Chapter Forty-Five One of Each
By the twentieth week, Jennie had stopped fitting comfortably into most of her regular clothes, a fact she discovered with some indignation on a Tuesday morning when a pair of trousers that had fit perfectly two weeks earlier simply refused to cooperate.
“This is absurd,” she informed Lin Xing, hands on her hips, surveying the mutiny in her closet.
“I’m only twenty weeks. I shouldn’t look like this yet.
” “You’re carrying two people,” he pointed out, with the careful diplomacy of a man who had learned, somewhere in the last month, exactly which observations were welcome and which were not.
“I understand from several sources that this tends to accelerate the timeline.” “Which sources.” “Dr. Chen. Several medical journals. Your mother, extensively, on our last call.” He held up both hands in surrender before she could respond.
“I’m simply reporting the research.” “You’re hiding behind the research.
” “That is also accurate.” The anatomy scan fell on a bright, cold Thursday, both of them considerably calmer walking into the appointment than they’d been for any scan since the loss — not because the fear was gone, exactly, but because it had settled, over the past month, into something they’d learned to carry alongside the growing, undeniable evidence of two children thriving despite everything either parent’s nervous system still occasionally insisted on rehearsing.
“Everything’s measuring beautifully,” Dr. Chen said, moving the wand with practiced ease over Jennie’s now-considerable stomach.
“Baby A’s a bit ahead, Baby B’s right on track — completely normal for twins, nothing to worry about there. Growth looks strong for both.”
The twentieth week had also, by then, fully revealed Lin Xing’s approach to expectant fatherhood, which was — to the surprise of absolutely no one who had ever met him — rigorous.
He had read nine pregnancy books, annotated four of them, and developed firm opinions about the methodological weaknesses of two.
He attended every appointment with a small notebook.
At three in the morning, when Jennie woke him with a specific and non-negotiable need for pickles, he was dressed and holding his keys before she’d finished the sentence — and returned twenty minutes later with three varieties, because, he explained, setting them out on the counter like a differential diagnosis, “the literature is inconsistent on dill versus garlic, and I wasn’t prepared to guess wrong twice in one night.
” “The literature,” Jennie said, already eating pickle number one directly over the jar, “has nothing on this. This is uncharted territory.” “Then I’ll take notes,” he said, entirely serious, and did.
“Can you tell—” Jennie glanced at Lin Xing. “We didn’t find out with the first one. We were going to be surprised. But with two of them, I think I need to know this time.
I don’t know why. I just do.” “Only if you’re both certain,” Dr. Chen said gently. “Some people prefer to keep at least one thing a surprise, even now.”
“I’m certain,” Jennie said, and looked to Lin Xing, who nodded immediately, no hesitation in it at all.
Dr. Chen adjusted the wand once more, studying the screen with quiet focus, and then smiled — the particular, unguarded smile she reserved, Jennie had learned, only for the good news.
“Baby A,” she said, “is a girl. And Baby B, over here—” she shifted the angle slightly, “—is a boy.”
The room went very still for a moment, both of them absorbing it. “One of each,” Jennie said finally, wonder threading through the words. “A girl and a boy. At exactly the same time.”
“One of each,” Lin Xing repeated, and something in his face cracked open completely — not grief this time, not fear, just pure, undefended joy, arriving whole and unguarded in a way Jennie had learned to treasure precisely because it had once been so rare in him.
“I hadn’t let myself imagine specifics. I find I’m considerably more moved than I expected to be, hearing it named so plainly. ”
They sat in the car afterward, as they always did now, letting the news settle before either of them trusted themselves to drive.
“A girl and a boy,” Jennie said again, testing the shape of it.
“We’re going to need two of absolutely everything, and none of it can match, because they’re not going to want the same things.
” “I’ve already begun mentally revising the nursery layout,” Lin Xing admitted.
“I believe we'll need a room divider, at minimum. Possibly a full second room, depending on how the space allows.” “We only have the one spare room, Lin.” “Then I suppose we’ll need to be creative.” He glanced at her, something warm and slightly helpless in his expression.
“I confess I have no practical framework for this particular problem. I’ve spent considerable time researching pediatric development.
I have spent comparatively little time researching interior design for twins of different genders sharing finite square footage.
” “We'll figure it out. We’re good at figuring things out. It’s basically our whole relationship. ”
The nursery renovation, when it finally happened three weekends later, turned into a family affair in the truest sense — Sophia arriving unannounced with a trunk full of secondhand furniture she’d apparently been quietly collecting for weeks “just in case,’ Emma bringing sandwiches and a level head that proved considerably more useful than either of their enthusiasm, and a video call propped on the windowsill so Rosamma could supervise from Kerala with the specific, unrelenting authority of a woman who had raised four children in considerably less space than a Toronto two-bedroom.
“Move the crib closer to the window,” Rosamma.
instructed, via the phone Sophia had propped at an increasingly precarious angle.
“Morning light is good for babies. And put a small partition there, so the boy doesn’t kick his sister awake for the first three years of both their lives, believe me, this happens, your uncle did this to your aunt for a decade.
” “They’re not sharing a crib, Amma, they’ll have their own.
” “I know that. I’m speaking philosophically.
” By the end of the day, the small yellow room had been ingeniously divided — a soft curtain partition down the center, the original white crib now joined by a second, slightly different but complementary; the little stuffed elephant relocated to a small shared shelf between the two halves, where it could, as Lin Xing put it, “maintain equal jurisdiction.” “Two cribs,” Jennie said, standing in the doorway that evening once everyone had finally gone home, surveying the finished room with something like disbelief.
“I still can’t quite picture two actual babies in here.
It still feels like we’re preparing for a hypothetical.
” “They'll stop being hypothetical rather suddenly, from what I understand,” Lin Xing said dryly. “I’m told the timeline for that transition is quite abrupt.”
The names took longer to settle than either of them expected, weeks of gentle back-and-forth conducted mostly at the kitchen table, Sophia’s heavily annotated baby book making repeat, increasingly battered appearances.
“For the girl,” Jennie said, one evening in her seventh month, “what about Ella? I keep coming back to it. Simple.
Easy to say in either language. And—” she smiled, a little shy about the reason. “It sits right next to Ellie, doesn’t it. The elephant.
I like that echo. Not naming her for a toy, obviously. Just liking that the sound of it already belongs to something gentle in our story.” Lin Xing considered this with real warmth.
“Ella,” he said, testing it. “I like that very much. Simple, and hers alone, and still somehow carrying a small thread of how we got here.” For the boy, the decision came more easily, almost accidentally — Lin Wei, on a call one evening, mentioned in passing that his own father, Lin Xing’s grandfather, had been named a word that translated roughly to “strong” or “resilient,” a man neither Jennie nor Lin Xing had ever met but who had, apparently, survived considerably more than his share of hardship with a steadiness the whole family still spoke of decades later.
“Eric,” Lin Xing said, turning an English form of it over.
“Close enough in sound to honor him, easy enough that it won’t trip anyone up at three in the morning during a fever, the way I insisted on.
I like the idea of carrying my grandfather forward that way.
” “Ella and Eric,” Jennie said, testing the two names together for the first time.
“A girl and a boy, arriving at exactly the same time.” She smiled, eyes bright. “I think that might be the two best names I’ve ever heard.”
The one difficult stretch came at thirty-two weeks, when a routine appointment revealed that Ella — Baby A — had begun measuring slightly behind her brother, enough of a gap that Dr. Chen recommended, gently but firmly, reduced hours at work and twice-weekly monitoring for the remainder of the pregnancy.
“It’s not uncommon in twin pregnancies,” she reassured them both, watching Jennie’s face carefully for the old fear she knew was never far from the surface.
“One twin often takes the lion’s share of resources for a while.
We'll watch closely, but there’s no reason to expect this becomes anything more serious than what it already is — a normal variation we’re keeping an eye on. ”