They held hands walking from streetlight to streetlight. "They used to just be mounted to the telephone poles," said Quentin. "Then when they were building the expressway over the old creekbed behind the house, they buried all the phone lines and put up these aluminum poles. Shame, too. Because Lizzy and I had scratched graffiti into all the old poles. Like marking our territory. No good trying to mark anything on these things." He slapped the pole and it rang metallically.
"It's her shadow in the house that made everything so tense, wasn't it?" said Madeleine.
"Not her shadow. Her memory isn't a shadow," said Quentin.
"Losing her was a shadow," said Mad. "That's what I meant."
"I don't think it had to do with her," said Quentin. "My parents—I've just never seen them act like that. Like complete strangers."
"I wouldn't know," said Madeleine. "I've never known a normal family."
"What, your parents have eight legs each?"
"Life in the Family Arachnid," she said, laughing. "No, my parents were fine. But... well, to be honest, they acted like your parents were acting, all the time. When I actually saw them, of course. Just always sort of—what—on, I guess."
"On what? Cocaine?"
"More like on stage." She jabbed him. "They weren't that hyper."
"I didn't mean to make a scene like that," said Quentin. "But I couldn't seem to get you alone. Or them either."
"I was so afraid that I wasn't doing it right," said Mad.
"Well, it wasn't you, anyway. They were the ones acting strange. You were a hero about it all."
They walked on to the corner. "That way was where I used to ride my bike to junior high. The elementary school was back that way, through an orchard. Now it's a park. The orchard. The school is gone. My Scout Troop once took on the job of distributing flyers for a supermarket through the whole neighborhood. I had two hundred of them to tuck into people's screen doors. I did about twenty and then dumped the rest in a culvert, right down there."
"There's no culvert there."
"That used to be a bridge over a creek. Everything's changed. I wish I could show you the place I actually lived in. You're lucky that way—didn't you tell me your family had lived in their house forever?"
"Not forever. We're all descended from immigrants."
"It must be nice, though, to go back and have nothing changed."
She laughed but it was nasty. "Oh, yes, it's so nice."
"Is there really some major problem between you and your family?" said Quentin.
"It's not a feud or anything," said Mad. "There was a rift for a while, but I've had it under control for years now."
"But you still won't take me to meet them."
"Oh, in good time." She turned and faced him. "After we're married."
"What, you think they'll come between us if we're merely affianced?"
"I want to be part of your family before I take you into the bosom of mine."
"Do I hear the sound of somebody moving up the date of our wedding?"
"We haven't set a date yet."
"I meant from 'let's talk about it sometime' to 'let's get married pretty soon.' "
"Sooner than that."
"How soon?"
"I suppose tonight wouldn't be practical."
Quentin kissed her. "There's the matter of a license."
"As soon as possible. Here, in this town. At your family's church. Surrounded by your parents' friends."
"Nothing would make them happier."
"And you? Would that make you happy, Tin?"
He nodded.
"And yet you still look sad."
He shook his head, smiling. "Not sad at all. Very happy. The sooner the better—you know that's how I feel. Short engagement, yes, but then I've been waiting twenty years for you."
"Do you love me as much as her?" asked Mad.
Quentin made a show of looking over his shoulder. "Who?"
"As Lizzy. Your sister."
"Let's put it this way—I never would have married my sister."
"No, I was wrong even to bring it up. But I've felt it—I've felt it almost from the start. Another woman. And yet you kept insisting that there was no other woman, there had never been another woman, only every time you had a memory of childhood Lizzy was in it. She's the other woman, the one in your past. And because she's... dead... I can never measure up to her."
Quentin kissed her, long and thoroughly. "You're not being measured against Lizzy. She's my childhood, my memory, my past. But you're my future."
"It's selfish of me, isn't it? But you have to love me. More than anyone, you have to love me, or I can't... can't anything. Can't be happy."
"Mad, you're already off the scale. I love you more than life."
She clung to him under the streetlight.
But as he stroked her hair he wondered—was it true? Did he love her more than Lizzy? Was there still some crazy part of him that clung to Lizzy and wouldn't let her go? After all, he had never hallucinated seeing Madeleine.
He shook off the thought. It was Madeleine who had opened up his life and given it meaning. He was excited for the future now. That was something that his memory of Lizzy had never been able to do. Hallucinations, but no dreams.
It took longer than they thought, because a proper church wedding required some lead time—invitations, if nothing else, took a week. But by the end of August they were married, full church wedding and all, the bride like a goddess in white, the groom grinning like an idiot, or so Dad assured him just before the ceremony.
The honeymoon was Hawaii, of course, because neither of them had ever been there and from the bay area, that was the only place you could go with a more pleasant climate. They made love for the first time on their second morning in the Turtle Bay Hilton, after recovering from jet lag and post-wedding exhaustion. They were both shy and awkward but it worked pretty well. "After all," said Madeleine, "if it was really hard, stupid people wouldn't have so many children."
They snorkeled, they visited Japanese Buddhist temples, they flew to Maui and the big island, they ate fresh pineapples and shopped in the open-air mall in Honolulu and stood at the pass where hundreds of warriors plunged to their deaths in an ancient Hawaiian story. They watched the show at the Polynesian Cultural Center and tried out some of the dances back in their room, minus the costumes, of course. Quentin noticed during the week that he actually had something of a knack for having fun.
But there was still a shadow between them, and it wasn't Lizzy, because the shadow wasn't in Quentin, he was sure of that. It was in Mad. They would make love and he would hold her in his arms and she would smile at him and he would say, Yes, it was wonderful, it was sweet, I love you. And she would assure him, too, only he knew, though he wasn't sure how, he knew that he was telling the truth and she was lying. It wasn't good for her. Something was wrong with this part of their marriage and she wouldn't tell him what. He couldn't even ask her, because she really wasn't giving any outward sign of dissatisfaction. It was more as if there were some inner pain that she couldn't shake off, that nothing he did could ease. A pain that became most painful in those moments after sex when she should have been happiest, should have felt most loved, most worshiped by her husband. Something was stealing joy from them, something in her past.
Something in her family. Something in that mansion on the Hudson that she was determined not to let him visit.