17. Santino
— ? —
Santino
Five minutes.
I’ve been alone with my children for exactly five minutes, and both of them have just filled their diapers in what I can only assume is a coordinated biological attack.
The smell hits me first, a wall of it, unholy and aggressive, the kind of smell that makes your eyes water and your survival instincts scream retreat.
Leo grins up at me from his high chair like he’s accomplished a magnificent feat.
Junie, in her matching chair, watches my face with the cold interest of a scientist observing a specimen.
“Okay,” I say out loud, because speaking helps me think. “Okay. This is fine. This is manageable. I’m a man who has negotiated deals most people can’t imagine. I can handle-”
Leo kicks his feet happily. A squelch.
I grab my phone.
Mel answers on the second ring. “Already?”
“There’s been an incident.”
“What kind of incident?”
“A… digestive incident. Both of them. Simultaneously.” I’m trying to keep my voice calm, professional, the way I’d deliver bad news in a boardroom. “The smell is… significant.”
Silence on the other end. Then I hear it, muffled, like she’s pressed the phone against her shoulder, but unmistakable.
She’s laughing.
“I can hear you,” I say.
“That was a cough.”
“That was a cackle and you know it.”
“I’m expressing sympathy through involuntary respiratory responses.” More muffled sounds. “Chiara, stop - he can hear us-”
“Tell my sister I’m going to remember this.”
“He says he’s going to remember this,” Mel relays, and I can hear Chiara’s cackle in the background.
“What do I do?” I ask, because pride is a luxury I can’t currently afford. “It’s… it’s everywhere, Mel. How is it everywhere? The physics don’t make sense.”
“Welcome to parenthood.” She’s not even trying to hide the laughter now. “First step: baby wipes. There’s a pack in the basket by the changing table. Second step: if the wipes don’t cut it, just throw them in the bath.”
“The bath?”
“Both of them at once. It’s faster.”
“How do I-” I stop. Take a breath. “Right. I’ll figure it out.”
“You sure?”
“How hard can two diapers be.” Even as I say it I hear how doomed I sound.
“Okay.” A pause, and I can tell she’s biting back a laugh. “Call if you need backup. We can be there in twenty minutes.”
“I won’t need backup.”
I hang up before she can hear the lack of confidence in my voice.
The wipes lose.
I go through half the pack on Leo alone, and every time I think I’ve got it handled, there’s more. It’s like a magic trick from hell, an endless regeneration of biological horror that defies all known laws of infant anatomy.
“How,” I mutter, wrestling with a new diaper that seems to have more parts than a differential equation. “How is this possible. You weigh nine kilos. Where did all of this come from?”
Leo grabs my nose with sticky fingers and says “Boop!”
“Yes. Boop. Very good.” I finally get the diaper secured, probably wrong, but secured, and turn to Junie.
She’s been watching the whole disaster unfold with an expression that suggests she’s filing away my incompetence for future reference.
“Your turn,” I tell her.
She shakes her head. “No.”
“It’s not optional, piccola. You need to be changed.”
“No change. No.”
“I can smell you from here.”
She considers this. Then, very deliberately, she holds her arms straight up, the universal toddler signal for pick me up, but the moment I reach for her, she drops them again.
“Nope,” she says.
My daughter is a tiny sociopath and I respect her completely.
The bath it is, I’ve never given a baby a bath, and it becomes catastrophically apparent the instant I’m navigating two toddlers, one tub, and a pair of hands roughly the size of tennis rackets trying to work squeeze bottles of baby soap.
“Okay,” I say. “This is - stay there. Just stay-”
Leo immediately tries to climb out.
I catch him with one hand and he twists like an eel, giggling maniacally, treating this whole endeavor like a prison break he’s been planning for months.
“No climbing,” I say firmly. “We stay in the water. We get clean. We-”
He splashes me directly in the face.
I sputter. Leo shrieks with delight.
“Again!” he demands. “Splash again!”
“That’s not-” I wipe water out of my eyes. “We’re not playing splash. We’re getting clean.”
“SPLASH!”
He demonstrates by bringing both hands down on the water surface with the force of a tiny depth charge. Water erupts everywhere, the walls, the ceiling, my entire front, and Leo looks up at me with pure, uncut joy.
I should be frustrated. I should be maintaining some kind of parental discipline. Instead, I’m struggling not to laugh, because his face is ridiculous and perfect and I’ve missed two years of this.
“Fine,” I say. “One more splash. Then soap.”
I bring my own hand down on the water, controlled, measured, just enough to send a small spray toward his belly.
He screams with happiness.
And then the unexpected happens.
Junie splashes.
It’s a small splash, tentative, experimental, but she’s watching my face as she does it, and when I grin at her, she does it again. Harder.
“Good splash,” I tell her. “Very good.”
She almost smiles.
The next twenty minutes are chaos. Absolute, unmitigated chaos. Water on every surface. Soap in places soap shouldn’t be. Leo attempting to drink the bathwater while I’m trying to wash his hair. Junie making what I can only describe as motorboat noises with her lips in the bubbles.
But somewhere in the middle of it, I don’t know exactly when, I start making faces.
It’s stupid. I’m a grown man making faces at babies like some kind of fool. But Leo laughs so hard he hiccups, and Junie makes a sound that’s almost a giggle, and suddenly I can’t stop.
I cross my eyes. They howl.
I puff out my cheeks. They shriek.
Then I make a fish face, opening and closing my mouth, and Leo literally falls over laughing, slipping in the tub so that I have to catch him, and Junie, Junie, who has frozen me out for weeks, reaches out and pokes my fish-face cheek with one small finger.
“Silly,” she says.
Everything in me lurches.
“Silly,” I agree, my voice thick.
Somehow, eventually, I get them dried without incident.
This feels like a triumph. A small triumph, but I’ll take it, two clean, dry babies wrapped in towels, sitting on the bathroom floor while I search for pajamas.
“Stay there,” I tell them. “I’ll be right back.”
“No go,” Leo says. “Stay.”
“I have to get your clothes, piccolo.”
“Stay,” he repeats, more firmly.
So I bring them with me, one tucked under each arm like wriggling footballs, to the bedroom where Mel keeps their pajamas. I find matching sets with ducks on them and somehow, through a combination of bribery and determination, get both children dressed.
Leo yawns.
“Tired?” I ask.
“No.”
“You look tired.”
“NO.” He yawns again, more aggressively, like the yawn has betrayed him.
I carry them both to the living room. The couch is enormous, Hattie’s furniture tends toward the practical, and I sink into it with a child on each knee.
“Story?” Leo asks hopefully.
“I don’t know where the books are.”
“Story no book. Make story.”
I look at him. “You want me to make up a story?”
He nods vigorously.
So I do.
It’s a terrible story. A goat named Gerald who goes on adventures, I borrow heavily from my recent trauma, and a brave horse named Biscuit who saves the day. Leo listens with rapt attention. Junie’s eyes start to droop.
Halfway through, Leo crawls from my knee onto my chest, settling against me like a very warm, very heavy paperweight. A moment later, Junie follows.
I freeze.
Both of my children are pressed against my chest. Both of them. At once. Their breathing slowing, synchronizing, the warm weight of them pinning me to the couch like an anchor.
I don’t move.
I barely breathe.
Leo’s fingers curl into my shirt. Junie’s head tucks under my chin.
And I sit there in the quiet of Hattie’s living room with my heart cracking open in my chest, thinking about all the nights I missed this.
All the mornings. All the stories I didn’t get to make up, all the baths I wasn’t there for, all the first words and first steps and first everything.
Two years.
I missed two years of this.
Wetness slides down my cheek. I don’t wipe it away.
They sleep on me for twenty minutes before I finally work up the courage to move them.
It takes forever. I shift them so slowly it’s almost imperceptible, adjusting positions millimeter by millimeter, terrified that any sudden movement will wake them. Eventually I get them both cradled in my arms and carry them down the hall to their room.
The cribs are side by side. I lower Leo into his first, he makes a small sound but doesn’t wake, and then Junie.
She opens her eyes.
I freeze again.
She studies me, unblinking, with those green eyes that are so much like her mother’s. And then she does the one thing that makes my knees actually weak.
She holds out her cracker.
It’s been clutched in her fist this whole time, half a rice cracker, soggy from the bath, pre-bitten into a rough crescent shape. She holds it toward me with absolute solemnity, like she’s offering a sacred artifact.
“Santi,” she says softly.
First time she’s ever said my name.
I take the cracker. I eat it. It tastes like cardboard and baby drool and it’s the best thing I’ve ever tasted in my life.
“Thank you,” I whisper.
She watches me chew. Then she rolls over, pulls her blanket up, and goes to sleep.
I stand there a while, not trusting my legs.
And then, because I can’t sit still with everything roaring in my chest, I clean the house.
Nobody asked me to. I need a job for my hands, a productive one, one that says I was here and I made things better.
The bathroom first, water mopped, tiles wiped, ceiling dried somehow. Then the kitchen, where I discover a sink full of dishes Mel clearly didn’t have time to get to. I wash them. I dry them. I put them away in cabinets I have to guess at, because I don’t know where anything goes.
The living room is a disaster zone of toys and books and what I think might be dried applesauce on the coffee table. I pick up every toy. I stack every book. I scrub the applesauce until the table shines.
Two years of missed chores.
Tonight, I can answer for one night of them.
By the time I hear Mel’s car in the driveway, the house is cleaner than it’s probably been in months. I’m back on the couch, exhausted in a way that has nothing to do with physical labor and everything to do with the cracker dissolving in my stomach.
The door opens.
Mel stops in the entrance.
She looks at the clean floors. The organized toys. The sparkling kitchen visible through the doorway. Then she looks at me, soaked, wrecked, probably with bath water still in my hair.
“They’re down?” she asks quietly.
“Fed, bathed, pajamas, sleeping.”
“Both of them?”
“Down for the count. Both.”
She stares at me. Her eyes go complicated.
“That would have taken me hours,” she says.
“I had time.”
“Santino-”
“Making your life easier.” My voice comes out hoarse, raw. “It’s all I want to do, Mel. It’s the only thing I want.”
Her eyes go shiny.
She doesn’t say anything else. Just whispers “Goodnight” and disappears upstairs, and Chiara has to touch my arm to make me realize I need to leave.
“Come on,” she says gently. “I’ll walk you out.”
I follow her to the porch in a daze. The night air is cool on my damp skin, and I’m talking before I realize it, the words spilling out in a rush.
“She said my name.”
“Who?”
“Junie. She said my name, Chiara. And she gave me her cracker.” My voice cracks. “Half of it. She shared it with me.”
My sister watches me for a long moment without saying anything. Then she smiles, a real smile, warm and soft, one I haven’t seen aimed at me in years.
“It’s been a long time since you were this happy,” she says.
“I didn’t know I could be.”
“I know.” She glances back at the house, at the light that’s just flickered on in Mel’s window. “She had reasons, Santi. Her reasons for leaving - they were true. Every one of them.”
“I know.”
“But I’m glad.” Her voice is fierce and tender at once. “I’m glad all the way down that you found her.”
I nod, still watching the light. The silhouette moving behind the curtain. The shape of the woman I’ve never stopped loving.
“I’ll prove myself to her,” I say quietly. “It’s all I’ve ever wanted to.”
Chiara pats my enormous back with the affection of someone who’s known me since the womb.
“Go get it, big guy.”