Page 1 of The Beast
1
MARY CATHERINE
The dress weighed seventeen pounds.
I knew this because my mother had announced it with the reverence most people reserved for miracle births and canonizations, hands pressed to her cheeks, eyes shining:seventeen pounds, Mary Catherine.
As though suffering beneath something beautiful was, itself, a sacrament. As though the Catholic Church had finally found a way to make the dress the penance.
Standing in the back room of Saint Sebastian's, I was starting to think she might have been right.
Colleen was sitting on the velvet settee when I came back from the bathroom, shoes off, feet tucked beneath her in a way that would have made our mother short-circuit, if she'd walked in. My sister was thirty-two and three years older than me, and she had the gift of looking comfortable in rooms where comfort wasn't the point. She was watching me the way she'd been watching me all morning. Carefully.
“You've been in there a long time," she said.
"It takes a long time to exist in this dress."
She smiled, but it didn't quite reach. "Cat."
"I'm fine, Colleen."
"I didn't ask."
I sat down at the vanity and looked at myself in the mirror instead of at her, because her face was doing something I didn't have the bandwidth to receive right now. My lipstick had survived the bathroom, which felt like the one thing going right.
Outside, the organ was playing—that low, resonant sound that didn't so much travel through the air as move up through Saint Sebastian's marble floors and into the soles of my feet, and from there, directly to whatever part of me was currently conducting a quiet referendum on my entire life.
"Do you remember," I asked, "when I was seven and I told Mama I wanted to be an artist?"
Colleen didn't even have to think about it. "She said that was a beautiful dream and suggested you might also consider something with more stability."
"Right." I pressed my lips together, checking the color in the mirror. "I wasn't even that committed to it. I just wanted to see what would happen if I said something unexpected."
"What did you learn?"
"That unexpected things make Mama nervous and pot roast is her apology language." I set down the lipstick. "I think I've been optimizing for the pot roast ever since."
She laughed—a short, real one—and then the laugh faded and she was looking at me again with that careful expression. I wished she would stop, because it was making it harder to be fine.
I turned back to the mirror.
Ivory silk with a cathedral train that had required two people to arrange properly that morning, my mother and the seamstress both flushed with the effort. I had stood very still and let them work because standing still and cooperating wassomething I had always been good at. Hand-sewn lace along the bodice. A neckline that showed more of my collarbone than I usually allowed.
My hair was swept up, dark and severe against the paleness of my neck, pinned so tightly I'd felt it behind my eyes since ten o'clock. My face was the face I'd always had, the one that stopped people mid-sentence at parties, the wide eyes and the jaw and the cheekbones that I had spent twenty-nine years learning to soften with expression, with warmth, with the smile that my sister had once told me could stop traffic.
What Colleen didn't know—what I had never told her—was that I used that smile the way other people used a held breath. To get through things. To stay on the surface when something underneath was pulling.
I was using it now. Alone in front of the mirror, I was smiling at my own reflection, and I noticed it only because it struck me as both completely automatic and faintly absurd.
"The Whitakers are lovely people," Colleen said from the settee. Not justDaniel is wonderful. The family. The whole structure of it.
"They are," I agreed.
"Dublin is going to be incredible."
"It is."
I meant it, or I had meant it for the eight months since Daniel and I had planned it together over takeout at the kitchen table, spreading a travel guide open between us and circling things with a pen like people in a movie about being happy.
