Happy Birthday to Me Again (Birthday Trilogy, Book 2) (6 page)

“Dad, it’s
simple. I love her. And she loves me. And I’m not interested in wasting another
ten years of my life trying to make myself believe there’s another girl out
there for me. Remember. I’ve seen my entire life flash before my eyes. Life is
short… fleeting. I don’t want to spend a single second of my time without
Liesel.”

“You really love
her, don’t you?” my mom asked.

“With all my
heart. She saved my life, after all.”

My parents
looked at me a little perplexed as I felt warm, inviting breath hit the back of
my ear. “Cameron…” It was Liesel. She brought her hands to my arm.

“Yes?”

“You want to go
outside?”

I turned around
and tried to keep myself from kissing her right there in front of my parents.
“I thought you’d never ask.”

She followed me
out into the freezing cold—it was barely twenty degrees outside—but
the air still somehow felt warmer than it had around the pessimistic parents,
who still, after everything I’d been through last spring, would question
something as important as my decision to get married. I didn’t care how young I
was. I had made up my mind. This April, soon after Liesel’s nineteenth
birthday, we were going to be named husband and wife. And there was nothing
anybody could do to stop us.

The wind picked
up and Liesel wrapped her arms around my waist. “Are you scared?”
    

I shook my head
before kissing her on the cheek. “Never. I’m sorry to say, Ms. Maupin, that
you’re gonna be stuck with me for a long time.”

“Soon it’ll be
Mrs.
Martin
.”

I shrugged.
“Sounds the same to me.”

We could hear a
group of teenagers counting down in the distance.
Ten, nine…
I turned around and pulled Liesel close to me.
Six, five…
We stared into each others’
eyes and waited as the wind picked up even more.
Two, one…

“Please don’t
lift us up in the air,” I said.

“Believe it or
not,” Liesel said, “this wind isn’t me.”

“Glad to hear
it,” I whispered, before we started kissing, our arms wrapped around each
other, the wind and the chill and the cheering fading around us.

After a minute,
I looked down. Our feet were still planted on the gravel. “Yay for gravity,” I
said.

“Shut up and
kiss me,” Liesel said.

“Gladly.” I
stared at her, our eyes just inches away. “Do you have any idea how great this
coming year’s gonna be?”

“None
whatsoever,” she said.

Our lips didn’t
part ways for another twenty minutes.
  

---

January came and
went, offering day after day of snow, as well as Kimber’s fourteenth birthday.
We celebrated by going out to dinner, but then she met up with friends and her
boyfriend Tommy for some bowling later that night. It was the first birthday
Kimber celebrated not entirely with us. “She’s growing up,” my mom said. “She’s
not our baby any longer,” my dad said. “She’s kissing boys now… doesn’t that
gross you guys out?” I asked my parents, but they didn’t respond. They were
still irked at me about the wedding, even though I guaranteed them that it
wasn’t going to be a crowded, lavish affair.

My dad still
seemed confused that he’d be the one paying for the wedding, as opposed to
anyone on Liesel’s side. I’d been dating Liesel for eight months, and still,
her family history was murky to me, no matter how much I tried to get Liesel to
talk about her past. Her dad had died years ago, which I knew from the
beginning, but it wasn’t until recently that I learned she had no idea where
her mom lived, or if she was even alive. The only family she had in all of Reno
was her uncle Dom, a man in his eighties with bad hearing and a heart
condition; I had met him on only two occasions at Liesel’s dumpy apartment.
No wonder the girl wants to marry me,
I
kept telling myself.
I’m not the only one
who wants to start a new life.

Liesel had
almost no one, as if she had deliberately tried throughout high school to make
herself invisible. Her only friends were from her waitressing job. She had
next-to-no family. I was her shining light, and all I wanted to do was make her
happy. But underneath all the joys of the time we spent together, there was
always this feeling that there was something big Liesel wasn’t telling me. I
was the one person who knew her big secret, but she still hadn’t really opened
up about her childhood, or where she came from. If I was going to marry her, I
wanted to know
everything
. But given
her lack of communication about these kinds of things, I found myself pushing
all my questions to the back of my mind for a later date.

That date turned
out to be on a
real
date, on
Valentine’s Day, when Liesel and I escaped to a small cabin in Lake Almanor,
California, where we could spend a glorious weekend by ourselves, she away from
her grandfather and waitressing job, me away from the questioning parents,
maturing younger sister, and my internship with Faye Snider Architects, which
had sucked up a lot of my time since I started working there (unpaid) the first
week of January.

I found Liesel
that morning sipping coffee at the kitchen table, going over the seating
arrangement, yet again, for our April wedding.

“Do you think
your mom would want the seat closest to the aisle, or your dad?” she asked.

I made my way
over to the kitchen island and grabbed one of the maple scones we had brought
along for the trip. “I don’t think it matters, does it? I mean, my dad won’t be
walking
me
down the aisle.”

“Yeah, I guess
you’re right. I just don’t want to offend any of your family with this seating
arrangement. I want everything to be just right. I want everything to be
perfect
.”

“I know you do,
honey.”

It had been
unexpected, to say the least, to see how much Liesel had involved herself in
the wedding preparations. In December I questioned if she was interested in
getting married. Now I watched as she had become a mini wedding planner,
constantly obsessing over every detail, from the perfect Reno church, to the
dress, to the cake, to the seating arrangements. I was more than grateful that
she had two girlfriends from Uncle Tony’s to bother with the details; I took
part in some decisions, but for the most part, all I had to do was remind
myself the day and time I had to show up in a tuxedo to kiss the beautiful
bride. Saturday, April twenty-ninth. Three weeks after Liesel’s birthday. One
week after Easter. Two days before the honeymoon I
hoped
my parents would pay for.

I sat down at
the table and started scarfing down the scone, while Liesel, who still looked
beautiful sans make-up, and with the frizziest red hair I’d ever seen,
continued outlining the seating arrangements. We had sent out invitations to
about eighty-five people a week and half ago, with only six of those
invitations going to Liesel’s acquaintances, and the rest going to my family
and high school friends. Obviously we couldn’t have one side of the church
empty, so we decided to arrange it so that people could sit on either side.

Liesel appeared
to be in a good mood on this Saturday morning, smiling as she continued with
her work, so I thought it’d be a good time to start asking some pertinent
questions. I decided to begin with a goofy one. “You don’t have
me
sitting down, right?”

“Ha-ha.” She bit
down on her lower lip and sketched in some names of my parents’ friends in the
sixth row back. Then, surprisingly, she put the pen down and turned to me. “You
know, your mom’s been really great through all this, Cam. I know your dad’s had
kind of a hard time with it. But your mom’s finally coming around. She just
took me to try on some dresses the other day, and we had a lot of fun.”

I leaned over
and kissed her on the mouth. She didn’t seem appreciative, considering I was
still eating my scrumptious scone.
 

I decided to let
it rip.
Here we go.
“Speaking of
moms…” She stared at me, not knowing where I was headed. “You know, Leese,
you’ve never really told me about
your
mom.
I know you never met your dad, but what memories do you have of your—”

“She’s dead,”
Liesel said, abruptly. “She’s gone. Can we talk about something else, please?”

“Really? But I
thought—”

“She’s dead,
Cam.”

I could see she
was holding something back. “What was your mom like?”

She scooted back
and crossed her arms. She started banging her head lightly against the wood
door behind her. “You really want to know?”

I nodded, trying
not to laugh in frustration. “You’re going to be my wife, Liesel. I want to
know everything about you, including your family.”

“My mom was…
uhh… what can I say? She was OK, I guess. She had red hair like me. She had a
fiery temper.”

And now the big question.
“Was she…”

Liesel shook her
head slowly. “Was she what?”

“You know. Did
she have
powers
?”

Liesel grinned
subtly before returning back to her seating arrangement, which I figured she’d
be agonizing over for another hour, at least. “If she had powers like me, I
don’t think I’d be sitting here talking to you right now.”

“What do you
mean?”

“Just… I don’t
know… things would be different.”

“How so?”

“
CAM
.” She shook her head fiercely and
motioned for me to leave her alone. “I don’t want to talk about this.”

“But I do. I
want to know everything.”

“You don’t have
to know
everything
.”

“Yes I do! For
Christ’s sake, Leese, I feel like I know
nothing
about you!”

I regretted
saying it before the end of the sentence erupted from my mouth. But there was
no going back.

I saw her pen
drop out of the corner of my eye, and I half expected her to throw it at my
face, using only the forces of her mind.
That
would really shut me up
, I thought.

Liesel didn’t
show a lot of emotion. She just stood up from the table and turned to leave the
room. But then she stopped and stood still, like she wanted me to approach her,
wrap my arms around her, and tell her I didn’t mean what I said. But I didn’t
budge.

“I’m sorry,” I
finally said.

That turned her
around. “I’m sorry, too, Cam. I’m sorry that I haven’t come clean with you
about everything. But you have to understand… I’m trying to adjust to this new
life… with you… with your family. Before you entered my life, things weren’t
so… well…
complicated
.”

“Not
complicated?” I took her hands. “Liesel, you can do magic. What’s not
complicated about that?”

“It’s something
I was trying my best to ignore. Plus, give me some credit. I’ve been completely
magic free since graduation night. Eight months and counting, Cam. That’s
pretty damn good for me.”

“I agree,” I
said. “That’s smart, I guess. But Leese, your powers are
extraordinary
. It seems careless in a way for you to just
completely ignore what you’re capable of.” She stared out the window, onto the
shiny blue lake just a few yards past our backyard, and then brought her
attention to me. “I didn’t mean what I said before. I know you. I know your
spirit, and I know your kindness, and I know that nobody could ever make me
happier than you. I just have this strong feeling that there’s hidden demons in
your past that you have yet to let me in on. And as your fiancée, I promise,
you can tell me
anything
. And I won’t
judge you. I promise.”

She nodded and
kissed my palm before caressing it against her cheek. “There’s things that I’ve
done that I’m not proud of. But I promise… I’m not hiding anything that I’m
ashamed of, or that I think might jeopardize our relationship in any way.
There’s just some things in my past that I’m still trying to make sense of.”
She grinned and crossed her arms.

“You’re gonna
have to tell me sometime.”

“I know, Cam.
And I will. Just not today. Not this weekend.”

“OK.”

“Thanks.”

I kissed her on
the forehead. “Now, please, let’s enjoy our weekend. Can you believe this is
our first Valentine’s Day together?”

She smiled big,
revealing her big pearly whites. “I know. It’s my first Valentine’s Day with
anyone
.”

---

Liesel and I
walked hand in hand to the center of town early that afternoon to grab a bite
to eat and take in the local sights of what my parents still referred to as the
hidden gem north of Reno—I had been going to Lake Almanor nearly every
summer for the last ten years. Many of the Reno locals elected to just drive up
the hill thirty minutes to the gorgeous but crowded Lake Tahoe. But there was
always something more mysterious, and more of a true destination, about
Almanor, which was always mostly empty yet provided lots to do. This weekend,
Almanor, while maybe the coldest it’d been since my family and I had started
coming here, was particularly dead in town.