Winter Wedding

Marc Messett. Misty Parking Lot at Night. 2010. Digital photograph.

The night before Melanie Robinson's wedding, a foot of snow fell, and though half the guests cancelled, the wedding was held anyway, in a cathedral that would've been a short walk from the bride's apartment if not for the snow. The next day, Melanie's father, William, donned his suit and a new black coat, wrapped his legs in Saran Wrap, and, carrying an orange shovel, hiked through the powdery drifts to the cathedral, to help clear a path from the street to the steps. He finished, and the priest invited him into the rectory, where William unwound the plastic from his legs, folded it into a neat square and slipped it into his pocket. He sipped metallic water from a paper cup and watched the guests arrive, their Cadillacs and Grand Ams floating over the whiteness and into the frozen parking lot, tires slinging snow-chunks into the air. Music began, candles were lit, people filed into the cathedral, and William found himself standing beside his daughter, waiting in an anteroom for the cue from the organist. William—whose anxiety had left him giddy and dry-mouthed—had planned on giving Melanie a little speech but instead, he put his nose to the holy water, studied his reflection, and slurped from the yellowed marble basin. Melanie, in an attempt to appear appalled, whispered Dad! but she couldn't stop from laughing, the sound of which was so reminiscent of her mother's that pain flares sparked inside William's chest. The laughter; the eyes; the way she touched her hair with her hands; the plain, slim dress she was wearing—it was as if she'd taken a picture of her mother to some kind of master artist and said, here, make me look like this—and they had.

When William considered his fatherhood, he considered failures: the times he'd left Melanie alone in their apartment; the poor, hasty suppers of dry cereal; the times he'd canceled trips to the park, or the zoo, or the movies, because of the burden of work. The nights when, after long days of teaching, he'd sent her to bed early and with the help of tall glasses of gin and tonic put himself to sleep in the living room. The next morning, he'd wake on the couch, to find Melanie, dressed in frayed jeans and a sweatshirt stained with things she'd spilled, asking if he would please drive her to school.

Of her childhood, he remembered her room, decorated with over a hundred notebook pages of people she'd drawn using crayons, charcoals, and colored pencils: people who had made themselves visible only to her. Well into her teens, she spent hours alone, drawing, scribbling, writing—filling notebooks with handwriting that resembled her mother's, as if she'd made a conscious effort to reproduce the flawless cursive of the letters she'd discovered in a shoebox. Once, William had opened a sparkly pink notebook whose cover displayed a hologram of a unicorn; inside, he'd found a story Melanie had written about a young girl who'd been separated from her mother. The enterprising girl hawked her possessions on the street in front of her house, ran away from home in the middle of the night, to begin a journey by train, by ship, and by horseback, searching cities and fields and beaches for her mother—and though she thought many times that she'd spotted her in the distance, it would always turn out to be someone else.

William couldn't remember whether he'd ever asked Melanie about the notebook; he remembered little about their conversations. He did remember that when Melanie had asked about her mother, that he'd recount, using the evidence his wife had left behind, the woman's most extraordinary features: Miriam was a singer of opera—which an old cassette tape demonstrated; an accomplished artist—as a dusty leather portfolio stuffed with yellowed, dusty drawings asserted; a vision of stark, German...