4. Ariel
4
ARIEL
The gel is warmer than I expect. It’s a relief, really—the waiting room’s air conditioning had turned my skin to gooseflesh.
“Ah, there’s Bébé A ,” the technician murmurs in a thick French accent, pointing to the leftmost blob on the screen. “Kicking up a storm today, non ? Très bien. Parfaits.”
I squint. To me, it just looks like static with a pulse.
Spat. Spat. Spat.
The Doppler picks up twin heartbeats. One is steady as she goes, the other staccato as rain on a tin roof. My own heart stumbles over itself trying to match their rhythm.
This is real. This is real. This is real.
I glance down at the swell beneath where my sweater is hiked up to my ribs. I’m as surprised as always by what I see there. Twenty-five weeks in, and I’ve gone from looking moderately peckish to smuggling cantaloupes. Still, my brain hasn’t quite caught up to the math: two cantaloupes.
Twins came as a surprise the first time a technician spotted them. I made him go get the doctor and check again, and when that doctor said the same thing, I made her go get another doctor for triple confirmation. But when the dust settled, they all agreed.
Twins. Two babies. Two Makris-Ozerov-Ward angels-to-be.
God help us all.
Right on cue, I feel a pang and I bolt upright, sending a glob of ultrasound gel flying. The twins have been staging an MMA fight in my uterus for weeks now. I’m just the unwilling arena.
“Soon, Maman ,” the tech tells me with a broad, toothy grin. “Are you ready?”
I laugh politely and tell her the same thing I tell everyone who asks: “Not even close.”
The woman grins, then leaves to fetch the doctor. I hear a knock on the door a second later, and when I look up, I see Jasmine slipping into the exam room.
“Sorry,” she says. “Lesson ran late. Isabelle is getting better, though.”
“Well, she can’t get much worse.”
“Hey!”
“No offense to her wildly talented instructor, of course,” I hurry to say. When Jasmine continues to pout, I add, “… who is also wise, beautiful, and has an ass you could bounce a quarter off of.”
She nods primly. “That’s more like it.” She plucks a pair of tissues from the box on the counter and helps wipe the gel off my belly. “Any motion in the ocean?”
“They’re right where they’re supposed to be. Still kicking me like Pelé.”
Jas frowns. “Like who?”
“Isn’t he a soccer player? I thought he was. Could be wrong.”
“It’s football here,” she reminds me with a grin.
I roll my eyes. Six months in Europe has mostly gotten me acclimated to life across the pond. Some things are more adjusted than others, though. You can take the girl out of New York, but you can’t take the New York out of the girl. And the distinct lack of good egg-and-cheese bagels is giving me conniptions.
“Any names come to mind yet?” Jasmine asks as she goes to stand in the corner. Like every other one of the visits she’s accompanied me on, she leaves the husband chair empty. We haven’t talked about that gesture, what she intends it to mean, what it might mean to me. I have no plans to ask.
“Thing One and Thing Two.”
“Ah, yes, such a rich etymological history to those. Full of culture, tradition, and yet also forward-thinking and contemporary.”
I stick my tongue out at her. “No, smartass, I have not yet decided on names.”
“Hm. How about Leon if there’s a boy and Leona for a girl?”
“‘Leon’?”
“Greek theater muse and French lion. It’s balanced.”
“It’s tragic. ”
“Says the woman who named herself after a fairy.”
Jasmine—excuse me, Morgane— lobs a peppermint at my head. “Rude. Also, moving the goalposts. Again.”
I catch it, unwrap it, pop it in my mouth. The sharp coolness cuts through the hospital’s antiseptic gauze taste. “That’s a bad name and you know it. Sounds too much like…”
Leander.
The mint cracks between my molars.
Jasmine cringes at the sound. “Too soon?”
“Only by a century.”
As often as possible over the last six months, we’ve talked about the future, not the past. Leaving Marseille was easy for Jas; she’d been ready to run for a long, long time. We packed up her apartment, got in her car, and drove west. When we hit the Atlantic coast of France, I said, “Good enough,” and we found a little bungalow in a tiny beach town called Moliets-et-Maa.
It was simple enough to focus my attention on the little things. Get food to eat, a job to make a bit of money, stuff like that. Most words having to do with recent history are verboten: Leander, Dragan, and most of all, Sasha.
That hasn’t stopped him from coming to me at night. More than once, Jas has shaken me awake with concern in her eyes. You were moaning his name. I could even feel the sticky residue it left behind on my lips.
Sasha. Sasha. Sasha.
And whenever I do dream of him, my ears catch odd little noises the whole next day. I’ll hear a seagull squawk and I could swear it’s saying, Ptichka, ptichka!
Jasmine reaches over to the ultrasound printer and plucks off the hard copies that the tech made for me. She studies them. “They have your nose.”
“They have alien noses.”
“Your alien nose, then.”
I scowl at her, but before I can reply, the doctor shoulders through the door. She’s a broad-hipped, no-nonsense woman with an elegantly gray ponytail and a clipboard she wields like a battle ax.
“ Madame Ward, vos tests sont bons, mais votre tension artérielle… ”
The French rolls over me like a poorly dubbed movie. I’ve gotten better, but I’m a long way from fluent. I do catch the highlights: hypertension. Bed rest optional but recommended. No flying internationally.
I look at Jas, who repeats all those things just to be sure I understood.
The blood pressure has been a recurring nuisance. Occasional headaches and swollen feet are just the name of the game so far as pregnancy goes. It’s the spotty vision and the sudden dizziness, like someone whacked me in the back of the skull with a bat, that are driving me insane.
Not much to do other than wait it out and be careful, though. And, apparently, don’t pilot any commercial aircraft.
I give the doc a thumbs-up. “Don’t worry; I wasn’t planning on going anywhere.”
I’ve had to lie about a lot of things in my time as a fake Frenchwoman, but that part is true. As far as I’m concerned, Moliets-et-Maa will house me for the rest of my days. It’ll be me and Jas, Jas and me. Two mobster’s daughters lying low in the French Riviera with a double stroller and a lifetime of trauma that we refuse to face.
What could possibly go wrong?
“Lunch?” asks Jas.
“Duh. Crêpes. And a gallon of Orangina.”
“Such refined tastes you have.”
“I’m eating for three,” I remind her. “You’re not allowed to make fun of me.”
She snorts. The sidewalk ahead shimmers with heat and promise. Our apartment’s three blocks east and the beach is three blocks west. Tourists clot the sand beyond, broiling themselves in oil. We veer north, toward the market stalls.
We’ve fallen into this rhythm—mornings at the marché , afternoons teaching violin students (her) and freelance editing for expat magazines (me), evenings bickering over whether we’re watching Bridgerton or Emily in Paris. It’s so aggressively normal it feels like playing house.
Today, though, I can’t stop thinking about that chair.
That stupid, empty husband chair in the corner of the room. It’s been empty for six months; why am I fussing over it now?
I know the answer. It’s because of two silly little words I can’t stop rolling in my head over and over again.
What if…?
That’s as far down that road as I dare to go. If I start filling in the blank that comes after “What if,” they’ll have to institutionalize me.
Because I can’t let myself think, What if that chair were filled? I can’t wonder, What if he was the one handing me tissues to wipe my belly off? I can’t ponder what names he might suggest, what jokes he might make, what smiles might spread across his face when he hears the proud thump of our children’s hearts.
What if is a dangerous, dangerous game.
It’s also a pointless one, because in many ways, there is no “what if.” France is home now. The twins will be born in the same cream-colored hospital complex currently shrinking in our wake. They’ll speak Franglais, suck down sugared churros, throw sand at German toddlers building drip castles in the shallows.
They’ll live their whole lives here. A world away from smoke-choked alleys and doorway bloodstains and men who hoard power like pocket change.
The crêpe stand guy knows us by now. “ Les s?urs américaines! ” he calls, already slinging batter.
“ Grecques, ” Jasmine corrects lightly, like she always does. He never listens.
The two of them banter as I gaze out at the navy blue ocean lapping at la plage . It’s hazy on the horizon. Might storm later, another afternoon sprinkle to take the edge off the heat for a little while. I rub my belly absent-mindedly and try not to think about empty chairs anymore.
I look up to see the crêpe guy holding out a Nutella-drenched monstrosity for me. “ Merci,” I tell him as I take it off his hands and give him a fistful of euros.
We go find a bench and sit. In the distance, seagulls chatter and families laugh. I lick Nutella off my thumb.
“You’re spacing out a lot lately,” Jasmine says, bumping me with an elbow. “Something new on your mind?”
“Checkbook trauma.” I lift the crêpe. “These things are bleeding me dry, but I just can’t stop.”
“He’s ripping us off because we don’t haggle,” she tells me. “Act like prey and they’ll eat you alive.”
“Said the sheep in wolf’s clothing.”
“A sheep would’ve fainted at your first pelvic exam.”
I can’t decide whether to chuckle or shudder at the memory. Both seem appropriate. The most fun you never want to have again, promised the doctor who performed it. I think she might’ve slightly upsold the procedure.
My crêpe disappears in the blink of an eye and I’m left mournfully picking crumbs from the wrapper. Jas eyes me warily, but she knows better than to begrudge a pregnant woman her sweet treats, so she says nothing.
When she’s done with hers, we start the slow walk home. We pause at a crosswalk to wait for the light to change. Across the street, two kids are arguing over a melted gelato. A terrier pees on a hydrant. Normalcy settles over me like a too-small sweater.
It’s not New York, but I’ve learned to love that about it. Sometimes, you don’t realize how much you’ve started to call your cage “home” until you finally get the chance to walk around outside the bars a little bit.
“Uh-oh. We’ve been spotted,” Jasmine mutters.
Madame Duvall hobbles toward us with the grim determination of a gossip bloodhound. Her toy poodle, Pierre, beats her to us, circling around and furiously yapping at our ankles.
“ Mes chéries! How is the little whale today?” Her knuckles dig into my belly before I can dodge.
“Great,” I grit out.
“You must rest more! My niece’s neighbor’s cousin, she ignored her hypertension and… pop! ” She mimes an explosion.
Jasmine steps between us, forcing a polite smile. “We’re heading home for a nap right now, actually.”
“Good, good. Remember, rosemary tea with?—”
“—with honey and lemon, twice daily. Got it.”
We escape into a side alley clogged with linen dresses flapping on twine. Jasmine fake-gags. “Only eleven more weeks of that.”
“Sounds like hell.”
“No, hell would be Baba breathing down your neck all the time, telling you to—” She stops. “Sorry. I don’t know where that came from.”
“It’s okay.”
The grief comes at odd moments. Usually, it’s manageable, but every now and then, the weight of the lives we left behind hits us like a truck with the brakes cut.
That’s when the What if game becomes harder and harder to ignore.
We resume walking. Jasmine’s quiet for a while. “You could call him, you know.”
“Pass.”
“It’s not just your secret, Ari.”
My toes scrunch in my sandals. “I don’t owe him a damn thing.”
“Fair. But you might owe them something.” She taps my stomach. “He’s still their father.”
Spat. Spat. Spat.
“And Baba was ours. Look how that worked out.”
“So you think turning your back on the whole concept of a dad is the right response?”
Heat pricks behind my eyes. “We had a deal, Jas.”
She holds up her hands. “Silence. Verboten. I remember. I’m sorry; I’ll drop it.”
She sighs, the sound swallowed by the crash of waves. We’ve had this argument weekly since I showed up on her doorstep. Her optimism versus my spite, round one million. Neither one gets out alive.
“You don’t have to forgive him,” she says carefully, unable to help herself. “But those babies… they deserve more than half a story.”
I swipe at my face with the back of my hand. “Since when are you the wise one?”
“Since I realized running only works if you unpack the baggage first.” She tucks a curl behind my ear. “You’re still carrying his.”
That night, I dream of the library.
Sasha’s breath hot on my neck, his hands spanning my hips. “Marry me now,” I’d whispered. “With nothing to gain.”
In the dream, he says yes.
I wake up pawing at sweat-damp sheets, the twins somersaulting like they’re trying to kick the memory out.
I shove myself to my feet and go tiptoeing down the hallway. Through the crack in her door, I see Jasmine is still sleeping. I keep going, into the kitchen, where my laptop rests on the table.
When I open it, a folder titled Thing1 I almost proposed on the spot).
I open a new document. I feel like telling stories tonight.
Once upon a time, there was a girl who loved a wolf…
The cursor blinks.
She knew his teeth. Knew his hunger. Knew she should stay away. But one day, the wolf said ? —
I highlight the lines. Delete.
Another draft:
A queen once told her daughter, “Love is war waged softly.” The princess didn’t listen. She followed a soldier into the fog. When she returned, her crown had rusted, but her sword…
Delete.
Third try:
Dear Sasha,
They have your nose.
I shut the laptop.
Outside, waves erase the shore. Somewhere beyond them, my father’s body cools in a grave. Maybe Sasha’s is beside him, or maybe not. Maybe Dragan has killed him, or maybe not. It’s impossible to know.
What I do know is this: here, in the dark, two heartbeats sync with mine.
Spat.
Spat.
Spat.