Chapter Thirty-Nine A Very Small Yellow Room
“We’re not painting a nursery at eleven weeks,” Jennie said, with the full authority of a woman who had said the exact same sentence three times already that morning and was still, somehow, standing in a hardware store holding a paint swatch.
“We’re not painting anything today,” Lin Xing agreed.
“We’re simply looking. Gathering information.
This is a research trip.” “You have four paint swatches in your hand.” “Four is a reasonable sample size for research purposes.” They left the hardware store forty minutes later with a full gallon of pale, buttery yellow, two rollers, a drop cloth, and Lin Xing’s solemn assurance that this in no way constituted “getting ahead of themselves,” a phrase Jennie was fairly certain he’d looked up specifically to use with confidence.
“Yellow,” her mother said approvingly, over their weekly call, once informed of the color decision.
“Very wise. Not finding out the gender yet?” “We want to be surprised.” “I was surprised with you,” Rosamma said.
“Your father was convinced for seven months you were a boy. He had already chosen a name. Very traditional, very serious. Then you arrived, and he cried for a different reason than he expected, and the name went straight in the drawer, never used again.” “What was the name?” “Doesn’t matter now.
It belonged to a boy who never existed.” Her mother waved this off with the particular briskness she reserved for sentimental things she’d decided not to get emotional about on a video call.
“Yellow is good. Neutral. Happy. Paint it on a Saturday when you’re both rested, not after a twelve-hour shift, or you'll do a terrible job and resent the wall forever.”
They painted on a Saturday, rested, exactly as instructed, and it took considerably longer than either of them anticipated — not because the room was large, but because Lin Xing approached wall-painting with the same exacting rigor he brought to a surgical consult, taping every edge with mathematical precision, testing three different roller techniques on a hidden section of wall before committing to one.
“It’s a wall, Lin. Not a chart.” “Walls have edges.
Edges deserve respect.” By early afternoon, Jennie had abandoned all pretense of following his careful methodology and was simply painting in broad, happy strokes, humming under her breath, a smear of yellow already drying in her hair where she’d absently pushed it back with the wrong hand.
“You have paint on your face,” Lin Xing observed, setting down his roller to study her with open, helpless affection.
“You have paint exactly nowhere, because you’ve spent forty minutes taping instead of painting. ”
“I have a system.” “You have paralysis by preparation.” She dabbed a small stripe of yellow onto his nose before he could dodge it, laughing at his genuine, wounded outrage. “There.
Now you’re part of the room too.” He retaliated with a careful, deliberate streak along her jaw, which led, predictably, to a full ten minutes of chasing each other around a half-painted room with loaded rollers, both of them laughing too hard to actually land a decent hit, until they collapsed together on the drop cloth, breathless, yellow paint smeared across both of them in a pattern that resembled nothing so much as two people who had stopped taking themselves seriously exactly when it mattered most. “This is not how professionals paint a nursery,” Jennie said, staring up at the half-finished ceiling.
“I’ve reconsidered my methodology,” Lin Xing admitted. “I find I prefer this approach.”
They finished the room two weekends later — pale yellow walls, a white crib assembled after Lin Xing’s earlier furniture-store debate had resolved decisively in his favor, a small bookshelf already holding four books Jennie had bought on impulse and couldn’t bring herself to regret.
In the corner, propped where morning light would reach it first, sat the small stuffed elephant, keeping watch over a room that didn’t have a person in it yet, only the certain, growing shape of one.
Sunday afternoon, sunlight pouring warm through the single window, they sat on the floor of the finished room with a baby name book Sophia had gifted them — “with extensive personal annotations,” she’d warned, and she had not exaggerated.
“Absolutely not,” Jennie said, reading Sophia’s margin note beside a name.
“She’s written ‘DO NOT, this was a boy in my third grade class who ate glue.’” “I trust her judgment on this specific matter.”
“What about a name that honors both sides properly? Something that works in English, doesn’t clash with Malayalam pronunciation, and isn’t going to confuse your father’s side of the family either.
” They spent an hour trying names against each other — some solemnly, some dissolving into laughter within seconds, Lin Xing vetoing anything that sounded, in his considered medical opinion, “difficult to say clearly during a fever at three in the morning,” which turned out to eliminate an alarming number of otherwise lovely options.
They told the hospital the following week, twelve weeks along exactly, the milestone Dr. Chen had gently suggested waiting for — “not because anything’s wrong,” she’d clarified, “just because most people feel steadier sharing news once the odds settle a little more in their favor.”
Sophia, informed officially at last after weeks of increasingly unsubtle hinting, screamed loudly enough to summon two nurses from an adjacent floor, and immediately produced a folder — an actual physical folder — labeled GODMOTHER APPLICATION, complete with what she insisted were “relevant qualifications,” including “excellent taste in gifts” and “will absolutely spoil this child beyond reasonable limits, see attached references.” “There are no references attached,” Emma, pointed out, examining the folder.
“They’re implied.” The senior surgeon, informed via hospital grapevine within the hour, paused at the nurses’ station just long enough to say, “A baby now too.
Efficient couple,” and continued on his way, which the whole ward had by now learned to recognize as roughly the highest compliment the man was constitutionally capable of paying anyone.
That evening, home again, the small yellow room caught the last of the daylight through its single window, warm and complete and waiting.
Jennie stood in the doorway a long moment, one hand resting against the doorframe, watching dust drift lazy and gold through the last of the light.
“I keep thinking,” she said, as Lin Xing came to stand behind her, arms circling loosely around her, chin resting against the top of her head, “that this is the happiest I’ve ever been.
And then some new thing happens — the heartbeat, the room, the name — and I think, no, actually, this is.
And it just keeps happening. I didn’t know happiness could keep finding new rooms to grow into.
” “Neither did I,” he said quietly, and she felt him press a kiss to her hair, unhurried, certain, entirely undefended.
“I intend to keep being surprised by it, for as long as it keeps happening.” Outside the small window, the last of the sun slipped behind the rooftops of Toronto, and the little yellow room settled into a soft, golden dusk — full of a crib no one had slept in yet, a bookshelf of stories no one had heard yet, and a small stuffed elephant standing quiet watch over a future that felt, that evening, as certain and unshakeable as anything either of them had ever built.