Chapter 14 #3
“Well, enjoy the quiet,” she says as the sound of the girls’ laughter in the background rises to a shockingly high decibel level. We lock eyes, and I can tell we’re both thrilled we could make this sleepover happen.
I glance over at Sasha, whose face remains stoically placid. I can’t tell what he’s thinking, and I hate that. I hope he sees how happy Stella is and is himself happy that he allowed this. Or got roped into it. Whichever.
Sasha doesn’t respond to Sofia’s comment. “I will,” I tell Sofia, not wanting to speak for Mr. Silent standing next to me.
He’s quiet in the elevator ride down to the car, and silent as we climb into the backseat of the car next to each other.
He doesn’t speak as the driver—who I now know is called Daniel, but who has never said more than a handful of words to me despite the number of times I’ve been in this car over the last week—pulls into traffic and heads back to Sasha’s apartment.
I cast a glance at him out of the corner of my eye, but he’s facing the front, focused on the back of Daniel’s headrest or looking out the front window.
I can’t tell what he’s thinking any more than I can tell what he’s looking at.
I glance down at my phone in my lap, wondering if maybe I should plan on going out tonight.
He looks . . . angry? Tired? Like he wants solitude?
But also, it feels like there’s a nervous energy just below the surface, pulsing between us.
He shifts slightly away from me, toward the door on his side of the car.
He’s always been a hard one to read. Gentle and quiet, even though you’d think the opposite to look at him.
His tight mastery over his emotions and his actions is one of the things that drew me to him.
As someone seemingly without a filter, prone to spitting out the first thing that came to my mind, I always marveled at his ability to control everything about himself.
Maybe it’s my age or that I don’t like to play games, but I find that now I’m tired of having to work so hard to understand him, to know what he’s feeling.
My phone buzzes in my lap and I glance down to find a message on the group chat I have with my best friends.
Lauren
OMG! They. Are. Mobile. God help me!
I make sure my sound is silenced, and tap play on the video she’s sent. Both twins are on their hands and knees, and in a few shaky movements, one of them crawls toward the other.
My inhale sounds like a gasp in the silence of the car, and I can feel Sasha’s eyes on me.
I hit play again, and can’t help it when I choke up a bit.
Less than a year ago, I was holding these babies in the NICU.
Sierra and I would take turns showing up every other day to help Lauren and Josh however we could.
Now these baby girls are freaking starting to crawl, and it feels like it’s all happening so quickly.
“Are you okay?” It’s a tender question asked in an unusually quiet voice. He’s not whispering exactly, it’s more like a verbal caress and it has heat pooling in my stomach and spreading through my chest.
I hold my phone so he can see it and hit play again. “These are my friend Lauren’s twins. They are ten months old, and I feel like they’re growing up way too fast.”
He’s silent for a beat, then says, “Kids have a way of doing that. I feel like Colette was just showing me how to change Stella’s diaper, and here she is in first grade.
” I shift my eyes toward him in time to catch his Adam’s apple bobbing as he swallows down whatever thoughts or emotions he’s holding back.
“I don’t know how people do it.” The words are out of my mouth before I can think better of it, and even though that’s par for the course with me, I wish I somehow could take them back.
I already know he’ll press me on my meaning, and it feels like too vulnerable an admission to someone I used to know, in a car with a driver who’s essentially a stranger to me.
“Have kids?” he clarifies.
“Yeah.” I shrug, hoping he’ll drop it.
“Why not?”
“It just seems so . . .”
“Hard?” he prompts.
“No.” I’m no stranger to hard work. “Painful, I guess. Watching them grow up so quickly, knowing they’ll experience pain you can’t fix, knowing that there’ll be heartbreak and obstacles you can’t prevent.”
“But that’s life.” His voice isn’t dismissive or judgmental.
Any time I’ve voiced something like this around my friends, they’ve basically dismissed it—not because they’re jerks, but because none of them grew up with the kind of loss I experienced, nor had every single person they loved disappoint them over and over again.
“And it’s filled with joy and successes too,” Sasha continues.
“And as a parent, you get to . . . I don’t know .
. . help them learn to live through both, I guess. ”
I love the way he sounds like he’s still figuring all this out, too.
Like he doesn’t know exactly what he’s doing, but he’s willing to make it work.
So often I feel like everyone around me has their shit together, has built the life they want, and I’m over here still trying to figure out what that life even looks like for me.
I very intentionally make it look like I love this life I’ve created for myself, but the truth is that even at thirty, I don’t know where I’m going or what I really want.
I work hard and I’ve gotten lucky too. I’ve been able to essentially reinvent myself and my life and my career over and over.
But the result is that instead of feeling successful, I feel like everything is temporary.
That’s a scary feeling, one that I tamp down deep so I don’t spend too much time thinking about it.