Epilogue
Alex, The Bellamare Estate
Seal Harbor, Eight Months Later
Thirty-four years old. Lying on the long couch in the living room with my hand on my stomach because the baby has been kicking for forty minutes. The window is open. The water is doing what the water does in June, which is more or less nothing, slowly.
Matteo is at the dining table working on a structural problem with the fort, which has been on the table since October and which now occupies most of it.
Elena is on the floor with paper and crayons making, by her own description, "a card to put on the baby when the baby gets here so the baby will know." What the baby will know is unspecified.
Max with the kitchen staff and is in the kitchen, making something he has not asked me about and which from the smell involves butter and rosemary. He has been doing this for almost nine months. He has read four books on pregnancy. He has annotated three of them. The fourth he gave to Renata.
The luggage is ready by the foyer.
My eyes are closed for a moment.
"Mom." Matteo, from the dining table. "Where do you want the new wing?"
"Whichever side gets the most light."
"The south side, then."
"Yes."
"The south side faces the water."
"Yes, it does."
He nods. He turns back to the fort. He begins to extend the south wing, which has now been extended four times since the original construction and which is starting, in its scale and ambition, to resemble a place where everyone fits.
Elena holds up the card.
"Mommy."
"Yes, sweetheart."
"Look."
Looking. The card is a yellow square of construction paper with four figures in crayon, one of them notably round in the middle, and a fifth figure that is much smaller and is being held by the round one. Above all of this is a sun. The sun has eyes.
"The baby is going to know everything," I tell her.
Max comes in from the kitchen with two glasses of water. He sets one on the side table next to me. He sits on the floor next to Elena and looks at the card. He puts his hand on top of my hand on my stomach.
The baby kicks.
Max’s eyebrows go up, just slightly, the way they do when something he was expecting nevertheless arrives.
"Yes," he says, to the baby.
"Yes," says Elena.
"Yes," says Matteo, from the dining table, without looking up.
And then, beneath my hand, beneath his, something else. Not a kick. A quiet shift, the way my body has done because my body has known this timing for nine months.
I do not move. The window is still open. The water outside is still doing what the water does in June. Elena is still holding her card up to the sun. Matteo is still extending the south wing of the fort.
Max is looking at me. He has been looking at me for a moment already, the way he looks when he has registered something before I have said it. He waits.
I open my eyes.
“Max, it’s time.”