Epilogue
Samuel is sitting on a rug in the middle of the floor surrounded by gifts he has no interest in, and a wasteland of scrunched up balls of wrapping paper he adores. He turned one today.
‘Next year,’ Hannah says, ‘we should just wrap up some empty boxes and give him those instead.’
We kept his birthday party small – my mother, Hannah and me, Rick and Alice. We’re not ready to invite anyone else into our strange patchwork family, two mothers and a father who both is and isn’t one. We are still feeling our way and it is only thanks to Christina that we have managed it at all.
It was Christina who persuaded Hannah to give Alice another chance. My adoption, she said, had broken something in all of us – me, Alice and her. We were none of us to blame for what happened, not really, but what we could do was try to make things right. In other words, shall we start again?
I think her efforts to help Alice mend switched something on in Christina. It’s easy to forget she was once a woman lost in the past too, mourning a child that never lived.
The Alice that has come here today is very different from the one we first met. She laughs easily, she asks us questions, sometimes she’ll even share details about my past. And she’s painting again, not pet portraits or those odd pictures of Samuel, but vast great skyscapes which Rick says are brilliant and extraordinary, although we haven’t been allowed to see them yet.
Hannah has disappeared from the kitchen and my heartbeat quickens when she comes back into the room, carrying a large rectangle wrapped in sheets of bright pink paper.
‘Alice?’ she says and am I the only one to detect the slight nervousness in Hannah’s voice?
Alice has been standing over by the French doors chatting to my mother and she turns around with an enquiring smile.
‘I know we’re celebrating Samuel today. But Luke and I have something for you too. You can probably guess from the shape that it’s a painting.’
‘Intriguing,’ Alice says, still smiling, no idea of what lies within.
‘I managed to track down the collector who bought it from Robin Armstrong and when I told him our story, he said the painting had given him years of pleasure and he’d like you to have it.’
I’m trying not to look as Alice tears the pink paper and unveils the picture: a young woman cradling the head of her lover in her lap. Jake’s asleep, or at least faking it, eyes closed, lips slightly parted, his long dark hair pooling on the grass beneath him. Alice is leaning against a terracotta wall and wearing a forest-green dress with thin straps, one falls from her shoulder. Bold, jump-out colours, it’s a glorious painting. But it’s Alice you really notice. She’s not smiling; instead she looks out in utter contentment, her smooth, almost babyish face lit up by an internal joy.
‘Oh,’ is all Alice says.
No one else says anything, the room in utter silence as we watch Alice gaze at a painting she made long ago.
She stoops down and reaches out to press her palm against Jake’s painted cheek.
‘There you are,’ she says, so quietly I only just catch it.
I glance at Hannah and she grimaces. Is it too much? Did we make a mistake?
But when Alice turns around moments later, her face is serene.
‘Thank you,’ she says. ‘To see this again means so much to me. But it belongs to you now, Luke.’
‘Alice no—’ I say but she interrupts.
‘It’s your beginning, Luke. The question mark in your story.’
‘But Jacob—’ I say.
‘Would want you to have it.’
She walks over and hugs us, first me, then Hannah.
‘You are both so kind,’ she says. ‘And I will love seeing this painting whenever I visit. But I’m looking into the future now.’
And she doesn’t need to say anymore.
Much later I lie next to Hannah in bed, listening to the soft in and out of her breathing, my mind whirring with the day’s events, the change in Alice, the change in all of us. Sometimes I wonder if I’ll ever be able to process it.
I slide from the bed, as noiselessly as I can, and go downstairs to the kitchen.
The painting is the first thing I see, just as Alice left it, propped up against the wall. I kneel in front of it, looking and not looking. Allowing the painting to wash over me, the vibrant colours, the Italian sunshine, the young lovers, the start of it all.
There you are, I think.
I feel a kind of peace.