CHAPTER SIXTY-FOUR
Alex
Now
I stood in the bathroom and looked at a thin pink line.
I sat on the edge of the tub.
The tile was cold.
Sundays. Arthur at a new school. The Jeep in the drive until the paint stopped looking like a miracle. I had stopped counting nights.
It was different.
I looked at the line and felt nothing complicated.
Just warmth.
Immediate and uncomplicated and filling the room the way the desert sun filled things. Without asking permission. Without negotiating with whatever else was in the space.
I thought about when.
I thought about it the way Alex-who-was-a-nurse thought about it rather than Alex-who-was-overwhelmed.
Clinically. Working backward from the date.
It hadn’t been difficult to determine.
The timing was sloppy and unmistakable once I bothered to look.
I knew that with the certainty of a woman who knew her own body and had been paying attention. The timing was unambiguous. The math was simple.
We’d made a family the first time without trying and without knowing.
It seemed right that we’d made one again the same way.
I looked at the test in my hand. Then, I went to find him.
He was on the back porch.
Saturday morning. Coffee. The desert doing what it did.
I came out and sat beside him.
He said good morning without looking up.
I set the test on the porch rail in front of him.
He looked at it.
He picked it up.
He studied it for a moment.
Then he set it back on the rail.
He looked at the mountains.
“I know when,” he said.
“Same.”
He was quiet.
I watched his face.
He took a moment to absorb it all before he responded to any part of it.
Then he exhaled.
Long and slow and from somewhere deep.
He reached over without looking at me and put his hand over mine on the arm of the chair.
I turned my hand over and held his.
We sat there.
The desert morning was warm. The saguaro was doing its thing at the back fence. The mountains were blue at the edges. A roadrunner moved through the scrub at the far side of the yard with the purposeful efficiency of an animal that had somewhere to be.
“Arthur’s going to have something to say about this,” he said.
“Arthur’s going to be delighted,” I said.
“He’s going to have something to say about it anyway.”
I laughed.
He squeezed my hand.
“Are you scared?” I asked him.
I wanted the honest answer and not the comfortable one.
He thought about it, the way he thought about everything. Unhurried.
“A little,” he said. “Not of the baby. Of getting it wrong somehow. I missed years of practice with Arthur without knowing I was supposed to be practicing.” He looked at his hands. “This one I get from day one. I don’t want to waste a single part of it being scared instead of just being there.”
“You won’t waste it.”
“You don’t know that.”
“I do,” I said. “I’ve watched you not waste a single Saturday with Arthur since the day you met him. You don’t have it in you to waste this.”
He looked at me for a long moment, something working behind his eyes that he eventually let surface. “Okay,” he said, simply, the way he said most things once he’d decided to believe them.
We sat on the porch and drank our coffee and said very little and needed to say very little and the morning went on around us, being exactly what it was.
We told Arthur that evening at dinner.
Martina already knew. She’d found the test in the bathroom trash and appeared in the kitchen doorway while I was making lunch with an expression that required no words and received none.
She’d hugged me.
That was all.
Just hugged me. Properly. Both arms.
Then she went back to whatever she’d been doing.
Arthur was at the kitchen table with his homework when I sat across from him.
He looked up.
“I need to tell you something,” I said.
He put his pencil down.
“You’re pregnant,” he said.
I stared at him.
He shrugged, like guessing this was no different than guessing what was for dinner. “Martina was humming. She only hums when something good happens.” He paused. “And you keep touching your stomach. You did it like four times just now.”
“I did not.”
“You did.” He picked his pencil back up, then pointed it at me, like he’d just remembered his best evidence. “And you bought ginger ale. You hate ginger ale.”
I pressed my lips together. “You’re eleven.”
“Almost twelve,” he said.
He looked at his homework. Then at me.
“A girl,” he said.
“We don’t know that yet.”
“It’ll be a girl,” he said with complete authority. He raised the end of the pencil to his mouth. “I’ve always wanted a sister.”
He went back to his homework.
I sat across from him and said nothing, because I was busy recognizing something I hadn’t let myself name before that moment.
He’d guessed the pregnancy off a hum, a few trips to touch my stomach, and a case of ginger ale I wouldn’t drink.
He’d guess the sex off nothing at all except wanting it enough to say it out loud.
Watching him bend back over his homework like he hadn’t just done anything remarkable, I thought of Della, the same habit of noticing small ordinary things and turning them into certainty before anyone else had caught up.
A girl.
I thought about that.
About a daughter. About what a daughter would mean. About every morning brushing her hair before school. Teaching her to put it up herself. Sitting in the front row at her recital with a sign. A ridiculous sign. Best one on the stage, whether she was the best one or not.
Watching her become, slowly and then all at once, someone I admired.
My own parents had missed every version of me.
I wasn’t going to miss a single version of her.
I looked at Arthur bent over his homework. I cleared my throat. “Arthur.”
He looked up.
“Thank you,” I said. “For all of it. For everything.”
He held my gaze with the directness that was entirely his own.
Della found out the way Della found out everything, which was almost instantly and through some channel nobody could ever quite identify.
She called before we’d told her.
“I’m not going to ask how you know,” I said, answering the phone.
“Good,” she said. “Because I’m not going to tell you.” A pause, and then her voice cracked slightly, unguarded in a way Della rarely allowed herself to be over the phone. “A grandbaby, Alex. A whole new one. I get to do this from the very beginning this time.”
“You get to do all of it,” I said. “Bottles. Diapers. The works.”
“I would crawl through glass for the diapers,” she said, with complete sincerity. “You have no idea what you’re offering me.”
I laughed, and she laughed, and for a moment neither of us said anything else, just held the phone and let the joy of it sit there uncomplicated, which was, I was learning, its own kind of luxury after so many years of complicated joys.
“I don’t care what it is,” she said eventually. “Boy, girl, doesn’t matter one bit. I just want to hold it and spoil it and give it back to you when it cries.” A pause, softer. “Antonio would have loved this so much he wouldn’t have been able to stand it.”
“I know,” I said.
“You tell that baby about him,” Della said. “Whichever one it turns out to be. You make sure it knows there was a man who would have adored it before it ever took a single breath.”
“I will,” I said, and meant it completely.