Author's Note: I couldn't resist, folks! I finally wrote that epilogue I've been promising you, and it ended up so long I had to split it into two chapters. Thanks to TiredChips and NatashaRostov, whose continued enthusiasm for this fic sparked the inspiration to write these chapters.
Epilogue Part I: Ages 18-21
The initial parting was a bitch.
JJ was all jokes and grins and copping a feel right up until the ferry left with both Kie and Pope on it on it, then he put his foot through the chicken coop. John B cried. Sarah went on a baking spree that blew all their grocery money for the month, so once all the lumpy bread and underdone cookies went moldy, they were eating bricks of ramen for weeks. The next month, she started getting actually good at baking bread and began talking about opening a sandwich shop, maybe partnering with Kie on The Wreck someday when she came home from traveling.
Pope sent letters home from Stanford—on paper like it was 1875—and they were longer than the damn dictionary. Sarah started to read them out loud at night after she saw JJ still struggling over the first page of a week-old letter. She even read the dirty parts, which John B hated, which made JJ love them even more. Almost as much as he loved how happy Pope was at college. To have nerd friends to talk about nerd stuff to. Pope joined so many study groups he didn't even have time to surf.
Kie hated Peace Corp. Said the assholes running her branch were all on the take and they were too busy Instagramming pics of themselves with smiling children to get around to helping any actual people. She took off after two months, ended up in a village with more goats than people, and wrote her own grants to get them a set of composting toilets to replace the sewage pits overflowing into their drinking water. They taught her how to keep bees, and she taught them how to dig a ditch and install a Pelton wheel to generate their own power. She got turned down for fourteen grants, but after the fifteenth, the equipment they needed showed up on an oxen-driven cart from her Amazon Prime.
During freshman year, Pope grew his hair into a full natural Afro. Kie shaved her head. John B put on fifteen pounds and JJ lost ten because he could never sit still now that there was no one to sit on his lap. Sarah got a tattoo.
They all came home for summers, no matter what they were doing. The months stretched long and lazy and they all glowed healthier the more sun they absorbed and the more fish they caught. Kie was starting to rival JJ at surfing. Sarah was starting to rival the junior high kids.
After Pope and Kie left, John B stayed at Sarah's tiny apartment and the Chateau sort of became JJ's. Every summer, it became all of theirs again. Summers, John B stayed over so much it was almost like the Pogues all over again, but never quite the same as it was in high school. Every year the group felt a little different than the last, each year taking on its own flavor. Kie could never decide which was her favorite. Pope analyzed them all endlessly. JJ didn't even seem to notice.
The first night when they all came back to the island for a visit, they always slept together in a big pile. They never planned it on purpose, or if they did, they never talked about it. It just usually went about the same way, starting with beers at the Chateau. John B would fall asleep, because John B was always falling asleep. Sarah would flop on one side of him and Kiara on the other, resting their heads on him like he was just another piece of furniture to gossip over.
JJ and Pope would be off playing some ridiculous physical game, like slap hands or leg wrestling or whatever they did. Sooner or later, they'd all end up on the pull out couch, John B's ridiculous hair tickling Kiara's cheek, Sarah snoring snortily. Pope muttering equations because he didn't sleep talk, he sleep-mathed. Long division, mostly, though he never spoke the answers. Only the problems.
JJ was the only one who slept quietly, his fingers finding and tangling with Kiara's no matter where they ended up in the pile. He got beautiful when he slept, but it knifed at her sometimes how quiet his breathing was, like he was always listening for what might approach. He was always up first, out on the dock flicking his fishing pole over the water, or checking on the boats, or rolling a jay in the hammock. His smile rising like the sun when she wandered out to find him, the light in his eyes a little mischievous, a lot sexy.
With JJ, it was so easy it was like she never left. With Pope, he loved school, but the longer he was away from them, the tighter he wound. Kiara knew from that first summer that he couldn't take many years of it. Certainly not as many as he'd need to get the degrees he'd planned. She and JJ didn't talk about it, but there was a look passed, just once. They knew. They'd deal with it when they had to.
But until then, she had a new village waiting on her, run by the nephew of her landlord from the last one. They needed clean water and she needed to be needed. When fall came around, she only stayed a week after Pope went back to school, kissing JJ breathless every day like she couldn't get enough, and then boarding another plane anyway. These first years of her adult life weren't meant for the island, and no one tried to talk her into staying.
The plumbing at the Chateau gave up for good, and when none of them could afford to fix it, John B and JJ packed up and got jobs on the offshore oil rigs JJ always talked about. Kiara asked if they liked oil spills killing sea creatures, and JJ asked if she liked having a roof over her head. They argued about it for a long time, and made up for even longer, and JJ went anyway.
John B only lasted three months. He couldn't stand to be away from Sarah, he kept falling asleep during the long night shifts, and after the second hurricane hit their platform, he quit. JJ stayed for six months, then eight. After the third hurricane demolished their platform, JJ went missing. Kie was halfway home, waiting out a layover in Paris, when she got the call that they found him on a life raft a hundred miles off the coast. She was crying so hard she missed her flight to the States. Pope rerouted to Paris to go to her. That ticket used up his spring break ticket money, so he only got to come home once at Christmas that year. John B tried to drive the VW bus all the way to the hospital where they'd airlifted JJ, and when it broke down, he hitchhiked the rest of the way.
The lawyers promised the gold would come through any minute. The next appeal was sure to win. They were so sure, they even loaned John B the money to get the VW out of impound and tow it all the way home.
JJ got a settlement from the oil rig company to not sue them for his four days lost at sea after the hurricane wiped out the oil platform. JJ joked that he had a life raft to himself, and since he was able to twist nails from the debris into hooks, that he basically had him a little free fishing vacation, no need to bring more lawyers into anything. He used the hurricane settlement money to re-plumb the Chateau, nailed on a new roof himself, then headed back out to the oil rig. Kie's plane had just gotten back to Kandahar when Pope texted her that news. She called JJ and broke up with him on the spot. He quit the oil rig and moved back to the island an hour later.
The Heywards started having JJ, John B, and Sarah over for dinner every Sunday. Once a month, Mrs. Heyward cut JJ and John B's hair and Sarah swore it had them looking so clean cut she nearly had to kick them out of the Cut. JJ and Big Heyward cooked up a new plan to sell fillets of the trash-eating dock fish to the Kooks, laid out on beds of chipped ice and parsley and rebranded as Argentinian Ice Fish. They made enough money on dock fish to send Pope to a conference where he was supposed to meet, wine, and dine some honcho in charge of all the forensic pathologists in Chapel Hill. If Pope could land the job there, JJ wrote to Kie, he'd only have to commute by the ferry. Otherwise, he'd have to move to work in his field, and then they'd all have to move to the fucking mainland. The weekend of that conference, they were all holding their breath.
The first day, Pope tried to introduce himself to the executive, stuttered his way into a panic attack and spilled a pitcher of water on the guy. But later that weekend, the executive's car broke down and Pope climbed under the car to fix it, his tie dragging on the asphalt. Pope ended up being an usher in his wedding the next spring.
Their future, JJ told Kie, was just about set.
After they'd been working together full time for a while, Big Heyward took JJ aside and told him Pope wasn't going to take over the family business, and if he wanted, it could be JJ's. When John B retold the story, JJ's mouth started flapping like a flounder and he swooned like a cartoon princess. Sarah's version included a few days of indecision and a drunken weekend binge that nearly sunk the HMS Pogue. JJ wouldn't say anything about his eventual decision to turn down Big Heyward except, "Can't kowtow to those fucking Kooks for my whole life."
But as flippant as he was, Kie could see the shadow in his face when he stared out across the ocean after telling her about it. Thought that if the marina only served the Cut, he'd have taken the job in a heartbeat. Either way, he and Big Heyward were different after that. Easier, more like equals, even if they hadn't ended up business partners.
John B and Sarah said they were going to wait until they were both 21 before they got married, but they totally didn't make it. They barely lasted until Pope's spring break freshman year, so everybody could come back to the island. John B lost the rings before the ceremony, and they never did find them.
After the wedding, Kie joked that Sarah Routledge sounded too teachery, so everybody started calling her Sarah B instead. Even after they were married, the couple still got sappy and disgusting so often that the ferry driver would blow the foghorn to get them to stop macking. This happened so often that people at the marina got in the habit of yelling "John B!" when the foghorn blew, even if he wasn't riding the ferry at the time.
They got a dog named Princess, and JJ adopted one named Pogue that they thought was fixed until Princess had puppies. Ironically, Pogue ended up the better trained of the two.
Sarah opened a sandwich shop called the Royal Merchant. It just about went under its first year, and nobody asked where JJ got the money to bail her out. Well, that wasn't strictly true. Everyone asked, but JJ wouldn't tell. After that, the sandwich shop and the story of the treasure hunt landed in one of the tourist guides and it got so busy that during tourist season, sometimes John B would have to stop by and waitress. He forgot everybody's orders, but was a big hit with the female tourists, who all competed to get him to tell the "How We Found the Gold" story again and again.
Kie learned to slackline, and to weave her own cloth. She hardly ever lost a grant application anymore and she knew how to install three types of micro-hydro power generation systems. One year, she spent entirely in animal sanctuaries, raising injured babies and lobbying for more conservation of habitat. She was just recovering from a bout of dengue fever, hoping to fly home next month, when she got the email from John B.
JJ's dad died. It's bad. You need to come now.
Her calls to JJ just went to voicemail. He barely answered her texts. She kept texting with one hand, and booked a plane ticket with the other.
The way the timing worked out, she and Pope landed on the same ferry in. His fingers jittered along the rail. "Okay, if JJ gets out of hand," he told her, "John B and I will tackle him. Don't come close until he quits fighting. Then, once he subsides, you can hug him. He never breaks until you hug him and then he'll be okay."
She rolled her eyes. "Ooh, is the manly toughness just seeping out of you going to protect you from all that? I broke up a fight between two herders crazy on fermented mare's milk last week, and they were the ones who went home with black eyes. Who've you been wrestling, college boy?"
A smile flickered through his worry. "My manly toughness is just oozing. It's all over the place. Can't you feel it?"
"Oh yeah, will your toughness get you this?"
She grabbed his hat and frisbeed it off the side of the ferry.
"What?" He gaped after it. "Dammit, Kie, that was my favorite hat."
"Oh, you don't have enough toughness to go after it? College boy forget how to swim?"
Pope threw a glance back at the cockpit and One-Eared Joe. "You know they don't like us to jump off the ferry."
In answer, Kie skimmed off her dress and dove straight over the edge.
"Dammit, Kie!" He looked after her, looked to where One-Eared Joe was goggle-eyed at her fallen dress, then went over the rail after her, fully-clothed and kicking hard to clear the wake of the ferry.
The foghorn blew angrily, and everyone on the boat and the dock chorused, "John B!"
Pope choked on seawater, laughing, and was relieved when Kie surfaced wearing his hat and a red bikini. He'd thought, in his panic, that she'd gone in naked. They swam to the shore and then circled around to the dock to meet the ferry and get their luggage and her clothes.
"Who wears a bikini under their clothes when they've been in airports all day?" Pope bitched, wringing out his tie.
"Somebody who knows swimming always cheers you up." She leaned over and kissed him on the cheek. "Welcome home, Pope."
Sarah B was waiting with the VW bus. Kie offered to drive and Sarah glared at her, finessing the finicky clutch out of the parking lot.
Kie nodded, a little impressed. "This old thing ever going to die?"
Sarah B scoffed. "The way John B and JJ baby this engine, it'll outlast us all. They spent all last month covered in grease up to their eyebrows, rebuilding the whole thing. Happy as pigs in shit."
"Not so happy now, I guess," Pope muttered from the backseat as they rounded the bend into the Chateau. The whole fishing shack was wrapped with Christmas lights, so thick Kie wasn't entirely sure they left a gap for the door. The chicken coop was just as lit up.
The rooster crowed a little indignantly, like it wasn't too sure about the changes, either. Kie's stomach stirred. JJ could roll with most any knocks the world sent his way—and there had been many. But when he lost it, he went big.
As she watched, fireballs began to arc from the roof to the ocean with the familiar whoomp whoomp of roman candle fireworks.
"Fuck," Pope muttered.
"Well, the Chateau's not on fire yet," she said optimistically. "When John B said it was bad, I kind of expected JJ would have burned down the whole island by the time I could get back to the states."
Sarah B sighed. "That's not as far off as you think."
As they got out of the van, John B limped around the side of the house, his hair all ruffled up and singed on the left side and a scowl on his face. "About time," he muttered, barely even nodding hello. "It's your shift in Crazytown."
They found JJ on the roof, bottles of cheap champagne rolled down into the rain gutters, light-up sunglasses hiding his eyes from the fading sunset. The reflected glare of the roman candle fireballs burned a fiery arc across each lens as Kie paused on the top of the ladder, watching him.
JJ's lips twisted. "The fuck you doing home? Aren't all the villages of the world going to starve without you?" He waved a bleary hand. " 'S fine. John B's too much of a bitch to celebrate with me so I'll sell-brate mesself." He tried to light another roman candle, the flame of his Zippo lighter wavering past the fuse once, then again. Then it caught and he seemed to realize, too late, that it was pointed at his stomach instead of the sea.
"JJ!" Pope shouted from behind Kie and she exploded off the ladder and across the roof, swiped the firework tube, and tossed it into the ocean just before it shot, the sparks subsiding just under the surface of the water.
Kie squatted down in front of JJ. "You blow up at me right now, one of us is going to end up rolling off this roof."
He scowled at her. "I'm fine. Dunno whatshure talking about. John B just forgot how to party. Old married people. Fuck."
From below, the VW engine sputtered as John B and Sarah B drove off to their house. Pope was still hanging back, the old roof creaking as he shifted his weight side to side. The Christmas lights illuminated JJ's face in odd tones of red and yellow and green that reminded her of another night, a hot tub. But his ribs were blessedly free of bruises this time and for a second, she couldn't speak, she missed him so much.
Never again. She'd never have to see the marks of his father's fists on JJ's skin ever again.
She swallowed, her voice steady again by the time she finally found the words.
"It's okay to miss your dad, you know. He was your blood. You loved him, even if he was an asshole." She nudged him. "Trust me, I understand the feeling."
The gentle tease broke the awful tension on the roof and JJ dropped his head, laughed shakily. "You didn't have to come back for this, not for fucking Luke. Ev'body you're saving out there's better than him. More 'portant."
She moved to sit next to him, the reek of champagne coming off him in sour waves.
"I didn't come back for Luke. I came back for you." She slid the sunglasses off his face and beneath them, his eyes were so bloodshot and swollen he didn't even look like himself. "You didn't lose your family, JJ. We're here and we love you. We always love you."
He caught his breath, stared past her to the sea. None of them were breathing.
"I inherited his house, his boat." He laughed, humorlessly. "He had a leak in the kitchen roof so big he had two buckets under it when I went over there, but that boat is fast as fuck. You say what you want about my old man. He was a piece of shit father, crappy employee, all around sack of shit human being. But he could tune an engine. Man could tune an engine."
Pope nodded, standing behind Kie. "He could."
"My cousins had already been through there by the time I went. Stole the couch, the chainsaw, his stash of pills." JJ shook his head, speaking more clearly now like the topic alone had sobered him. "Bad genes. Bad fucking genes. They're in me…" He caught his breath but his back started to shake anyway. "Don't you ever…"
He caught Kie's face in his fingers and she didn't flinch, holding his eyes.
"I feel it in me, sometimes. That anger, like it just scorches the earth and I can't see myself past it. Don't you ever let me start turning out like my old man. I don't care what you got to do to me. Pope would—" He shook his head. "Pope'd let me by. John B, too. Sarah'd just hide. You won't, right?"
"I don't have to do a thing, JJ. You do that all yourself," Kie said. "Remember when you were fourteen and you started walking away? You used to get so mad. When one of us would argue with you or you were hungry or there was something going on with school—you'd start yelling, then chucking stuff, and John B would get in your way. Sometimes you'd just shove him, sometimes you'd start wailing on him. And he just took it, said that was just JJ, and you didn't mean nothing by it. Never bothered him. But one day you just started walking away instead."
"I did that because of you." Silent tears streaked down his face, painted with carnival colors in the lights from the house. "Don't you remember, Kie? You got between us one day and I almost hit you before I could pull the punch. You said figure out another way because I was hurting John B. You weren't gonna watch me hurt John B no more." He dropped his head and Pope came up behind him, holding him. JJ's sob finally broke and over the sound, Kie lifted her voice.
"And you didn't. You learned how to walk away. You're not your daddy." She wrapped her arms around him and Pope and rocked all three of them as JJ started to come apart in their arms. "You've never been your daddy. I love you, JJ. We all love you."
John B came back the next morning, early. Brought breakfast burritos from the Royal Merchant but Kie gestured him toward the door instead, leaving JJ sleeping in Pope's lap on the new pullout couch. They walked down the beach, the gulls screaming and the sea air salty on Kie's eyes, still swollen from crying along with JJ on the roof last night.
"The last year or so," John B said, "JJ started going to the Anchor."
"That old dive bar in the Cut?"
"Yup."
"Just to drink? Why would he go there? Isn't that his dad's neighborhood spot?"
"He'd go early, before Luke had too many beers in him. They'd talk about engines, mostly. JJ picked up some new tips from him. Never would say goodbye, never stuck around too long. Would just say he had to take a piss, slip out the back. Before things could get ugly. It was the best I ever saw the two of them get along, the last few years."
Kie gave John B a sideways look, her hair blowing against her cheek. It was almost grown out to her waist again. It had grown even faster after she shaved it, like it was leaping to the challenge. "Luke Maybank was an abusive piece of shit. The only good thing he put into this world was JJ and he did his level best to fuck that up, too."
"I'm not arguing. But JJ always wanted—"
"I know." She paused. "Do you think he got it?"
"A tiny little piece of it, maybe. For once." John B slung an arm around Kie, kissed her head. "And for the rest, he has us."
It was still a month before summer break, but Kie didn't go back to her latest village. She stayed, drinking beer in the hammock with JJ and running on the beach with him in the mornings. Helping him repaint his dad's old boat and then selling it for cash to pay the property taxes on the Chateau, which were always going up up up as the Kooks took over more and more of the beachfront property on the Cut side of the island.
It was that summer when they finally did it. They didn't make a fuss, because Kie didn't believe in commercializing emotion, and JJ was broke, and Pope only cared about one part of all this and he was already getting it. Kie put on a little sundress, the bottom of it flirting with the breeze and the tiny straps crisscrossing her bare back. A flower behind her ear that blew off in the wind as soon as they hit the throttle on their way out of the marsh.
"When you said dress up, I thought you meant jeans," John B complained, from the wheel of the HMS Pogue. "How fancy is this sandbar party, anyway?"
JJ smirked from the bow, in sharply creased charcoal pants and suspenders over his wide shoulders. His hair was a glorious wreck and he couldn't keep his eyes off Pope, who was done up in an open-collared white shirt and dark tuxedo jacket that made his eyes glow like obsidian. Or maybe that was just because he couldn't stop smiling.
"Damn, Pope," JJ complained. "You look hotter than me. I don't think you're supposed to look hotter than me at our wedding."
"Too bad, blondie." Pope winked, glowing even brighter. "Suck it up."
"Wedding?" John B yelped. "I thought we were going to a sandbar party!"
Sarah B rolled her eyes fondly. "Bet you thought all your presents at Christmas came down the chimney, too, right?"
"No, Santa left them in the boatshed," he muttered, wounded. "We didn't have a chimney. If we're having a wedding, why didn't we take Big Heyward's boat? More room to stand up."
"Then he'd be the captain," Kie said, leaning back into the cradle of JJ's arm. "And he'd have to marry us. We wanted it just to be Pogues, today."
Sarah looked up, eyelashes fluttering wide, and Kie nodded.
"You heard me right, Sarah B. Just Pogues."
Tears sparkled in Sarah's eyes, but she made it until the ceremony itself before she started crying.
Pope wrote all their vows. Neither Kie or JJ asked to read theirs before the ceremony, and later, they all agreed they wouldn't have changed a word from what Pope wrote. They were individual to each of their personalities and relationships, and they were perfect. It wasn't until John B went to sign the marriage certificate that he even thought to ask about the legalities.
"Wait, what the fuck? Only Pope and JJ are on this."
"Yup." Kie sipped her champagne and JJ's hand tightened on her shoulder. "North Carolina wouldn't recognize a marriage with all three of us, technically. In terms of the benefits of the legal stuff, Pope can get cheap health insurance, as a student, and my parents are paying for my insurance. JJ needs coverage more than me. Plus, if either of them are ever hurt, in the hospital, people will let me in no questions asked if I say I'm the wife." Her jaw set with anger. "For them, they might need the legal proof."
"Never needed the law to tell me how to live my life before," JJ said. "Don't need it now. I just did the paperwork end of things because they wanted to. All I wanted was this." He held up his hand with his new ring solid on his left hand.
They'd all gotten bands of gold, silver, and rose gold, all braided together. Pope's and JJ's wide and Kie's narrow and delicate.
"How the hell'd you afford those?" John B grumped, because he was still saving up to replace the ones he misplaced before his own wedding.
"I learned metal working in my last village," Kie said. "I can make you guys rings, too, if you want." She twisted her new band so it sat steady alongside the silver abalone ring JJ once gave her, still at home on her second finger.
John B sighed. "No, I want to buy them myself, not get them free off my buddies. Those are nice, though."
It was the best summer ever, like a honeymoon with no sunset. Which was lucky, because it was the last good one for a while.
Author's Note: One more chapter! The next epilogue section will cover the next seven years, and some of my favorite moments along the way.