Chapter Forty-Six Strong Heartbeats, Plural
It happened, in the end, three weeks earlier than the date circled on Dr. Chen’s calendar, and considerably less gracefully than either of them had pictured it.
Jennie was standing in the kitchen at eleven at night, thirty-seven weeks along and thoroughly done with being pregnant in every way a person could be done with something, reaching for a glass of water she’d already decided was going to be the last thing she did before finally, blessedly, going to bed — when something shifted low in her abdomen with a suddenness that had nothing at all to do with the Braxton Hicks contractions she’d been quietly ignoring for two weeks.
“Lin.” He was beside her before she finished saying his name, the particular speed he still reserved only for her.
“My water just broke,” she said, staring down at the floor with the calm, detached disbelief of a woman whose body had apparently decided to skip several stages of warning entirely.
“I think. I’m fairly certain. I’m a doctor, I should be more certain than this.
” “You’re allowed to be less certain about your own body than everyone else’s,” Lin Xing said, already moving, already reaching for the hospital bag they’d packed weeks ago and rechecked no fewer than six times since.
“We're going. Now. Can you walk, or should I—” “I can walk, Lin, I’m in labor, not injured.” “Forgive me. I appear to have misplaced several years of medical training in the last thirty seconds.”
The drive to St. Maple took eleven minutes, which Lin Xing later insisted, with visible chagrin, he had absolutely not covered in eleven minutes under normal traffic conditions, and which Jennie spent gripping the door handle through two contractions that arrived considerably closer together than anything the books had prepared her for.
“Twins tend to move quickly, once they decide to,” a resident informed them cheerfully at triage, which did nothing whatsoever to slow Jennie’s heart rate.
Dr. Chen arrived within twenty minutes, unhurried and steady in the way that had carried them both through nine months of careful, anxious monitoring, and delivered her assessment with the same calm clarity she brought to everything.
“Baby B’s positioned a little awkwardly,” she said, reviewing the monitor.
“Not dangerously — just enough that I’d feel considerably better delivering both of them by cesarean rather than risking a complicated vaginal delivery with a second twin.
Given everything you’ve both been through to get here, I'd rather be cautious than clever.” “Whatever’s safest,” Jennie said immediately, through gritted teeth as another contraction rolled through. “I don’t need clever.
I need both of them here safely.” “Then that’s the plan,” Dr. Chen said, already moving.
“Let’s get you prepped.” The next twenty minutes passed in the particular blur Jennie recognized from the other side of a thousand procedures — gowns, monitors, a spinal block that made her hands shake even as it did exactly what it was supposed to, Lin Xing gowned up beside her, holding her hand with a grip that suggested he’d entirely forgotten his own considerable strength.
“You’re squeezing very hard,” she informed him, mostly to have something to say that wasn’t fear.
“I’m aware. I find I can’t seem to moderate it.
” His voice, usually so level, had gone thin and strained in a way she’d only heard from him twice before — the cemetery, and the exam room where a screen had once gone silent.
“Jennie, I need you to know that if I say anything unhelpful in the next several minutes, it will be entirely due to terror and not a reflection of my confidence in Dr. Chen, whom I trust completely, and I would like that noted in case I say something regrettable.” “Noted,” Jennie said, laughing despite everything, the sound cracking slightly around the edges.
“For the record, I’m terrified too. Exactly the same size as you.
” “Room enough for both,” he said, and she felt him press his forehead briefly against her temple, steadying them both at once.
The drape went up. Dr. Chen’s voice, calm and running commentary the way Jennie had heard a hundred surgeons do for a hundred nervous patients, though she had never once understood, until this exact moment, how much that steady narration actually mattered from the other side of it.
“Here we go. You'll feel some pressure, nothing sharp. Dad, you’re doing wonderfully, just keep breathing with her— ” “Tm not the one giving birth,” Lin Xing managed, strangled.
“I’m not sure I qualify for that praise. ”
“You’re the one not fainting,” a nurse said cheerfully.
“That’s higher praise than you’d think, from this side of the curtain.
” And then, with a suddenness that Jennie would spend years afterward trying and failing to fully describe, there was a sound in the room that had nothing to do with monitors or careful clinical narration at all. A cry.
Small, furious, unmistakably alive. “Baby A,” Dr. Chen announced, voice full of open warmth now, all business briefly abandoned.
“A very healthy, very angry little girl.” Jennie burst into tears before she’d even seen her, the sound alone enough to undo every careful defense either of them had left, and beside her Lin Xing made a sound she’d never once heard from him in over three years — something between a laugh and a sob, entirely unguarded, entirely helpless.
“Ella,” he said, voice breaking completely. “Jennie, that’s her—” “One more to go,” Dr. Chen said, already moving. “Baby B’s turn. Nearly there—” The second cry arrived less than two minutes later, deeper already, somehow, even in fury, and Dr. Chen’s voice carried the same bright warmth.
“And a very healthy baby boy, right on his sister’s heels, same as he’ll probably spend the rest of his life doing.
” Eric. Jennie turned her head as far as the drape allowed, desperate for a glimpse of either of them, and found Lin Xing already crying openly, unashamed, watching the nurses work with an expression of such complete, undefended wonder that she thought her heart might actually break open from the size of it.
“Can I—” Her voice came out cracked and small.
“Can I see them? Please, I need to see them—” “Coming right up,” a nurse said gently, and within moments two small, furious, impossibly perfect bundles were being settled against Jennie’s chest, one at a time, skin warm and slick and entirely, gloriously real.
Ella first — smaller than her brother, dark-haired, already blinking up with the same wide, dark eyes Jennie recognized instantly as her own mother’s, her grandmother’s, passed down through generations of women who had carried both grief and hope in the same body and somehow, always, made room for both.
Then Eric — heavier, calmer already, settling against her other side with a small, huffing sigh that Lin Xing would later insist, with complete seriousness, was “clearly already displaying excellent clinical composure.”
“Hello,” Jennie whispered, to both of them at once, tears falling freely now onto two small, warm heads. “Hello. We’ve been waiting for you. We’ve been waiting for you for so long.”
Lin Xing knelt beside the bed, careful of every wire and monitor, and rested one hand gently against each small back, and for a long moment he didn’t say anything at all — just looked at them, at both of them, with the particular, focused intensity Jennie recognized instantly from a hospital corridor years earlier, a man crouched down to a frightened child’s eye level, listening to a stuffed elephant’s heartbeat like it was the most important sound in the world.
“Strong heartbeats,” he said finally, voice thick, barely above a whisper.
“Both of you. Very brave, already, before you’ve even opened your eyes properly. ”
Jennie laughed and cried at the exact same time, recognizing the echo instantly — the very first thing she’d ever heard him say, crouched beside a crying boy and a worn stuffed elephant, a lifetime and an entire impossible love story ago.
“You remembered,” she managed. “I’ve never once forgotten a single word of that day,” Lin Xing said, looking up at her, everything he’d ever felt written plainly across his face without a trace of the old defenses left standing anywhere at all. “I don’t think I ever will.
Not after this.” Word traveled through St. Maple, predictably, at the speed of sound once again, and by the time Jennie had been moved to recovery, propped up carefully with a baby settled in the crook of each arm, the small room had already begun filling with the particular chaos she’d come to recognize as this hospital’s specific love language.
Sophia arrived first, took one look at both babies, and burst into tears so immediate and so loud a passing nurse checked the doorway to confirm nothing was wrong.
“TWO,” she said, for what Jennie suspected would not be the last time that day.
“They’re both here. They’re both real. I need to hold them. I need to hold them immediately, I’ve been practicing my technique on a weighted teddy bear for a month, ask Emma, she’ll confirm this— ” “That’s true,’ Emma said, arriving close behind her, considerably calmer but visibly just as moved.
“She named the teddy bear. She’s been rehearsing.” “His name was Practice Baby. It’s a very serious name.”
Sophia held Ella first, cradling her with a gentleness that undercut every ounce of her usual chaos, and went very quiet not moving, studying the small, sleeping face with something Jennie hadn’t often seen from her — a stillness that looked, for just a moment, like a private hope of her own quietly stirring at the sight of new, impossible life.
“You’re going to be so loved,” Sophia whispered to the baby, so quietly Jennie almost missed it. “By all of us. I promise you that.”
The video calls came next, one after another — Rosamma sobbing so completely she could barely form words, her father gruff and thick-voiced, saying only, “Two. God is very generous with this family,” before handing the phone off entirely, overcome.
Lin Wei, quieter as always, but visibly, openly weeping at the sight of his grandchildren, saying Mei’s name softly, the way he always did, as though including her automatically in every joy too large to hold alone.
“She would have already spoiled them both rotten,” he said, laughing through tears. “I hope you’re prepared.
I certainly wasn’t, and I only had the one of him to contend with.
” It was well past midnight before the room finally quieted, visitors gently ushered out by an insistent nurse, Lin Xing settled into the chair beside Jennie’s bed with Eric sleeping against his chest, one hand splayed protectively across the baby’s small back.
“I keep waiting to wake up,” Jennie admitted softly, watching Ella’s small chest rise and fall against her own. “This feels too large to be real.
Nine months ago I didn’t know if we’d ever get here at all.” “I know,” Lin Xing said quietly. “I’ve been thinking the same thing all evening. I keep needing to touch them, just to confirm it, the way I keep touching your ring some days, still, after all this time.”
He looked down at Eric, something endlessly soft moving across his face. “I don’t think the fear fully leaves. I think Sarah was right about that, from what you told me. I think we simply build a life large enough to hold it alongside everything else.”
“All of it,” Jennie murmured. “Every last bit,” he agreed, and reached across the small space between their chairs to take her hand, three hearts beating steady and close in the quiet hospital room — four, she corrected herself silently, feeling her own pulse settle into something like peace for the first time in months.
Four heartbeats, all finally, safely, in the same room together.
He began to hum, very softly, so as not to wake either baby — the folded-together melody, grief and hope woven through each other so completely now that Jennie could no longer find the seam between them, the lullaby he’d started composing over a year ago and finished, slowly, for two who had stayed.
“You kept your promise,” Jennie whispered, throat tight, watching Eric’s small face relax further into sleep at the sound.
“The first thing they’d ever hear.” “I did,” Lin Xing said softly, still humming between words.
“I find I’d like to keep telling them, in whatever way I can, that they were already loved before they’d even arrived.
For as long as they'll let me.” Outside the window, Toronto moved through its ordinary, indifferent night exactly as it always had, entirely unaware that in one small hospital room, in the very building where an elephant had once taught a nervous new doctor exactly what a strong heartbeat sounded like, two more had just been added to the world — small, furious, impossibly loved, already carrying an entire family’s history forward into whatever came next.