Epilogue
now
We pull up to Wild Horse Villa almost to the second five years after we last arrived. I lean forward, squinting up at the
terrace I sat on with Laurel on the first day of that trip.
“It looks . . .” I start, trailing off.
“The same?” Everett, in the driver’s seat, finishes for me. I turn to him, smile.
“The same,” I repeat. “It looks the same.”
It hadn’t been Ralph at the front desk, a jarring start to this week here that had me worrying it was some kind of sign until
Everett had reached over on our drive down to the house, settling a warm hand on my knee.
“It’s going to be a good week,” he’d said, and he was right. There was no reason it wouldn’t be. But it felt big, somehow,
all of us gathering like this again. We’d tried and failed to make the trip work for as many summers as we’d missed it before,
and while I knew things were different, while I knew that this place or this trip, even, weren’t what we were made of, it
was still significant. It felt like returning to some time in our lives none of us had seen in a while.
A blur of gauzy white comes barreling out the front door, Laurel’s tanned arms pumping as she hurries across the driveway
toward us.
“Where is she?” she asks as Everett and I climb out of the front seats, completely ignoring us in favor of yanking the back door open and leaning in over the car seat there. “My baby June!” she exclaims as she lifts the wriggling body out, settling June onto her hip. “She’s grown so much.”
“You saw her last week,” I say, laughing as June snuggles her head into Laurel’s neck, one of her favorite places in the world.
“I know, but they grow so fast when they’re this age,” Laurel, who is already planning June’s second birthday, still three
months off, says.
“It’s true,” Everett says from behind me, settling his hands onto my shoulders. I lean back against him, watching as Laurel
walks over to the house, pointing out the flowers in the pots out front to June as she goes.
“I’ve got it!” she calls over her shoulder before they disappear inside. “You two can go now!”
Laurel took to being June’s aunt like she’s taken to most things in her life: quickly and with a zeal that shouldn’t have,
but did, surprise us. It started even before she was born, when she’d come over to the house I’d moved into with Everett two
years prior every day after we shared the news, bringing baby books and supplements she’d read about, special tea once we
were close enough to June’s due date.
We haul our things inside, Gabe and Mia arriving shortly after us, their now three kids spilling into the house behind them.
“How was the drive?” I ask as I hug Gabe hello.
“It was good,” he says, bending to pick up their youngest, who is stretching his arms up toward him.
“It was long,” Mia adds from behind him. “We’re glad that we’re here.”
“When is Davi arriving?” Gabe asks.
“Don’t you mean Davi and—” Laurel starts from where she’s bouncing a laughing June on her lap, and we all whirl on her at the same time.
“Don’t be weird!” we say in unison, the mantra Davi has burned into our brains since he announced a month ago that he’d be
bringing his girlfriend of a year on this trip.
After he didn’t get the promotion he was up for at his firm in New York, Davi started looking for other jobs, burned-out on
how relentless the pace of his work had been. After a year of hunting, he found one in Seattle, which put four of us in the
same time zone again, and all of us a three-hour flight away from each other. The biggest surprise, maybe more to him than
anyone else, was meeting Sydney, who changed his tune about relationships almost overnight. He was happier when we talked,
lighter, in a way I hadn’t really noticed he wasn’t until he suddenly was.
“I’m not being weird,” Laurel says. “It’s just that the man swore he’d never settle down and now here he is, bringing someone on this, our sacred trip?”
“I think it’s already a pretty different kind of trip this year,” Everett says as Gabe and Mia’s twins go hurtling by him,
already deep into some game.
It takes longer to get settled than usual: There are naps and getting more people unpacked and different dinnertimes and very
much not being weird when Davi and Sydney do show up. It’s not until after ten, when all the kids are finally asleep, that we emerge onto the back
deck, one by one, like something called us there.
Everett and I are the first outside, and I curl up against him on one of the wicker couches, rest my head against his shoulder.
“What are you thinking about?” he asks, lips against my hair.
I glance out at the ocean, where the dark of the water and the starry sky meet at the horizon.
I’d thought there were countless nights in my life when I’d looked out at this view, but in reality, there are only a handful.
Flashes of perfect summers I thought needed to be flawlessly re-created for them to mean something.
But what’s happened in the five years since we were last here is better, marked by moments that feel as important as this one.
“Just this life of ours,” I say, tilting my head back to look up at him. Everett smiles, and it’s as good as it was the first
time I saw it, lighting me up from the inside.
At first, because of the structure of our jobs, we were able to work from our respective cities a lot of the time, and so
we set up camp in my apartment and in his house in LA. What used to be two days was now two people, two cities, two homes
that we traveled between.
Two homes, but really only one: each other. We talked about our future and what it would look like, jobs and homes and kids
and places we wanted to visit and things we wanted to do. When I asked Everett where he wanted to be at seventy, his answer
was always the same: With you. It was my answer too, and we asked each other all the time, more often than we should, because I think we both liked hearing
it. A refrain of the promise we made to each other. That we would want this. That we would love each other for as long as
we’ve got. That there was no controlling today or tomorrow or next week, but there was always this—Everett’s hand to hold,
his shoulder to rest my face on in the mornings, conversations in the middle of the night. Us. Not the us I started out with,
but the one I needed.
It still doesn’t mean that everything is wonderful every day.
After all, there is the bad. A few weeks into things, Everett finally called his father, talked to him about the movie, had the hard conversation, and the studio cast him anyway.
His father didn’t turn them down. Hank started to talk about retirement and I had to face the fact that the restaurant would go to someone else, if it stayed a restaurant at all.
But with all of that, there came so much good.
In having to see his father every day, Everett carved out a place for him in his life—small, but there, something healing
in it. My own parents remained the same: hard to connect with, distant, but our door stayed open to them, phone calls scheduled
more regularly especially once June was born.
Because he started to have a little more free time, Hank met Rebecca, an artist who had a place in a small coastal Oregon
town where they started spending more and more of their time.
It meant that I slowly began to let go of San Francisco, that I shifted more and more of my life to Los Angeles, where Everett
was, of course, but also where Laurel and I started to spend more time together again. Where we repaired the broken pieces
of us.
Everett and I turned our home into the thing we’d always wanted: warm, welcoming, a place we always want to return to.
The back door opens and Davi and Sydney come out, settle into chairs across from us. In a few more minutes Gabe emerges, then
Mia, and finally Laurel, completing our little circle as I scoot over to make room for her next to me.
“Is it time?” Gabe asks after a while, all of us sitting in comfortable silence. It doesn’t feel like our last first night
here, when I was so nervous about seeing Everett again, when everything had to go perfectly. Now it feels like people who
have grown up together, who know that no matter how much time passes, we can always come back to this.
“For what?” Davi asks.
“What we’re afraid of, what we’re excited for,” Gabe says. He glances at Mia and Sydney. “It’s tradition.”
“It’s a last-night tradition,” Laurel says. “We’ll get to that part when we’re saying goodbye.”
Gabe nods, agreeing with her, before he asks her how Grace is, the girl Laurel started seeing a few months back. Her first
time dating anyone seriously since Stephen.
I burrow farther into Everett’s side as everyone talks, as laughter floats out into the night and some dormant piece of me
is drawn back to the surface. The girl I was when we first came here, poking her head out to see what’s changed since then.
We never will get to that final tradition. On our last night here, June will be restless and Everett will go upstairs to sleep
with her while Davi and Sydney head into town to meet up with friends who are in the area. I’ll sit in the living room with
Laurel while Gabe and Mia stay outside a little longer, kid-free for a few hours. It will only occur to me that we missed
it when Everett and I are halfway back to Los Angeles the next day.
But it doesn’t matter, I’ll realize. Not really. Maybe we’ll re-create the tradition again, when one or all of us needs to,
maybe it’s gone forever, but that’s kind of the whole point. Things will keep shifting, changing, and we’ll step into each
part of our lives knowing the most important truth. No matter what we’re afraid of or excited for, we all have each other.
In another year, Everett and I will move into a new house when I’m pregnant again, and it will be where we stay, where we
watch the life we’ve made unfurl around us, and I’ll think sometimes about how we almost didn’t have it. How a million things
had to line up for us to be here: Gabe making a friend in middle school, a pact on the beach, breaking it again and again,
falling apart only so we could find our way back to each other. How it made us who we are.
How it all started at a party I wasn’t even supposed to go to.