Part Nine: The Gate
He bought a house in the spring.
Not Millbrook Lane — he had no intention of returning to Millbrook Lane. A different street, in the same county as Sarah, with a garden that backed onto a small area of woods and had a bird table and a patch of earth that the previous owners had used for vegetables and that Emma had already decided she was going to use for flowers.
“You can grow vegetables too,” he said.
“I know,” she said. “But flowers are better.”
He was not going to argue with this.
The house had a gate. A different gate — wooden, painted dark green, with a straightforward latch that did not need oil. On the afternoon they moved in, Emma went through the gate approximately seventeen times for the pleasure of the sound it made, which was different from Millbrook Lane’s gate, was entirely its own sound.
On the eighteenth time, she came back through it and ran across the new garden toward him.
He caught her.
She weighed more than he remembered, and more than she had weighed when he caught her in the hospital room, and she was laughing — actually laughing, the full-bodied laugh that she had been working her way back toward for months — and she said something that he didn’t quite catch because she said it into his shoulder.
“What?” he said.
She leaned back to look at him.
“I said it sounds right,” she said. “The gate. It sounds like the right gate.”
He looked at his daughter’s face. At the color in it. At the entirely ordinary expression of a child who had decided she liked something and was telling someone she trusted.
“Yeah,” he said. “I think it does.”
She wriggled down and ran back toward the gate to go through it again.
He stood in the garden of the new house and watched her go, and he thought about all the gates he had come through in his life, and all the returns, and all the things he had imagined finding on the other side of them.
He had not imagined this, exactly.
It was better than anything he had imagined.
