Belle walks into the woods, holding love tight in her arms.
She feels a gust of frost across her cheek, and turns away from it: she doesn’t want the adventure snow promises on a sunny day. She doesn’t want, right now, that great wide somewhere of the palace she leaves behind. And though the mountains call to her—curses! enchantments! a whole new story!—Belle wants to build the old one, wants to find the past drawn on this wrinkled paper by some old hand.
She finds a hill in the wood, covered thick over with late-blooming blue flowers, and sits among the tiny blue stars, papers spread around her like a sun.
The smell of snow dies away. The blue sky stretches out huge, above her, and she remembers, sharp and quick, that day she ran up this hill and threw her hands out to the horizon: I want it more than I can tell!
Looking back across the hill, she sees a blur to the south: what might be a clocktower, if the haze of the mountains weren’t so thick and hid it all in mist. She runs back to the memory: the running up the hill: the running from something: the running back to something.
Belle, sitting in a meadow specked with flowers, closes her eyes and conjures up a spell from her own heart.
Her spell is tied up in her running brown boots; it’s tied up in love; it’s tied up in going home, in inventing that home out of the nothing scraps she has in front of her. She lays out the pieces in front of her, as someone taught her, and turns the scraps of paper—the servants’ pain—Chip’s abandoned tea box—the tears they let nobody hear—into gears and screws and tools, building up the thing no one can look at. Hands that paint, hearts that love, an old man’s blue eyes staring at her through the shadows of her home.
Belle jumps. What was that?
The paper is blowing in the wind, but it’s not the frosty wind of earlier: now she smells summer cabbages, and jam, and the dust of horses’ hooves. Gasping, she shuts her eyes tight, clutches the tools in front of her, and remembers like it is all that matters in the world.
The house with the crooked stoop. The church with its small bookshelf. The village drunk, shoved into the tiny country jail. The smell of bread wafting from someone’s house. Calls in the marketplace—the twirl of the skirts—the muddy well water, the potter’s donkey, pointed roofs pointing up to the sky. Beth. Jean. Alléchant. Clothilde. Stanley. Maurice.
The sky cracks open above her, light so bright and blinding Belle falls back, the air knocked out of her, crushing the forget-me-nots under her. The pages whip and froth and there’s a hurricane on the mountain, and the mountains moan, and the mist cries out like the death of a witch.
And when she looks up, blue eyes look back at her, and Maurice’s hands shake a little with the joy of it.
At the palace, Cogsworth finds Clothilde exploding from his waistcoat pocket, ripping it to pieces as she goes. Chapeau takes a hat off the handstand and finds his mother’s face beneath it. One moment, LeFou is standing before the fireplace, admiring the decorative swords hung above it; the next, Stanley has fallen into his arms, looking shocked as always at his good luck.
Adam meets Belle and Maurice at the gates, panting, his cravat undone. “You found him!” he calls. “You found them! You found home!”
Belle beams and hugs her father. She never wants to let him go.
That night, they hold a banquet. Lumiere and Plumette make a quick run to the village for supplies, digging around in now-sunny cupboards for forgotten jams, new-made breads, butters still golden as corn. Jean Potts won’t stop swinging Chip around, Beatrice won’t stop laughing. Villagers swarm every room, drinking coffee, holding court, finding family in every corner.
Belle sits with Maurice in the library, showing him her books, showing him passages she marked out for him when she still didn’t know who she wanted to show them to. He’s still a little shaky—still a little frightened—he, too, remembers, and he remembers falling numb, he remembers being unable to finish that last sketch. He remembers falling to the tabletop, brushes useless.
“It’s all right, papa,” she murmurs. “I remembered.”
He smiles at her. “I still don’t see how.”
She shakes her head at him. “You don’t need to see, Papa. You already saw. You put so much love into me it couldn’t help sprouting out, somehow, someday. It wasn’t me that broke the curse. It was your love.”
She hands him the sketches—all crumpled now, the ink running. He’ll have to start anew, make new ones, studying her as she runs and yells and reads. He has all the time in the world to do that, now. All the time to keep on loving her, as he always has.
Make this last forever, he thinks. As he thinks it, he knows it won’t happen—memories fade, minutes pass, girls grow up and fall in love. But this moment was here, he had it. He made it. Somehow, he had made a daughter who could outlast a memory. He didn’t know such a thing was possible.
The whole world was possible, now, the whole world was alive with baking bread and home. Somewhere, Chip was calling. Chapeau’s sisters wanted paintings, portraits. Adam was wondering if Maurice could put a little toy painter back into the windmill he keeps on his desk. The windows were open, and the light was coming in.
Why stick to a moment, when all of life is right there in front of you?
Maurice kisses Belle’s forehead, and steps forward into life.
