Chapter 24 Ronan
RONAN
I have, in my life, made a number of decisions that could be charitably described as impulsive and less charitably described as reckless.
Sleeping with a woman I’d just met in an airport was one of them.
Taking Connor to dinner last year when I wasn’t sure he’d come was another.
Submitting my paternity leave paperwork, after delivering three children I had not yet known were mine, was a third.
I have also made a number of decisions that others considered reckless, but that turned out to be simply correct.
The distinction between impulsive and correct is not always legible in advance, and I have learned to trust the instances when something feels not like a lack of caution but like the absence of the need for it.
When the path is simply obvious and the only thing standing between me and it is the habit of deliberating.
Showing up at Sage’s cottage with no invitation and no plan is shaping up to be one of those decisions.
I stand on the pavement outside and consider, briefly, whether I should call first. It is seven forty-five in the morning.
She has three newborns. The responsible, considered approach is clearly to call first, to ensure she’s awake, to give her the option of telling me she’d prefer I come another time.
This is the height of rudeness. I am aware. I am also unable to walk away.
She is, obviously, awake. She has been awake since approximately four in the morning, as she is every morning. I know this because she texts me at odd hours with the dry, observational humor of someone processing her life in real time and finding it useful to have an audience.
Last night at ten forty-seven: Baldy just sneezed on me and then looked offended.
At four-ten this morning: Boy is awake for no reason. Extremely rude. Currently judging me.
I knock.
She opens the door in leggings and a sweater with a burp cloth over her shoulder and Bossy on her hip, and she looks at me for a moment with an expression that cycles through surprise and something warmer before it settles into the dry, considering look I am beginning to recognize as her baseline.
“You don’t have work,” she says. Not a greeting exactly.
“Paternity leave, which entitles me to be here rather than there.”
“Entitles is a strong word.”
“It is. May I come in?”
She steps back, which I take as a yes.
The cottage again smells of vanilla and warm milk and the particular lived-in warmth of a space that has, in three weeks, become entirely organized around three small people. There are muslins on every available surface, and in fact, no surface is unadorned.
Baldy and Boy are in their bouncy chairs in the sitting room.
Baldy is regarding the ceiling fan with the serene philosophical interest she brings to everything.
Boy is watching the door, and when I come in he looks at me with a recognition that is almost certainly my imagination and absolutely does something to me regardless.
“Hello, sir,” I tell him.
He blinks.
“Eloquent as always.”
“He’s been doing that,” Sage says from behind me. “Looking at the door. Leigh thinks he’s waiting for someone. I told her he’s three weeks old and doesn’t know what a door is yet.” A pause in which I can hear her deciding something. “Maybe she’s right, though.”
I look at him for another moment. Then I do what I came here to do, which is make myself useful, and I go to the kitchen and assess her fridge.
“You have butter,” I report, “eggs, two heels of bread, half a block of cheese, and something I’m going to charitably describe as yogurt.”
“I’ve been meaning to go shopping.”
“Give me a list. I’ll go after breakfast. Which I plan to make, because I assume you’ve not eaten.”
“Are you applying for sainthood? Because I think you could get it.”
I laugh, then set the kettle on. “Chamomile, right?”
“Yeah.” She appears in the kitchen doorway with Bossy still on her hip, and looks at me with an expression I am learning to read—the one she gets when something has landed differently than she expected and she’s not yet sure what to do with it.
Slightly open. Slightly off guard. “You don’t have to do this. ”
“I know.” I take the eggs out. “How do you feel about eggs in top hats again?”
“I’d love that.” She sits, which I note because she does not strike me as a woman who sits easily when there are things to be done.
Bossy settles against her shoulder and grabs a fistful of her dark waves and holds on with the proprietary confidence of someone who has decided this is simply her territory now.
I make breakfast. The cottage is small enough that we can talk easily from the kitchen to the sitting room, and we do, about nothing in particular at first—the texture of the morning, whether Boy’s habit of watching the door is personality or coincidence, whether Baldy is the most serene baby in recorded history or simply conserving energy for something spectacular later.
It is easy in the way that things are easy when two people have, without quite deciding to, already begun to know each other.
Two of the eggs come out overcooked, so those are mine.
She takes hers “dippy,” as she likes to put it, so I’ll not burden her with hard yolks.
We eat. I do the washing up over her objections.
When I return from the grocery, bags in hand, she swears she’ll stow the supplies, but I’m too fast for her to object to the help.
Then we spend the morning with the babies in the way I am discovering mornings with newborns go—not structured, not particularly plannable, but full in a way that I have not felt in my domestic life in a long time.
And it is a discovery. Aoifa handled the girls at this age far more than I ever did.
I can still change a diaper with the best of them, but the moment-to-moment stuff was her.
Now, it’s me. At least, while I’m on leave. As long as Sage allows me.
Sitting in her cottage with Baldy on my knee and Boy watching me from his chair and Bossy finally asleep against her mother’s shoulder and the sound of Sage talking about her website analytics with the focused energy of someone who does not believe in not working just because she has recently produced three human beings, I am aware, with a clarity that is both illuminating and slightly alarming, that I have been very wrong about what I prefer.
My home is neat. Orderly. Clean. Cold, some might say.
I prefer this. The warmth and the noise and the small, persistent demands of three people who have not yet learned that the world doesn’t organize itself around their needs.
The company of a woman who fills a room without trying to, who makes me laugh precisely when I’m not expecting it, who hands me a baby and turns away to do something else without ceremony, like my being here is simply part of the furniture of her day.
I want to be part of the furniture of her day. I want that with a directness I am no longer interested in denying.
In the evening, while all three sleep at once in the miracle formation that Sage treats with the hushed reverence of a religious event, we sit on the sofa and watch something on television that neither of us is paying attention to.
She tucks her feet under her and leans sideways into the cushions and tells me about her sister Rosemary in North Carolina.
It is, evidently, notable that she cried on the phone twice.
“Rosemary doesn’t cry,” Sage says, with the tone of someone reporting a fact of natural law.
“The last time I saw Rosemary cry was when our grandmother died, and before that, I genuinely don’t know.
She cried twice about these three and then apologized for it both times, while also apologizing for not coming to see them, which is very Rosemary. ”
“She sounds dramatic.”
“She’s the best person I know. She can bake chocolate chip cookies that’ll break your heart and rewire a car alarm by hand.
There’s nothing she doesn’t know how to do perfectly, so she hates asking for help and gives it constantly.
” Sage is quiet for a moment. “She wants to come. I keep telling her to wait.”
“You should let her come and see what a good job you’re doing. You have more feet under you than you think.”
She looks at me sideways. “You’re very sure of things about me for someone who’s known me three weeks.”
“I have seen you at a level of difficulty that would have flattened most people. I have also watched you handle your business and feed three babies and manage a content schedule while working to solve my son’s emotional problems. I feel my assessment is reasonably grounded.”
She’s almost smiling. “You’re very… You notice things.”
“Noticing things goes with the occupation.”
She turns her head and looks at me for a moment with that direct, considering look. “Is that all it is?”
I meet her eyes. “No. That’s not all it is. I like paying attention to you.”
The room settles around that for a moment, warm and particular, and she turns back to the television, and neither of us says anything else, and the silence is the kind that means something. I wish I knew what that was.
“Why did you take paternity leave, Ronan? Really. You could have come by in the evenings. Kept your distance. But paternity leave?”
“Because keeping my distance would have been a pretense, and I am done with all that. I have already spent too much of my life using work as an excuse not to be where I should have been.” I pause, building courage to say the thing on the tip of my tongue.
“And because I didn’t want to keep my distance. ”
She turns her head and looks at me properly now.
“I want to be here. With you. With them. Not because of obligation or because it’s the correct thing to do. Because this is where I want to be. Quite specifically.”
Sage holds my gaze for a long moment, and then she does something that surprises me entirely. She reaches out and takes my hand, simply and without ceremony, the way she seems to do everything.
She doesn’t say anything. Neither do I. There’s something thrilling my blood when she laces her fingers between mine, like they belong there.
Because they do.
She takes a deep, contented breath and settles onto my shoulder to watch the movie that’s come on. Some old film I can’t pay attention to because I smell her hair. Vanilla and something uniquely Sage.
I don’t know when she falls asleep, but I notice when she snorts in her dreams. When her fingers stir between mine. When her sighs go from content to something restful.
I sneak a kiss on the top of her head, hoping to settle her dreams to something pleasant. I can’t believe she’s fallen asleep on me, because it feels more intimate than anything we did on my plane, and I’m not sure I’ve earned that with her.
But I suppose she’s decided that I have.