48. Nikolai
NIKOLAI
The dumplings were already a problem, and I had not even added the filling yet.
Isla stood in the kitchen doorway, arms crossed, watching me measure a fourth cup of flour with the kind of grave concentration most men reserved for defusing something dangerous.
"Nikolai."
"What?"
"We're making dinner for two people."
"I am aware of the headcount."
"Then why does that look like enough dough to open a restaurant?"
I set the measuring cup down and considered the counter, which had, admittedly, begun to resemble the aftermath of a minor industrial accident.
Three separate surfaces I had not intended to touch were now dusted white.
A second mixing bowl sat washed and waiting beside the first, ready for a batch I had not yet decided I needed to make.
"I like to have extra."
"Extra implies a reasonable amount more than necessary. This implies you're expecting the whole building."
"If the Petrov twins from the fourth floor happen to stop by, I would rather not be caught unprepared."
"The Petrov twins are eight years old, and they've never once visited us in their lives."
"Precisely why I remain prepared. Complacency is how these things happen."
"You say that about everything. The smoke detectors, the spare tire, the second set of keys hidden in the plant."
"Those are all reasonable precautions."
"You alphabetized the spice rack last week."
"That was about order, not precaution. Entirely different matters."
She crossed the kitchen and stole a pinch of dough straight off the counter, popping it into her mouth before I could object, which she knew perfectly well I would not have anyway.
"You've made these a dozen times now. You don't need three batches of insurance dough anymore."
"I am aware that my technique has improved."
"You've gone well past improved. You're better at this than I am, and I'm the one who taught you."
That was true, though I still found something almost unbearably satisfying about hearing her say it out loud.
Isla had shown me how to make her mother's dumplings on an evening eleven months ago that ended less with dinner and more with Renee walking in on us not quite kissing over a countertop dusted white, and I had been making them every few weeks since, refining the fold, the pleat, the exact ratio of filling to dough that kept the whole thing from falling apart in the water.
I had not once, in eleven months, managed to make only enough for two people.
"It is not about needing insurance dough. It is about respecting the process."
"It's about you being incapable of doing anything by half measures, which I actually love about you, for the record, even when it means we're eating dumplings for the next four days."
I let that sit for a moment, the particular warmth of being loved for a flaw instead of despite one, and returned to the dough with slightly less urgency than before.
We ate at the small table by the window an hour later, the apartment full of the kind of ordinary evening noise I still occasionally could not quite believe belonged to me, a television murmuring in the other room, dishes clinking, Isla telling me some elaborate story about a coworker's disastrous blind date that required at least four separate voices to do properly.
The man had apparently introduced himself with his college nickname and then asked her to guess what it stood for.
She had refused on principle and ordered dessert out of spite instead.
I noticed the coffee first.
She had made a full pot that morning, out of habit, and it sat on the counter untouched, the same as it had sat untouched the morning before. Isla drank coffee the way some people drank water, constant and unthinking, and two full pots going cold in a row was not nothing.
I did not say anything about it yet, only filed it away, the way I had once filed away exits and unfamiliar cars, except this particular vigilance came without any of the old dread that used to follow it, only a careful, quiet attention that felt considerably more like love than suspicion.
Then there was the commercial.
It was for laundry detergent, something with a golden retriever puppy shaking water off itself in slow motion, wholly unremarkable in every conceivable way, and Isla went quiet halfway through it in a manner that had nothing to do with the story she had just been telling.
"Isla."
"I'm fine." Her voice cracked slightly on the second word, betraying the claim before she had finished making it.
"It's a stupid commercial. I don't know why I'm like this."
"You are not like anything. You are simply reacting to something."
"To a dog commercial."
"To a dog commercial that apparently found something true to say.
" I kept my tone light, deliberately so, though something quiet and careful had already started assembling itself in the back of my mind, piece by piece, the same methodical instinct I had once used for threats now turning itself toward something considerably less dangerous and considerably more terrifying in its own way.
She wiped under her eyes with the heel of her hand, laughing a little at herself, embarrassed in the specific way people got when their own bodies betrayed them without permission.
"I've been so tired lately. Like, bone tired. I fell asleep on the train yesterday and missed my stop by four stations."
"You did not mention that."
"It didn't seem important."
"You are exhausted, off your coffee entirely, and crying at advertisements for dish soap."
"Laundry detergent."
"The category is not the point."
She looked at me properly then, something shifting behind her eyes as the individual pieces she had not let herself assemble began arranging into a shape neither of us had said out loud yet.
"Nikolai."
"I am not saying anything is wrong."
"You're saying something."
"I am saying we could find out, if you wanted to." I kept my voice as steady as I could manage, though my pulse had picked up in a way that had nothing to do with fear and everything to do with a hope I did not entirely trust myself to name yet.
"There is no reason to wonder about it when we could simply know."
She stared at me for a long moment, something complicated crossing her face, hope and terror occupying the exact same small space the way they so often did for both of us.
"You're being remarkably calm about this."
"I have had a great deal of practice being calm about things that terrify me. This is simply a different category of terrifying than I am used to."
That got a real laugh out of her, watery and surprised, and some of the tension went out of her shoulders.
"Do we even have one? A test?"
I stood, crossed to the hallway closet, and retrieved a small paper bag from the top shelf, where I had hidden it three weeks earlier, the exact day I had first noticed her turning down coffee without seeming to realize she had done it herself.
She stared at the bag, then at me, something between disbelief and helpless affection moving across her face.
"You've had that for three weeks?"
"I like to be prepared."
"You bought a pregnancy test on a hunch three weeks ago and said absolutely nothing?"
"I did not want to alarm you over a hunch. I wanted to have the option available if the hunch turned out to matter."
"That's the most Nikolai thing you've ever done, and I include the multiple insurance batches of dumplings in that assessment."
We went to the bathroom together, which felt at once completely absurd and entirely necessary, neither of us willing to be anywhere else for however long the next few minutes turned out to take.
I stood in the doorway while she read the instructions twice, her hands not quite steady, and when she finally disappeared behind the door I stayed exactly where I was, back against the frame, staring at nothing in particular.
Three minutes. That was what the box promised, three minutes standing between the life we currently had and one we had never once spoken about directly, both of us too careful, too superstitious about naming something neither of us was certain we were even allowed to want.
I listened to the small, ordinary sounds through the door, water running, the soft rustle of the box being set down on the edge of the sink, and found myself cataloguing them the way I once catalogued footsteps in a hallway, every part of me straining toward hope instead of danger for possibly the first time in my life.
I thought about a nursery we did not have.
I thought about names we had never once discussed, about a crib in the corner of a room that currently held nothing but a treadmill neither of us used and a box of wedding cards we had not gotten around to sorting yet.
"Talk to me," she said through the door. "Say something, anything. I can't just sit here in silence."
"I do not know what to say."
"Then say that. Just keep talking."
"I was thinking about the dumplings," I said, because it was true, because my mind had gone strange and untethered in exactly the way it never did under actual pressure. "I have been making enough for an army every time for eleven months, and I never understood why, and I believe I finally do."
"Why?"
"I think some part of me has been preparing for a bigger family this entire time without admitting it to myself."
Silence answered that, long enough that I wondered if I had said too much, and then I heard something that might have been a small, wet laugh from the other side of the door.
"You're ridiculous."
"I am aware."
"I love you. I need you to know that, whatever this says."
"I love you as well. Regardless of what it says." I meant it more fully than I had ever meant anything, and saying it out loud through a closed door felt somehow exactly right for two people who had built their entire relationship out of saying true things at inconvenient moments.
The door opened.
Isla stood there holding a small white plastic stick, her face doing something I could not immediately read, caught somewhere between shock and a joy too large to fit her expression yet.
"Two lines," she said, quiet. "Nikolai, there are two lines."
She held it out to me, and I took it gently, the way I had once handled things far more dangerous and far less important, and looked down at the small plastic window in her palm.
Two lines. Clear, unmistakable, entirely real.
For one suspended second, the old fear rose in me exactly the way it always had, quiet and familiar and uninvited, the same question that had shadowed every good thing in my life since the fire.
Do I get to have this? Do I actually get to keep something this good without it being taken from me the way everything else once was?
Then I looked up at Isla, standing in our bathroom doorway with tears on her face and her hand pressed flat against her own stomach like she was already trying to memorize the shape of something that was not yet there to feel, and the fear simply had nowhere left to land.
I set the test down on the counter, careful, and pulled her into me, and felt something in my chest give way completely, replaced by an uncomplicated, unguarded joy I did not think I had ever once let myself feel for a single full moment in my entire life until right now, standing there with the whole ordinary evening still around us and a whole unclaimed future opening up in front of both of us at once.
This was, I supposed, exactly the kind of scare I had spent six years bracing for without ever expecting it to arrive wearing this particular shape, quiet and small and shaking in my arms instead of armed and waiting in a doorway. I found I did not mind the substitution even slightly.