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Grace doesn’t write by hand. Not anymore- she doesn’t have time.
All of her forms are typed up, and written records are now done by her accounting manager. She taps away at her laptop, and stretches her fingers, sometimes letting her thoughts go back to a dusty cranberry-juice-stained blue-bound book in her room-
But Grace doesn’t write by hand. She doesn’t have the time for it. Or the talent.
(She hears people need talent, and then years of practice to ever be worth something. She sometimes wonders if you can create talent from scratch, and then create the time necessary to hone it with. But Grace needn’t cry for the moon if she hasn’t a candle-)
Julia has always written everything down, from the highlighted calendar in her room, to the post-its lining her mirror, to her own event cards. Grace’s father keeps a leather disk-bound notebook in his suit pocket for contact information, with little descriptions of each person supplied by him, and Grace’s mother has a lovely, loopy script she delights in signing everything with, and Grace-
(-wonders where all that need to have words spilling out of you comes from. What well was there in her that was so silent, so spent, that she didn’t feel this all-consuming urge to fill her life with her own voice? To reach out for fear of silence? Where- were they?)
Why doesn’t she want to talk in her own voice, in her own script, not from a cursor?
(Grace’s eyes hurt from looking at computer screens too much. She should probably get glasses soon. Emmett teases her that she can finally dress as a librarian, like she always wanted. He’s kissing her when he says this, so Grace knows by his smile against her cheek that he means it as a compliment.)
Grace was never angry that Julia got all the words. She just wasn’t.
She didn’t get to be angry, or jealous, or spiteful- either it wasn’t in her nature, or someone else always beat her to it, and then she had to be the one to smooth things over so that things could go on as usual. She was so happy to be what was needed of her- it helped her not worry anymore.
(Well. Worry less.)
The trouble was-
Grace used to lie in her bed, looking up at the moonlight coming through the cracks in her blinds, and actually tangibly feel words swimming around in her head, all around her.
She was a little bottle, bobbing and spinning in the sea. If she reached out her hand, she could almost grasp them, but they danced through her fingers, just like water.
Why can’t I just write you out of me? Why can’t I make you still so I can sleep?
Emmett didn’t completely understand, and he did, at the same time.
Emmett had trouble sleeping sometimes, too, but in a different way from Grace.
Where she felt full and lonely, Emmett was lonesome and crowded. He’d lived in the same house all his life, with the same faces and personalities around him, and he’d been reaching out for connection all the while.
He’d been in his room, looking over the fields for something, not knowing he’d been looking over the fields for her.
She always kisses his forehead when she gets into bed, now. He always falls asleep before her- but it isn’t so bad for her, either. If Grace must spend her nights lying awake counting cracks on her wall, at least she has the soft breathing of her husband peaceful and steady beside her.
Grace’s life is quiet and crazy- but she loves it, being both frantic and steady. She loves the soil under her feet and the wind tearing at her. Sometimes, even during the winter, she walks through the rows of her fields, just to feel that sense of domain and home in her chest.
(The year that she was fifteen, she used to take her notebooks out here and clamber up her favorite tree and write her thoughts till someone came looking for her. Grace hadn’t known what was so wordy about Grace-at-fifteen, but she treasured the notebook from that year like it was a half-filled treasure. They were outliers from a person who didn’t write. Who couldn’t bear to, somehow. Who knew nothing about words, and how to tie them down, as a world she was locked out of forever.)
She’d almost kissed him that year. They were too young, but she- almost, almost.
So much of Grace’s life is composed of almosts. Because she couldn’t ever fall without catching onto solid ground.
But-- he’s almost the next best thing besides safety.
The first night he kisses her, and she kisses him, Grace walks- swings- waltzes to her room, and draws a heart on a post it note, and sticks it above her desk.
They go on a date- she takes the receipts from their dinner, and sticks it on her fridge, and draws little roses on the corners when she’s bored, and brushing her teeth.
She sings when she walks, now. She’d forgotten that she used to do that.
Life dating Emmett is pretty much the same as it ever was. But Grace is pretty certain, at the same time, that she had been loving two very separate lives all that time- one where she loved Emmett, and one where she had gone about as usual, directing strawberry farms and yelling at him till kingdom come.
Her life is much the same. But she feels the sunlight coming in from every corner now- feels the light shining from under every door, through every window. She’s always the same, always the same- but life has finally come and tapped at her window of all windows, telling her to come in.
He’s draped over her couch. He’s leaning on her door frame, too tall and too graceful and too much for her to look at undistractedly.
Grace’s day to day life is fairly edged, hedged, and filled with Emmett-isms.
She does her paperwork, and he’s reading beside her. She cooks, and he’s rearranging their cupboards, filing the spices according to his own petulance, just to make her laugh. She sits on her chair, too tired to look at anything anymore, and Emmett is there to pretend he’s exhausted just to get her to lie down, to help her remember she needs to sleep.
Marrying him was almost an afterthought, the careful eventuality of every moment she’d lived and breathed in her life.
Sometimes, when she braids her hair, about to sleep, she wonders why God lets her be so happy in this life. Why should it be her? Hadn’t she used up all her chances years ago? But here he was, so peaceful, so anxious, so good.
Grace was going to be spending the rest of her life earning him.
He brings out all the shades of light in her- the dappled sunshine that Grace had abandoned at age two, hidden away in herself. She brings out constancy in him, she thinks- some version of him that is too sure and too brash to be completely wrong, some note in him that resonates like truth.
(They share a name, now. There’s something so binding about that act- Grace has shivers at the power of writing a W after her own name now- whoever knew it would end up like this?
But maybe it was always meant to be.
Oh, Grace loves inevitability.)
Once she asks him how he decided to draw. His charcoal is in his hair, and he glances at her with a bemused look. Fond. Always fond, now.
(“I wasn’t ever aware that this was a choice I could make,” he replies, precise with his words even with the pencil between his teeth. “You can stem it for a while, but it- is always there. College closed it off for awhile, in me, but it’s come back. You’ll feel it, too, sometime. The pull is never gone- it just takes long, long drives to California and forgets the way back for awhile.”)
Emmett’s art is all soft lines now, reds and oranges and greens, the fields and hills they’ve always known. He draws like there’s all the time in the world- like he hasn’t a care left except how to capture the light on paper.
Grace envies that focused, guileless space he gets to live in- and doesn’t, because it’s so like Emmett. Who else could pluck a sunbeam right out of the air, and keep it in its most precious form forever?
Someday, Grace and Emmett have children. They’re patient and forward, like her, with eyes that see through everything and everyone, but perhaps softer than even the barest truth. They’re immutable and irrepressible, like him, with tongues and merry wit that make them fit companions for any journeying they undertake, for life itself.
She teaches them that they can always move on-
They just can’t leave each other behind.
Grace’s life is much the same. There’s just more of it. Not for the first time, she’s tired. But she’s no longer weary.
(She didn’t know the difference, before.)
(Now it’s like- she’d been swimming the whole time, never knowing what solid ground felt like. )
They plant a new tree in their backyard, the year that they are married.
Julia loves that tree. She thinks it’s the most romantic thing in the world. Emmett, on the other hand, loves the feeling of leaving a mark upon the earth, but a mark of life, not of scarring.
Grace thinks that it looks like family-
-and the minute she thinks that, she barely realizes how much she’d been yearning for her own family, all her life.
The years sharpen her with stress and worry, with dialogue and merriment, with happiness and sorrow and love all the way through.
Grace is harder and wiser and tired and so, so full of- everything.
It touches every surface of her life, that love. It’s like she’s constantly giving love away, and yet it comes back to her a hundredfold. She can’t ever earn it, not even halfway. But she’ll keep working like she could.
(Somewhere down the line, a grim woman at her church tells her she “laughs too much”. That, in itself, makes Grace want to laugh. Reserved Grace? Quiet Grace? Laughing too much? You might as well have told her she trusted too much.
She can’t have changed. Not that much.
But there’s been so much—time. Who knows anymore? Maybe Grace has become someone who smiles so much that people get sick of it.
She can hardly believe it.)
One day, Emmett finds her muttering to herself. He knows when to draw her out, and when to leave her alone. When he finds that she’s been trying to compose a speech for their daughter’s confirmation party. Grace is thrilled—but she hates speeches. She always forgets what she’s going to say.
Emmett is bemused, but hears her out. He’s a good listener. Grace knows that now, like the back of her hand.
(He says more gently than anything else he ever says, “Maybe you should write this out. Not this specifically, really- I think you can easily type this one out- but just about- us. About family. Everyone has a center that they draw on for creating out of nothing. Maybe that’s yours. Maybe that’s what you were reaching for all that time.”)
(Grace loves that he didn’t joke about it. That matters more than he knows.)
He makes everything clearer for her. She makes everything softer for him. Somewhere between it all, they see the truth of life. They love the world better when they’re together, Grace knows. She wants to write it out. She wants to write it out of her, once and for all.
It’s a Sunday. She loves Sundays. She rises early, puts on her finest raiment, sits in the same pew, and marvels at the ever-new delight of early fall sunshine filtering in through the blue-and-green windows.
Everyone’s yawning and singing and praying. Her family’s all with her, crammed together. It’s her favorite day of the week.
(Sunday morning Masses just make you feel clean, through and through.
They’re like- the ultimate new beginning.)
She goes home, takes off her shoes, undoes her hair, and takes out a notebook. Just the right notebook- she’s had her eye on this one for awhile. It’s nice, but not too nice. Her pen is fine, but doesn’t leak, doesn’t smudge. It’s a bright day, but just cloudy enough that her eyes won’t hurt. She settles beneath her marriage tree, and leans her head against its solid trunk. She can almost hear it humming, so she hums back.
Grace sighs, and falls into the blank pages.
But the climbing back up is-
Everything she was waiting for.
Maybe to write is to join all the people you ever were, all along. To make them sing as one, to calm the clamor.
It’s the truth. It's the ending. Tomorrow, you can do it all over again.
And Grace smiles.
We will be buried together, someday.
In those pine coffins that the abbeys make, and we’ll be buried in Highbury.
We will be planted under a tree, side by side.
And if this is an epilogue, then I’m very lucky.
Lay me down to sleep, love,
What a lovely life to lead.