believed there would be a wedding until that morning, when she woke up and it suddenly dawned on her that her situation was quite real.
“Cordelia!”
She turned at the sound of her name and saw her best friend, Letty Haubstadt, whose eyes stood out like two pure blue planets against the white oval of her face. Her dark hair was parted down the middle and pinned back, and her petite body was clothed in the same black dress and black tights and black shoes her father always insisted she wear. The sight of Letty reassured Cordelia some, even if her garb was a little funereal for a wedding, and she managed to almost smile.
“I‧m sorry it took me so long,” Letty told her, smiling more broadly. Then she untucked the folded yards of mosquito netting that she‧d been carrying under her arm, shook it out, and stood on her tiptoes to arrange it over the taller girl‧s head. “I know your aunt says you don‧t deserve one, but I just think it wouldn‧t be a wedding if the bride wasn‧t wearing a veil.”
There was a sharp rapping on the windowpane, and both girls looked up to see Cordelia‧s aunt Ida, her thin lips set in a hard grimace, looking down at them expectantly. Cordelia gave her aunt a curt nod and turned back to her friend.
Letty handed her a bouquet of yellow wildflowers, which she must have picked on the way there, and then asked, “Are you ready?”
Cordelia glanced up to make sure her aunt had returned to her seat, and then pulled the netting away from her face so that she could look directly at her friend. She swallowed hard, and said, “Let‧s go tonight.”
Letty‧s smile fell, and her face grew pale. “Tonight?”
“You‧ll never be a star if you stay here.” Cordelia fixed her friend with an intense gaze. She was merely saying out loud what they both knew to be true. “The train leaves at six fifty-two from the Defiance Station.”
There was only one train a day in that part of the state that would carry you all the way to New York City—a fact Cordelia had known for years. She knew the timetable by heart, for running away was an obsessive fantasy that had carried no special urgency until the dawning hours of that particular day, when the notion that she was to be married had ceased to seem absurd and faraway, and she had begun to apprehend it with a kind of dread. By the time she‧d risen to help her aunt with breakfast, the plot to leave had taken on a decided shape, and though her mind had pulsed with it all morning, Cordelia had not imagined she might be brave enough to go until she said it out loud to Letty.
There was no discussion. Letty repeated the train‧s departure time and nodded. Then Cordelia replaced the netting over her face and followed her friend up the creaking wooden steps to the church. She glanced back once, at the little gabled structures—houses and storefronts and churches—that constituted Union, where she knew everyone by name, and everyone knew her as the parentless girl with the perpetually scraped knees. In a few hours she would be on a train, and all this would be lost to her. By then the dusk would have settled in and the darkness would be soon to follow—and in that part of the world the darkness could go on and on forever, as though there would never be light again. She hadn‧t ever been able to tolerate that very well.
Moving up the aisle, toward the head of the church, she could barely feel her own feet. It was almost as though she were floating; her movements had become automatic, beyond her control. A greenish light filtered in through the narrow windows along the sidewalls, beneath the high, peaked ceiling with its unfinished wood beams. John‧s parents and younger brothers were situated on one side of the aisle, and on the other sat her aunt, with that same grimace, in an old flowered dress with a large white lace collar, and Uncle Jeb, in his overalls, with her cousin, Michael, between them. In the pew behind her aunt and uncle sat Letty‧s two sisters, Louisa and Laura, wearing the same tight, old-fashioned bun.
In Union, the Haubstadt family was known for their dairy farm, for their austerity and religious reverence, and for having worn all black since the death of Mrs. Haubstadt, during the birth