Epilogue #2
He kept thinking about that, the way he’d keep pressing a bruise to check it was real.
Every winter for years he’d let himself sink into stone in mid-December, the way his people did.
Last year he’d gone under intending to stay that way for six weeks.
He’d come up two weeks early, and not known why for eight months.
This year there had been no reason to sleep through the dark at all.
There’d been a tree Toby picked out that scraped the drawing-room ceiling.
There’d been Maris’s terrible, joyous attempt at his mother’s mince pies.
There’d been a boy waking him at dawn with a small body climbing onto the bed to announce the morning.
He’d stayed awake for all of it, every short grey day, and it had been the first winter in almost twenty years he hadn’t wanted to miss.
The Pinckneys had come. They had stayed four days at the Inn, as invited, and it had been exactly as difficult as he expected for about a day and a half. Then Toby had called him Dad across the breakfast table, in front of both of them, without looking up from his toast.
He had watched Cornelia Pinckney take it.
She set her cup down, but she didn’t correct the boy.
She didn’t look at her husband, and she didn’t leave the room.
She asked Toby whether he would show her the greenhouses, and then she went out in her good coat and stood in wet gravel for forty minutes while a five-year-old explained propagation to her.
On the last evening she found him alone in the hall.
She told him that Jefferson had been a kind boy and a hopeless gardener, and that she was glad Toby was learning to garden.
It was not forgiveness and it was not permission.
He had understood it to be the most she had.
Maris had cried in the pantry for ten minutes afterwards and then come out and asked what everybody wanted for supper.
“You look like you’re doing arithmetic,” Maris said as he reached the steps.
She had her chin on her knees and her hazel eyes were bright.
There was dirt worked permanently into the creases of her knuckles that no amount of festival scrubbing would ever get out.
He loved her past the point of language.
“Flora took credit for the weather.”
“Flora would take credit for the tides.” She patted the warm stone beside her, and he folded himself down onto the step next to her—his body twice the width of hers.
She leaned into his side without ceremony, and he curled a wing around her.
“It went well. Did it go well? I think it went well. Ermengarde bought out the flat of hellebores, and Elara wants to do something next year with cakes and plants, which is either brilliant or a disaster waiting to happen—”
“It went well.”
“—and three separate people asked me to come and fix their gardens after seeing this one, which is… Garrick, that’s word of mouth.
That’s something you can’t buy. Junie’s going to have to go full-time by June.
” She said it and laughed disbelievingly, her hand on his knee.
“Full-time. I hired a person and now she needs to be full-time. Do you know what my mother-in-law would say about that?”
“No.”
“Neither do I. I never asked her. She decided at Christmas that the gardens are ‘characterful,’ which from Cornelia is roughly a Nobel Prize.” She grinned up at him.
“And you terrified her, you know. Back in November. When you said no like that in front of Lawton. No one has ever been that blunt around her before.”
“Good.”
“Garrick.”
“I’m content she’s frightened of me. It’s the correct relationship.
” He watched Toby out on the grass, up on his knees now, cupping something between careful hands and carrying it with immense gravity towards the flower bed to release it.
“She held a place at a school for him. A house near them. A trust released early. I could have written the check for all of it before breakfast and never felt it.” He’d told her this once before, in the dark, the same night she’d told him she was staying.
He was saying it now, in the golden light, with their son releasing a beetle into the marigolds, because it meant something that the darkness hadn’t.
“It was a good offer. I’ve never once in my life let a good offer go by before. ”
“You didn’t let this one go by. I did.”
“You let it go by. And then you invited them for Christmas anyway.” He turned his head to look at her. “That was better than anything I’d have done. I’d have paid them to go away. You made them want to come back.”
She went a little pink, which he enjoyed immensely and intended to keep causing for a great many years to come. “It wasn’t strategy.”
“I know. That’s why it worked.”
Toby came pounding back up the grass, coat grass-stained at the elbows exactly as predicted, and flung himself down on the step below them.
He was breathless with the excitement of a child who has discovered a wonder.
“There’s a beetle that’s a ladybug but it’s black with red spots instead of red with black spots.
It’s backwards. Aidan says it’s still a ladybug, it’s just a different one.
Can we look it up? Is there a book? There’s got to be a book. ”
“There’s a book,” he said. “In the library. Third case, lower shelf.”
“Can I—”
“After supper. Wash the beetle off your hands first.”
“It’s not on my hands, I let it go, I’m not a barbarian—” Toby paused, having clearly acquired the word recently and being delighted with it.
Then his face changed, changing from beetle-outrage to something else, and he looked up at his mother with an expression Garrick had learned to watch for.
It was the look Toby got when something was too big for him to hold any longer.
“Are we going to tell him now? You said after everybody left.”
She didn’t answer the boy. She looked at Garrick instead, and there was something in her eyes that he couldn’t read. That almost never happened anymore. He could read her now the way he read stone, and the fact that he couldn’t put a strange careful hush over the golden evening.
“Tell me what?” he asked.
She took his enormous hand in both of her small dirt-creased ones and turned it over, palm up. Then she placed it carefully over her stomach, below the waistband of her jeans, and held it there. She looked up at him, and waited for him to do the arithmetic.
He looked at his hand on her stomach.
“You didn’t go under this winter,” she said quietly, watching his face. “You want to know why I know that arbor’s going to flower for somebody?”
He didn’t move. He could feel his own pulse in his palm, or hers, or a faint, impossible third thing. His eyes had flared gold, warmer than the sunset. And he didn’t have four words, or one, or any.
“Toby’s getting his wish,” she said. “The one he lodged with me in the front yard back in the autumn, with Robin standing right there and Birdie on her hip as Exhibit A. He wants a baby sister.” Her voice wobbled and steadied. “I can’t promise the sister part.”
“A sister,” Toby said, from the step below, with the gravity of a boy who has been vindicated. “I said.”
Garrick looked at his son. He looked at his mate’s face, and at his hand on the warm curve of her stomach.
Then past both of them, at his father weathering easily amongst the roses with a blue feather stuck upright at his feet.
At a whole town’s worth of daffodils running yellow down the slope his mother had loved.
At a green oak arbor he’d built for a wisteria that wouldn’t come for a year or two, planted for the ones who’d sit under it when he was the one gone to stone—except he wasn’t going to stone.
Not this Christmas, not for a long time, because there was no dark left he wanted to sleep through.
He’d spent fifteen years believing that the way you survived loving people was to never be anywhere where they could be taken from you. He’d built a whole life out of exits.
He gathered them in with both arms, Maris tucked against his chest and Toby scooped up off the lower step, protesting and delighted, nestled against his side.
And then, because he couldn’t help it, because the feeling in his chest was too much to hold, his wings swept forward and around, enclosing the three of them in warmth.
Not to guard them. He wasn’t a wall, something standing between his family and the world, scanning for threats.
He was just holding them. Because they were his.
Because inside the circle of his arms there was a boy asking whether they could name the baby after the beetle, and a female laughing into his shirt, and a small warm impossible weight under his hand that measured its life in seasons he fully intended to be present for.
Every one of them—spring after spring, under a wisteria that had not yet learned to bloom.
“Yes,” he said, to all of it, to every question anyone had ever asked him.
And the wings closed, and the last of the golden light came through the membrane the color of home, and out in the roses his father weathered gently on, and Fairhaven Falls, had anyone been left to look, would not have found a single thing about it strange.