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But it can’t last forever.
“You’re shivering,” Elio murmurs against my wet throat. “Come on.”
He carries me from the pool and sets me down on my feet near a shelf of towels, wrapping one around my shoulders and then placing another on top of my head like a hood. Once I’m thoroughly covered, he shucks out of his wet stuff, wrapping a towel around his hips and grabbing his phone from the tiles of the floor.
“Want a cup of tea?”
Who ever thought that a question like that would make me want to sob?
Overcome with emotion, I nod, and together we head into the kitchen.
When we get there, we both stop short when we see a large cardboard box on the granite island. After what happened at our wedding, seeing a strange package in an unexpected place is alarming, if not downright terrifying.
“It’s OK,” Elio says quickly, “All the mail goes to the gatehouse and it doesn’t make it in here if it’s not something safe.” But even so, he approaches it slowly, narrowing his eyes at the writing on the label. His expression instantly relaxes.
“Well, that’s good timing for the tea, I guess.”
“What is it?” I ask as he grabs a knife and starts cutting the box open.
“This was supposed to be your wedding gift from me,” he says, slicing tape and pulling tabs of cardboard. “But I had to send it to a master artisan in Japan. And it took longer than I thought to get it back.”
He reaches into the box and pulls out something wrapped in a ton of bubble wrap. I watch, clutching my towels, entranced as the bubble wrap falls away layer by layer, revealing something that feels deeply familiar though I can’t quite say why.
Not until the last layer is peeled away.
“It can’t be,” I whisper.
“It is,” Elio says softly, watching me. “It’s your mamma’s teapot.”
And it is. It really fucking is. Unbelievably, it’s all in one piece again. The shape is exactly how I remember it – high and elegant with the most beautiful tapered spout. Even the painted flowers are just how they looked before, so tiny and beautiful that it almost hurts to look at them even though I can’t make myself stop staring.
The only difference?
Veins of gold run through the entire piece, like living blood vessels. Every jagged piece of the teapot has been painstakingly fitted back against all the others, and they’ve all been sealed with shimmering metal.
And now I’m crying again, because it’s so meaningful that it’s shattering my heart and putting it back together again all at the same time. It’s a sign that beautiful things can come from broken ones. And that sometimes the cracks are the things that make us what we are.
Nothing’s ever perfect
But maybe everything can be mended.
Even us.
There will be scar tissue.
But sometimes it’s the scars that truly shape the soul of a thing. Sometimes it’s our scars that prove that we’re alive.
“Don’t cry,” Elio says, setting the kettle to boil. “You just sit down like my good little Songbird. And I’ll make you some tea.”
Epilogue
1.5 years later
I shift in the hard wooden seat, tugging at the collar of my shirt. It’s hot in here. There are a lot of bodies crammed into this big old University of Toronto hall. I stare over the heads of the other people in the audience. With her hair, Deirdre is easy to spot among the sea of arts students robed in black graduation gowns beside the stage. I don’t like being so far away from her, even though I’ve got a good seat that’s nice and close to the stage. But still. It makes me real fucking antsy.
But we won’t be here for much longer. The woman behind the podium has already reached the T section of the alphabet. I keep my gaze glued to my wife as she slowly shuffles along in a line of fellow graduates, getting closer and closer to the stairs leading up to the stage.
Millicent Tan, Grayson Teague, Andrew Thacker, Grace Thornton…
