Epilogue
Nova
A Few Months Later…
Baby Hope is four days old and she's asleep on my chest.
It's just past sunrise. The clubhouse is in that gray half-quiet of the hour before Ruby starts breakfast, the only sounds are the bikes settling in the courtyard and the murmur of the desert waking up outside the walls.
Hope weighs almost nothing.
She's curled into a peanut-shape against my sternum, her cheek warm against the collar of my t-shirt.
One fist is tucked under her chin and her dark hair is fuzzy and standing up in every direction.
Lashes is asleep down the hall, finally, after four days of running on coffee and adrenaline and a love that doesn't let her put a newborn down.
I'm not putting her down either.
I'm sitting on the couch in the main room with my knees up and Hope propped against my chest, watching the sky lighten through the high windows above Oakleigh's mural.
The wall is still half in shadow still.
By the time Hope wakes up, the whole room will be gold.
I press my lips against the top of her head.
She smells powdery, like a baby and the lavender oil Ruby's been rubbing into her scalp.
The stairs creak behind me, but I don't turn around. I know who it is.
Doom comes around the side of the couch in sweatpants and a t-shirt, his hair a mess, his bandana for once not on his head.
He sees the two of us and stops.
"Couldn't sleep?" I whisper.
He shakes his head and lowers himself onto the couch beside me, careful not to jostle Hope.
He slides his arm around my shoulders, and his thumb traces the side of her tiny back through my t-shirt.
"Lashes okay?" he asks. His voice is rough from sleep.
I shift Hope slightly so she settles deeper into my chest. "Sleeping. I told her I had Hope until eight."
He nods and keeps his thumb moving on Hope's back.
We sit like that for a while in the peaceful quiet, but it won’t be peaceful for long.
Soon, everyone will be up, running around, and chaos will ensue.
Brick and Imani just told the club they’re expecting. It feels like everyone is getting pregnant around here, but not me.
I’m not ready for motherhood yet.
"We still going on Saturday?" he asks eventually.
I tilt my head back against his arm to look up at him. "If you want to."
He brushes a thumb along my jaw. "I want to."
He's been talking about taking me to meet his mother for a while now.
He'd finally settled on a date and then Hope decided to come early, and we ended up postponing twice.
But Lashes is up and walking, Hope is eating and sleeping, and the clubhouse is full of aunties who will help at any moment.
Saturday it is.
The next few days move fast.
Hope eats every two hours and sleeps in stretches that never line up the same way twice.
Brick walks around the clubhouse looking shell-shocked and in love.
Lashes is starting to nap on the couch and wake up smiling at whoever's in the room.
By Thursday, Hope is having moments where she's awake and alert, dark eyes wide, looking at the world like she's trying to figure it out.
I'm in clinicals two days that week.
I miss half of pharmacology Friday because I keep thinking about her tiny hands.
Friday night, I pack a small bag in Doom's room at the clubhouse.
Jeans and a dress.
The boots Imani helped me pick out go in last, on top of Doom's old leather jacket.
I sleep with his arm heavy across my waist, and when his alarm goes off at four-thirty in the morning, I'm already half-awake.
I've never ridden eight hundred miles on the back of his Dyna.
I've ridden with him plenty—around Chihuahua, down to the border, out to the mountains once. But this is different. This is the route he rode for me.
Doom checks the strap on my helmet twice before he swings his leg over the bike.
He's wearing his cut. The bottom rocker catches the sun when he turns.
"Ready?" he asks me over his shoulder.
I climb on behind him and wrap my arms around his waist. "Ready."
I rest my cheek between his shoulder blades, right where the patches sit on the back of his leather.
The bottom rocker presses into my chest through my jacket.
He kicks the engine, the rumble runs up through my legs into my chest, and we pull out of the gate into the desert.
The ride is long.
Hot when the sun gets high, then cool through the mountains.
We hit the border crossing mid-morning and wait in line behind a delivery truck while Doom keeps one hand on my thigh the whole time.
We stop twice for gas.
The second stop, somewhere outside Las Cruces, he buys me a Topo Chico from a cooler at the back of the station without asking.
I sit on the curb with him and drink it while he refuels, and we don't talk much, because we don't have to.
By the time we hit the Vegas suburbs, the sun is dropping behind the mountains.
The sky has gone pink and orange.
The heat coming off the asphalt smells like every road trip I took with my mom as a kid, and I'm tired in a good way.
He turns off the freeway into Henderson, and a few minutes later we're slowing in front of a small stucco house with a tile-floored porch and a yard full of plants I don't recognize.
His mom lives in a house with a garden of yucca and bougainvillea by the front walkway.
A wooden sign on the door reads Bienvenidos.
Through the front window, I can see lamplight and a wall full of framed photographs I can't quite make out from here.
Doom kills the engine, and we pull off our helmets.
I run my hand through my hair to do something with what the wind did to it.
"You good?" he asks me.
I press my palm against his chest. "I'm good."
He takes my hand. He walks me up the front path and knocks once on the door, and a woman opens it.
She’s in her late fifties, slender, her dark hair threaded with silver and pulled back at the nape of her neck.
She's wearing jeans and a soft blue cotton blouse, and there are small gold hoops in her ears.
The dark eyes she gave her son are looking up at him like she hasn't seen him in too long.
"Mijo," she breathes.
Doom pulls her into a hug. She's small against him, holding the back of his neck with one hand, her eyes squeezed shut.
I look away because the moment is theirs, and when I look back, she's already turned to me.
She reaches for my hand. "Nova," she says, like she's been saying my name to herself for a while. Her accent is warm and Colombian, the Nova rolling off her tongue. "Pasa, mija. Pasa."
I step inside.
The house smells like cilantros, onion, and something simmering on the stove I can't place.
The walls are warm yellow.
Photographs everywhere—Doom as a kid in school portraits, a teenage girl with the same eyes who must be Wren, a wedding photo of two people in Colombia from the 70s, and what looks like Carmen's mother in front of a green mountain.
Carmen steers me toward the kitchen with her hand on my back.
She makes Doom sit at the small kitchen table, makes me sit beside him, and ladles food into bowls without asking.
Chicken, corn, potato, capers, avocado.
She sets a small dish of cilantro and capers on the table beside the bowls.
"Ajiaco," she tells me as she sits. "From Bogotá. My mother's recipe."
I take a spoonful. The broth is rich and warm and tastes like a kitchen that's been alive for forty years.
"Gracias, senora," I say, looking up at her.
She waves a dismissive hand. "Carmen. Por favor."
She sits across from us and watches us eat for a minute before she picks up her own spoon.
The food is incredible.
I tell her so and she ducks her head and smiles, pleased and embarrassed at the same time, the way my mom does when someone compliments her cooking.
We talk through the meal.
Carmen asks me about nursing school, listens with her whole body the way good listeners do.
She tells me she's worked trauma, and then went to maternal-fetal medicine at the hospital a few years ago, and when I tell her I helped deliver a baby four days ago—really helped, as the support person, as a friend—she lights up.
She wants the details. She wants to know what unit I'm hoping to specialize in, whether I've been in an L&D rotation yet, what I thought of it.
Doom watches us quietly, eating slowly.
Mostly he's listening, but every so often his mother glances at him, and he meets her eyes and a look moves between them that isn't for me.
When the plates are empty, Carmen tells Doom to take the bowls and rinse them.
He does it without arguing.
She turns to me. "Walk with me?" She pushes back from the table.
I follow her out the back door into the yard.
The yard is small but full of life.
More bougainvillea climbing the back wall, herbs in clay pots along the patio, a lemon tree heavy with fruit by the fence.
There's a small statue of the Virgen de Guadalupe set into an alcove in the back wall, candles in glass jars at her feet, half-burned.
Carmen sits on the bench under the lemon tree and pats the wood beside her. I sit.
She's quiet for a moment, looking at her plants, her hands folded in her lap. Then she turns to me.
"He has never brought a woman to this house," she says. Her voice is quiet. "Not once. In all these years."
I don't know what to say to that. I look at my hands.
"When he was small," Carmen continues, "his sister and I were the only people he trusted. After what happened—you know what happened?"
"I know."
She nods, studies my face for a second, then looks back at the lemon tree.
"After that, he closed. Like a door. I have spent years watching the door, hoping someone would knock.
No one knocked. He never let them." She turns her hand over in her lap, palm up.
"Then he called me from Mexico. After Colombia.
After what they did down in that country. He told me he had met someone."
My throat goes tight.
"He didn't say much. He never does. But I have known my son his whole life, mija. I heard everything he wasn't saying."