Chapter Forty-Seven Every Two Hours
Nobody had properly warned them about the first six weeks, and Jennie decided, somewhere around three in the morning on day nine, that this omission constituted professional malpractice on the part of every parent she had ever nodded politely at while they described “the newborn phase” with suspicious vagueness.
“They didn’t tell us,” she informed Lin Xing, bleary and upright in the nursery’s rocking chair with Ella finally, miraculously asleep against her chest, “because if they told us, nobody would ever do this a second time. It’s a conspiracy.
A loving, exhausted conspiracy.” “I’ve begun to suspect the same.
” He stood in the doorway with Eric slung against his own shoulder, patting slow, steady circles against the baby’s back with the same careful precision he brought to everything, dark circles under his eyes that hadn’t fully faded in over a week.
“I read six books on this before they arrived. Not one of them adequately conveyed the reality of two infants requiring feeding at staggered forty-minute intervals through the night.” “You read six books.” “I read six books and took notes. I do not recommend the experience. None of it prepared me for the actual math.” They had, by unspoken and entirely necessary agreement, split the nights into shifts within days of coming home — Jennie taking the first stretch, Lin Xing the second, both of them meeting somewhere in the grey hours before dawn for whichever baby had decided, with an infant’s total disregard for schedules, that this was the moment for maximum volume.
Sophia had offered, more than once, to take an overnight shift herself “just to give you two a full night’s sleep,” and had been gently but firmly declined every time.
“You’ll get your turn to be tired for us,” Jennie told her.
“Just not this particular kind.” “I resent that logic and also completely understand it.”
By week three, something had begun to settle — not into ease, exactly, but into a rhythm they could at least recognize as their own, learned the way everything with them had always been learned: slowly, through trial, with considerable laughter at their own expense.
“I’ve discovered,” Lin Xing announced one bleary Tuesday morning, holding up Eric’s bottle with the triumphant gravity of a man reporting a breakthrough in surgical technique, “that if I warm it to exactly this temperature and hold him at this specific angle, he finishes twenty percent faster.” “You’ve been running experiments on our son’s feeding efficiency. ” “I’ve been optimizing.
There’s a difference.” “Lin, he’s three weeks old. He doesn’t need to be efficient.” “Everyone benefits from efficiency,” he said, entirely serious, and Jennie laughed so hard she nearly woke Ella, who had only just, after considerable negotiation, agreed to nap.
It was Ella, in the end, who found the one problem Lin Xing’s considerable research could not solve.
She had taken, at nearly a month old, to a very specific and very loud form of protest at exactly six each evening, for reasons no pediatric textbook Lin Xing consulted could adequately explain.
He tried every technique he had read about, in order, with the grim thoroughness of a man working through a differential diagnosis — the football hold, the five S’s, white noise, a change of temperature, a change of song.
Nothing worked. Ella screamed on, unimpressed by his credentials.
“I have successfully calmed infants I have never met,” he told Jennie, over the noise, something close to genuine bewilderment on his face. “Strangers’ children. In waiting rooms. I do not understand what I am doing wrong.”
“You’re not doing anything wrong,” Jennie said, taking pity on him, and lifted Ella from his arms. She didn’t bounce or shush or offer a single trick from any of his six books.
She simply hummed, low and off-key, the same two lines of a hymn her own mother used to hum over her — and Ella, with the swift, total betrayal only a six-week-old could deliver, went quiet within thirty seconds.
Lin Xing stared at the two of them, thoroughly undone.
“That’s it? Humming?”
“Badly, apparently. She likes it badly.”
“I have a doctorate,” he said, with real anguish. “I have delivered a conference paper on infant self-soothing mechanisms.”
“She doesn’t care about your doctorate, Lin. She wants the off-key humming and the specific one who smells like dosa.”
He looked so genuinely wounded by this professional defeat that Jennie laughed until she had to sit down, Ella dozing peacefully against her shoulder, entirely unmoved by the fact that she had just humbled a pediatrician in his own home.
Sophia and Emma came by most days that first month, arriving with meals neither of them had energy left to cook, folding tiny laundry with the specific tenderness reserved for objects smaller than seemed reasonable for actual human beings to wear.
Rosamma flew in for two weeks, took one look at the state of the apartment, and quietly, without asking permission, restored order to the kitchen, the laundry, and Jennie’s own frayed nerves with the brisk, unstoppable competence of a woman who had done all of this herself, decades earlier, with considerably less help and no working dishwasher.
“You are allowed to put them down, molé,” she told Jennie gently, on the third night, finding her daughter standing over the shared crib at two in the morning simply watching both babies breathe.
“They will still be there in five minutes.
Sleep is not abandonment.” “I know that. I just can’t stop looking at them.” “I know,” Rosamma said, and there was something in her voice — old, worn smooth, entirely without judgment — that told Jennie her mother had stood in exactly this spot herself, once, a lifetime and an ocean ago.
“You will look at them for the rest of your life and never quite believe they’re real. That part doesn’t go away. It just gets easier to also sleep.”
The first smile arrived at six weeks, on a Sunday, and Jennie happened to be the one holding Eric when it happened — a small, gummy, entirely unmistakable curve of his mouth in response to nothing more remarkable than her making a face at him.
“Lin. LIN. Come here. He smiled. He actually smiled, it wasn’t gas, I know the difference now, I’ve become an expert in the difference—” He arrived at a speed that suggested an actual emergency, took one look at his son’s small, gummy grin, and went uncharacteristically, helplessly soft.
“Do it again,” he said to the baby, entirely seriously. “Show me. I want to see it properly.”
Eric, unmoved by the request, promptly fell asleep instead, and Lin Xing’s crestfallen expression made Jennie laugh so hard she had to sit down.
Ella’s first smile came four days later, aimed, with what Jennie chose to interpret as deliberate favoritism, entirely at her father — a small, considering look followed by a slow, delighted grin that undid Lin Xing so completely he had to leave the room for a moment to collect himself.
“She smiled at you,’ Jennie called after him, delighted.
“Are you crying? Lin, are you actually crying about a smile?” “I am not crying,” he called back, audibly crying.
“I have something in my eye. Several somethings. It’s allergies.
” “It’s February. In Toronto. Inside our apartment.
” “Powerful, resilient indoor allergies.”
Jennie returned to work at four months, a decision that had taken considerable negotiation with her own conscience and several long conversations with Emma, who had walked this exact road herself not long before.
“It doesn’t get easier the day you walk back in,” Emma warned her, over coffee the week before.
“It gets easier eventually. Not immediately.
Be gentle with yourself about the gap in between.
” The first morning was, exactly as promised, considerably harder than Jennie had braced for — not the work itself, which came back to her hands and instincts with the easy familiarity of a language never fully forgotten, but the specific, physical ache of being somewhere the twins weren’t, checking her phone every hour for updates from the sitter with an anxiety she recognized, distantly, as its own kind of love.
“They’re fine,” Lin Xing told her at lunch, showing her a photo the sitter had sent — both babies, wide awake, apparently delighted by something entirely off-camera. “They are, in fact, better than fine.
I believe Ella has already learned to grab Eric’s foot with startling precision.” “That’s concerning.” “That’s a twin, apparently. I’ve been reading about this too.”
By the six-month mark, both babies had rolled over, discovered their own hands with evident fascination, and begun the specific, joyful chaos of grabbing everything within reach — hair, glasses, the crooked bookshelf’s lower shelf, which Lin Xing finally, grudgingly, reinforced after Eric nearly pulled an entire row of books down on himself.
“I told you it was a structural flaw,” he said, triumphant despite the alarm of the moment, once Eric had been safely extracted and soothed.
“You built an entire safety case around a two-degree tilt.” “I was vindicated. I intend to enjoy this vindication for a reasonable period of time.”
Eric took his first steps at ten months, wobbling three unsteady paces from the sofa to Lin Xing’s outstretched hands before collapsing, delighted, into a fit of giggles that made the whole apartment feel, for one small suspended moment, entirely and perfectly complete.
Ella followed six days later, considerably steadier, considerably more determined, crossing the entire length of the living room on her first real attempt with the specific, unhurried confidence Jennie recognized, with a laugh, as entirely her father’s.
“She waited,” Lin Xing said, watching his daughter toddle past him with the serene competence of someone who had simply been observing the process before committing to it herself.
“She watched her brother do it first, calculated the mechanics, and then executed without a single stumble. I find that deeply reassuring about her future decision-making.” “Or she just wanted to make sure it was worth the effort.” “Also possible. Also, somehow, still reassuring.”
The first birthday arrived on a bright, cold Saturday, the small apartment filled past capacity with balloons Sophia had insisted on in colors that “technically matched nothing but felt correct,” a cake Emma, had baked herself after declaring the bakery option “insufficiently personal for this specific milestone,” and enough family crowded onto video calls from two continents that the ancient laptop speaker crackled audibly under the strain of simultaneous Malayalam and Mandarin well-wishes arriving at once.
“One year,” Jennie said, watching both twins enthusiastically destroy their respective slices of cake with a total disregard for the concept of utensils, Eric’s face nearly entirely obscured by frosting, Ella approaching the whole endeavor with slightly more surgical precision.
“I keep trying to remember what our lives even looked like before this, and I genuinely can’t.
It’s like there’s a before and an after and I’ve lost the before entirely. ”
“I don’t think that’s a loss,” Lin Xing said, watching his children with the particular, undefended tenderness that had become, over the past year, simply the ordinary shape of his face rather than a rare and startling exception to it.
“I think that’s just what it looks like when something becomes the center of a life instead of an addition to it.
” Sophia, cake-frosting already smeared somewhere on her own cheek courtesy of an enthusiastic hug from Eric, raised her glass of sparkling cider with theatrical solemnity. “To one year,” she declared.
“To surviving it, to loving it, and to whatever chaos year two apparently has planned, because based on the current trajectory, I have concerns.” “Reasonable concerns,” Lin Xing agreed, and the whole small, crowded, cake-covered apartment laughed together, two toddlers shrieking with delight at a sound they didn’t understand but were already, instinctively, learning to love.
Jennie looked around the room — her husband, her friends, her mother’s face beaming from a laptop propped precariously on the counter, two small, impossible, entirely beloved people covered in frosting and joy — and thought, not for the first time and certainly not for the last, that she had absolutely no idea, six years ago, stepping off a plane alone and homesick, that this particular chaos was waiting for her all along.