Sophia #2
Liam had stopped pretending hours ago. My brother — the man who hadn’t cried at our parents’ graves because one of us had to stay standing and he’d decided it would be him — sank onto the edge of the bed and gathered the two of them in, his wife and his daughter, and pressed his wet face to Steph’s hair, one huge finger finding the baby’s foot like she might break under it.
He didn’t lower his voice quite enough to keep it from me.
“You were so strong,” he told her. “Look what you did. You’re the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen in my life.
” Steph turned her face into his, spent and laughing and crying at once, and for a moment the three of them were a closed country and I was only watching from the border.
My niece, I thought, the word still new and warm — and I figured that was the worst the night had in store for my composure, my brother turned father right in front of me, already most of the way to doing me in.
Then they looked up. Both of them. At me.
“Soph,” Steph said — careful, brimming, and something in it put me on alert a half-second before I understood. She found Liam’s eyes; he found hers; then he looked at me, and his voice came out wrecked, almost nothing.
“Meet Clementine Louisa Walker.”
The room kept going — the OB said something, a machine beeped, Steph laughed wetly a long way off. I didn’t hear any of it, because the name had gone off in the middle of me like a slow flare and I was standing in the light of it with the floor dropped clean away.
Clementine.
I hadn’t heard that name said aloud as a living thing in longer than I’d ever let myself count.
It had become a name on grey granite. A name in a folder a Ranger kept in a locked drawer.
A name Liam and I did not say in our own homes, because to say it was to lean on a door we’d both spent our lives holding shut.
And here he’d gone and given it to a baby.
Here he’d stood in a room with no police in it, no flowers, no judge — a room loud with a brand-new voice — and said our mother’s name out loud, and made it belong to someone who got to grow up.
We lost a Clementine, something said, far under the part of me that could still make words. And here was another.
Then I looked at the second name, the Louisa, and thought of the woman who’d folded two orphaned kids into a family that already had a houseful of its own and never once made us feel like guests in it.
I couldn’t speak. I’d spent my whole life being the one who always had the line, the deflection, the dry thing, and I had nothing. So, I stood there, and looked at my brother, and let him watch me come apart.
“Yeah,” Liam said thickly, answering the thing I never managed to say. “Yeah. I know.”
They came in a flood — Owen first, hat already off and eyes already going; Louisa a half-step behind, both hands pressed to her mouth; Wyatt and Ivy, Ivy enormous now and navigating the doorway like a woman piloting a barge; Hunter and Callie; Maisie at a dead sprint with a fistful of crayon artwork for a cousin she hadn’t met yet.
Too many bodies and not enough chairs, everyone talking over everyone, all of it love.
And Caleb was in it. Owen caught him by the shoulder and said something under his breath that made him duck his head.
Hunter drifted over to stand at his elbow, the two of them not talking, which between those two counted as a full exchange.
Maisie, finding every lap already taken, attached herself to the nearest large stationary object — Caleb’s leg — and stayed there, occasionally holding the drawing up for his review.
Liam had taken up a position. There was no other word for it.
He’d planted himself at the head of the rolling bassinet, feet set, shoulders squared, scanning a room full of the people who loved him most on earth like a man clearing a perimeter — and every time a well-meaning aunt drifted within reach of the baby he did not move and did not speak and somehow communicated, with his entire body, that she would be touching this infant over his cooling corpse.
Clay watched Liam standing over the bassinet and barked a laugh.
“Oh, we’re in trouble.”
Liam frowned. “What?”
“You were already the Hulk.” Clay pointed at the sleeping baby. “Now the Hulk’s got a baby girl.”
The room went up instantly.
Liam looked down at his daughter, looked back at Clay, and didn’t even try to argue.
Which made everybody laugh harder.
“He’s not wrong, you know,” Steph offered from the bed, wrung out and radiant and missing nothing. “He hasn’t let go of my hand since Tuesday. I had to do the dishes one-handed.”
“That was one time,” Liam said.
“It was four days, baby.”
For about ten minutes, the room got to be still.
Settled, anyway — there was no quiet with a Blackwood within a county mile of you, but it was the settle a house finds after a storm’s gone through and left everything standing.
Steph had the baby again, drowsy now. Owen had pulled Louisa half onto his lap in a chair.
Liam had finally, finally let go of something, and sat on the edge of the bed with his hand spread flat over both of theirs, his guard come down to just this, just them.
So of course that was the moment Ivy made a small, surprised sound by the window and looked down.
“Oh,” she said, in the tone of a woman noting a mildly interesting development in someone else’s life. “Oh, that’s — Wyatt. Wyatt. Honey, I think — yeah.”
It took the room a beat to catch up. Then it caught up all at once.
“Oh, fuck.” Wyatt came off the wall like he’d been shot off it, every bit of color gone out of his face.
“Oh, fuck, okay — okay —” He turned a full circle looking for something and came up with nothing, and Clay said, “There he goes,” with deep professional satisfaction.
And Liam, who two hours ago couldn’t locate his own car keys, rose off that bed calm, a man who had now Seen Things, and put a steadying hand on his brother’s shoulder.
“Breathe, brother. You point the truck at the hospital. You’re already in the hospital. You’re gonna do great.”
“She’s two weeks early,” Wyatt said, to no one, to the universe.
“And this one was a week late,” Steph called from the bed, delighted. “They’ll share a birthday give or take a day. Cousins.” She said it like she’d planned the whole thing personally.
They swept Ivy out in a rising tide of voices and wheelchairs and someone hollering for the nurse, Wyatt towed along in the wake of it like a man handed the controls of an aircraft mid-flight — and the noise rolled off down the corridor and left a sudden, ringing, wonderful hole where all of it had been.
I’d ended up with Clementine somewhere in the chaos — somebody had needed two free hands and mine had been the nearest steady ones — and now she lay in the crook of my arm in the gold coming up through the glass, no weight at all and the entire world both at once, eight pounds of it, asleep and frowning faintly at some newborn dream.
Caleb crossed the room to us. He didn’t reach for her — just came and stood close and looked down at her in my arms a long moment, and then at me.
“She’s been out cold ten minutes,” I said, low. “I keep checking she’s breathing. Occupational hazard.”
“She’s breathing,” he said. He’d been watching her too. “You going to give her up at some point, or do I have to fight your whole family for a turn?”
“You can have a turn.” I didn’t move to hand her over. “In a minute. Let me have my minute.”
Something moved behind his eyes — he knew exactly what the minute was for — and he let me have it.
“Clementine Louisa,” he said instead, quiet, trying the name on.
“Walker,” I added.
“Walker.” He looked at me when he said it, not the baby. “Hell of a name to live up to.”
“She’ll manage. She’s got all of us.”
He went quiet at that. At us. His jaw worked once, and he reached out and ran one finger down the baby’s cheek — this man with grease worked permanently into the creases of his knuckles — gentle as I had ever seen anything done, like the word had gotten into him and that was where it came back out.
Down the hall a door banged, Wyatt’s voice climbed an octave, and Ivy laughed somewhere under it.
My family, already busy making more of itself.
Caleb’s arm came around the two of us, the baby and me, and he set his chin on the top of my head and let out a breath that went on a long time — a man laying down a weight he’d carried a long way and not meaning to pick it up again.
We stood there in the gold and held what was ours, and let the rest of it happen down the hall.