Chapter 42
The wedding was in December, in a garden in New Kingston that Nia had designed the layout for herself, because of course she had. It was entirely her considered and beautiful and not following any particular template except the one she had made.
Forty people in the garden: family, friends, the core people who had shaped both of them. Leroy was Marcus's best man, which had never been a question. Sandra stood with Nia. Auntie Beverley had flown from Wolverhampton, arriving on the Thursday and standing in the doorway of Diane's kitchen and embracing her sister for a long time without speaking.
Priya and Tunde both came from England. They arrived on the same flight, having coordinated without Marcus knowing, and appeared at his apartment on the Friday evening with gifts and the easy familiarity of people who had kept an important friendship across time and distance.
'You're actually doing it,' Priya said, looking at him with genuine emotion.
'Did you think I wouldn't?'
'I thought you might think about it for another decade,' she said.
He laughed. He embraced her. Then Tunde.
The ceremony was simple. They had written their own words Marcus had spent three weeks on his, writing and revising with the same care he gave to his best essays and they stood in the December garden in the warm Kingston afternoon and said them to each other.
Marcus looked at Nia and said: 'I have been trying to say the true thing since I was old enough to know that truth was what mattered. I am still learning. I want to learn it with you, for the rest of our lives. You are the person I am most fully myself with. That is the most important thing I know.'
She said: 'You see things other people miss. I want to spend my life being seen by you. I will spend my life seeing you back.'
His mother sat in the front row in a dress she had made herself, in a deep blue that was exactly right for her. She was composed, steady, dry-eyed. She was the most beautiful thing in the garden.
When the ceremony was done and Marcus had kissed his wife and turned to face the small crowd of people who had made him, he found himself briefly unable to speak.
Leroy clapped him on the shoulder.
'You good?' Leroy said.
'I'm good,' Marcus said.
'I know,' Leroy said. 'I always knew.'
That evening, when the garden had cleared and the family was still together around a table of food and the Kingston sky was doing its impossible things with colour, Marcus looked at the faces of the people he loved his mother, his wife, Beverley, Leroy, Priya, Tunde and felt the whole weight of what it had taken to arrive at this moment, and what a gift it was.
He wrote in his journal that night, the last thing before sleeping: 'The tree survives the storm and does not forget the soil. I have survived. I have not forgotten. This is where the building begins.