Page 87 of On Fire

Epilogue

Dave Keller

It’s summer and there’s a baby on the sand in a baby bucket, nearly hidden from view by a huge red canvas beach umbrella. I lay next to her while her parents swim in the freezing cold waters of Echo Bay.

“Your parents are crazy,” I say to her as she grips my finger. “Crazy, I say!” Her tiny fingernails go white with the effort. Then she burps. A wet one. Nic glances at my face.

“I got this.” He grabs a fresh cotton diaper from the diaper bag. He un-hitches her from her seat and lays her on his tanned legs. We watch her startle reflex engage—gasping, arms flung open—while he mops curdled milk from the crevices of her neck.

“You’re so good at this.”

I almost couldn’t watch the day Finn placed teeny Nikki in Nic’s arms. When we went to visit the new family in the hospital, Nic was so careful, so tender it broke my heart. Finn placed the tiny infant in Nic’s arms and said, “Say hi to baby Nicole.”

Cradling her, Nic bent down to stare at her. She burbled in her sleep, sighed a long sigh, and smiled. Nic just kept grinning.

I’m the one who caught it. “Nicole?”

“Yes,” said Claire.

Still focused on the baby in his arms, Nic wasn’t listening.

Finn put a hand on his shoulder. “We’re calling her Nikki.”

I saw him stiffen. I knew he was steeling himself against a flood of tenderness and love he couldn’t allow to show—this morning was supposed to be about them—this new family. And then he gently kissed Nikki on the forehead and held her for the next hour.

It wasn’t until we were in the car driving home that he teared up. Luckily, I had tissues on me. Thought that might happen.

That night, he sat out in the hot tub for a long time under the stars. When I joined him, he said it was one of the happiest days of his life.

“I’ve gone from having no family to being in a family.”

One day, I wanted to tell him, we’ll expand that family ourselves. But all I did was sit beside him and hold his hand.

Lying on the beach, having a day off, being with my boyfriend is heaven. Suddenly Finn and Claire come running up from the water.

“Here they come,” I say.

Claire ducks in under the umbrella. She’s too wet to hold the baby right away. But she smiles and takes the towel her husband hands her.

“Are you playing with Uncle Nic?” she says to her daughter in a sing-song voice.

Little Nikki smiles, thrusts her hands up, and grabs Nic’s fingers. He buries his face in her neck and makes snorting noises. She laughs and then hiccups. Her little tummy buckles with each spasm and she laughs and then looks startled in quick succession. A few minutes later Claire takes her inside to breastfeed.

“Do you want me to come?” Finn asks.

“Nope, I got it,” she says. “Just bring the diaper bag and bucket later.”

He sits down next to the two of us, while his wife is off, trudging through sand, cradling Nikki, and making her way back to The Inn. Her sisters are all on the back porch having a beer.

She sits down next to Laurel and Cory climbs into his mother’s lap so he can look at his cousin. Devon is dripping wet having followed Finn and Claire out of the water. Her swimsuit is bright pink which Luke thinks is hilarious.

Maybe I should say “thought is hilarious.”

“I am never going to let her live it down,” he said last week after she described it to him over the phone. He repeated the word “pink” about four times.

When he finally saw her in it, all bravado left him. They disappeared for a good two hours.

“Hey chief,” she says without even a nod to me, then she turns around and blows me a kiss on her way to meet her sisters.