39. Epilogue Cali
EPILOGUE: CALI
It's early fall when we go back to the lake.
The leaves are just starting to turn, the ones on the far side of the water fading to amber and orange, the water itself gone dark and still as the summer heat finally lets go.
Ronan drives us up in the old Land Rover.
No Paolo, no black car, no men in dark coats trailing behind. It's us, and the kids in the back.
Plus, of course, Doctor Fuzz's shoebox on Isabella's lap.
The caterpillar is still a chrysalis. Isabella checks it every ten minutes, tilting the box toward the window like the light might do something. But he's taking his sweet time with the transformation. Hanging there. Waiting. I think Ronan has been giving him secret midnight lessons in patience.
Isabella was clearly not in on those lessons. "When's he gonna come out?" she asks for the hundredth time.
"When he's ready," I tell her. "You can't rush it."
Hayden, who has read three library books on the subject, launches into an explanation of metamorphosis that lasts several dozen miles.
Having heard this a dozen times already, I'm a little weary on the subject.
But Ronan is attentive as always, even though he was also a captive audience for each of those previous twelve lectures.
God bless this man. We truly don't deserve him.
The house is exactly like I remember it.
Old and wooden, the wide porch, the dock, the rope swing.
My mom's car is already parked out front.
She came up yesterday to help set things up, which mostly meant she supervised while Grigor carried folding chairs, the two of them arguing the whole time about the correct way to arrange them.
Setting those two up was either my best idea ever or my worst. I can't decide yet. Either way, they seem smitten.
The kids tumble out of the car before it's fully stopped. Isabella dashes for the water with the shoebox held out in front of her like an Olympic torch, Hayden right behind. My mom comes out onto the porch, wiping her hands on a dish towel.
"There she is," she crows. "The bride!"
"Mom." I blush. "Stop."
"Second time's the charm." She kisses my cheek. "This one's the real one, isn't it?"
I look out at the water, at the dock, and then at my tall, patient man unloading suitcases from the back of the car.
"Yeah," I say. "This one's real."
The trick to doing it right the second time around is not to do much at all.
There's no minister, no clerk with beige walls and fake flowers. There's no gala ballroom, no room full of people I have to convince. There's just the dock, and the water, and the six of us.
My mom, of course, who's both my wedding planner and maid of honor.
Grigor, who shaves his thick beard for the occasion, the ultimate act of respect in his book.
Navi, who is still healing but who drove here despite his doctors telling him not to, and who is sitting in a folding chair with a blanket over his knees like an old man, complaining about it the whole time.
"I took two bullets for that man," he says to nobody. "You'd think somebody would fluff my pillow."
"I'll fluff you right into the lake if you keep whining, young buck," Grigor tells him.
The sun is climbing down over the far trees, flamingo-pink and brilliant, when Ronan comes out onto the dock in a plain white button-down shirt with the sleeves rolled up. We decided to nix the tuxedo and tie. I want just him.
I'm waiting at the end in a simple dress, pale green, because it's my color now. I've got the gold octopus on my wrist and my mother's earrings, but no mirror to check myself in, because I don't need one anymore.
Isabella kicks off her shoes before the ceremony begins and stands barefoot on the wooden planks, singing and swaying so the hem of her dress flares wide. Hayden stands beside me with his hands folded in front of him, very serious.
"So I'm the witness again," he reminds me.
I bend down to kiss his head. "I couldn't imagine anyone better for the job."
"Duh. I've done this before. At the courthouse, remember?" He straightens his shoulders. "I'm basically a professional at this point."
Ronan hears us as he approaches and laughs. "You are indeed, Hayden. The most experienced wedding witness I know."
We line up on the dock as the water laps and gurgles at the pilings under us.
My mom stands off to the side with her arms crossed, already crying and pretending she isn't. Navi has his phone up, filming, even though Ronan explicitly told him not to and warned him about which orifice the phone will end up in if he disregards orders.
It's so fucking perfect I could cry.
"Okay," I say. "So. There's no clerk this time. Nobody to say the words for us."
"Then we say them ourselves," Ronan answers.
He reaches into his pocket and pulls out a small velvet box. When he cracks the lid, I see that inside, nestled on a bed of crushed suede, is a ring.
It's not new. Not big. If it were in a storefront, my eyes would probably slide right by it. It's a thin gold band with a teeny-tiny stone, old-fashioned. It's smudged with fingerprints and the metal is worn a bit soft at the edges.
"This was my mother's," Ronan explains.
I stop breathing.
"It's the only thing of hers I kept. After she died, there was almost nothing.
My father had sold most of it, or broken it, or hurled it at a wall.
But this—" He turns the box slightly so the last of the light catches the stone.
"Pyotr had it. He took it off her hand the night he came, and he kept it for me, all those years.
He gave it back to me when I let him go home.
I didn't even know he had it until then. "
I press my hand to my mouth.
"I didn't give it to you at the courthouse," he goes on, "because a paper marriage didn't deserve it.
I gave you a plain band from a shop, but I put this one back in my pocket and I told myself maybe someday.
" His voice goes husky with emotion. "I didn't think there'd be a someday, if we're being honest. In fact, I thought I'd be dead.
I wrote you a letter about it, if you recall. "
"I do. We burned that letter."
"We sure did." He looks up at me. "So there's no letter anymore.
There's just me, standing on a dock, holding the one thing my mother left behind, asking you to wear it.
Not because we have to. Not for spousal privilege.
Not to convince a fed. Because I want you to have the only pure thing I've got.
My mother would have loved you, Calista Meadows.
She'd have loved that you're loud and that you take up room and that you never once made yourself small for me. "
I'm crying now. Openly and unashamed. I wouldn't dream of wiping it away.
"Will you wear it?" he asks.
"Yes," I say. "God, yes."
He takes the plain practice band off my finger and slides Anna's ring on in its place.
It fits like it was made for me, which it wasn't, of course.
But somehow, that makes it fit better.
"Now come the vows," Hayden prompts. "That's the next part. I remember."
"Right," I say, laughing wetly. "The vows."
Ronan takes both my hands. His are warm. Mine are shaking a little, and he squeezes them, and then remembers, out of habit, that gripping wasn't in the deal, and starts to loosen his hold. I hold on tighter so he can't.
"There's no deal anymore," I remind him. "Grip all you want."
He laughs and pulls me a little closer.
"I'm not a good man," he begins. "I've told you that a hundred times.
I've spent my whole life taking things. But I stopped, with you.
I've spent every day since trying to give instead.
And I'll spend whatever I've got left doing exactly that.
For you. And for Hayden, and for Isabella, and for one very brave caterpillar.
" Isabella beams at the inclusion of her friend.
"I'll tell you you're beautiful every morning.
I'll hang whatever mirrors you want in whatever rooms you want.
I'll make the pancakes with the crispy edges.
And I will never, ever again decide something for you in the dark. That's my vow. That's all of it."
"That's a good one," Hayden announces.
Then it's my turn.
I've spent weeks thinking about what I'd say. I had a whole thing planned. It may or may not have contained eight sections. Just for good luck.
But standing here on the dock with his mother's ring on my hand and my kids beside me and the lake's surface like a dark, perfect mirror beneath us, all the planned words go out of my head.
I speak from the heart instead.
"I built a machine to catch liars," I say.
"It takes a thousand pieces of a person, chews them up, and out the other side comes the truth, whether you want it or not.
I ran you through it more than once, Ronan Akov.
The numbers were never in your favor." Navi cackles from his folding chair.
"But I chose you anyway. Despite the data.
Against every receipt I own. And it turns out that sometimes the machine is wrong and the person is right, and the only way you can ever find that out is to close your eyes and stop counting and just—" I press my hand against his chest, over his heart. "—feel it."
He covers my hand with his.
"I love you," I say. "And I'm keeping you. There's no napkin left to hand back, so you're stuck. Forever."
The last of the dying sun lights up his eyes. Sparks of brilliant gold swirling amongst the gray and blue oceans.
"Now, kiss," Hayden orders. "That's how it ends. I've seen it twice."
Ronan starts to bend. But before he can kiss me, a small voice cuts in. "Wait!"
We both look down. Isabella has set the shoebox on the dock and is standing there with her hands on her hips, looking up at Ronan with an expression I know very well, because it's mine.
"I have a question," she says.
Ronan crouches down to her level. Never towering. Always down where she can look him in the eye. "Ask me anything, brave girl."
"Are you gonna stay forever?" she asks. "For real this time."
Unlike last time, when she asked him this on the night he thought he might die and never come back to us, Ronan doesn't look at me.
He looks at her.
"Yes," he says. "For real. Forever."
Isabella nods slowly, satisfied. But she's not done.
"Then can I stop calling you Mister?"
Something goes haywire in Ronan's face. Shock and surprise, like the best kind of stab to the heart. "You've been calling me Mister Ronan for a long time," he manages to rasp out.
"Yeah, I know." She taps her bare toe against the dock. "But that's a name for somebody who might leave. And you said you're not leaving. So it's a dumb name now."
He has to clear his throat before he can answer. "What would you like to call me instead?"
She looks at me. She looks at Hayden. She looks back at Ronan, this huge man folded down small on a dock so a six-year-old can see his face.
"Papa," she chooses. "I want to call you Papa. Is that okay?"
I watch it hit him.
Every hard thing in this man comes apart on a dock at sunset, quiet, no sound at all, just his eyes going misty and his jaw going tight and his big scarred hands going open and closed at his sides like he doesn't know what to do with them.
"Yes," he croaks. "That's okay. That's more than okay, Isabella. You can call me that."
She throws her arms around his neck. He catches her and stands, lifting her up, and she tucks her face into his shoulder like she does when she's tired, except she's not tired, she's just happy.
Hayden butts in. "So are you gonna kiss Mom now, or what? We gotta do things in the right order."
Ronan laughs, loud and carefree. "Right you are, little man. Now, where was I?"
He kisses me.
One arm still holds Isabella. The other hand comes up to my face, his thumb at the corner of my mouth, and he kisses me like this is the one that means more than the rest of them put together.
Our lips mesh and our tongues clash, my breath sighing into his and his back into mine.
The autumn sun filtering through the canopy warms our backs.
The kiss makes one thing clear: The paper marriage is gone.
We burned that stupid paper. We burned the letter, and the napkin, and the trauma, and the past. There's nothing left of the deal I wrote to protect myself, nothing left of the cage either of us built.
There's just this. A thing we chose. A thing we keep choosing, out loud, in the light, in front of the people who love us.
Later, after the kids are in bed, my mom and Grigor have retreated into their room to have what I'm sure will be some highly acrobatic old people sex, and Navi has limped out to the front porch to take a mysterious phone call that seems to make him giggle a lot, Ronan and I sit on the end of the dock with our feet in the cold water and a bottle of wine between us.
Anna's ring is on my hand. It's bright in the moonlight.
"Your mother would really have liked me?" I ask.
"She'd have adored you." He's quiet a second. "She'd have adored all of it. The kids. The noise. She spent her whole life apologizing for the space she took up. She'd have loved watching a woman refuse to do the same."
I lean my head on his shoulder.
Upstairs, in Isabella's room, on the windowsill where she insisted on putting it so the moon could get in, there's a shoebox with a chrysalis hanging inside. Still waiting. Still becoming.
When things get all wrapped up and dark and squished, she told us once, that's when they turn into something better.
Damn, my daughter is wise.
I was wrapped up and dark and squished not that long ago.
In that hotel room in Phoenix, I thought my world was ending.
But that's just how it feels to be a caterpillar when the time comes to become a butterfly.
You think you're going to die, and then, suddenly, you wake up one day and you have wings.
Look at me now.
Here I am.
Soaring.