Epilogue
Brooke
The house is finished, and it is exactly the house I drew in the dark when I’d given up on ever building it, which is the strangest, most disorienting kind of happiness, living inside a thing you only ever let yourself want in secret.
The kitchen is wide, with counters long enough to actually work at and the double oven I fought Adrian about, because he wanted to buy the twelve-hundred-dollar one and I wanted the reasonable one, and we compromised, which is to say I won.
The reading nook is by the window with the good afternoon light, and there’s a bench built into it with cushions, and I have not sat in it once since we moved in because I have a nine-week-old, but I look at it sometimes, and I know it’s there, waiting, and that’s enough.
Out back the garden is coming up, and there are tomato plants on stakes, my father’s tomatoes, the variety he grew every summer of my childhood, and when they fruit I am going to cook with them and cry about it, and Adrian already knows this and has promised not to say a word when it happens.
And in the nursery, which faces east and fills up with morning exactly the way I designed it to, on the wall beside the crib, there’s a shadow box.
Inside it, mounted with more care than the man who built it has ever given anything, is a lopsided cardboard house with a thumbprint of dried glue on the front step, and beside it, my father’s old drafting pencil, worn down to a stub, the one thing I took when I left, framed now, kept.
Adrian put them there. I found him doing it the day we moved in, standing on a stepladder with a level, making sure a cardboard house he built badly in the worst month of both our lives hung perfectly straight on the wall of the room our daughter sleeps in.
“It’s the first house I ever built you,” he said, when he caught me watching.
“It was terrible. But it was the first one.” And then he hung my dead father’s pencil beside it, so the man who taught me to draw houses could watch over the girl who’s going to grow up in one, and I had to leave the room, because I was not going to cry in front of him twice in one morning.
Her name is Brianna.
She is nine weeks old and she has Adrian’s eyes, that same too-observant dark, already watching everything like she’s deciding whether it meets her standards, and she has, according to every single person who has met her, my stubbornness, which they say like it’s a warning and I take like a compliment.
She does not sleep. She has strong opinions about being put down. She is, objectively, the most beautiful and most tyrannical human being I have ever encountered, and I would set the whole world on fire for her without blinking.
Right now she is being fought over.
“You are holding her wrong,” my mother says.
“I raised a son,” Alani says, not moving Brianna one inch. “I know how to hold a baby.”
“You raised a son thirty-four years ago, the guidance has changed, you’re supposed to support the…”
“Laura. I am supporting the everything. Look at her. She’s asleep. A distressed baby does not sleep. This is a woman holding a baby correctly.”
“She’s asleep because she likes me better.”
“She’s asleep because I have a gift.”
I am watching this from the kitchen, where I am supposed to be resting and am instead eating cold pasta straight from the fridge like a raccoon, and I catch Adrian’s eye across the room, and he is biting the inside of his cheek so hard I can see it, and neither of us says anything, because the two grandmothers have been going at it for an hour and it is the best entertainment we’ve had in weeks.
“They’re going to come to blows,” Adrian murmurs, coming into the kitchen. “Over a sleeping infant. I’ve made peace with it.”
“My money’s on your mom. Mine telegraphs.”
“My money’s also on my mom. I’ve seen her end men twice her size at a dinner table with one sentence.
” He steals a piece of pasta out of my hand, which should be a crime, and leans against the counter beside me, and for a second we just watch our mothers love our daughter competitively across the living room of the house I drew and he built, and I think, not for the first time and not for the last, that I have no idea how I got here from where I was.
Because a year ago I was eating dinner alone at a table set for two, drawing empty chairs.
And now the chairs are full. All of them. There is not a single empty chair in this entire house.
The doorbell rings, and Adrian goes to get it, and I hear the door open and then a silence, a specific loaded silence, and I come around the corner drying my hands and find Edison Ashbourne standing on my doorstep holding a gift bag like it’s a live grenade.
Adrian’s father. Who I have met exactly four times in two years of marriage, all of them cold, all of them brief, a man who told his son that leaving a company to write novels was a nervous breakdown and never once, that I saw, said a kind word to anyone.
“Edison,” I say.
“Brooke.” He clears his throat. He is deeply, visibly uncomfortable, a man who does not know what to do with his own hands in a house full of feeling. “Alani said… That is. I was told there was a baby.”
“There’s a baby,” I agree.
“I brought.” He holds up the bag. “It’s from a shop. Alani picked it, I paid for it, I don’t know what’s in it, I want to be honest about that, I’m not going to pretend I picked out infant clothing.” A pause. “May I. Is it acceptable. To see her.”
And I look at this cold, stiff, closed-off man standing on the porch of the warm house his son helped build, holding a gift he didn’t choose, asking permission to meet his granddaughter, and I understand that even Edison, even Edison, has been rearranged by this, that a baby is a kind of gravity that pulls even the coldest things a little closer, and I step back and open the door wide.
“Come in, Edison,” I say. “Come meet Brianna.”
He comes in. He stands very stiffly in the middle of my living room while Alani, without a word, without asking, places our sleeping daughter into his arms and arranges them for him, because she has apparently decided this is happening.
And Edison Ashbourne, who I have never seen express a single soft thing, looks down at the tiny sleeping face of his granddaughter, and his own face does a complicated, unpracticed thing, like a muscle he’s never used, and he goes very quiet, and after a long moment he says, gruffly, to no one, “She has Adrian’s eyes. ”
“Everyone says that,” I tell him.
“He had those eyes.” Edison doesn’t look up. “When he was small. Before I taught him to stop showing what he felt with them.” And then, so quietly I almost miss it, so quietly I don’t think he means for anyone to hear it, “I hope you do better than I did. Teaching her what to do with them.”
Across the room I watch my husband go still, watch years of cold silence between a father and a son crack open just slightly, just an inch, over a sleeping baby, and I think about how this whole disaster started with people who couldn’t say the true thing out loud, and how it’s ending in a warm house with a hard man finally, clumsily, trying.
Adrian crosses the room and stands beside his father and looks down at his daughter in the old man’s arms, and he doesn’t say anything either, because they don’t have the words yet, that family, they’re only just learning. But he puts his hand on Edison’s shoulder, once, and leaves it there.
It isn’t everything. It isn’t a lifetime repaired in an afternoon.
But it’s an inch, and I have learned, this year, exactly what an inch is worth.
***
By evening the house empties out, one grandparent at a time.
Edison leaves first, stiff and formal, but he pauses at the door and looks back at Brianna asleep in her bassinet for a beat longer than a cold man should, and I catch it, and I don’t say anything, because some things you let a person keep.
Alani goes next, hugging me too tight and whispering that she’s proud of me, of us, of all of it, and then it’s just my mother, who does the dishes I told her to leave, and folds the laundry I told her to leave, and finally, at nine o’clock, lets me walk her to her car.
“He’s good with her,” she says, at the door. “Adrian. He’s up at night. I’ve seen it. He doesn’t hand her off.”
“He’s good with everything now.” I lean against the doorframe. “That’s the part I still can’t get used to. He just, he’s here. All the way here. I keep waiting for the old version to come back and he never does.”
My mother touches my face. “The old version was never the real one, baby. It was just the one that was easier for him. This is who he was under all of it. You didn’t get a new man.
You got the one you married, finally showing up.
” She kisses my cheek. “I’m glad I was wrong to worry.
I worried for twenty years about a man like your father.
I’m glad the story goes different for you. ”
Then she’s gone, and the house is quiet, quiet in the good way now, not the cold empty penthouse way, quiet like a full house resting, and I stand in the front hall of the home I drew and let the silence be soft around me.
Adrian finds me there.
“She’s down,” he says. “Actually down, not fake down. I did the thing your mom showed me with the swaddle. I am, and I say this with total confidence, a swaddle genius.”
“You’re going to jinx it.”
“I’m not going to jinx it, I’ve transcended jinxing, I’m on a different plane now.
” He comes down the hall toward me, and there’s a loose ease in the way he moves that I never saw in two years of marriage, a man at home in his own life, and he stops in front of me and reaches up and tucks my hair behind my ear, and his hand stays against my jaw. “Hi.”
“Hi.”
“We have,” he says, “by my calculation, somewhere between forty minutes and four hours before that tiny dictator wakes up and demands tribute. Do you know what we haven’t done, Brooke, in a truly criminal amount of time?”
“Slept?”
“Besides slept.”