28. Epilogue, I Can Float
Chapter twenty-eight
Epilogue, I Can Float
Voss, After, Big Sur
Voss, Made Up Like a Bride
The wedding is small and off the grid and exactly right, and Nolan arranges every piece of it himself, which tells me more about the man I'm marrying than any speech could.
A private cove on the Big Sur coast, one gated road down off Highway 1 where the signal dies to the north and doesn't come back.
Nobody flies. No cameras, because half the men coming can't appear in an image anywhere, except one old film camera of ours on a tripod above the tide line, with nowhere for a picture to go but into our own two hands.
“Checked it all out. No flags.” That's the security whole brief. I don't ask a single follow-up question, and three years ago that would have been unthinkable, and I notice myself not asking, and I let it be the last audit I run all weekend.
He tells me the ceremony is at four o'clock. Not four thirty, not five. Four, and he says it the way a man reads a number off a page. I say fine. I don't ask him why, because I have not asked this man why about anything operational in three months, and that is its own kind of vow.
***
They make me up like a bride.
That is the part I did not expect to matter. For eleven years I chose clothes nobody would remember, hair nobody could describe, a face a witness would struggle to draw.
Unmemorable was a survival skill and I got very good at it.
This morning Loretta sits me down in the lodge with the good light coming off the water and does the whole thing, my hair pinned up off my neck, and a woman from Carmel who has no idea who any of us are does my face with a steady hand and tells me I have good bones.
I let her. I sit there and let a stranger make me beautiful on purpose, and it is the least invisible thing I have done in eleven years.
The dress is ivory and plain and has pockets, which I did not know was possible and which made me laugh out loud in the shop. There's no veil. I have spent enough of my life not being seen.
My mother does up the small buttons at my wrist, one at a time, taking a good deal longer than the buttons need. Her hands aren't steady. Neither of us says anything for a while.
“I used to think,” she says, “that the worst thing that could ever happen to me had already happened. And then that man put me in a room.” She gets the last button.
“The whole time I was in there, I kept thinking, she is going to do something stupid to get me out.
She's going to give them whatever they want.” She smooths my sleeve flat with her thumb.
“You didn't. You stood up. Do you have any idea what it is to find out your daughter is braver than you raised her to be?”
“Mom.”
“No. Let me.” She takes my face in both hands, the way I have watched Nolan take it. “I got you back, and I got you back whole. Go marry him.”
Then she stands, and smooths the skirt of the dress flat, and says out of nowhere, “It's a good fabric. It'll come back.” I ask her come back from what. She is already at the door with her handbag over her arm, telling me the light is going.
The path down to the cove is packed sand and driftwood steps. Eli waits at the top of it in a suit, because six weeks ago I asked him to walk me down and he said yes before I had finished the sentence, and then went and stood at a window for a while.
And standing at the bottom of the steps, in a jacket I recognize from a Christmas twenty years ago, with his hat actually in his hands, is my father.
I stop three steps up and cannot make my feet do one more thing.
Behind me my mother says his name out loud, once. James. She has not laid eyes on him since the night Eli put the two of them into separate cars, and neither have I.
“The tomatoes came back,” he says.
It is the only thing he says. He got on a phone once, in the worst week of my life, to tell me they had gone to weeds, one sentence, because one sentence was all he had in him.
And he has driven a very long way down a coast road to stand on a beach in a twenty-year-old jacket and give me the other half of it.
I get down the last three steps somehow. My father has never in his life known what to do with his arms. He puts them around me anyway, badly, and I hold onto him in a wedding dress with my mother crying somewhere above me on the steps.
Over his shoulder I find Nolan, forty feet down the sand at the waterline, standing easy with his hands folded, watching me get this. Beside him, in a suit that fits no better than it did an hour ago, is Beau Harlan.
“Six weeks,” Loretta says quietly, arriving at my elbow. “After the holds stood down, nobody could raise him again. Your mother tried. He went to ground the way he was told to and then he stayed there, because that is apparently the kind of man he is.” She watches him with me.
“That man of yours went and found him anyway. Rattler drove up and got him and drove him back down, two days, told nobody.” She is smiling in a way I have not seen on her before. “They didn't tell your mother either. Harlan said if it went sideways it was better only two people were carrying it.”
Eli comes down the steps behind me with his arm already out, and then he sees what is standing at the bottom of them, and he stops. I watch a man who has spent thirty years making hard calls inside of a half second make this one in less.
He drops his arm. On the way past he puts a hand on my father's shoulder, one squeeze, and keeps going down toward the sand to find himself a seat like any other guest.
Beau Harlan is here in a suit that doesn't fit him right, tugging at the collar like a man who would rather be anywhere in tactical gear than standing in tailoring, uncomfortable in every inch of it except the six inches nearest Loretta. There he's easy.
She has him laughing at something before the ceremony even starts, the two of them tucked into folding chairs up past the tide line with their heads together. At some point I catch them playing footsies in the sand like a couple of teenagers who think no one can see.
Charles sees. Charles sees everything. He watches his daughter and the man who used to be her instructor knock ankles under two chairs. He smiles, and shakes his head, and doesn't say a word, a father watching a thing take shape that he isn't ready to have a name for yet.
Voss, Into the Water
So we do it at the water.
Twenty-two people stand in a loose arc on wet sand where the wash comes and goes, shoes off, hems already dark. Charles has his trouser cuffs rolled and his bare feet in the Pacific, like a man who has done stranger things in the service of other people's healing.
My father walks me the last forty feet over hard wet sand with the water running warm over both our feet.
He does it badly. He has no notion what to do with his elbow, and he holds it out at an angle that makes my arm ache, and he does not look at me once, straight ahead the whole way with his jaw set.
About halfway down he says, without turning his head, “He came and got me.” That is the entire speech. Off to the side in the shallows, Eli Freeman stands with his eyes wet the whole way and pretends they are not, and I let him pretend.
I have run every kind of calculation there is on Travis Nolan, in the worst rooms of my life, for three months.
I don't run one now. I walk to him with the surf breaking around my ankles and twenty-two people standing in the shallows, and the only thing in my head is that he's right there and nobody is going to take him.
He waits in a dark suit with the Pacific enormous behind him and the water coming and going around his shoes, which he has not bothered to take off. When I reach him he leans in under the sound of it.
“Cove's clear, by the way. Checked the approach twice.” I laugh, because of course he did, because loving me and guarding me are the same motion in him and always were, and I would not change one line of the man.
“We're going to keep this short,” Charles says in that soft Georgia cadence, “because the tide is going out and I would like these two married before it takes my shoes.” The shallows laugh. Then he looks at Nolan.
“Travis. You came into my office a year ago and told me you did not get to keep what you guarded. I would like every person standing in this water to hear what I told you. Feel it. Name it. Keep your hands.”
Almost nobody here knows those are the words that stitched him back together. But I know, and he knows, and I watch his jaw go tight and hold.
"I ain't no good with words," Nolan says. "You been knowin' that about me. So I'm fixin' to say the true things and then go on and sit my tail down." He has both my hands in both of his.
"I spent twenty long years believin' I arrived too late to the landing. Then you went and walked right into that courthouse askin' for somebody else entirely, and I got you anyway, and I ain't been late one single time since." His thumb moves over my knuckles.
"I'm gonna wake at 0430 the rest of my born days.
I done went and made my peace with that.
What I'm layin' down to you right now is that every one of them mornings, I'll be right there in the house.
I'll check the doors, and I'll come on back to bed, and you ain't never once gonna have to wonder about it, no. " He pauses.
"That's the whole vow. I show up. And I keep on showin' up. And there ain't a single thing on God's green earth that gets to take that away from you.”
I had written mine. Three drafts, indexed, cross-referenced, because that is who I am.
I don't use a word of them.
“For three years I ran arithmetic on everybody who came near me,” I tell him. “What they cost. What they could be used for. How fast I'd have to run when it went wrong.” The wind takes some of it and I say it louder, out over the water.