Epilogue
Cormac
Late spring in Clover Ridge smells like wet earth and lilac, and the town threw me a party that Nadia catered and Gabriel officiated with a toast that will, I suspect, follow me for the rest of my natural life.
"To Cormac Vale," he announced, glass raised, entirely too pleased with himself, "the only man in this town's history to RSVP to his own funeral two years late.
Let the record show it remains, to date, the most dramatic entrance this club has ever witnessed, and we have witnessed Diesel try to propose during a bar fight. "
The whole clubhouse roared. Diesel threw a napkin at him.
I laughed until my ribs hurt, standing in the middle of the family that buried me and welcomed me back in the same room, and I thought, not for the first time, that I hadn't earned a single bit of this and intended to spend the rest of my life trying anyway.
They called me Ghost for a decade before any of this happened — a road name earned young, for reasons that had nothing to do with dying and everything to do with a habit of showing up quiet when nobody expected me.
Now it's a joke instead of a wound. Boone toasted me with it at the party, raising his glass and declaring, with a completely straight face, that I was the only member of the club who'd taken his road name a little too literally, and I let it land, let it be funny, because that's what healing looks like sometimes — letting the thing that used to be unbearable become something you can laugh about at a party.
The old headstone came down off Willow Street on a Tuesday morning, and I kept it. It's propped in the garage now, against the wall by my toolbox, and I wrote on a strip of masking tape stuck across the bottom: MY FIRST DRAFT. Josie thinks it's morbid. I think it's the funniest thing I own.
We renewed our vows in the community garden in early June, not because the first ones had expired — I don't believe vows expire, I believe mine held through two years of silence and a locked room and a leash I never once stopped fighting inside my own head — but because we wanted to choose each other again, on purpose, in the daylight, with the whole loud family watching.
Reverend Thomas officiated, and near the end of the ceremony he paused, looked out at the assembled club in their leather and their tears, and said, with real warmth, "I've officiated a great many things in this town.
I can say with confidence this is the only resurrection I've ever presided over that came with a full bar afterward. "
The whole garden laughed. Josie cried and laughed at the same time, which I've learned, over these months, is simply the weather she lives in now, grief and joy sharing the same sky without apologizing to each other, and I've come to think that's not a flaw in her healing. I think it's the whole point of it.
Josie
I stood in the community garden in a dress I chose myself this time, no funeral, no widow's black, sunlight coming warm and gold through the new leaves, and I watched Cormac Vale — road name Ghost, first draft headstone in our garage, the most alive thing I have ever touched — say vows to me for the second time in our lives, and I understood, standing there, that the two years hadn't been erased.
They'd been folded in. Made part of the shape of us instead of a wound we pretended had never happened.
I went to counseling for the delayed grief, the kind that surfaced that Tuesday night on our kitchen floor and kept surfacing, in smaller waves, for months afterward.
Cormac came with me, every session, not because I needed him to but because he told me, plainly, the first time I mentioned it, that we didn't carry things alone anymore, either of us, not ever again, and he meant it enough to sit in a small office once a week and do the harder work of learning how to talk about two years neither of us got to choose.
I expanded the bakery that summer — my own storefront, finally, on Main Street, with my name on the lease and Gerald the sourdough starter enshrined in a place of honor by the front window.
Cormac works the club's legitimate businesses now, and rides again on weekends, the mountains opening up around him the way they used to, and some evenings I stand at my own front window and watch him come up the road on his bike and feel my whole chest go warm and unafraid, which is, itself, its own kind of miracle — that I got to a place where watching him leave doesn't automatically mean bracing for him not to come back.
At the annual spring ride, I climbed on behind him for the first time in three years, arms wrapped around the chest I once watched them lower into the ground, and felt the engine come alive beneath us, and felt him reach back once, briefly, to squeeze my hand where it rested against his ribs, and I thought: this.
This is what I fought for, without even knowing that's what I was doing, every single day of the two years I spent learning to live without him.
I buried a man I loved and learned to live without him, and it was the hardest thing I ever did.
Then he knocked on my door on a Tuesday, and I had to learn something harder: how to love someone I'd already grieved.
How to choose a future I'd stopped believing in.
How to be furious and grateful in the same body, at the same time, without picking one feeling to perform for everyone else's comfort.
He didn't come back to the wife he left.
He came back and fell in love with who I became without him — stronger, sharper, entirely capable of standing on my own two feet — and I fell in love with the man who was brave enough, finally, to let me be angry, let me be whole, and never, ever decide my grief for me again.
They called him Ghost. But riding behind him up the mountain road in the late spring sun, arms tight around the steady, unmistakable, entirely alive beat of his heart, I can tell you with complete certainty: he's the most alive thing in my life.
And this time, we're doing it out loud.