CHAPTER SIXTY-NINE
Alex
Now
She arrived on the same Thursday that every temperature record in the Sonoran Desert was shattered.
Not dramatically. Not at a moment designed for arrival. She came the way she would probably do everything, which was on her own schedule and without particular concern for the plans others had made.
Her name was Elena Della Panzolini.
We hadn’t discussed names at length. It hadn’t required length. One evening on the back porch Riley had said Della, and I had said yes immediately, and then he’d said Elena, which had been his grandmother’s name, and I had said yes to that too and that was the whole conversation.
Della cried when we told her.
No polite dab at the eyes, no turning away to collect herself. She sat at her kitchen table and let it happen and didn’t apologize for it and Addy handed her a dish towel and Della used it and handed it back.
The room was full before I was ready for it to be full.
That was how it went. One moment it was just the nurses and the efficient quiet of a delivery room and then Elena was there, announced without ceremony, and then the room was something else entirely.
Riley was beside me.
He’d been beside me since four in the morning when I’d woken him with the news that something was happening and he’d been dressed in under two minutes with an absence of hesitation that was pure him.
The hours in between had their own strange shape.
Pain that arrived in waves I’d forgotten the exact geometry of, and between the waves, ordinary conversation, absurd and grounding.
Riley reciting motorcycle torque specifications at my request because I’d told him, somewhere around hour six, that I needed him to talk about literally anything else, and he’d taken the assignment with complete seriousness.
Martina in and out with ice chips. Arthur banned from the room itself but camped in the hallway chair the nurses eventually stopped trying to move, doing his homework by the vending machine light because he’d refused, flatly, to do it at home.
Somewhere around hour nine I stopped being able to talk through the waves at all, and Riley simply held my hand and let me crush his fingers and didn’t once mention it afterward, though the bruising told its own story for the better part of a week.
He held my hand through the whole of it.
When Elena arrived he stood and looked at her with the expression he reserved for things that mattered completely.
Open. Unguarded.
She was small and furious and unbothered by the size of the room she’d just arrived in, one fist working free of the blanket to hang in the air like she had something to add to the proceedings.
Her hair, what there was of it, was dark, and her face had the particular squashed, indignant dignity of every newborn who has just been asked to do something as undignified as being born.
The nurse asked if he wanted to cut the cord and he looked briefly overwhelmed by the question, a rare enough sight that I filed it away to tease him about later, and then he did it anyway, carefully, with the same exact focus he brought to a carburetor or a stubborn bolt, like the task deserved nothing less than his full attention regardless of what it was.
The nurse placed her in his arms before mine. I don’t know why. Perhaps she sensed something. Perhaps it was simply the order of things.
He held her.
He looked at her face.
His throat moved once.
That was all he showed and it was everything.
“She’s got your temper already,” I said, watching her fist.
“She’s got her own temper,” Riley said. “Give her that much credit on day one.” But he was smiling when he said it, the real one, unguarded, and he didn’t look away from her face for even a second while he said it.
I don’t remember the room emptying, or being moved, or how much time passed between one thing and the next.
If I tried to lay that day out in a straight line, saying this happened, then this, I’d be lying about how it felt from the inside.
It came to me in pieces, the way things do when a body that’s just run itself past empty decides for itself when it’s present and when it isn’t.
I surfaced once to find Martina already there, though I couldn’t have said when she’d arrived or how long she’d been holding Elena like she’d been doing it her whole life.
“She looks like you,” Martina said.
“She looks like Riley,” I said, my voice thick with a sleep I hadn’t agreed to.
“She looks like both of you.” She touched her forehead to Elena’s, brief and private, and by the time I opened my eyes again she was gone, and I couldn’t have told you whether the kiss on my own forehead had actually happened or whether I’d only wanted it to.
I went under again.
I came back up to a hallway doing something no hospital hallway was built for.
Lowered voices that were still too loud.
Boots on linoleum. Brisco, almost certainly, explaining to a nurse that capacity guidelines were more of a suggestion.
Riley went to the door and said something brief and the noise dropped to something reasonable, and I never surfaced far enough to see who was actually out there.
Just fragments through the little window when I managed my eyes open.
Lackey on his phone. Sparks talking to the man beside him.
Price at the end of the row, arms crossed, hair pushed back, not moving.
I meant to ask who else had come. Sleep got there first.
Price came back while I was somewhere between waking and not.
I only know because, when I surfaced enough to focus, there was a kutte folded over the back of the chair by the door, leather, worn soft at the folds, a patch on it I hadn’t seen in years, with Riley sitting beside it, looking like a man deciding how much of the story to tell.
“He came back in?” I asked.
“Long enough to leave that,” Riley said.
“Found it in a box in the clubhouse storage room, he said. Was going to throw it out. Didn’t.
” He picked it up, turned it over once like he was checking it was real, and set it back down with more care than its size accounted for.
“Told me to tell you that you earned it. Twice.”
I looked at the leather a long time before I let myself go back under.
You earned this, twice.
I didn’t ask what he meant by it. I didn’t need to. I already knew what the first time had cost me, and what the second one had, and apparently Price, of all people, was the one who’d been keeping count.
Addy’s voice found me at some point after that, and then Addy herself, and I surfaced for exactly enough of it to hear her say “she’s perfect” and feel her mouth against my cheek, and not enough to remember if I said anything back.
Arthur came in last, and for him, I was awake for every second of it.
He’d been in the hallway the whole time. I knew that. He’d been there since Riley called him at four in the morning and he’d arrived at the hospital at four forty-five without being asked how he’d gotten there, which was a question I decided not to examine.
He came in once everyone else had gone quiet.
He was in the clothes he’d clearly thrown on in the dark. His hair was uncombed. He looked young in the way he rarely looked young. Uncertain in the way he was almost never uncertain.
He stood at the side of the bed.
He looked at Elena.
She was awake. She’d been awake for the last twenty minutes. Her eyes were the unfocused newborn eyes that were looking at everything and seeing it all differently than the rest of us.
Arthur looked at her for a long time.
“Hey,” he said quietly.
Elena looked in the direction of his voice.
Something moved across Arthur’s face. Private and enormous and quickly smoothed.
“I’m Arthur,” he said. “I’m your brother.” He looked at her steadily. “I’ve been waiting for you.”
He looked up at me.
His eyes were bright.
“She’s good,” he said. With great authority.
“She is,” I said.
He looked at Riley.
Riley put his hand on the back of Arthur’s neck briefly. The way fathers do.
Arthur leaned into it slightly.
Then he straightened.
“Can I hold her?” he asked.
“Sit down,” Riley said.
Arthur sat in the chair beside the bed. Riley placed Elena in his arms with the careful instruction of a man who knew what he was doing, which surprised me and then didn’t.
Arthur held his sister.
He looked at her face.
He was completely still.
My phone was on the tray beside the bed.
A notification appeared.
My mother.
A photograph first. Greece, from the look of it. A harbor. Blue water. White buildings. My mother’s handwriting in the caption below it.
Thinking of you and your beautiful family today.
Then a message. Short. My father’s cadence in it even through text.
Congratulations to all of you. We are so very proud.
Followed by a second message from my mother.
We are in Santorini. Home in three weeks. We will come straight to you.
I looked at the photograph.
My parents in Greece.
I looked at it for a moment.
Then I laughed.
Riley looked at me.
“My parents,” I said. “They’re in Santorini.”
He looked at the ceiling briefly.
“Of course they are,” he said.
I set the phone down. The three-week promise sat on the screen like all the others. I didn’t wait on it.
“I’ve been thinking,” Arthur said.
“About what?”
“She’s going to need to learn things. A lot of things.” He looked at me. “I can teach her some of them.”
“Like what?”
He considered it. “How to hold a wrench,” he said. “The names of motorcycle parts.” He paused. “How to pick things up with her toes.”
He held my gaze. Steady and clear. His, unmistakably.
“It’s a good skill,” he added.
I pressed my lips together.
“It is.”
Della arrived at eight.
She came through the door with the energy of a woman who had been awake since four and had been patient long enough. She kissed my cheek. She looked at Arthur. She crossed to Riley and held out her arms.
He placed Elena in them.
Della looked at her granddaughter.
She was quiet for a long time.
She looked at the baby’s face. At her hands. At the particular curl of her fingers around Della’s thumb when it was offered.
She looked at Riley.
“Antonio would have loved this,” she said.
“I know,” Riley said.
She looked at Elena.
“He knows,” she said. Simply. Like it was true and required no defense.
Nobody argued it.
The four of us stayed like that for a while.
Della still holding Elena like she had nowhere else to be, Arthur watching over her shoulder for an opening he was clearly angling for, Riley leaning in the doorway with his arms crossed and the particular stillness he got when a room already held everything he needed from it.
Della caught me watching her and smiled, the kind of smile that didn’t require anything back.
“You did good,” she said. Not to Riley. To me.
“We did good,” I said.
She considered that, and let it stand.
Outside, the mountains. Blue at the edges. Not going anywhere.
I closed my eyes.
I let it be everything it was.