The Night Before by Luanne Rice Read Free Book Online

T he night before the wedding a wild thunderstorm rolled down the Connecticut River. Awake for good, Lydia Madison got out of bed and padded across the rough board floor to close the windows and watch the lightning. The Christmas trees, silvered with summer dust from the field and salt from Long Island Sound, looked so otherworldly in the intermittent flashes that for a moment she forgot to worry that the field would be soaking wet for the ceremony.
    A crash made her jump; had the house been struck? No, it was just thunder, accompanied by whipping wind. She felt the walls shake. White curtains blew horizontal, drenched from the rain, as she lowered the windows.
    She thought about making a quick sketch. It could be her gift to the couple, and she would call it The Night Before. It would have double meaning: a connection to Christmas, and how they had met here last winter—he had been working the farm year-round, and she’d been hired for the season to sell trees—and it would also be a reminder of tonight’s tempest—beautiful tumult, more intense than the average summer storm, just passing through.
    So that’s what she would do, make a drawing. Sleep was over for the night. She pulled on jeans and a chambray shirt and walked down the back stairs, hearing thunder crack just outside. Entering the kitchen, she was shocked to smell coffee.
    Danny Byrne, the groom-to-be, stood at the screen door with Tally, Lydia’s blue merle collie, by his side. They stared out at the rows of white spruce, thick and ordered and magical in the pouring rain.
    “Good morning,” she said. “If four-thirty counts as morning.” At the sound of her voice, Tally romped over. Lydia buried her fingers in the collie’s long blue-gray fur, snagging tangles in the silk.
    “Hi, Lydia,” Danny said. “Some storm, eh?”
    “Is that why you’re up?” she asked. “Or you nervous about today?”
    “No, I’m fine,” he said. But she heard it in his voice. He ran her family’s farm, and although he got up early, it wasn’t usually this early; she was often awake before him, at her easel with coffee, catching the day’s first light. Lydia hid a smile; he was nervous.
    That’s good,” she said, rattling dry food into Tally’s bowl.
    “I hope it stops soon,” Danny said. “I know the trees need rain, but there’s going to be mud.”
    “Give it ten minutes,” she said. “The storm will blow through, and the day will be perfect. That’s my prediction.”
    “Isabel’s dress…”
    “It won’t get wet.”
    “I wish her mother was coming.”
    “We tried,” Lydia said.
    “It’s killing her to be apart.”
    “Her mother says you’re her family now,” she said. “Already, even before the wedding.”
    He didn’t respond to that. The deluge began letting up, and the rumble of the thunder sounded miles away, perhaps across the river in Old Saybrook now, or moving across the Sound toward Orient Point. Tally finished her bowl of food, clattering it across the floor as she ate the last bites, then ran to Danny’s side. He opened the screen door, and together they headed out into the rain.
    Lydia watched them disappear into the trees. She picked up a piece of charcoal, opened her sketchpad, and began to draw. She sketched a stand of white spruce and slanting sheets of rain, and she left areas of white to denote that big flash of lightning that had pulled her from bed.
    Black Hall had always been a haven for artists. At the turn of the last century they had taken the train out from New York, set up their easels on the riverbanks and rocky shore, attracted by the stunning scenery and the play of light with so much water to reflect it. Lydia was transfixed by the line where the river met the sea, where the storm met the land.
    She was drawn to edges. Her grandfather Frank Madison, one of the early American impressionists and the first of her family to settle in Black Hall, had said, “There is something about a boundary.”
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