The Groom Who Never Showed

Every wedding I plan teaches me something about love. That's what I told my mother when I got into this business, and she laughed and said it sounded like something you'd find in a fortune cookie. But it's true. The Hendersons taught me that second marriages can be sweeter than first ones. The Patel wedding taught me that a grandmother with a cane will out-dance everyone in the room. And the Starr wedding, so far, had taught me that a groom can just vanish. No note, no phone call, no body in the river. Just gone.

It was a Saturday in November, which in the South Island means the weather can't make up its mind. I was twenty-three years old, three months into planning this thing, and standing in the middle of Open Flow yoga studio in my good heels while the bride did laps around the reception mat.

"Celia. Celia. Has he called you?"

"No, Vicky. He hasn't called me!"

"Has he texted you?"

"No!"

"Email?"

"Vicky, nobody emails anybody. No, he hasn't contacted me."

She stopped pacing and pressed her hands together like she was about to do a sun salutation, which I suppose was muscle memory. She was twenty-six, a yoga instructor, and built like someone who has never once eaten a whole pizza alone. I'd liked her from the start, honestly. She was one of those brides who knew what she wanted and said it out loud, which is rarer than you'd think.

"Okay," she said. "Okay. He went out for milk at eight this morning. People don't get abducted buying milk. Right?"

"Right."

"So he walked off. He just walked off." She sat down hard on a yoga block. "Do you know what the cancellation fee is at the rooftop venue? Because I do. I've read that contract eleven times today."

"Then you know we lose the deposit unless the ceremony happens or we cancel before three."

"Unless the ceremony happens," she repeated. "Great. Fantastic." She looked up at me. "Rico's coming."

"Who?"

"Rico Andersson. Hector's best friend. The best man." She said it like I should know who that was, and in fairness the name did ring a bell, a bell I didn't like. "He's a bail bondsman. He finds people for a living. I told him to come straight here."

"When did you call him?"

"Nine o'clock. He said he'd be here by noon." She checked the clock on the wall. "It's ten past."

And that's when the door at the bottom of the stairs banged open and I heard footsteps, and I knew before I saw him. I'd know that walk anywhere. Fast, like he's late for everything, like the world owes him a head start.

He came up the stairs and stopped, and we looked at each other, and for about three seconds neither of us said anything.

"Macdonald," he said.

"Rico."

"You're the wedding planner?"

"I'm the wedding planner."

He was twenty-four now, and he still had the same shaggy brown hair and the same habit of standing with his hands in his jacket pockets like a man in an old movie. He looked good, which annoyed me. We'd had one night together two years ago, after a bar crawl, and I'd called it a mistake the next morning and he'd agreed, badly, and we hadn't spoken since.

"Vicky," he said, stepping around me and giving her a hug. "I got here as fast as I could. Tell me everything."

"So Hector woke up normal," Vicky said. "Normal breakfast, normal everything. Said he was popping out for milk. Took his phone but it's off. Off, Rico. He's never once turned his phone off. I thought he died in a ditch for the first hour."

"Any money missing?"

"His card was used at a petrol station on the highway north. That's it."

"North," Rico repeated, and he pulled out his phone and started typing. He had a way of going quiet and businesslike when he was working. I remembered that from college too. "Which station?"

"Z Energy, the one past the bridge."

"When?"

"Receipt says 8:40."

"Okay. That's a start." He looked up. "Who's here? Family?"

"His mum's in the back room lying down. My mum's downstairs making tea. The ushers are at the venue setting chairs for a wedding that may not exist."

"Right." He pocketed the phone. "First thing, we need the ring."

"The ring's not missing," Vicky said. "The ring's here. The ring is the one thing I have."

"Then where is it?"

"In the storage loft. I put the ring box in there Thursday, in my gym bag, because Hector kept picking it up and jiggling it and it was making me insane."

Rico and I both looked at each other. I knew what we were both thinking, and I hated that we were both thinking it.

"Can you get it?" I asked her.

"I can't leave the front. My mum will come up every five minutes asking if there's news, and if I hear that question one more time I'm going to scream in front of clients." She stood up off the yoga block. "You two go up. Loft's at the top of the back stairs. Bag's a purple Nike duffel, ring box is in the side pocket."

I said, "Vicky, can't we just..."

"Please, Celia. I can't be up there right now. I'll start crying and I promised myself no crying until at least two o'clock." She was already walking away. "Thank you. Both of you. Seriously."

So that's how I ended up following Rico Andersson up the back stairs of a yoga studio, two years after we last spoke, hunting for a wedding ring for a groom who'd run off. The stairs were narrow and smelled like the laundromat downstairs, that hot damp tumble-dryer smell.

The loft was at the very top, a low room over the studio proper, mostly storage. Foam rollers in stacks. Bolsters. Boxes of flyers. A space heater nobody had used since last winter. And, for reasons I couldn't explain, an empty birdcage on top of a crate. Big brass thing. No bird, no sign there had ever been a bird.

"Why is there a birdcage up here?" Rico asked.

"No idea. It's been here since I did the walkthrough."

"Maybe the studio had a bird."

"Maybe the studio had a bird," I agreed, because there was nothing else to say about a birdcage.

The duffel was under a window, half hidden behind a stack of mats. I pulled it out and unzipped the side pocket and there was the ring box, little white square, heavier than it looks. I held it up.

"Got it."

"Good. One problem solved." He looked around the low room. "So. How'd you end up doing weddings?"

"Long story. You first. How does a guy from our business program end up a bail bondsman?"

"Uncle had an agency in Christchurch. Needed someone to drive around and knock on doors. Turns out I'm good at knocking on doors." He shrugged. "You didn't answer the question."

"I answered yours first, so we're even."

"That's not how conversations work, Macdonald."

"Don't call me that. You're not cross-examining me."

He grinned, and it was the same grin from college, the one that got him out of trouble he had no business getting out of. "You always did hate my professional voice."

"I hated everything about your professional voice."

"Liar." He said it lightly, but it landed somewhere in my chest and sat there. I turned away and fussed with the duffel, zipping the main compartment, doing a job that didn't need doing.

We'd kissed once before that night, back at a party in second year. I was nineteen, he was twenty. He'd left before morning with no explanation, and I'd spent a stupid amount of time thinking about it, which is why the whole thing after the bar crawl had made me so cross with myself. Twice was a pattern. I don't do patterns.

"So Hector," I said, mostly to change the subject. "You know him best. Would he actually run?"

Rico was quiet a moment. "Hector ran from a flat lease in Auckland. He ran from a personal training contract he signed too fast. He ran from a girl named Sophie about four years ago, and I helped him carry boxes." He looked at me. "So yeah. He'd run."

"Vicky deserves to know that."

"Vicky deserves a lot of things. She deserves her deposit back, for a start." He ran a hand through his hair. "Look, I'll find him. That part I can do. The talking him into coming back part, that's above my pay grade."

"He's your best friend."

"Which is exactly why I know what he's like."

I went to sit on the crate next to the birdcage, because my feet were killing me in those heels, and as I did my shoulder brushed the loft door. It moved. Just slightly, and then it stopped, with a little grinding sound.

"What was that?" Rico asked.

"The door." I went over and pulled it. It wouldn't open. I pulled harder. Nothing. "Rico."

"What?"

"The door's stuck."

He came over and tried it, and he's stronger than me and it didn't move for him either. He put his eye to the gap. "Hinge. The bottom hinge is loose, the door's dropped and it's jammed in the frame."

"Can you fix it?"

"Not without a screwdriver and about ten minutes and probably a second pair of hands, no offense." He knocked on the door and called down the stairwell. "Hello? Anyone? Vicky?"

From somewhere far below, music was playing and someone was laughing. The laundromat's dryers thumped on like they always did at noon. Nobody was coming up those stairs.

"Great," I said, and sat down on the crate. "Well. At least we've got the ring."

Rico looked at the door, then at me, then at the bottle of cheap red wine somebody had left open on the windowsill, with the cork shoved back in it loose.

"So," he said, and picked up the bottle. "Wine?"

"Don't you have a groom to find?"

"He's not going anywhere," Rico said. "The entire issue with grooms who run. They stay run."

He poured two cups of wine, the paper kind from the stack by the kettle, and handed me one, and I took it, because we were clearly going to be in that loft for a while.

I looked at the cage again while I drank. Cheap red, tasted like it came from a four-pack, because it probably did. "So who keeps an empty birdcage in a storage loft?"

"Someone who used to have a bird."

"That's a sad sentence, Rico."

"It's a sad cage." He tapped it with one finger and it rang hollow. "Maybe the bird's at the wedding. Sitting on a little chair."

I laughed before I could stop myself. He heard it and smiled into his cup, and I hated that I'd given him that.

"And another thing," he said, sitting down on the mats across from me, elbows on his knees. "I probably do know where Hector is."

That stopped the laugh. "What do you mean, probably?"

"I mean he's got a pattern and the pattern has an address." He took his phone out of his jacket. "There's a motel on the other side of town, the Taramea. He stays there when he's hiding from things. I've picked him up from there twice."

"Picked him up for what?"

"Nothing criminal. For his sister's thing. For a job interview he chickened out of." He turned the phone over in his hand. "Point is, I know the room number."

"Then call him. Right now."

"Celia."

"Call him. His phone's off, you said that yourself, but maybe it's back on. Maybe he's turned it on to check the cricket score, I don't know. Call him."

"He might not answer."

"Then he might not answer and we've lost nothing. Call him." I put my cup down. "Rico, it's past noon. The ceremony is at three. Vicky's downstairs calm-coaching a class like a lunatic, and her deposit goes up in smoke at three o'clock, and you're sitting in a loft with an empty birdcage drinking four-dollar wine."

He looked at me for a moment. "You're kind of scary when you're working."

"I'm always kind of scary when I'm working. Call."

He dialed. I expected him to hold it to his ear, but he put it on speaker and set it on the crate between us, which I wasn't ready for. It rang. Once, twice, four times, and I was already composing the voicemail in my head when a voice came through, low and flat.

"Yeah."

"Hector. It's Rico."

A long pause. "How'd you know it was me calling?"

"Caller ID, genius. Also nobody else would call this number."

"Right." There was a TV going somewhere behind him. "Is Vicky there?"

"Vicky is downstairs teaching a hot flow class with her phone in her waistband, waiting for it to buzz with news. That's where Vicky is."

Another pause. "Tell her I'm sorry."

Cups down. Both of us leaning in now. "Hector," Rico said, very evenly, the voice he must use on doors, "where are you?"

"Taramea. Room fourteen. Don't tell her that."

"Too late, you said it on speaker."

"What? Who's on speaker?" A rustle, the TV going quiet. "Is she there?"

"No. It's me and the wedding planner!"

"Hi, Hector," I said. "Celia. We met in August."

"I know who you are." He sighed, a big wet sigh, a man who'd been crying or close to it. "I went out for milk."

"We know. Eight o'clock this morning."

"You know that?"

"Your card pinged a Z station at 8:40," Rico said. "North of the bridge."

"Huh." A small, broken laugh. "I really am easy to find, aren't I."

"Hector." I leaned toward the phone. "Do you want to marry Vicky? Yes or no."

"Celia," Rico started.

"No, he should answer that. It's a yes or no question and he's had five hours to think about it."

There was a long silence, the kind you can hear someone breathing through. Then: "No. No, I don't. I think I don't." His voice cracked on the second no. "I like her a lot. I love her, maybe, I don't even know what that means anymore. But every time I picture the rooftop and all those chairs I feel like I'm going to pass out. I've felt like that for two months. I kept thinking it'd go away."