Epilogue
MELODY
One Year Later
The orchard was in early bloom.
Melody stood at the kitchen window in a gray t-shirt of Alexander's that no longer quite closed around her middle and a pair of his running shorts she had claimed the summer before and never given back.
She watched the morning light move slowly across the tops of the apple trees the way it had been moving across the tops of apple trees since before her husband's family had ever heard of the place.
The trees were not the Winters orchard. The trees had come with the land.
The trees predated everyone, and would outlast everyone, and Melody liked them for it.
It was a Saturday morning. The light in the kitchen was the pale green light of a country morning before the day had made up its mind what it was going to be, the kettle on the stove was just beginning to click itself toward a whistle, and on the windowsill in front of her there was her pothos plant.
It had gotten enormous. Its vines trailed down the front of the cabinet under the sink and curled along the baseboard and had, over the last several months, developed a stubborn leafy confidence.
Melody laid her hand flat on the small curve of her stomach under the soft worn cotton of Alexander's t-shirt, and the curve moved, very slightly, against her palm.
"Good morning," she said quietly to her daughter.
Her daughter, who had been kicking for about a week now, kicked once in response.
Melody had been told by everyone who had ever been pregnant that the kicking was not a response to anything, that it was just the baby doing her own unrelated business at her own unrelated schedule, but Melody had decided early on that she was going to take every single kick as a response whether or not it was one.
Her daughter, she had explained to Alexander one night in bed, was going to be raised by two parents who assumed she was listening even when she was not. It was the opposite of how he had been raised. It was the opposite of how she had been raised too, in a different way.
The kettle began to whistle.
Melody turned off the gas and poured the water into the small chipped mug on the counter — the one from the farm stand in Hudson, the one he had mentioned in the first of the Reasons I Love You texts — and dropped a teabag in.
She watched the water go brown the way it went brown when you were not hurrying.
She did not rush mornings anymore. Mornings had become the part of the day that belonged to her.
Alexander had made structural changes, the first of which had been you get to wake up before me, and you get to have the kitchen to yourself, and you get the first cup of whatever you want to drink in silence, and I will come down when you are ready for me to come down, not before.
It was the kind of arrangement she had not known she wanted until he had offered it.
Melody had found out about the baby in the small upstairs bathroom with the door closed and the afternoon light coming in gray through the frosted window.
She had been late by ten days. She had not said anything to Alexander because she had not wanted to say the words out loud until she was sure, and because some small private part of her had understood that the saying of the words was going to change the shape of their life in a way that could not be un-changed, and she had wanted to hold the not-yet-changed version of it in her hands for one more afternoon before she let it go.
The test had taken two minutes. She had sat on the edge of the bathtub with her hands on her knees and watched the small window on the plastic stick fill in, and when the second line appeared she had put her hand over her mouth and sat there for a long time without moving, because her body had understood before her brain had caught up that the second line was not just a line.
It was a person. It was a person she and Alexander had made.
She had told him that evening. He had been in the kitchen, making pasta — badly, the way he always made pasta, with too much water and not enough salt, one of the domestic incompetencies she had come to love about him.
She had come down the stairs with the test in her hand and stood in the doorway of the kitchen.
He had turned around with a wooden spoon in one hand and a look on his face that said I am concentrating very hard on not ruining dinner, and she had held up the test without saying anything.
He had looked at it.
He had looked at her.
He had set the wooden spoon down on the counter, very carefully, as if the spoon were suddenly the most fragile object in the house. He had crossed the kitchen and taken her face in both hands and looked at her for a long time without speaking.
"Melody."
He had pulled her against his chest so hard she had laughed into the front of his shirt, and she had felt his arms lock around her.
He had cried. She had cried. The pasta had boiled over.
Neither of them had noticed for a long time.
When they had noticed, they had laughed, and the laughing had turned into more crying, and the crying had turned into him kneeling on the kitchen floor with his forehead against her stomach saying things she could not hear because his mouth was against her shirt.
They had eaten cereal for dinner that night. She had not minded.
Catherine and Alexander were now speaking again, and their relationship had deepened.
Melody and Catherine had even tentatively started a relationship.
It had not been easy. There had been awkward silences, and a few sentences in the first few months that had caught Melody wrong and that Catherine had, to her credit, corrected herself on before Melody had even had to point them out.
Twice, Catherine had sent a small handwritten note afterward that had said only I caught that one after I said it, I am sorry.
Catherine was coming up to the upstate house next weekend to see the nursery, and Melody had found herself, the day before, cleaning the guest room and putting fresh linens on the bed the way you did when a person you wanted to be comfortable was coming to stay.
She had understood, smoothing the top sheet flat, that at some point in the last several months without her noticing, wanting Catherine to be comfortable had quietly become a real thing.
Upstairs, the floorboards creaked.
The bedroom above the kitchen had a loose board near the bed that Alexander had been meaning to fix for a year and had never gotten around to fixing, because Melody had told him not to.
She liked the creak. The creak was the small reliable announcement that her husband was awake, and it had come to be one of her favorite sounds in the world.
She heard him move across the floor. She heard him come down the hall. She heard his bare feet on the wooden stairs.
She smiled into the steam of her tea.
"Melody?"
His voice, from the doorway behind her. She turned in the doorway and looked at her husband.
He was in the soft white t-shirt he slept in and a pair of worn pajama pants that had seen better seasons, slung low on his hips to reveal those enviable abs of his.
His hair was sticking up at the back the way it always stuck up in the mornings because he slept on his stomach like a child, and the dark smudge along his jaw was a two-day-stubble shadow.
His eyes when they landed on her did the thing they now did every morning when they landed on her: a quiet gladness.
He looked at her as if looking at her was the small daily work of his life that he had never, now, been able to convince himself he could take for granted.
"There you are," she said.
He crossed the kitchen in three strides and put one hand on her face, the other on the curve of her belly and he leaned his forehead against hers.”
Good morning, Mrs. Winters."
"Good morning."
His thumb moved on her stomach. The baby kicked, once, underneath it.
"She's saying good morning to you."
"She's saying I am awake and I would like breakfast," Melody said. "She is a very practical woman."
"She takes after her mother."
"She takes after her mother's sister, who is shameless about breakfast."
"Angelica's coming up this afternoon?"
"Three o'clock. She's bringing the pie she told you about."
"Good." He kissed her, slow and soft, a good-morning kiss that did not have anywhere urgent to be. When he drew back his hand was still on her belly.
"You’ve been up a while."
"Since six."
"Orchard watching."
"Orchard watching."
"Anything happen?”
"The trees are still there."
"Reassuring."
He reached past her to the kettle on the stove and put his hand on the side of it to check — still warm — and began to make himself a cup. He did it in one of the cheap blue Cobble Hill tumblers, because the cheap blue Cobble Hill tumblers lived in the upstate house now.
They had migrated up from the city over the course of the winter, one at a time, without any of them ever having a conversation about it.
The crystal wedding-present glasses were still in the back of a cabinet in the city apartment, which was the apartment they now used one weekend a month.
Alexander had cut his hours at the company, had stopped attending the gala circuit entirely, had politely declined every event in Genevieve Langley's orbit, had — without ever once making it a public gesture — rearranged the whole public shape of his life around the fact that his wife was happier upstate in a t-shirt and jeans than she had ever been on Fifth Avenue in silk.
The small daily geometry of their life had been quietly rebuilt around a kitchen window, an orchard, a pothos shelf and a photograph of her on a beach in Greece.
The rebuilding was the marriage she had come back to, and the marriage she had come back to was the marriage she had thought she was signing up for the first time around and had not quite gotten.
She had gotten it now.
Alexander finished making his coffee and turned around with the tumbler in his hand and looked at her again — his wife, in his t-shirt, with his daughter in her belly, in the doorway of their kitchen on a Saturday morning with the orchard in bloom outside the window — and his face did the quiet gladness thing.
Outside, a blackbird landed on the nearest apple tree and shook pale petals off the branch in a small soft shower. The pothos on the windowsill caught the morning light in four different shades of green. Her gaze caught the framed photograph from Greece.
She had taken it with her out of the apartment the morning after she had come home, in the small silver frame he had put on the entry console while she was at her sister's, and she had brought it upstate the next weekend and had not been sure, at first, where to put it.
She had tried the bedroom. She had tried the dresser in the spare room.
She had tried the bookshelf in the living room. None of them had been right.
The photograph had wanted to be in the kitchen, on the windowsill, where she could look at it in the mornings when she was drinking her tea and watching the orchard, because the woman in the photograph — the woman on the beach in Greece in a white shirt of his with her head thrown back in a laugh — was the woman Melody now saw in the bathroom mirror every morning.
The gap had closed. The two of them had become the same woman again. The photograph was no longer a relic of a person she had lost, but a record of a person she had gone back to being, with the man who loved and trusted her with his whole heart at her side.