Remembering the address for Grace’s Orphanage, I send word to Silas about the study. He shows up one year as the study’s newest participant, and he takes an immediate liking to my sister wife; every day she’s growing more into a woman, becoming something lovely and enchanting. She meets Silas’s advances with annoyance, although sometimes he manages to get a laugh or a smile out of her. “Be careful with her,” I tell him one afternoon as we’re wading in the ocean’s shallows. “I know how you can get around girls.” He kicks ocean water at me.
Cecily is just as hesitant about these things as I am. She still wears her wedding ring and maintains that Linden will always be her only love. But maybe one day that will change; everything is already starting to change all around us.
I’m still uncertain. I’m still untrusting that I’ll live long enough to know what it means to love the way that my parents loved.
On the morning of my twenty-first birthday, though, I awaken with a feeling that the whole world is possible.
That’s the morning that Cecily bursts into my room with Linden’s sketch pad and tells me her greatest plan yet to keep Linden alive. She wants us to build one of his houses.
Every day, we’ve looked for ways to keep Linden alive. It’s especially important to do this for Bowen, who doesn’t remember. Cecily has an exceptional memory for detail; she can make stories of even small moments. She writes things down so that she won’t ever forget, and sometimes, late at night, she comes to my doorway unable to sleep, fearing that he’s slipping away from her, and we put our memories together—the way he held his sketch pad at an angle, and his small, frustrated sighs as he erased the lines, and how at a glance his hair was black, but then the sun made it bright with auburns. I remember the things she can’t, and in that way he’s still our husband, the thing that once did and always will bond us together.
Reed has his memories too. He tells us of the quiet, inquisitive boy who wanted to know how things were made, who built houses out of old books and towers out of cards. He tells stories that make us laugh, and more still that have us in tears.
I didn’t think the house would happen so quickly, but one day Reed started building it, and he hasn’t stopped. Once he hired the contractors, the skeleton of the house seemed to appear overnight. I help wherever I can, and Cecily makes sure that the details are exact. The number of steps. The gingerbread trim.
“Maybe it will give you some closure too,” Gabriel says, and I let him pull me into his arms.
We let Bowen help with the painting, and though he’s only four, he moves with patience, taking care with his strokes. Cecily’s convinced he’ll grow up to do something great, something that will impact the world. She won’t let him waste a second of his potential, because just being able to grow up at all is a gift. Each new year, each new day, is the chance to do more. I try to remind her that she’s still young herself. We all are. Once the house is built and Bowen is older, we’ll all travel. We’ll see the things we thought only existed in books. We’ll scale mountains and parachute from planes, and visit the river that has my name. Rowan believes our parents always meant for us to see it, that they knew it was out there waiting for us to find; it won’t be the way they intended, but we’ll get there. We’ll squeeze every second that we can from our lives, because we’re young, and we have plenty of years to grow. We’ll grow until we’re braver. We’ll grow until our bones ache and our skin wrinkles and our hair goes white, and until our hearts decide, at last, that it’s time to stop.