One afternoon, in the chilly blue month of March, on the day when Franny was born and Jet had left the world, Sally was walking through one of her favorite fields, where daisies grew wild and she thought she spied a black heart in the grass. It was a young crow fallen from its nest in the wet gusts of the previous evening, who came to her of its own accord. She named the bird Houdini, after the great magician. She brought it home and nursed it, and when Ian saw it he grinned and said, “Be prepared. He’ll never leave.”
Much to Sally’s delight, he hadn’t. She’d left Houdini with Jesse Wilkie at the Three Hedges Inn to be cared for during their wedding trip to Massachusetts. He was meant to stay in the large iron cage the inn kept in the old milking room, but Jesse had a big heart, however, and couldn’t keep the crow caged, allowing Houdini to sit at the bar, where he often behaved badly, stealing cherries and orange slices and crossly refusing to accept any pats from those who’d had a drink too many. Occasionally he’d swoop across the barroom so he could stare out the window, lovelorn. The crow made a clattering sound that was quite heartbreaking. “Sally will come back to you,” Jesse told him. “Wait and see.”
* * *
Unable are the Loved to die, for love is immortality, the Reverend quoted at the end of the marriage service, a blessing not only for the happy couple exchanging vows, but also in remembrance of Jet, whose favorite poet was Emily Dickinson, and of Franny, who had sacrificed so much for those she loved. The entire ceremony took under four minutes. Sally wore the black dress Franny had worn at her wedding, and her red boots. The color red had come back to her slowly, first in Ian’s flat on the day she met him, in flashes of rose and scarlet, until one day she was cutting an apple for them to share and the color was so brilliant that she burst into tears. Red, after all, was the color of love.
Sally wore Maria Owens’s sapphire pendant, as was customary at an Owens wedding. When Sally and Ian kissed they couldn’t seem to stop, and a sigh went up among the crowd as people remembered what true love was like, and how lucky those who found it were. The babies in attendance were surprisingly well behaved during the ceremony. Birdie, only two months old, was utterly silent, in awe of the magnolia trees with their huge saucer-sized flowers. Antonia had let Leo run around beforehand so he could tire himself out and yet he still had enough energy to hide under the table where the wedding cake was being plated, refusing to come when called. “He’s your spitting image,” everyone declared when Vincent came to claim his great-grandson, and even the Owenses from Maine, who were notoriously argumentative, had to agree. Antonia laughed and told Ariel that if that was true they were in for some big-time trouble. Vincent had never adhered to the rules.
Sally adored the little boy, and didn’t mention to Antonia that when she and Vincent had taken him into the parlor, Leo had made the books in the study jump off the shelves simply by waving his hands. They’d looked at each other and laughed. Antonia had no idea what she was in for.
“I had to practice for ages to do that,” Vincent confided.
When Antonia came looking for Leo, and asked what had happened to the books, Vincent shrugged and said there were known to be little earthquakes in this part of the commonwealth. Sally had then unclasped the necklace she had worn during the ceremony so that she could give Maria’s sapphire to Antonia. “To wear at the next wedding,” she said to her darling daughter. “How lucky to be able to fall in love.”
Vincent sat in the sunlight, where he removed his tie and his jacket and grinned at David, who was so enamored of America he was wearing a Red Sox cap. Oh, how Vincent wished he could tell his sisters how unexpected everything was. He wished they could sit down at the table, today, in the sunlight, so that he could tell them everything. Once, a long time ago, before we knew who we were, we thought we wanted to be like everyone else. How lucky to be exactly who we were.
The guests had a lavish wedding supper of lobster and scallops baked into a rosemary crust, with salads of every sort of lettuce, all fresh from the garden, and at last there was Tipsy Cake with cream, served while they all admired Leo and how precocious he was. Why, if you weren’t watching him like a hawk, he’d climb into the lilacs and disappear. He might have shaken down the cake table that he ducked beneath, had his great-grandfather not coaxed him out with the promise of a biscuit.