The Don Saved Me From the Ice, Then Buried Me in the Sea novel · Chapter 3 of 24

Chapter 3: Catering for My Own Wedding

Viola slips into the wedding as staff, watches the kneeling video played for laughs, and records her sister's confession. A woman grabs her wrist.

At eleven o'clock I carried a tray of champagne flutes onto the terrace of my own wedding.

Santo had found me a black waitress uniform from the caterer's van and pinned my hair under a cap.

"Keep your eyes down," he said. "Nobody looks at the face of someone holding a tray."

He gave me a cheap phone with the camera already open.

"Rule one still applies."

"I remember."

I walked up the hill in borrowed shoes.

The chapel stood on the headland with the bay spread out below it.

White chairs were set out on the terrace, and every chair was full.

My aunts were there, my father's business partners, and women I had gone to school with.

They were dressed in black ribbons for me and white roses for the bride.

Dario stood at the altar in a pale grey suit with his hands folded.

He looked sad and brave, and he looked good.

The steel diver's watch hung loose on his wrist.

Ilaria came up the aisle in my mother's veil.

I had picked out that veil.

I had been going to wear it in an hour.

My chest closed so hard that the glasses on my tray rattled.

A woman beside me touched my elbow. "Careful, dear."

"Sorry," I whispered, and kept my face down.

In the front pew sat Dario's mother, Agnese, in black silk, sitting very straight.

She did not look at the bride.

She looked at the water.

Ilaria cried real tears at the vows.

Dario kissed her, and three hundred people clapped.

I kept my tray steady and filmed all of it with the phone in my sleeve.

At the reception, a white screen went up on the terrace.

Ilaria took the microphone in her veil and her grandmother's pearls.

"Everybody, I have a little tribute for my sister," she said, and her voice broke beautifully. "She was the strongest woman I know."

The screen lit up with a video.

It was me, soaked and shaking, on my knees on the deck of the boat.

My own voice came out of the speakers, begging.

"Please. Take me, not him. Please."

I stood frozen between the tables.

A man near the front laughed out loud and tried to turn it into a cough.

Then another one laughed, and then half the terrace.

"Oh, she really loved him," somebody said.

"The poor thing. What a performance."

On the screen I cried and shouted at the men in masks.

Dario put a hand on Ilaria's back and bowed his head.

His shoulders were shaking, and I could see he was laughing.

Ilaria wiped her eyes with a corner of my mother's veil.

"She would have wanted us to laugh," she said.

My nails cut into my palms.

The tray stayed level, because Santo had told me nobody looks at a waitress.

I walked straight past all of them, through the side door of the chapel, and up the back stairs.

A sign on a door said BRIDE.

I knocked once and pushed through with the tray before anyone said come in.

Ilaria was alone with one friend, a bridesmaid in pink, while her hair was being fixed in the mirror.

"Put it on the table," Ilaria said, without turning her head.

I set the tray down and bent over it, straightening glasses that did not need it.

The phone in my sleeve was already recording.

"Honestly, I thought I'd throw up on the boat," the bridesmaid said. "When she started begging, I almost cried."

"Don't be soft." Ilaria laughed and pulled at a curl. "She's been the family saint since she was born."

"But the tank, Ilaria. Isn't that a bit much? What if somebody checks it?"

"Nobody will check it. It's at the bottom of the bay with her."

I stopped breathing.

"I drilled that hole myself, you know." Ilaria stretched her arms over her head. "Dario held the light. It took two minutes, and we practiced on an old tank first."

"And the baby?"

"What baby? There's no baby. She'll be a very sad little line in the paper, and I get Papa's company, and Dario's mother gets her grandchild from me."

She turned her head, and her eyes landed on the tray.

For a second she looked right at my face under the cap.

Then she waved a hand. "Go away. Get me some water."

I walked out and shut the door behind me.

In the empty corridor I put my back against the wall and stopped the recording.

It was every word of her laughing about my death.

I could not feel my hands.

I started down the stairs.

A hand closed on my wrist.

Dario's mother stood on the landing in her black silk, and her fingers were cold and hard.

She looked at the cap and the uniform, and then straight at my face.

"Viola," said Agnese.

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