Chapter 37 Maren
It was eight months later, and Sunday film night had survived fame, marriage, and a kitchen renovation.
It convened that night in the film room, in the original configuration.
Damian at the left arm with me tucked against him.
Thomas at my other side, already losing his battle with consciousness somewhere around the twenty-minute mark.
Brady on the floor with his head against my knee, narrating crimes against cinema.
"He wouldn’t run through an airport," Brady informed the room, of the man on screen. "Nobody runs through an airport. You'd be tackled. I've thought about this a lot."
"Oh, you did?" Damian said.
"I think about a lot of things. It's a rich inner life."
"It's not an inner life if you narrate all of it."
Brady's snack spread violated four of Damian's stated nutritional positions, and Damian had, in response, brought a written rebuttal, which he was reading aloud during the trailers.
"Point one," Damian said. "There is no fiber on this entire table."
Keith had been displaced from the armchair by a guest, which he was handling with visible grievance from the floor.
The guest was Eric's daughter, asleep under a blanket at the end of a family dinner that had run long, while Eric and his wife finished their coffee in the kitchen with Polly, who comes most Sundays now and has begun claiming founder's credit for the entire household.
The year had been ridiculous in the best possible ways.
The statuette lived on the mantel now, next to a framed thermostat treaty with two amendments.
My next film, the script I'd defended at the kitchen table over Brady's notes and Damian's counter-notes, had wrapped in the spring with my name on it as producer, and the director was already raving about the cut.
Aegis was thriving under the new field teams. The founders taught now, mostly.
They took the occasional case, and come home for dinner.
Brady's edition of the coking project had sold to a publisher in the fall, with the proceeds going to a foster-youth organization Damian chose and refused to be thanked for.
"You should let people thank you," I'd told him.
"They can thank the kids," he'd said. "I just signed a form."
"You set up the entire fund."
"I filled out the form thoroughly," Damian said, and would not be moved.
Aileen visited quarterly. Eleanor and David hosted one Sunday a month. The orchid on the kitchen sill has bloomed four times and is currently working on a fifth, which Brady monitors like a man waiting for a sports score.
And upstairs, on Damian's wall, the load-bearing empty space, the one he'd kept on purpose beside his mother's photograph, the one he said was holding whatever came next, had been filled three weeks ago.
With a small black-and-white printout from a doctor's office.
I'd told them about my pregnancy at breakfast.
Brady dropped a pan and cried before I'd finished the sentence.
Damian went very still, the way he goes still when something enormous lands, and then, mid-hug, I felt him pull out his phone under the table and start researching prenatal nutrition with one hand while he held me with the other.
And Thomas's hands stayed perfectly steady, the whole time, while his eyes did not.
"Say it again," Brady had said, on the floor with the pan he'd dropped. "I missed the back half, I was busy crying."
"I'm pregnant," I'd said.
"Yeah, that's what I thought you said." He'd put his forehead against my knee. "I just needed to hear it twice. Once for me and once for Niamh."
The question outsiders ask was not a question anyone in this house has asked, not even once. Whose? We never needed to know, and we were never going to find out, because the answer was settled before the question could be asked.
Ours.
The nursery thermostat already required a constitutional amendment.
The crib was assembled by committee, which was to say Thomas read the instructions aloud, while Brady freestyled.
Damian quietly rebuilt the whole thing to spec late at night after the other two had gone to bed, looking, when I found him at it, happier than I have ever seen him.
"It was off by a few centimeters," he said, when I caught him.
"Nobody can see a few centimeters."
"The baby will know," Damian said, tightening a bolt, and I understood that he meant it. Our child was going to be the most loved centimetrically-correct child in the history of the world.
On the couch, the film kept playing, and nobody was watching it.
Thomas surrendered fully to sleep against my shoulder, undignified noise and all, the way he does, a man who counted seconds for so many years finally able to stop counting.
Brady tipped his head back against my knee and demanded his kiss, and I paid the toll, because I always do.
"One for the road," he said.
"You're not going anywhere."
"One for staying, then." He grinned up at me. "Different occasion. Same rate."
Damian's thumb traced the inside of my wrist, the old signature, the thing he started doing in a dark movie theater a lifetime ago and has never once stopped.
And Keith, who has always run the best surveillance in this house, padded over from his grievance on the floor, evaluated the available real estate with his usual democratic care, and rested his chin, very gently, on the curve of my belly.
He probably knew.
I sat there in the middle of everything I had chosen, held three different ways by three men who had chosen me back and never once made me choose between them.
I looked around the room, at the sleeping man and the laughing one and the still one with his hand on my wrist, at the whole loud, kind, impossible life I'd built out of a contract I'd signed when I was still afraid to fall asleep at night.
And I registered that the credits could roll whenever they liked. This one runs forever.