Epilogue
RONAN
St. Patrick’s Day
Galway in March is exactly as I remembered it and completely different, which is how Galway always is.
It changes and doesn’t change simultaneously, the city and the people and the particular quality of the light over the bay all exactly themselves regardless of what has shifted in the life of the man looking at them.
What has shifted, in my case, is considerable.
We arrive on the Thursday before Saint Patrick’s Day, all five of us plus the nanny, Brigid, who is from Cork and has a gift with the babies that I recognized within the first ten minutes of meeting her.
The family house is large enough to accommodate us without difficulty.
It has accommodated Callahans for three generations and is accustomed to chaos.
Mary has arranged everything with the precision of a woman who has been running the Galway parade for twelve years and treats all logistical challenges as opportunities to demonstrate competence.
She meets us at the door. She looks at Sage, then at the babies, then at me, with the expression of a woman who is filing a great deal of information very quickly. “Ronan.” She hugs me first, the hug of a sibling who is genuinely glad to see you.
Then she turns to Sage and holds out both hands and says, “I’ve heard a great deal about you. All of it good, and the good bits were told to me by a man who doesn’t exaggerate. You must be extraordinary.”
Sage, who has been mildly nervous about this meeting since Cork airport, looks at Mary and says, “He told me you’d be terrifying. He was right.”
Mary laughs a full, delighted laugh and takes her by the arm to bring her inside, and that is that.
I stand at the front door with Brigid and the triple stroller and the considerable luggage of three four-month-old babies, and I listen to Mary and Sage talking in the hallway, and I feel something so uncomplicated it takes me a moment to name it.
Pride. I feel proud. Of her, of us, of this life I did not expect.
Liam is here, and his family, and various cousins and their children, and the house fills through the evening with the particular warm chaos of a large Irish family assembling for a celebration.
Sage moves through it with the particular quality I have always loved in her.
She is present, direct, and interested. She talks to Liam about the labs without knowing he’s impressed that she knows what she’s talking about.
She sits on the floor with the cousins’ children and teaches them something involving hand movements that Morrigan Pearl then demonstrates from her spot in the middle of the rug, which earns the kind of laughter that fills a room.
She’s excited by the reaction, and I fear she might become a performer.
Myrna finds me at one point and stands beside me, watching Sage with the evaluating attention of an artist assessing something she wants to paint. “She’s good with people.”
“Yes,” I agree.
Myrna nods once. This is, from Myrna, a complete endorsement. I accept it as such.
Orla appears on my other side. “She already knew about Myrna’s commission that went sideways.”
Myrna pipes up. “So what?”
“You never tell anyone about your commissions that go badly,” Orla points out. “Only the good stuff, like you’re trying to be your own marketing firm.”
A trademark Myrna eye roll. “Whatever. She’s easy to talk to.”
Orla concedes the point. “Aye. But you barely even tell me about them.”
“I know.”
“That’s significant.”
Myrna nods. “She’s significant, don’t you think?”
I do.
Sage is going to be here, in this house, in this family, for the rest of my life.
This is not a hope or a plan. It is simply a fact I can see clearly from where I’m standing.
As clearly as I see any clinical finding I am confident in, as clearly as I see anything which I have decided to stop doubting.
Connor finds me at the sideboard later in the evening, refilling his water glass. He looks well. Better than well. He looks like a man who has been sleeping properly and eating properly and is present in his own body in a way he wasn’t the last time I saw him. “The kids are incredible.”
“They are,” I agree.
He’s quiet for a moment. He’s watching Sage across the room, where she’s sitting with Myrna and Orla on the floor with Morrigan Pearl between them, and there’s something in his face that is not quite wistfulness but is in the vicinity of it. “She looks happy.”
“She is,” I say. And then, because he deserves it, “Thank you. For what you said to me. That night at my flat. About looking after her.”
He looks at me. “Did I do that?”
“You did.”
He nods. “Good.” A pause. “She deserves someone who shows up.”
“She does,” I say. “I intend to. Every day.”
He looks at me for another moment, and I see in his face the complicated, imperfect, ongoing negotiation of a young man who is figuring out who he is in relation to the people he loves.
I know this process. I did it badly for years. I hope he does it better than I did.
“Buy me a pint tomorrow,” he says. “Before the parade.”
“I’ll buy you a pint.”
He goes back to Leigh, who is talking to Mary with the careful attention of someone on good behavior and doing reasonably well at it. I watch them for a moment, and then I go back to my family.
Dinner is tense, given who is at the tables. But Sage handles it with more grace than I expected, and Leigh and Connor keep their conversations limited to the cousins, for the most part.
After dinner, I pull Mary aside in the kitchen. “Well?” I say.
She gives me the look that means she knows I’m asking something I already know the answer to.
“She’s wonderful. She’s exactly right for you.
The children are extraordinary. And you,” she adds, with the particular affectionate precision of a sister who has known you your whole life, “look like a man who has finally stopped running his life like a hospital department.”
I consider this. “Is that good?”
“It’s the best you’ve looked in twenty years. Since before Aoifa died, actually. I’m going to say that once and then we won’t talk about it further.”
I look at her. Mary, who has held a great deal for me over the course of fifty-two years of siblinghood, quietly and without being asked and without ever requiring acknowledgment. “Thank you.”
“Don’t be sentimental,” she says, and goes to refill her wine, and that is that.
Myrna, who has been sketching quietly in the corner as she does everywhere, turns her notebook around.
She has drawn all three of the babies in a few swift lines.
Unmistakably them, Fiona Rose’s particular serenity and Morrigan Pearl’s frowning intensity and Liam Cedric’s watchful patience all caught in something economical and entirely true. “For the nursery.”
Sage looks at it for a long moment. Then she says, “Myrna—”
“Don’t,” Myrna says, which is her way of accepting gratitude without having to sit in it.
Orla takes countless photographs of the next twenty minutes. They will be extraordinary, all forty-seven of them, and Sage and I will argue in the best possible way about which ones to print.
“There you are,” Sage says quietly.
I reach for her hand. She takes it. Outside, the bay is silver and the town is starting its parade preparations and it is Saint Patrick’s Day in Galway. Where all of this began. My family has grown by leaps and bounds, and rarely have I been happier.
I look at Sage. Her hair catches the morning light, and I stop breathing for a moment.
She tilts her head. “You okay?”
“Very.”
The End.