Chapter 31 Sean
SEAN
“Left at the mural, now,” I narrate, directing Willow out of habit. As if she needs the directions. As if she hasn’t practically lived at this hospital since that day she got her referral here and our lives changed.
As if reading my mind, Rowan says, “I’m sure she knows by now, so.”
Willow’s hands are white at the grip of the wheelchair. A whale smiles down from the wall, painted the exact blue of her favorite mug. I keep talking like a rope tossed across water. “They changed the paint, when did they do that? It used to be black and white, I thought.”
“A sperm whale,” Declan adds absentmindedly, trailing to my left, almost rubbing my shoulder with his. I can see his hand wanting to reach out for the handles of Willow’s wheelchair, but he mercifully lets me. I appreciate it more than he could ever know.
“Oh, well then it makes sense they changed it. Maybe they thought the women in these halls might be a little tired of sperm,” I ramble on.
The joke is thin; it evaporates as soon as it leaves my mouth.
“Ah, sure, look—tough crowd.” Willow’s tosses her own rope back—a tight, brave smile.
To my right, Rowan chuckles, and I’m too surprised to say anything.
We arrive at the NICU door, but Willow points to the glass wall. From here, we can see the babies in their little pods, soaking up light like plants. I steer her over, and we can see them, “Baby Girl Abel A,” “Baby Girl Abel B,” and “Baby Girl Abel C.”
“Honest, Willow, I had no idea I could be right about three girls, so I didn’t,” I tell her, petting her crown from above her.
She looks up at me with wet, green eyes and says with a scratchy voice, “It only makes sense. I’m one of two sisters.”
I resist the urge to tell her that the father determines the sex. “Actually—” Declan starts, and Rowan elbows him. Stifling a laugh, I smile back at Willow and lean over to kiss her on the mouth upside down. It’s gentle and quick, but it still gets a tiny moan of contentedness out of her.
Rowan edges down by her side, leaning on the arm of her wheelchair and squatting down. He holds her cheek and asks, “Are you ready to go in and see them, are you?”
She shakes her head, and Declan crouches down too, saying, “Hard part’s over, Willow.”
“I just don’t know if I can do it,” she whispers.
I keep petting her hair, gathering it in my hands and running the chestnut curls through my fingers. “You already are,” I say, and hear how unfunny my voice is. I always want to make the fire less hot by joking at it. This isn’t a fire for that. This is a hearth. “You’re doing it, Willow, you are.”
“Okay,” Willow says—just that one word, the little boat she’s paddled through all of today. “Okay.”
With an okay, all that I need, I roll her inside so I can hold my babies for the first time.
Rowan
Marta greets her with a gentle smile, like Willow’s the premature baby. “You ready, Mama?”
Willow nods and then looks like she’s going to shake her head. Her laugh is a broken diamond—sharp, sparkling, pressurized. “I guess I have to be,” she says truthfully.
Marta turns to us and lifts an eyebrow. “And y’all? Are y’all ready?”
I’m more ready for this than I’ve ever been for anything. It feels like the first time I got to kiss Willow—a deep knowing that kissing her was what I was made for. Nodding eagerly, I sit down in a chair next to Willow and hold out my hands.
Marta laughs and drapes a warm blanket over Willow and me while Sean and Declan sit down next to us. Another nurse moves to cover them while Marta turns to open the lid of the little chamber that holds Baby Girl Abel C.
Marta’s hands look enormous, then careful, then exactly the size of trust as she lifts her and lays her onto Willow’s sternum.
Willow shakes her head and lifts her chin to me.
So Marta lowers her onto my chest, this tiny red thing, and the air changes.
There’s a feeding tube taped at her cheek, and her hand is the size of my thumbprint.
She’s a cathedral. She’s a fistful of stars.
“Hi, pet,” I say, and my voice breaks on pet because I don’t know how to fit this in my chest. “We’ve been fierce excited to meet you.”
The other nurse is, at the same time, lowering Baby Girl Abel A onto Declan’s chest. Marta turns and lowers Baby Girl Abel B onto Sean’s chest. Willow watches like a proud mother seeing her child’s play for the first time—like she orchestrated all this. In a way, she did.
Willow exhale-laughs, leaning over her knees to look into Baby C’s face. “Hi,” she whispers. “Hi, hi. This is your dada.”
Willow says, “She’s perfect,” and the word perfect makes something teenage and ridiculous burn in me because I want to say, Yes, and I want to say, So are you, look at you, and I want to say every prayer I never learned.
Instead I say, “We brought a book,” and pull out the smallest board book I could find at the gift shop, the one with a lion who looks suspiciously like a golden retriever.
I read it in a voice I’ve never used for anyone. Sean doesn’t even make fun of me. Willow laughs exactly once, a tiny snort at a badly drawn duck. Baby A sleeps, then rouses, then sleeps again exactly where she is. I watch the little waveforms like they’re the weather.
“Hey,” Willow murmurs, lifting her feet up and resting them on Declan’s knees. “What’s your mom’s name?”
Startled, not able to tear his eyes away from the wrinkled, red face of the girl in his hands, he murmurs, “Fiona.” His thumbs run along the soft skin of the baby’s cheeks.
“Fiona it is then. Fiona Camille after my sister. Because it just sounds better than Fiona Nina, don’t you agree?” She peers into the sleeping face of Fiona, and Declan looks up at her with bright blue eyes.
“I—Willow, that’s—”
“I know,” she says. Declan reaches across her knees and grips her fingers. He pulls them up to kiss them, but he can’t reach, so she has to lower her legs, laughing. She leans forward and kisses him on the mouth, and I feel nothing. Not a twinge of jealousy.
She looks up at Sean. “Okay, how about you, Sean Byrne? What’s your mom’s name?”
He grins at her, palming the baby in one hand like a football. “Aw, you treasure, you mean it?”
“Out with it, come on.”
“Aisling.”
“Aisling! Okay, Aisling Nina it is then.” She does a gesture with her hand as if she’s knighting the little girl, then grins.
“You’re perfect,” Sean says, amazed.
“Aye,” she tells him with a solemn nod, laughing then clutching her stomach where her stitches are. “What about you, Rowan?”
Chewing on my lip and looking into the face of the most perfect being I’ve ever seen, I say, “I don’t want her to be named after my mom. I don’t even talk to my mom.”
“Okay,” Willow says. “Fair enough. You pick the name then.”
“Let’s name her after you,” I say. When Willow makes a face, I add, “Okay, okay, no Willow because that might be weird for Fiona and Aisling. But how about…Magnolia? A beautiful, Southern tree just like Willow.”
She chews on her inside lip and lets out a sobbing chuckle. “Okay, Magnolia Cheyenne it is.”
I’ve said “I’d die for you” before. To friends after beers, to people I didn’t actually mean, to the idea of this in songs on bad nights.
I don’t think it has ever been English until this second.
I say nothing. I nod at her and at these men who make up my family now.
I stroke Magnolia’s cheek, and I kiss Willow’s temple.
I am a man who keeps his voice low and his hands sure.
I am a man who finally has people to keep.
Declan
The NICU makes a liar of a man’s instincts.
You think louder is stronger. It isn’t. You think control equals protection.
It doesn’t. In here, control is a little green line that rises and falls at its own pace while you keep your hands in your pockets and let people who have practiced this for years do the part that must be done.
I stand and move to place Fiona in Willow’s arms, the first of the men to give up holding one of our daughters.
Willow’s eyebrows knit together, even as her arms go out instinctively.
“Declan, are you sure? You don’t want her a little bit longer?
” she asks, and I shake my head, hands on my hips and heart in my throat.
I drift toward the monitors because I am a cliché and also because I spent too many nights of my twenties reading meaning in numbers while a nurse taught me how to hear what they were actually saying.
The waveforms are good. The sats are where we want them.
The heart rates are small rabbits, not runaway horses.
I don’t realize I’m holding my breath until a hand—Rowan’s—lands on the back of my shoulder and presses. “They’re alright, now,” he says, like he’s not soothing me as much as translating the room into something I can carry. “Come here—sit yourself down, so.”
He moves from leg to leg, bouncing Magnolia in his arms, something fierce innate in him that he avoided acknowledging for fierce long.
For the first time since starting this journey, I fear that the only innate thing I have in me is the ability to get someone to this place.
But never past. What if I’m only meant for the clinical part and not this next part?
When I held Fiona, I felt stiff and unnatural.
Looking at Rowan, I can tell he feels at ease.
I understand I’m hesitating because there’s nothing for me to fix.
It’s an insult to my bloodline. It’s the relief of my life.
I nod at him and croak, “I’ll stand.” I look down at the babies.
Fiona is in Willow’s arms, her lips flat in a look of disapproval, her eyes squeezed shut.
Aisling is rooting at Sean’s nipple, and he offers her one of his giant fingers, which she sucks on greedily, to everyone’s delighted surprise.
“I’m not much use standing, but I’ll stand, so I will. ”
Rowan shakes his head and mutters, “This is new territory for everyone, Declan. Sit down and learn, like.”
I blink at him, at the new man in front of me who understands he can’t have everything without some growing pains. “Sit,” he says again, and I do because I’m not an idiot. The room doesn’t collapse. No one dies for lack of me standing.
Sean passes me a bottle of water with the cap already loosened the way he does when he wants me to drink and not argue.
I drink and don’t argue. He looks at me with that same teenage ridiculousness that lives in me tonight—love fierce big enough that it makes you want to steal small things like minutes and machine beeps and put them in your pocket.
I look back and let him see that I feel it too.
The night slides. Willow dozes. The babies do the kind of sleep that has nothing cute about it, just stubbornness. I watch six chests rise and fall.
When I can’t think of anything useful to do, I do something true. I stand close behind Willow’s chair and pull the blanket I’m holding up and over her shoulders. It slides into place like I planned it three months ago. It isn’t much. ’Tis the exact amount, now.
Marta catches my eye and tips her head, an acknowledgment from one person who has learned to live inside the boring part of miracles to another.
I shrug and tell her, “All I can do.”
“It’s enough,” she says back.
“Aye,” I answer, surprising myself with the word. “Aye, it is.”