County, New York Five years earlier

The summer before her senior year of high school, the last thing Daisy wanted to do was stay in a musty lakeside cabin with her dad and little brother. She had to, though. They were making her do it.

Although neither of her parents said much to her and Max, their family was in the process of breaking up. Her mom and dad couldn’t keep up the pretense of being a happy couple, even though they’d been trying for years. Her dad’s solution was to retreat from their Upper East Side home to the Bellamy family compound—historic Camp Kioga on Willow Lake—and act like everything was dandy.

Well, nothing was dandy and Daisy was determined to prove it. She’d packed her bag with a summer’s worth of hair products, an iPod, an SLR camera and a goodly supply of pot and cigarettes.

Though determined to ignore the mesmerizing beauty of the lakeside camp, she felt herself being unsettled by the deep isolation, the pervasive quiet, the haunting views.

The last thing she was expecting, out here in the middle of nowhere, was to meet someone. Turned out a boy her age had also been sentenced to summer camp, though for entirely different reasons.

When he first walked into the main pavilion at the dinner hour, she felt a funny kind of heat swirl through her and thought maybe the summer was not going to be so boring after all.

He looked like every dangerous thing grown-ups warned her about. He had a tall, lean, powerful body and a way of carrying himself that exuded confidence, maybe even arrogance. He was of mixed race, with tattoos marking his café au lait skin, pierced ears and long dreadlocks.

He sauntered over to the buffet table where she was standing, as if drawn to the invisible heat coursing through her.

“Just so you know,” said the tall kid, “this is the last place I wanted to spend the summer.”

“Just so you know,” Daisy said, making herself sound as cool as he did, “it wasn’t my choice, either. What’re you doing here, anyway?”

“It was either this—working on this dump with my brother, Connor—or a stint in juvey,” he said easily.

Juvey. He tossed off the word, clearly assuming she was familiar with the concept. She wasn’t, though. Juvenile detention was something that happened to kids from the ghetto or barrio.

“You’re Connor’s brother?”

“Yep.”

“You don’t look like brothers.” Connor was all clean-cut and WASPy, a lumberjack from the wilds of the North, while Julian looked dark … and dangerous, alternative’s alternative.

“Half brothers,” he said nonchalantly. “Different dads. Connor doesn’t want me here, but our mom made him look after me.”

Connor Davis was the contractor in charge of renovating Camp Kioga to get it ready for the fiftieth anniversary of Daisy’s grandparents. Everyone was supposed to be pitching in on the project, but she hadn’t expected to encounter someone like this. Even before learning his name, she sensed something fundamental about this boy. In the deepest, most mysterious way imaginable, he was destined to be important to her.

His name was Julian Gastineaux, and like her, he was between his junior and senior years of high school, but other than that, they had nothing in common. She was from New York City’s Upper East Side, the product of a privileged but unhappy family and a tony prep school. He was from a crappy area of Chino, California, downwind of the cattle lots.

Like moths around a candle flame, they danced around each other through dinner; later they were assigned cleanup duty. She didn’t raise her normal objection to the manual labor. An intimate camaraderie sprang up between them as they worked. She found herself fascinated by the ropy strength of his forearms and the sturdy breadth of his hands. As they were hanging up their dish towels, their shoulders brushed, and the brief encounter was electrifying in a way she’d never felt with a guy before. She’d known her share of guys, but this was different. She felt a weird kind of recognition that both confused and excited her.

“There’s a fire pit down by the lake,” she said, searching his strange, whiskey-colored eyes to see if he sensed anything, but she couldn’t tell. They were too new to one another. “Maybe we could go down there and have a fire.”

“Yeah, we could hold hands and sing ‘Kumbaya’”