Epilogue
BIRDIE
“Caro says thank you for letting her help with the invitations,” says Zenny while Lali presses his face into her stomach. (She’s just told him no regarding a second slice of cake.) “She’s been telling everyone who will listen that the mayor has seen her art.”
Caro drew the borders of our wedding invitations and then a picture of a wedding cake for the reception card, and Ry and I paid her so we could have the honor of being her first ever commissions.
I find my oldest now-niece on the dance floor with Amber’s daughter Luna. They’re giggling at Sean, who is surrounded by kids wanting a turn being flung into the air or tossed to Aiden, who’s waiting a few feet away with his arms up like a wide receiver.
“She did an amazing job,” I say, hoping I can be heard over the music and the fountain in the indoor courtyard where we’re having our reception. “She’s got an incredible gift.”
Zenny is rubbing Lali’s head as she smiles at Caro now showing Luna how to do some viral dance. “She does. I hope she finds ways to share it, like you do.”
A different version of Birdie Cooper—the version who hasn’t spent the last year living with her devil—might have answered with automatic self-deprecation, might have murmured that she didn’t know if she was all that good at sharing, that she maybe didn’t have that much to share to begin with.
But instead, all I feel is a tranquility, a brightness like a spring morning, and gratitude.
“I don’t know if I’ve ever thanked you for suggesting that I consider ways of teaching again.
It’s so much easier helping smaller groups and doing it without the pressure of grades.
And I—” A soft emotion catches in my throat, and I swallow.
“I used to think that the best thing a person could be was a person who didn’t need anyone, who didn’t need any help.
And until I was entirely self-sufficient, who was I to help someone else?
How could I approach people I didn’t know and act as if I had something to offer when my own life was so poor in every way?
It felt dishonest…and…and narcissistic even.
It felt like anything I offered would be as flawed as I am. But helping has helped me. Somehow.”
Zenny smiles over at me. The early evening sun drifting in through the glass ceiling catches the copper in her dark eyes.
“I told you it was magic, didn’t I? Like loaves and fishes.
It’s why I didn’t want to join a cloistered order when I was younger.
I understand the appeal, but it’s not how I’m wired, and it’s not what I see beckoning to us in the life of Jesus.
I grew up in a family that believed we are strongest together, as a whole, and that whatever our vocations were as adults, they would be about bringing wholeness to the world around us.
I grew up knowing that wholeness has a way of spreading out from itself, that it breathes itself back into you when you cultivate it—that your work will work on you.
And that you will meet God every day for the rest of your life in it. ”
I grew up differently than Zenny, because I grew up thinking the example of Jesus wasn’t his life but his death—that suffering and sacrifice were what made a holy heart—but she’s right.
Father Brady too, whose parish Ry and I now belong to and who frequently teaches something similar in his homilies and small groups.
Perhaps if my grandparents and my father had lived, if they’d been there to care for my mother and Busy along with me, perhaps if my world hadn’t grown cold and dark and bitter, I would have learned that suffering is a hollow gift compared to wholeness and love.
I would have learned that Paul was right when he said that without love, we are nothing, we gain nothing, no matter how holy we are otherwise.
“That’s a lovely way to think about it,” I tell her. “That wholeness breathes itself back into you. I do feel more whole. Fuller too.”
Even after selling what was left of the farm, all I felt was…completion. Like the hill and the creek and the trees knew what I knew: that it was time for them to belong to someone else.
For some people, a family home is a gift, a well that’s been filled with love and comfort for so long that the walls practically whisper it back to you, but those weren’t the whispers in my walls. My family home was no gift.
Sometimes I wonder if the storm did me a bittersweet favor, making it impossible to salvage a life in that place and forcing me to admit that home was the warehouse that had felt more like home in a day than the farm had in the last twenty years.
Home was where I slept deeply and enough, where there was a cat and magic waffles and as much wood as I wanted and where loneliness starved in the sunlight and against the solid heat of Ryan Bell’s chest.
“Okay, baby, come here.” Zenny sits down in a chair next to us and hoists a sniffling Lali into her arms.
I sit too, smoothing my skirt. Ry, naturally, would have bought me a dress covered in palladium spangles and diamonds if given the chance, but I’d wanted to wear what my mother wore when she married my father.
A white wedding suit with a skirt that hits just below the knee, with a notched collar on the jacket and Dad’s initials secretly embroidered by Mom on the inside lapel.
She’d told us it was so he’d be close to her heart that day, from before she even put on her veil.
Busy cried when she saw it on the hanger in the dressing room. And she was blotting tears with the back of her hand as she walked me down the aisle.
“The statues look incredible inside the church, by the way,” Zenny says as she rocks her son in her lap. “Even if I don’t know how I feel about seeing Ryan’s hip bones when I’m trying to pray.”
We just finished moving the three-piece Golgotha set to Father Bradys’s church, replacing the crucifix he had behind the altar before.
And while I had given Ry a beard as I’d sculpted, there’s no escaping it’s him—and his hips, partially swathed as they are in carved fabric.
The most telling feature, however, isn’t his hair or his mouth or the cluster of moles on his ribs but the look on his face.
I chiseled Christ with the same expression that my husband wears whenever he looks at me.
“Thank you,” I reply. “I never thought I’d see my work in a church building again. It’s wonderful and a little strange to see them in the kind of space they’re meant for.”
Zenny knows more now about how Ry and I met, so she knows why it’s been such a long time since I’ve seen my work in a church. “Ryan says there are more installations coming up?”
I smile down at my lap. My carver’s hands, scarred and nicked, one of them now with a wedding ring.
Ry chose a ruby instead of a diamond. A pomegranate seed changed into glittering permanence.
“Yes. An Episcopal church in the city and a Lutheran retreat center in Minnesota. And your old order, actually, has requested a smaller piece of Jesus as a shepherd that I’ll deliver in a few months.
The coming exhibition too might mean some sales. ”
“Private collectors. Tainted money,” she teases.
“I blame Ry and Elijah then,” I say, laughing a little.
“They talked me into it. Elijah has the connections to the local art scene, and Ry thought the response to the Lucifer in front of city hall was a sign that people might enjoy seeing more from me. And they both promised they’d do all the talking with the guests. ”
“They’re good at that,” Zenny remarks, looking at the corner of the courtyard where Ry and her brother are chatting with a group that includes the mayor and the owner of a local pizza chain.
“They are,” I murmur. Something tumbles over in my chest, a skip, a spill of joy, as I look at my husband standing there, magnetic and beautiful, an angel in a vintage suit.
The tailored shoulders and narrow waist of the jacket, the wide legs of the trousers and the gleaming shoes—stylish and yet so effortlessly him, like he’s stepped out of time.
He’s got one of those gorgeous grins on as he bends his head to listen to someone speak, and everyone is eager for his attention, for that charm to be pinned on them.
If they only knew what’s under all that classic fashion, that beguiling smile.
A lurid and villainous mind, a soul filled with unending want.
Want that only I can slake. Villainy that begins and ends with me.
As if he knows I’m thinking of him, his eyes find mine across the courtyard. Hunger flashes over his face, fast and hot, before he regains control and looks back at the person talking to him.
“He’ll be mayor one day if he wants the job,” Zenny says, shaking her head and sliding a plate of fruit closer to her on the table and offering it to Lali, who takes a strawberry with an air of wounded surrender.
“The hype has been steady for a couple of years now, and the shelter is getting so much good press. All he has to do is actually start working toward it.”
“He wants to,” I say, thinking of all that imagination, that clarity, that keen sense of justice.
Who would know better about justice, after all, than a wicked man?
“But he’s told me he’s not interested in anything that would worsen my anxiety.
I’m more comfortable with the possibility of being perceived than I was a year ago, and I think he’d be so good at it, so I want him to do it.
I’ll adopt the role of the mysterious artist wife and hide from it as much as possible when the time comes, though. ”
Ry says something to Elijah and then to the mayor, then slips out of the group. He walks toward me through the courtyard, his smile changing the slightest bit as he does, getting just a little sharper. The smile of someone who might say I like transgression and then feed you waffles after.