Epilogue Izzy
Epilogue
IZZY
Four years later
I’m in the middle of my essay when my door opens. I don’t look up from the computer screen until arms wrap around my shoulders and a kiss is placed softly on the top of my head. I lean back and see Kate standing over me. She stoops over and kisses my nose.
“One day, it’ll be an axe murderer walking in here because you never lock your door,” she says.
“I’ve got nothing to steal.”
“Uh, I beg to differ.” She gestures around the room at all of my electronic gadgets.
“Damn it. Okay, point taken. But if I lock my door, you won’t be able to pop in and out and annoy me all the time.”
“Hmm, true.” Kate plops down on my bed and grins at me. “Okay, forget what I said. You can continue to risk your life and keep your door unlocked so I can come in and bug you whenever I want.”
I save my document and get up, stretch my arms over my head.
For a moment, I’m distracted by the view before me.
My dorm room is on the twelfth floor, and from my window, I can see the entirety of the UC Berkeley campus.
It is so beautiful that even now, well into my second semester here, the sight of it sometimes still catches my breath.
And today, of all days, I’m more sentimental than ever.
When I look out onto campus, I imagine I can see Nainai strolling down the rolling hills, books in the crook of her arm, her thoughts on Ellery.
“You ready to go?” Kate says. Her voice is gentle.
I tear my eyes away from the window and smile at her. “Yeah.” I pick up the urn that contains Nainai’s ashes and place it carefully in my backpack. “Let’s go.”
Kate and I hold hands and leave my room.
It’s so easy to hold her hand. So natural.
Our fingers fit perfectly, as though our hands were designed with each other’s in mind.
We talk about our classes as we walk down the hallway to the elevators.
Kate is premed. I’m still undecided, but I love hearing all about her classes, and for whatever reason, she finds my random classes fascinating.
We take her car to the beach, and I laugh when Kate drives with her knees during a quiet stretch.
My god, I think. Nainai, if you could see this now.
She would crack the hell up, then she’d tell us to stop being idiots and to drive safe.
The beach is deserted at this time of year. The Bay Area’s beaches are pretty poor year-round, actually. The water is cold and gray, and the sand is rocky. Still, Nainai said in her will that she just wants to be spread in Californian waters—doesn’t matter which end of California—so here we are.
I stand with my feet in the freezing waves and stare out at the vast ocean.
The waves crash and roar, and I hug the urn to my chest, thinking of the time that Nainai waited outside of my window in the dark so that she could tell me about the love of her life, all because she wanted me to be true to myself.
I think about where I am, her alma mater, and I think about who I’m with, and I smile through my tears, because I have never felt so free in my life.
She made this possible. I open the urn and tip its contents into the water.
The ashes tumble out and fly into the wind, whipping away from the shore as though they couldn’t wait to fly.
I watch them until the last speck is gone.
“Hey,” Kate says, placing an arm around my shoulders. “You okay?”
“Yeah, actually.”
And I am. I let my head rest on Kate’s shoulder, and I know she’s wondering if I’m really okay, but it’s so hard to explain to her what I know. In the end, I decide to keep it to myself. I don’t even really know how to describe it. A dream? A memory? A glimpse?
But here it is.
The day that Nainai passed away, peacefully in her bed back in Jakarta, I knew she was gone before my mom even called me. Because that same night, as I slept, I had the most vivid dream of my life, so real and richly detailed it feels wrong to call it a dream. More like a vision.
In it, I saw Nainai as a young woman in her twenties, beautiful and shining with vitality and life. She smiled at me before walking across a bridge made of magnolia flowers. A voice said, “Magnolia Chen. She’s been waiting for you.”
A beatific smile lit up Nainai’s face. “She has?” Then she spotted the tall figure in the distance and started to run toward her. When she was a couple of paces away, she lunged, and the figure caught her and swung her. She said, breathless with wonderment, “You waited for me.”
And Ellery, her blond hair wild around her face, her eyes the same incandescent blue I’d imagined, replied, “Always, Tulip.”
Arms around each other’s waists, they faded into the air. After a lifetime of waiting, Nainai is finally reunited with Ellery, together the way they have always wanted to be.
And that is why I do not grieve Nainai’s death.
That is why, as I bury my face in Kate’s neck, I’m smiling through my tears.
I don’t know if Kate is the love of my life.
As Nainai said, it’s a tragedy to meet the love of your life too young.
It doesn’t matter, because whoever I fall in love with, I know I’ll fight like hell to be with them.
Nainai and Grandma have paved the way for me to have the life I want to have, and I won’t let their sacrifice go to waste.
As Kate and I walk back to the car, I turn and give the ocean one last look. Maybe it’s just my imagination, but I swear I catch a glimpse of two figures in the water in a tight embrace, right before the ocean swallows them from sight.