Chapter 27 Sage
SAGE
Moving in with someone, it turns out, is a moderately complex logistical exercise under normal circumstances.
Moving in with someone while also moving three infants, a triple stroller, a changing station, seventy muslin cloths, a white noise machine, bouncers, a baby monitor, and approximately eighty pounds of diapers, is a logistical exercise that makes the D-Day planning look casual.
Thank God Ronan hired movers.
He is extremely helpful and extremely in my way simultaneously, which I tell him, and he accepts this with the dignified composure of a man who knows it is accurate. He assembles the new cribs with focused competence, reading the instructions all the way through before he starts.
It’s a practice I find both admirable and deeply personally incompatible with my entire approach to life. I read instructions as a last resort, after three failed attempts have made it unavoidable.
We compromise. He assembles while I hand him parts and offer commentary that he describes as unhelpful and I describe as motivating.
At one point, he hands me the instructions and asks me to read step seven.
It turns out step seven is important, and I concede this point, as much as I hate to admit it.
He says nothing. He simply looks at me with that dry, measured expression, and that is somehow worse.
The penthouse is different with us in it. With the babies in it, I mean.
It’s still beautiful. All those clean lines and floor-to-ceiling windows and the bookshelves that run the length of one wall, which I have started reading my way along with the focus of someone who has discovered she has better taste in reading material when she has access to a well-curated library.
But the whole place has acquired a new layer.
A layer of baby culture.
The warm, organized chaos of three infants who do not care about clean lines. Muslins on the kitchen counter and a baby monitor next to the espresso machine and the triple stroller in the hallway that Ronan steps around without complaint.
He has adapted with a completeness I did not entirely predict, though I probably should have.
Ronan is not a man who does things by halves.
He is up at night without being asked, taking the early shift so I can sleep past five for the first time in weeks.
He’s been researching pediatric milestones and asking questions at appointments that have made our pediatrician smile and say she wishes all her parents were this prepared.
He’s good at this, as he is at everything—thoroughly and without a doubt.
“You’re still sure about this,” I say, on the third day, when I find him standing in the kitchen at six in the morning with Bossy on his shoulder and a cup of tea going cold on the counter.
“Completely,” he says, without looking up.
“She woke you up.”
“She woke everyone up. I got to her first.” He glances at me sideways. “Go back to sleep, Sage.”
I do not go back to sleep. Can’t. I make tea for us both and lean against the counter and watch him walk the slow circuit of the kitchen with our daughter.
I moved in with a man two days after our first official date, and it feels like the most natural thing I’ve ever done, and I’m not sure what that says about me except that maybe instincts are worth listening to.
His twins come on a Sunday, three weeks after we moved in.
Ronan tells me they’re coming with the low-key energy of someone who is not low-key about it at all.
He mentions it Tuesday, reminds me Thursday, and on Sunday morning reorganizes the kitchen twice, which he will not admit is because he’s nervous.
I find this endearing to a degree I do not tell him about directly.
“They’re going to like you,” he says, over breakfast.
“You don’t know that.”
“I know my daughters.”
Myrna arrives first. She is tall and dark and dressed entirely in black, and she comes through the door and looks at me with her father’s dark eyes and says, with complete directness. “You’re younger than I expected. No offense.”
“None taken,” I say. “You’re more intimidating than I expected. No offense.”
She grins then, and I think we’re going to get along well.
Orla arrives seven minutes later in all white with a camera bag over her shoulder and silver jewelry stacked to her elbow and a cloud of dark curls that makes my own hair feel inadequate by comparison.
She stops in the doorway, looks at me, looks at her father, looks back at me, and says, “Oh, Dad. She’s lovely. ”
Ronan makes a sound I have never heard from him before, something between clearing his throat and genuine embarrassment, and I have to work hard not to laugh.
“Hi,” I say to Orla. “I’ve heard a lot about you.”
“All true, probably,” she says cheerfully, and comes in and kisses her father’s cheek and goes directly to the babies.
The next two hours are, unexpectedly, among the most enjoyable I’ve had since before the birth.
Myrna holds Bossy with the careful, slightly wondering attention of someone encountering something small and consequential, turning her this way and that like she’s deciding how she’d paint her.
Orla takes seventeen photographs of Boy before he’s been awake for five minutes, then shows them to me on her camera screen.
They’re extraordinary. Something in them catches the particular quality of his gaze, that patient, interior watchfulness, in a way I haven’t seen in any of the photos I’ve taken myself.
“Can I have that one?” I ask.
“I’ll send you a set,” she says, already moving toward Baldy. “Oh. Oh, she’s got the fuzz starting.”
“She’s very proud of it,” I say.
“She should be. Dad, look at this child.”
Ronan, who is making lunch in the kitchen with the focused contentment of a man in his natural habitat, looks over. “I’ve been looking at her for weeks. She’s remarkable.”
“They all are,” Myrna says, not looking up from Bossy, who has grabbed her finger and is holding on with characteristic conviction. “You’ve done well, Sage.”
I look at her. She says it simply, not as a compliment exactly, but as an assessment. It’s the way her father makes observations, plainly and without decoration. “Thank you.”
“And you’ve made him happy,” she quietly adds, still not looking up. “Which we’ve been waiting for. So thank you for that as well.”
I glance at Ronan, who is very focused on the lunch he is making and is absolutely listening to every word. “I hope so.”
Over lunch, they ask me questions with the focused attention of two women who are genuinely interested. What is online personal training like? How did the pivot happen? What are my plans for the degree?
I answer honestly, including the parts I’m not sure about, and Myrna listens with the evaluating focus of an artist who is deciding what to do with what she sees, and Orla asks follow-up questions with the particular precision of a photographer who understands that the real answer is usually in the frame just outside the obvious one.
I find myself talking more than I intended to. It’s easy to talk to his daughters, even though they’re older than me and well within their right to hate me. I am the woman who accidentally birthed their half siblings, after all. They could think I’m up to no good.
I don’t get that off of either of them.
After lunch, when the babies are down and Orla is on the sofa editing photographs and Myrna is sketching in a small notebook she produced from somewhere, I go and stand next to Ronan at the kitchen sink and bump his shoulder with mine. “You were right,” I say quietly.
“About what specifically?”
“They’re wonderful.”
He looks at me. The expression on his face is the unguarded one, the one that still gets me every time, and he says, “Yes. They are. So are you. In case I haven’t said it clearly enough.”
“You’ve said it,” I tell him. But I still love hearing it.
“Good.” He goes back to washing up. “I intend to keep saying it.”
“You’re not so bad yourself.”
He smiles and keeps washing.
I look at my daughters and my son sleeping in the next room. At this man washing dishes in his kitchen, in our kitchen, with the quiet satisfaction of someone who is exactly where he wants to be.
Everything feels as if it’s falling into place, which historically, has been when it all falls apart. It’s hard not to listen for the other shoe falling, but I’m trying.
Orla appears at my elbow with her camera. There are five photographs. In all of them, I am looking at someone else. At Ronan, at the babies, at Myrna. Just enjoying their company. I look, in these photographs, like a person who is entirely at home.
I look like someone who belongs here.
I have been waiting my whole life to look like that in a photograph.
To be in a place and simply belong in it rather than managing my fit.
I hand the camera back to Orla, and I don’t say anything because I don’t have words for it yet, and she seems to understand this, because she just nods and moves away without making it a thing.
I add her to the list of Callahans I did not expect and am very glad of.
They stay for dinner, and I’m glad for it.
Ronan makes something Irish and substantial that involves potatoes in three preparations, which Myrna approves of and Orla photographs before eating, which Ronan pretends to find annoying and clearly doesn’t.
We put the babies to bed in relay while the twins wash up, and by the time I come back to the kitchen, they have apparently decided I’m one of theirs, because Myrna is telling me something about a commission that went sideways and asking my opinion as though I’ve always been in this kitchen, always been part of this family.
Maybe I have been. Maybe some things just take a while to find their way to where they’re supposed to be.
When they leave, Orla hugs me at the door with the same directness she brings to everything. Myrna shakes my hand, then thinks better of it and hugs me too. Ronan watches from the hallway with the expression I have come to love most. The one that is pure, unguarded, nothing managed about it.
I moved in with this man days after our first date, and it is the least reckless thing I have ever done. Maybe the smartest thing I’ve ever done.