Later, Willow lay on my chest, our bodies sweaty and slick, our heartbeats slowing as we lay naked, sated in my bed. There were boxes and bags all over my floors. Her toothbrush had been unpacked and we shared a pillow. I thought the jasmine scent would never leave my sheets, in the same thought I realized I didn’t want it to.
“A hundred lifetimes, I bet,” Willow said, staring up at the ceiling with her fingers moving over my arm.
“What?”
“A hundred. All those people, moving together. All the lifetimes spent searching, wanting to come together. We can’t be the first, Nash.” She lifted on her elbow, resting her palm against my chest as she watched me. “How sad would it be if after all those lifetimes it’s you and me who get our happy ending and no one else?” She laid back down, turning to rest her chin on my chest. “Doesn’t seem fair.”
“No,” I said, pulling her closer. “I don’t think it’s fair at all.”
“Why us, do you think? After all this time… why is it us?”
I’d thought of nothing else on the taxi ride home. We’d splurged, celebrating Roan’s departure with a cab ride back to Brooklyn and a pizza delivered ten minutes after we’d lugged Willow’s suitcases back into the building.
“Maybe it’s because no one learned.” I felt her move her head, her hair rustling against my shoulder. “It’s like this country and all the people who are still clueless. We kill each other, we fight and fuss and we forget that there was a time, not that long ago, where we were even more divided. It’s two hundred years and we’re still divided. Maybe all those people in our families, maybe they were divided too. Maybe because the world was, they couldn’t get past that to someplace where they could be happy.”
“And we can?”
I nodded, a non-answer that gave her pause. She was warm against me, a solid weight that was soft, and sweet and so new and exciting. Her life and mine were moving together, real and honestly, closing the gap on the distance that seemed to have always divided our families.
“Sometime, next year, I need to go to California.”
“To see your sister?” She was curious, and I tugged her further up my chest. I’d been thinking about Nat since we read Roan’s letter. How family and blood cross tides of time. How there had been so much anger, so much loss, and nothing ever got settled from holding onto it. I didn’t want that for me. I didn’t want it for Natalie, either.
“Yes,” I told her, swallowing as the words came. “To see Nat and… to see my father. It’s been a long time.” I exhaled when Willow relaxed against me. “I’ve hated him for a long time, Will. But... I don’t want to anymore. It’s time to start healing.” She nodded, I felt the movement of her chin. “Go with me?”
“Of course,” she said, kissing my chest. “I’ll go anywhere with you.”
She hummed when I kissed her, holding her face between my hands, feeling our bodies twining together. “We can have our happy, Will," I whispered to her, “the two of us. I know we can. I know it with everything I am.”
Epilogue
Roan
The Nation farm was a sprawling place well appointed with a small cottage off to the side of the main property and a larger wood frame home in the center. I watched it all, leaning on a tree that years before, lifetimes before, Sookie and Dempsey had hidden beneath, holed up in the treehouse that had long since fallen to shreds and ruin.
They could not see me, watching, the children running around, their laughter loud and sweet against the slow wind that blew the scent of honeysuckle and the tease of sugarcane into the air.
“Riley, you want to bring the baby inside?” Willow called, and I watched her, the slim waist only marginally rounder than it had been when she was young. There were small strands of gray coloring her chestnut hair, but she wore hardly any wrinkles at all despite her years. Those years, it seemed, had been very kind to her.
Around the end of the porch, Nash manned the grill, a beer in one hand and his grandson at his hip, nodding toward the surface that sizzled and burned with steaks and burgers. “No,” he told the boy, “not yet. You have to wait till just before they’re ready to add the sauce.”
Nash, too, had grown a little rounded about his middle, his hair still full, but duller, his eyes now covered with glasses that he rarely took off.
The farmhouse had once been a tiny, two-room shack built by hands who’d seen too much work and not much care. The years came fast, and with them the broken walls that were mended and the structure that grew wide, larger to accommodate children and grandchildren, and then cousins when they came, when old granny Bastien had seen her children scatter to the wind, to death and travel, and her granddaughter fall to her reward, taken much too soon by smoke and fire.
The home was now a large place with a wrap-around porch and double wooden entry doors, finely crafted with inlays, the craftsmanship something to boast and crow about. But that was not the way of Mr. Nation or his wife of twenty-five years.
They had seen fit to return to Manchac when their four young children became too wild for the confines of their Brooklyn brownstone. And so it was that Nash brought his family back to the swamp, to the place where it had all began. There the children grew up, the boys— Winston, Roan and Isaac—and a girl with wild auburn hair and skin tawny dark. Her they called Riley.
They had been here for fifteen years now. Fifteen years since Bastie’s place had been extended, since the Simoneaux kin were all too happy to take Nash up on his offer to buy their land. It was nothing at all to a man of his means, a man who had become successful, and content with the things he had built, more so by the life he was leading. And so Bastie’s old farm reached out, extended beyond the hidden trails that led to the old fishing shack, right to the sugar cane fields that Nash had torn down. It was a project of immense effort, as was the deconstruction of the Simoneaux mansion that had not been touched in some forty years, falling in to unreclaimable disrepair. The shelters and rehab stores got the woodwork from the foyer and the fine trim and millwork that had not rotted in the years of neglect. The rest of the mansion went to ground, became ash and dirt—a hard but very satisfying project. Nash and Willow set tracks and built cottages that could one day house their children and their families, if they so desired.
Those two great lines, divided for so long, had been settled, at least for now. But joy had come at a great price. There is always a price to pay. It had come in smoke and fire. It had come with fret and worry, with blood and tears, with loss, with anger, with pain. Yet joy endured—it came and went, then came again, until the girl with the wild hair and heart and the boy who could not be bothered with love or joy at all, had paid the toll, settled the debt so many had left waiting.
And like lifetimes before, the memory remained, passing into one life, into the next, through bone and blood and cells that made up one life and then another.
There it stayed.
THE END