Be Who God Meant You To Be

"How many shades of lipstick do I have on my cheek?" Meg asks.

The last of the guests has finally made it through the receiving line, and the bridal party has taken a moment to catch its collective breath after the whirl of thank you for being here and it was a lovely ceremony (and, from Laura to Alain, do not be a jerk).

Kim smiles. "A few," she allows. "Do you want help with that before your grand entrance?"

"And all the pictured thereof?" Meg asks. "Yes, definitely. Thank you. We'll be right back," she tells Alain.

He reaches out and catches her hand. "Hurry back. You owe me a dance."

The dance in question is to The Beatles' "Michelle." It may not exactly be a traditional choice, but it's in both English and French and includes Alain's nickname for her, and they like it. Alain is fond of humming it while they do things like fix dinner. (And it's certainly a better choice than that silly Bryan Adams Robin Hood movie song that the radio stations won't stop playing.)

There are other people Meg "owes" dances to as well: her father and Alain's father, Luc and Oncle Sylvain. And Carlisle, who asks her for what would probably be a very proper waltz if Meg knew how to dance a very proper waltz. She's quite sure that Carlisle does, but he's very gracious about leading her through steps she's not exactly getting right, and is probably doing a great deal of compensating for her missteps. When the song ends he returns her to Alain, and thanks them both. "Now you get to spend the rest of your lives realizing how lucky you are," he tells them before he goes.

"I think your friend is having fun," Alain says, wrapping an arm around her waist, and Meg looks over her shoulder to see what he's looking at, and then laughs. On the far side of the dance floor, Castiel appears to have been adopted by three of Alain's young cousins. (Meg knows their names are Hélène, Laetitia, and Virginie, though she doesn't know which name goes with which cousin). The four of them are dancing in the unself-conscious and fairly ridiculous manner of ten-year-olds and (apparently) Angels of the Lord.

There's no sit-down meal, though there's also no shortage of food. Not for most people, anyway, though Meg and Alain can't quite seem to get enough of a break from talking to people and dancing and photographs to actually get any of it themselves. Meg is starting to wonder how to go about remedying that when Parker arrives with a very full plate and hands it to Alain.

"You two need to eat something," she says. "Can't have the bride and groom fainting at the reception. I'm ninety-nine percent sure that's considered bad luck. And those little puff things by your thumb are excellent."

"Thank you," Meg says.

"Eat," Parker repeats. "I'm going to go say hi to the cute boy over in the corner."

Alain looks over to the corner. "That's my cousin Thierry. He doesn't speak English."

"Pfft," Parker says as she goes, with a wave of her hand that implies a common language is far from necessary.

Then again, this is Parker, so it may not be.

Several minutes later, when Parker is dancing with Thierry, and Alain has gone to get rid of the now-empty plate, Meg takes a moment to just look around the room and try to fix all this in her memory. It's all going by so fast.

"Hello, Meg," someone says from just behind her shoulder.

Hello, Edward. Meg turns around, and smiles. I suppose if I forget anything, I can always ask you to remind me.

Edward's smile has the edge of a smirk. "How thorough you like me to be? Should I prepare a journal with all the things you've missed?"

Meg smiles. No. Not all of them. Only the good ones.

When the DJ takes his break, Luc takes the microphone to make the toast. In addition to being the best man, the groom's brother is, after all, an actor and a performer. He is also fluent in English, and he essentially provides his own simultaneous translation throughout, moving easily from one language to the other, so no one will be left out.

"Mesdames et monsieurs, ladies and gentlemen, a moment of your time, please. Thank you," he says, as the the chatter in the room falls away. "My brother's first girlfriend was a girl called Anastasie." Beside her, Meg hears Alain groan, faintly and without anything much like sincerity. "She had long blonde braids and somewhat crooked teeth, and Alain talked about her all the time. They were six."

Luc pauses, and then continues. "After Anastasie, when he was older, Alain tended to be a little . . . cooler, about his girlfriends. Not quite so effusive. Until one evening, when he he showed up at a bar with this redhead he'd met in the audience of a play I had been in at university. And the next day, did he have anything to say what way, I must say, a rather performance by his only brother? Oh, no. All he wanted to talk about was this girl. How beautiful and intelligent and charming and kind and wonderful she was.

"And as far as I can tell, he has not shut up about her since, though he has decided she is even more beautiful and intelligent and charming and kind and wonderful than he initially thought.

"So, Meg, thank you, for giving my brother someone to talk about the way he talks about you, and welcome to the family. And Alain, I hope that you will always have as much to say about Meg as you do now. Just perhaps not always to me."

Luc raises his glass. "To the bride and groom. May you have every happiness."

"Merci, Luc," Meg says, reaching up to kiss her brother-in-law's cheek when he joins them a moment later. "That was lovely."

"You're welcome. Did you get lipstick on my cheek?"

"Only a little," Meg promises.

There's a small bouquet of roses that the florist has provided for Meg to throw, as she didn't carry one in the ceremony. There's a great deal of good-natured jostling and laughing, but Meg throws it quite deliberately to Kim.

The flowers from the prayer book she carried down the aisle, though, she gives to Laura, quietly and away from the main bustle of the party. "I want you to have these."

"Oh. I -- thank you. They are very pretty," Laura says. After a second, she adds, "I am sorry they will die." There's a longer pause, and then she says, "You will tell me what I am supposed to do with them?"

"Take them home, and keep them as long as you like," Meg says. "There's a superstition that whoever catches the bride's bouquet will be the next person to get married, but I didn't throw them and you didn't catch them. I just want you to have them. Because you're a good friend, and you've come a very long way to be here."

"You helped. It is important," Laura says. And, being very careful with the flowers, she hugs Meg.

All in all, it's everything Meg could have asked of her wedding day, with the possible exception of its refusal to slow down.

"Do you feel a little like this whole day has passed in twenty minutes?" she asks Alain, when the cake has been cut (and most decidedly not smashed into anyone's face) and they've made their farewells and left in a flurry of birdseed and confetti and cans rattling on the back of Alain's car.

"More like fifteen," Alain says. "But it was perfect."

"It was, yes," Meg agrees.

In every way.

Meg quite likes the oatmeal lotion Parker brought her.

It doesn't clash with her hair nearly so much as the calamine, and it seems to work fairly well on the itching.

She's still ridiculously covered in little red spots, but they're mostly crusted over now.

Still, she'll wait at least another day before she goes downstairs.

Much better safe than sorry.

Meg gives up on examining her face in the mirror and goes to pick a book to read for the afternoon.

They're only allowed to see Alain briefly, before doctors need to examine him and run tests and generally make sure that he was, in fact, all right.

And then visiting hours end, and the hospital puts its collective foot down and suggests none too uncertainly that everyone should leave until tomorrow morning.

And, with the exception of Meg (who had slept at the end of the universe), everyone had been up for more than twenty-four hours, or traveled hundreds of kilometres since last they slept, or both. (Kim has the added bonus of being five time zones away from where she last woke up.) When John Ford quietly suggests that the find a quick dinner and then the nearest hotel again, there isn't a lot of argument. Or, indeed, any at all.

Dinner is fast food hamburgers and french fries, and it would probably have been at least a little awkward if everyone hadn't been so tired. Adrenaline is a glorious thing, but when it wears off . . . well, conversation is minimal, really.

"I'll share with Meg," Kim says, "if she'd like," as John Ford asks about rooms at the hotel he's found.

Meg nods. "Yes, thank you." She'd rather not be in a room by herself.

Kim gives Meg her suitcase with instructions to borrow anything she likes, and then, with a short glance over to Dave, says that she'll be up to their room in a few minutes.

(That it winds up being slightly longer than a few minutes is not much of a surprise.)

Kim asks again if she wants to talk about it. "In the morning, maybe," Meg says. "Right now I just want to go to bed."

(And it's about equal parts wanting Kim to be able to go to bed -- since it's something like two in the morning on her internal clock right now -- and Meg's knowing that she's going to need some time to let everything process and settle before she can discuss it.)

Kim studies her face for a moment, then tells Meg to wake her up if she needs anything.

Meg stares at the ceiling for a long time. She doesn't quite expect to fall asleep at all, but she must have.

It's the only way she could have just woken up.

Meg sits crosslegged in the middle of her sister's bed, surrounded by an impressive collection of brushes and combs and clips and pins and make-up and jewelry and various odds and ends.

Kim is going to a dance and Meg is helping her get ready, having been charged with both handing her things and providing opinions.

These are very important jobs.

Meg knows, because Kim told her so.

It's not that difficult to find Sylvain Gagné's restaurant. It is, as Meg said, written up in several guidebooks.

And late morning isn't a bad time to arrive, at least on weekdays -- the breakfast crowd has gone, the lunch crowd isn't really there yet. There's no line out the door, no wait to be seated, just a hadful of patrons lingering over coffee at the tables on the sidewalk in front of the restaurant.

It's a beautiful summer day in Montreal.

She takes the time to change back into her own clothes before she goes upstairs. Fairy tale dresses, she has decided, are very lovely in book illustrations, but rather less than practical for everyday wear.

She doesn't exactly rush.

She also stands outside her sister's room for a long moment, turning the key Kim left over and over in her hand.

And then she squares her shoulders, takes a deep breath, and knocks firmly on the door, two sharp raps that sound ridiculously loud to her, in the empty hallway.

The problem with the letters from her sister is that Meg has never kept any of them for more than a minute or two. It's very easy to simply have a policy of throwing something away the moment you receive it . . . it's harder when you've kept it for a while, and carried it back from the end of the universe and so on.

Which is why Meg is sitting and staring at an unopened envelope addressed to her in her sister's handwriting.

And trying to decide what to do with it.

She stares at it for what feels like a long time. Well, she stares at it for what is a long time, for staring at an unopened letter, but it feels even longer.

And then, finally, she takes a deep breath, and in the slow, deliberate way she does most things, opens the letter.

It's not long. And it's not what she's expecting. Or maybe it's exactly what she's expecting. Or maybe she has no idea what she's expecting. Meg's not sure.

(Meg's not sure about a lot of things, lately.)

She doesn't spend nearly as much time looking at the letter as she spent looking at the envelope. She reads it twice, and then picks up a pen and draws a line under the phrase I figured I had a good idea. She writes K-- What, exactly, do you figure you know? --M in the margin next to that paragraph, in her textbook perfect script.

And then she refolds the letter, puts it back in the envelope, and tucks the flap into the envelope to keep it closed. She crosses out her own name on the front of the envelope, and writes Dr. Kimberly Ford.

And puts the letter back in her bag, to return to the bar next time she winds up there.

The train rolls west, a steady rhythm and blur of rails and stations, and Meghan Ford sits stiff-backed straight in her seat and stares out the window and wonders why the sky is clear.

There should be clouds.

This is, after all, the eye of a very large, very violent storm -- a deceptive moment of stillness that all but dares you to think that the worst is over.

It's not. Meg knows that. Whatever storm she and her sister have unleashed here isn't anywhere near done doing its damage.

Even knowing that, though, there's nothing she said in Kim's apartment that she wouldn't still say if she had it to do over again.

Meghan is not surprised to see her father sitting on a bench on the platform when the train reaches her stop. Whatever Kim had said, there was no way she hadn't called their parents after Meg left.

The conscientious big sister to the end.

There's a part of Meg that would very much like to just stay on the train and keep going west and west and west.

But, then, even if that were a choice, it's not the one she would make. So she gathers her bags and she steps onto the almost deserted platform, where both her father and the storm are waiting.

"Kim called," John Ford says, by way of greeting.

"I thought she might," says Meghan, though what she means is, I knew she would.

"She said you had a fight."

"I'd have said argument but fight is not exactly wrong."

John sighs. "Meghan--"

"Dad," she says, "can we please not have this conversation in the middle of a train station?"

Her father sighs again, takes half of his daughter's bags, and heads for the car. Meg follows just far enough behind to make it hard to talk. It's a fairly futile gesture, though, since if you want to trap someone for a conversation, it's hard to beat the front seat of a moving car.

"What happened?" John asks, eyes darting briefly from the road to his daughter.

"What did Kim say happened?" Meg counters. Partly because she wants to know the lay of the land here. Mostly because she thinks her parents deserve to hear Kim's news from Kim, even if Kim has told her to tell them.

"That she told you she was taking a job in England and you fought about it."

"Then I guess that's what happened."

"Meghan."

"What?"

"I was hoping for a more detailed answer. And I wanted your answer, not Kim's."

Meg crosses her arms. "Kim told me that she's moving to England. Next month. She's already done all the paperwork, and had it approved. The apartment is already almost empty, she's worried about giving sufficient notice to Toronto General, but telling us about it was pretty far down the To Do list. And I told her that I was tired of being lied to, and kept in the dark about . . . well, I left."

"Oh, Meg," says her father. They've stopped at a red light, and he turns his full attention to her. "Meg."

Meg doesn't say anything for a long moment, and it's not a comfortable silence that descends. Then she says, "The light's green."

John drives though the light, then turns into an empty parking lot and turns off the engine. "Meg," he says, again.

"What? What was I supposed to say? That it's all right that she's decided to just . . . just abandon us, without so much as making a show of discussing it with us? Again?"

"Meghan, you are not being fair."

"I'm tired of being fair."

"Did you talk about why she decided to move? Or why she waited to tell you?"

Meghan opens her mouth to reply and then stops. It's the first time she's realized that they didn't.

"Just . . . she just said that it was something she had to do."

"I see," says her father. "And did you give her a chance to explain what that meant?"

No, but Meg doesn't want to admit that. She's tired. She's tired of a lot of things -- not only of being fair but also of trying to be accepting and understanding about things she doesn't really know how to accept or understand. Things she doesn't really want to accept or understand. She's tired of trying to see Kim's side, of trying not to upset things, of feeling lost and alone and overwhelmed. She's tired of feeling ambushed and attacked. She's tired of having to work -- hard -- at a relationship that came as easily as breathing for the first 16 years of her life.

"Fine," she snaps. "Take her side. You always do."

"Meghan," says her father, firmly, "I am not taking anyone's side. I just want you think about this. I hate to see you decide at eighteen that you don't want your only sister to be a part of the rest of your life."

"She decided it first," Meg mutters.

John looks at her, but doesn't respond to that latest comment. "Kim said she'd be visiting soon. Maybe you two can talk about all this then."

"I have plans that day," Meg says. Whatever day it is.

John Ford sighs again. "Well, maybe they will have changed by then."

"I don't think there's much of a chance of that," Meghan says, and turns to look out the side window.

John waits a moment to see if she's going to say anything more, then starts the car and drives them home in silence.

In the west, clouds begin to gather and the wind picks up.

It's going to be a hell of a storm.

Nine years.

Kim Ford was nine years old when her sister was born.

Those nine years are the reason that Meg not only doesn't remember a life without her sister, she doesn't remember a life without her sister being in charge, at least part of the time. Because by the time Meg was old enough to remember anything in a coherent, linear way, Kim was old enough to be left to look after her sister when their parents were out.

Meg was never worried if Kim was there. It may have begun just because Kim's room was closer than their parents', and when Meg was four and afraid of nightmares or thunderstorms, it was easier to find the courage to run across the hall than all the way down it. And somehow, when Meg was too scared or (on a few occasions) too sick to go anywhere, or even to call for help, Kim always seemed to know to come and check. And nothing bad could possibly happen to Meg if Kim was there; Kim wouldn't let it.

As far as Meg was concerned, Kim could do anything. And so, when Kim dreamed dreams, or set grand goals for her future, Meg never questioned it. Even when she was old enough to understand that most people don't get to do good in big ways, she didn't doubt that her sister would be one of the few who did.

Her whole life, Meg had teachers who called her by her sister's name. Had family friends told her how much like Kim she looked, or how much she reminded them of her sister. And it made her smile. The only goal Meg ever had was to be like her sister.

Nine years.

Meg Ford was nine years old when her sister left home for the University of Toronto.

It's the reason Meg never kept a diary; she never needed to. Her sister got long, incredibly detailed letters, three and four times a week. And once she'd written it all down for Kim, there was no reason to write it all down again, at least, not that Meg could see. And when Kim was home, talking eliminated the need to write anything about her life. Meg took endless notes on almost everything else, in scores of neatly labeled blue notebooks, but her life was simply confided to Kim.

And so Kim always knew anything there was to know about Meg, because Meg told her. And over the years the secrets shifted from the small sins of childhood, to crushes that left Meg pink-cheeked and giggling, to the half-formed ideas of a girl trying to find the woman she'll be. But it never, in sixteen years, occurred to Meg to keep things from her sister. And she probably wouldn't have succeeded if she'd tried.

And maybe that's just not fair, to ask any one person to be hero and savior and role model and confidant and confessor, best friend and older sister. Because who could possibly live up to all of that? What ending could there be but the bitter resentment of disillusionment?

Because now, with nine years more gone, Meg keeps secrets from her sister, and they fill the pages of the diary she started on her seventeenth birthday. And she no longer smiles when people tell her how much like her sister she is. And thunder is just the collision of air masses, and no one has slept in the room across the hall for a year and a half.

And Meg is capable of taking care of herself.

And she's lonelier than she ever would have thought possible.