The next day we had a wedding in the backyard. I stood at the front next to Katie and Jill and felt the sun and the wind and considered, because the bishop asked us to, what it all meant. This story ends with a death and a wedding. Does that make it tragedy or comedy? It ends with the dissolution of our little family, though not entirely, and the forming and reforming instead of two couples, possibly three. Does that mean it reifies traditional conceptions of family? Of narrative? It couldn’t possibly because none of us believe it. Because Jill and Katie and I are all moving, not in together anymore, but near each other like before. Because Jason and Lucas are having a baby. Because Ethan promises me that Atlas will always be my family and not, I think, just to make me feel better. Because we are all too in love with each other to be just friends. Because sometimes I hate them, but it doesn’t matter. Because who else would you forgive for having you arrested but family?
But it’s also because this journey is not to death; this journey is not to marriage, and it’s not to couplehood or even parenthood. This journey begins with friendship and comes back to it again. My grandmother thought it all started with the baby in the Waldorf-Astoria, but that’s because for my grandmother, the story was all about me. I know better though. It’s the cracker aisle, meeting Jill, teaching Katie how to cook. The beginning of this story, Atlas’s story, is the three of us. And here, at the end, at the end of this part anyway, I looked out over how much bigger we’d become. Atlas was sitting on Jason’s lap, for the moment anyway more comfortable with him than with Daniel, and holding Lucas’s index finger in his tiny fist. Diane sat next to Lucas, trying to watch the wedding but having a hard time taking her eyes off her beautiful grandson. Dan sat next to her, sneaking occasional nervous glances at her beautiful grandson but having a hard time taking his eyes off Jill. My parents were there, happy for the first time in weeks, trying to keep Uncle Claude from rushing the altar. Ethan was there, smiling at me from somewhere between awe and wonder. It was a combination that worked for me. But none of that suggested it wasn’t a story from friendship and back again. In the beginning, in the end, it was our story, our wedding, we three.
Katie was happy. Truly happy. You had only to look at her. Peter seemed indeed like he must be her One. It wasn’t based on the foundation of the years of friendship they shared, but maybe it was all the trial and error. Maybe it was God. Jill I was less sure about. Jill seemed angry and depressed and insane. I didn’t know that Dan would stay. I didn’t know that she would forgive him. I wasn’t sure she should. I wasn’t sure she could handle Atlas without more live-in help. So that’s a wash maybe? They cancel each other out? Katie’s surety versus Jill’s unknown? Katie’s joy versus Jill’s crazy?
And me? I was what an unreliable narrator should be. Sadder but wiser and happier too. More skeptical, more injured, more in love. More tied in. Neither tragic nor comic. Not a happy ending exactly and certainly not a sad one. Ambiguous. With an emphasis on the why rather than the what, the what having been fairly clear all along. With an emphasis on the love rather than the anger, there being hefty helpings of both, this being family after all, but with love winning out in the end because that’s what it means to end. That’s how you know you’ve come to a close for the moment—because you’ve found the love again. You’ve reclaimed it, or it has—they have—you. This is why, finally, there are so many weddings at the ends of books. Not because the weddings are so much ends themselves but because it’s hard to go forward with the story after that much love. It’s too trite to use words to talk about it. It’s too momentous and extraordinary to return from to the mundane and the everyday. It is astonishing that after all the evidence and warnings to the contrary, such a leap of faith is possible. It asks us all what if you could love and be loved this much? In words, in spirit, in person even, it’s almost hard to believe. But believe it we must, we do, and so in the end, with our family, with our friends, with the ones who are both, with the ones we parent and choose to parent, with the ones we kiss on the mouth, with the ones we take in, with the ones who leave us, with the ones who come back, with the ones we remember, we make the leap. In the end, we leap; we always do.