Chapter 40
“Put the telescope down, Lydia,” said Aunt Jane as the two sisters lounged on the deck on Christmas Eve.
“I’m just—”
“Down!”
“You never let me have any fun.”
Lydia pouted as she placed the telescope in her lap but kept her hand on it, ready to pick it up again as soon as Jane left the deck.
“There’s a beautiful yacht out there,” she complained.
“You can look at the yachts.”
Lydia didn’t want to look at the yachts. She wanted to look at Dorian and Lily on the north end of the beach, sitting in the shade of a rock, talking quietly, in their own bubble of present attention and future hopes.
Juliet and Casey were in the kitchen making dinner for everyone.
Fire-Chief-Steve, now Steve-Lydia’s-Boyfriend, was on the jetty talking boats with Charles.
Lizzie and Fitz were out on the water kayaking strongly through a vigorous discussion.
Lizzie’s laughter drifted over the water to the deck like a ringing bell, echoed by an occasional ripple of giggles or squeals from the younger ones up on the back lawn.
Jane sighed and leaned back in her deck chair.
“I love it when we’re all together like this,” she murmured. “Remember when all the children were little, how loud it always was? How quickly the time goes. I wish we could bottle it. Put moments in a bottle. That would be good.”
They lapsed into silence and surveyed the glittering bay before them.
Dorian and Lily had disappeared among the rocks.
Lizzie and Fitz paddled beyond them and around the headland.
Steve and Charles came to some sort of satisfactory conclusion regarding the boats and loped back to their seats on the deck.
Lydia reached for Fire-Chief-Steve’s hand. He took it, smiled at her, and then returned his eyes to the water.
“Better be heading home,” he said.
“I thought you were staying!” said Jane, surprised.
“Nah, my daughter’s here.”
“You go,” urged Lydia. “Go on, see you tomorrow.”
They kissed briefly, softly, then he was gone.
“He’s nice,” Jane mused, and wondered if this one would last.
“It doesn’t matter,” said Lydia, as if answering Jane’s unspoken question.
“What?”
“Whether it, you know, lasts. I don’t need a man to make me happy. Whether it starts, finishes, goes on forever—we’re all just bumbling about in the dark, aren’t we? I mean, they’re so happy now.”
She threw out a gesture to the headland that took in Dorian and Lily and also Lizzie and Fitz. “And now is forever in a way, isn’t it?”
“Who said that?”
“I don’t know. I did.”
As the sun went down, Lily and Dorian strolled along the beach, hand in hand, and marveled at this moment that couldn’t be bottled.
There was no certainty where it would lead.
They might not be together in two years, or five, or ten, but they were together now and there was comfort in yielding to the certainty of constant change and knowing that this feeling of complete devotion would always be part of them.
Whether their future was together or apart, their stories would be forever intertwined.