Epilogue
LEIF
TWO YEARS LATER
Noelle looks like a Christmas angel. Everything about her sparkles: the snowflake earrings dangling from her earlobes; the fancy pin thing in her hair; the ring on her finger.
The necklace she always wears; the clover shining as she turns.
I walk toward her at my usual ambling pace, saying hello to people as I pass but not stopping. I won’t stop until I reach her.
Instrumental versions of the holiday classics emerge from the exceptional sound system in the Elizabeth Brown Theater, as the full house mills around holding cocktail napkins piled with canapés and admiring the displays on the walls and plinths dotted throughout the room.
I wait until the couple Noelle is speaking to excuses themselves, then come up beside her, slipping my hand across the nape of her neck and kissing the top of her head.
“Hey,” she says, angling herself to face me. The smile across her face is so bright my breath hitches.
“You doing okay?” I ask.
“Better than okay. You?”
I glance around at the huge crowd; at Aunt Nora’s documentary playing silently on the huge screen on stage; at the tiny woman in leopard print, flanked by two massive bodyguards, holding court on the far side of the room.
“Honestly? I still can’t believe all this is real.”
Noelle interlocks her hands behind my neck. “Which part? Approaching the end of the inaugural season at the theatre? This exhibit? Or your billionaire Sugar Mama over there?”
I chuckle, my hands pulling my wife closer. “Please never say those words again.”
The proper term for Lillian is benefactor, but truly, she’s been more like a fairy godmother to us.
From paying my hospital and rehab bills, to funding the complete renovation of the theater with state-of-the-art everything and a living space and offices at the back.
As if that wasn’t enough, when I mentioned the Eleanor Cleary story to her offhandedly, she set this event in motion, including hiring a museum curator and his team from the Smithsonian to display everything we had collected over the years.
Lillian has made the past two years completely surreal. But as she reminds me constantly, it’s not for nothing.
“You owe me several books, Mr. Kelly,” is her favorite saying.
She said it to me the second time we met, when she showed up in my hospital room somehow knowing everything about me, including that I’d say yes to her funding the books she wants me to write.
It’s never a threat—she has the same interest in improving the world through expanding our thinking as I do.
But I do owe her, and I intend to deliver.
I’ve been working on those in the apartment upstairs. Lillian keeps telling us there’s a house with our name on it whenever we like, but Noelle insisted we have to draw the line somewhere or she’ll own our firstborn.
Noelle laughs now. “It’s almost time. Did you remember your notes?”
“I did.”
Everyone insisted I do the keynote, even though I didn’t do half as much as anyone else in getting to the bottom of Eleanor’s story, including Noelle.
“Then you have time to kiss me,” she says.
Now, wrapped up in Noelle, the sounds of the party around us fade away as I press my hand across her back, the other one tangling itself in her hair. I wish we were upstairs next to a crackling fire, the box with my mother-in-law’s Christmas cookies at hand.
But that’s only until Noelle’s lips part from mine again and I can breathe.
I need this event as much as everyone else in my family.
“Did you see Marissa and Enzo?” Noelle asks as she straightens my tie.
“Yes. It’s giving me an unreasonable amount of satisfaction seeing that particular dude in love.”
Enzo’s grown up a lot over the past couple of years, the rest of him catching up with that mature business side.
He’s fallen in love and had his heart broken, and finally admitted—at Noelle’s and my wedding last Christmas, no less—that love was in fact real, and that all the guests were witnessing it in me and Noelle.
“First time you’ve been right about love,” I told him afterward.
He hugged me almost as hard as he had when he’d come to see me in the hospital two years ago.
Now, seeing him charm Marissa—a bona fide Broadway star, currently giggling at something he’s said as they stand far too close together next to the chocolate fountain—I grin.
When Noelle got the news her former assistant had gotten a lead role on the hottest show on Broadway, she’d told me tearfully that she finally understood what it was like for her mother. “Seeing someone live your former dream is like an expansion on your own happiness.”
“I’m proud of the little butthead,” I say, turning my attention back to my wife.
“Okay,” Noelle says after another kiss. “You’ve canoodled your way to showtime.”
“That’s a ridiculous word. More canoodling later?”
She gives me that beautiful crooked-toothed smile. “I promise.”
I give her one more for good measure, then make my way through the crowd, patting my pocket to make sure the notecards are in fact still there.
It’s a slow journey, and once again, I have to greet several people along the way.
I don’t mind—the breaks are nice. I’m at least 30% steel rods and disks.
I no longer walk with the cane, but I’m still not fast.
It doesn’t matter. I have nothing to rush to when my love is right beside me.
The music fades out and the crowd hushes as I climb the stairs to the stage. When I reach the podium, I slip my hand in my pocket, then change my mind.
I know what I want to say.
I clear my throat, the sound echoing through the sound system. “Guess it’s on,” I joke, suddenly nervous. This night’s been a long time coming.
But the crowd murmurs with laughter and I find myself relaxing.
“I know many of you have already been to the Elizabeth Brown theatre to see a performance directed by the most talented, beautiful, kind, and loving director ever to grace a theater—”
More laughter.
“But tonight, we’re not here for a play. We’re here to tell the story in words and images of the life and legacy of my great great grandmother, Eleanor Cleary.”
Noelle’s made her way to the front of the crowd, and she stands watching me, her hands clasped under her chin, her expression nearly the same as it had been that day she handed me the photo of the woman wearing my mother’s wedding ring.
A photo taken over a century ago.
I tell the audience the story I’ve told countless others in the past two years; one I’ll never grow tired of.
Now that we had her name, between James’ journals, Nora’s research, Enzo and Eli buttering up their contacts at the Quince Valley Town Hall Archives, and my grandfather John Kelly, we pieced together the rest of the story.
Even before Eleanor was killed, James had managed to make some kind of arrangement to get his sister Beatrice, who’d never married, to adopt baby Clea and bring her back to Quince Valley.
They all kept their distance, but when Eleanor was murdered—perhaps when her husband found out about Clea—James went into hiding.
He’d been wanted for Eleanor’s murder, and lived out his life as a hermit in the woods under a pseudonym, watching and supporting his daughter, who’d been renamed Carolyn, from a distance, without her ever knowing who he was.
Twenty years later, after traveling to London with Noelle’s Grandma Betty, Carolyn married a British soldier.
They’d had a child, who they called Amy.
But given what they did, risk led to tragedy.
Carolyn and her husband were killed within a month of each other—Carolyn in a bomb on the streets of London, her husband in the air over Belgium.
Betty brought Amy back to Quince Valley to be cared for by the very woman who’d raised Carolyn—James’ sister, Beatrice.
After Betty married, she moved several states away for a number of decades, losing touch with Amy and Beatrice over the time apart.
Amy married and had a daughter, who James alluded to in his final diary.
However, he was spared the knowledge that his family was one marked by tragedy: Amy and her husband Eli were killed in a car accident five years after his death.
They left behind their ten-year-old daughter, Shannon.
Bea, still living, adopted the third girl in the line to have lost her mother—her grandniece—and finally passed herself when Shannon was twenty.
Two years later, without any living relatives left in the world, Shannon met John Kelly. Their story broke the generational trauma that plagued the family, and they had five children: Cass, Eli, Griffin, Jude, and Chelsea.
Shannon had a rich, full life, which included purchasing—unbeknownst to her—the very hotel her great grandmother was killed in.
The only item she had from her family line was the ring that had been her mother’s, which had been passed down from her great grandmother, and had been gifted to her by her true love James.
Beatrice insisted Shannon ought not to wear it—everyone who had, had died young. Shannon passed when her and John’s youngest child was twenty. She was young still, but not compared to the women before her.
“Like articles in such publications as the New York Times and the Guardian newspapers wrote,” I tell the crowd as I wrap up, “Eleanor’s story is a remarkable one.
Though her life was marked by tragedy, bringing her story to light sparked a multitude of love stories over many years.
While her story may be over, her legacy lives on. ”
I clear my throat, looking out over the crowd, and seeing only Noelle, now flanked by my family.