Chapter 84 June

Chapter 84 June
June arrived the way Eleanor had promised it would.

Decided. Warm. The window boxes full and the beds along the garden walls doing the specific deep blue and trailing things she had described in May, and the stone paved center of the garden clear and ready in the particular way of spaces that had been prepared for something and were simply waiting for it to begin.

I woke on the morning of the wedding at six.

Luce was already awake beside me in the bassinet, not crying, simply present and alert in the way she was increasingly present and alert in the mornings, her dark eyes doing their slow inventory of the ceiling with the focused attention of someone who found the ceiling consistently interesting.

I picked her up.

We sat by the window together in the early June morning and looked at the park below, green and full now, the deep settled green of a decision made and kept, and I held my daughter in the particular quiet of a morning that knew what it was and was not rushing toward it.

Damien was asleep.

I let him sleep.

I had things to do before he woke that were mine to do alone in the particular way of wedding mornings that required some portion of themselves to be private, not from distance but from the understanding that certain feelings needed to be felt without witness first before they could be properly shared.

I thought about the rainy street.

I thought about it the way I thought about it sometimes, not with nostalgia or sentiment but with the particular specific gratitude of someone who understood that the distance between that moment and this one had been built from choices. His choices and mine. All the small daily choosing that accumulated without announcement into something as large and permanent as a life.

I thought about Rosa Santos writing keep going in a rented room.

I thought about Eleanor's brownstone and Isabelle Laurent and Catherine coming in from the cold and Gregory Rearden on a studio floor and Jonathan Cole on his last good day and Daniel Santos flying across an ocean on Christmas Day because he was afraid of losing his courage.

All of it leading here.

To a June morning with a daughter on my lap and a park below and a man asleep in the next room who had come to a rainy street and stayed every day since.

Luce looked at me with those dark eyes.

"Today," I told her quietly. "We are getting married today."

She appeared to find this acceptable.

Rosa called at seven.

My Rosa. Not the painting. The woman who had lent me a red dress and told me I deserved everything for twelve years and had been right about both.

"Are you crying," she said, before I could say anything.

"No," I said.

"Mia."

"Not yet," I said.

She laughed. Warm and entirely herself. "I am already crying and I have been awake for twenty minutes. This is your fault entirely."

"I know," I said.

"I will be there at ten," she said. "With coffee you cannot drink and pastries you can."

"Rosa," I said.

"Yes," she said.

"Thank you," I said. "For everything. For the twelve years and the red dress and all of it."

A silence.

"Stop it," she said. Her voice was not entirely steady. "I told you I was already crying."

She hung up.

I smiled at the window.

By nine the brownstone was full.

Eleanor had been up since five, which surprised nobody, and the garden was ready in the way that Eleanor's things were always ready, with the quiet thoroughness of someone who had been planning since February and had not left anything to chance.

Rosa arrived at ten with pastries and the particular energy of someone who had designated herself chief of operations and was prepared to fulfill that role completely.

Catherine was there. Serena. Victoria, who had come from Marcus's apartment with the baby, James, six weeks old now and entirely unimpressed by the significance of the occasion, sleeping through it with the serene indifference of the very young.

Noah appeared in the garden at ten thirty in his suit.

He had put it on without being asked.

He stood in the center of the stone paved space and looked at the flowers around him with the assessing expression.

"Gerald will stand here," he said. He pointed to a specific spot beside where Damien and I would stand. "On the left."

"Gerald is a rabbit," Damien said from the doorway.

"He is the best man," Noah said firmly.

Damien looked at me.

I pressed my lips together.

"Fine," Damien said. "Gerald stands on the left."

Noah nodded, satisfied, and went to collect Gerald from the sitting room.

The ceremony was at noon.

I stood at the back door of the brownstone at eleven fifty nine in something I had chosen myself. Not a wedding dress in the traditional sense. Something white and simple and mine, the kind of thing that said this is who I am rather than this is the occasion. My hair down because Damien had said once, without knowing it would matter, that he loved my hair down in the morning.

Daniel came to stand beside me.

He looked at me for a moment.

"Rosa Santos would have painted this," he said quietly. "The door. The garden. You standing here. She would have painted the light of it."

I looked at the garden through the open door.

At Eleanor standing at the edge of the beds with her hands folded. At Marcus beside her. At Catherine and Serena and Rosa and Victoria with James asleep in his carrier. At Noah in his suit in the center of the stone paved space with Gerald propped on the garden wall in his most dignified lean, the spot that had been designated.

At Damien.

Standing in the center waiting.

In a dark suit with no tie, collar open, exactly the way he had looked the first night I had seen him in his own apartment on a Sunday morning, assembled into the person he was comfortable being rather than the person occasions sometimes required.

He looked at the door.

He found me.

And the expression on his face was the one with the name I had found.

Home.

Entirely, simply, completely home.

"Ready," Daniel said quietly beside me.

I looked at my father.

At his hands, which were my hands, which were Rosa Santos's hands, which were now also Luce's hands, the inheritance passing forward as inheritances did, through blood and time and the particular quality of attention that saw things as they actually were.

"Yes," I said.

We walked into the garden.

The June morning received us with the particular warmth of a season that had made its decision. The flowers were doing their specific decided things along the walls. The window boxes were full. The stone paved center was warm beneath my feet.

Noah was completely still.

Gerald was in his dignified lean.

Damien watched me walk toward him with those dark eyes that did the reading thing, the complete thorough honest reading, and found what they were looking for, which was me, entirely and only me, walking toward him in Eleanor's garden on a June morning.

I stopped in front of him.

He looked at me.

I looked at him.

"Hi," he said quietly.

"Hi," I said.

The officiant said the things officiant said, and we said the things we had decided to say, which were not the standard words but our own, written the previous week at the kitchen table after Noah was asleep and Luce was settled and the apartment was quiet.

His were three sentences.

I came to a rainy street and I saw you and I have been choosing you every day since and I intend to keep choosing you every day after this one.

Mine were two.

You showed me the door was already open. I am staying on the warm side.

Noah made a sound when I said mine.

Small and immediate and entirely unplanned, the sound of a child hearing something true and being affected by it before the affecting could be managed.

Eleanor looked at the window boxes.

Daniel looked at his hands.

Marcus had his arm around Victoria.

When it was done Damien kissed me in the June garden in the particular way he kissed me when nobody was watching and everything was exactly right, unhurried and entirely present, and the family around us made the sounds families made at weddings which were warm and slightly undignified and entirely human.

Noah tugged my hand.

I broke the kiss and looked down at him.

He held up Gerald.

"Gerald says congratulations," he said seriously.

I took Gerald from Noah and held him for a moment with the dignity the occasion required.

"Thank you Gerald," I said.

Noah looked satisfied.

Eleanor had her hand over her eyes.

And the June garden was warm and full and the window boxes were exactly what she had promised they would be in February when they were simply empty boxes waiting for spring.

Spring had come.

It always did.