Chapter 28
TESSA
Bogdan is holding my coat as though somebody might try to take it from him.
It's folded over his knees in the waiting room, with my scarf tucked beneath his hand and my handbag between his shoes.
He offered to carry everything when we came inside.
Now I'm sitting beside a man who owns freight depots and nightclubs, watching him keep the end of my scarf off a carpet patterned with tiny blue flowers.
I should find it funny. I almost do.
Across from us, a paper witch hangs over a bowl of wrapped peppermints. Her pointed hat has bent against the wall. I keep looking at her because the photograph beside her shows a newborn's foot, and looking at that makes my stomach turn in a way that has nothing to do with morning sickness.
Today we'll see something. After three weeks of a plastic test and tired afternoons and wondering whether every strange feeling means anything, we're supposed to look at a screen and find our baby.
Saturday, October twenty-fourth. I counted toward it while I was still sleeping in Bogdan's bed. Then I counted toward it from the hotel, wondering whether we'd sit together like strangers.
His knee touches mine.
“Cold?” he asks.
I shake my head. The room is warm enough that the back of my sweater has begun to cling. I smooth my skirt, then make myself stop smoothing it. There isn't a crease in the world that can explain how much I need to do something with my hands.
He turns his palm upward on top of my coat. I put my hand in it.
On Thursday evening he came to the hotel after the police finished at the depot.
I stood in the lounge and looked him over, unable to keep my relief from showing.
He let me check the dust on his cuff, then sat beside me while I finished a cup of tea.
We hadn't fixed everything. He'd stayed until I was ready to go upstairs.
This morning he was downstairs before I was dressed.
I rub my thumb over the edge of his black ring, feeling the square stone beneath my nail. His hand closes a little more firmly around mine.
The examination-room door opens, and Dr. Marguerite Blair calls my name.
I get to my feet too quickly. Bogdan rises with the coat, and for a second I'm angry at my own legs for feeling unreliable. I've faced a room full of women who hated their fittings. I've been shot at. Apparently a pleasant woman in a cardigan can undo me simply by saying Tessa Sutton.
Her room has a padded examination couch, a rolling stool and a monitor turned partly away from the door. A framed pressed leaf hangs above the desk. There are no baby photographs in here, which makes it easier to breathe.
Matvei stays outside with the car. When the door closes, the room holds just the three of us and the quiet clicking of Dr. Blair opening my record.
She checks my dates and explains the internal scan she's recommending this early. Her explanation is ordinary and unhurried, but I keep looking at the equipment beside the couch.
“Will it hurt?” I ask.
“You may feel some pressure or discomfort. Tell me if it hurts, and we can stop.”
I nod. Bogdan hangs my coat on the wall hook and waits beside the chair until I ask him to stay near my head.
Behind the screen, I undress as instructed and pull the drape over myself. My fingers catch on the elastic of my skirt. The effort of doing something so simple nearly makes me cry, and I have to sit still for a moment before I call them back.
Bogdan takes the chair beside the couch. It looks too narrow for his shoulders. He sits in it anyway and gives me his hand before Dr. Blair dims the overhead light.
The paper beneath me makes a crisp little sound when I shift. I can feel my pulse where his thumb rests against my wrist. The examination begins with pressure and a moment of discomfort, then settles into something I can bear while I stare at the monitor.
At first the picture means nothing to me.
Gray, black, a curved brightness that vanishes when Dr. Blair changes the angle. She works without rushing, explaining that she's getting the views she needs. I watch her face instead of the screen, trying to read an answer she hasn't given yet.
Bogdan's thumb stops moving.
“Is something wrong?” I ask.
“I'm taking a careful look. There is more than one baby.”
I turn my head toward him so fast that the paper crackles beneath my shoulders. His eyes stay on the monitor. The hand holding mine has gone completely still.
Twins. The word is there before she says anything else, huge and impossible, and then she points to another part of the image.
“There are three.”
I wait for the rest of the sentence. Three measurements. Three things she needs to check. Something that allows the little future I've been imagining to stay the size it was when I walked in.
Dr. Blair turns the screen farther toward us.
“Three babies, Tessa.”
My mouth opens, but nothing comes out. Bogdan leans forward, bringing our joined hands with him until my arm begins to lift from the couch. He notices and lowers it again, carefully, as though my hand has become breakable.
“Three?” he says.
She smiles. “Yes.”
I start laughing.
It comes out too loudly in the little room, a breathless, disbelieving sound that makes Dr. Blair wait while I press my free hand over my mouth.
There can't be three. I only brought one body.
I have one stomach and one ridiculous heart that's already struggling to keep up with loving the possibility of a single child.
Then Bogdan looks at me, and the laugh falls apart.
His eyes are wet.
I haven't prepared for that either. He's looking from my face to the screen with an expression so open that I want to protect him from anybody else seeing it.
The thought lasts only a second. Then I want everyone to see him like this, stunned and happy in a chair too small for him, still holding my hand.
Dr. Blair shows us the small flickers of cardiac activity in turn. I can't keep track until she takes us through them again. Each time she points, I find the tiny movement and lose everything else in the picture.
One. Another. Another.
I look down at the drape covering my body. Nothing about it looks different. The same sweater is bunched near my ribs, the same hand lies against the paper, and beneath all that ordinary fabric there are three beginnings I didn't know I was carrying.
“They're really there,” I whisper.
Bogdan brings my fingers to his mouth. His lips stay against them while he looks back at the monitor.
For a few minutes I forget to be frightened. Dr. Blair takes measurements and records the images. The room makes its small working sounds around us, and I keep trying to memorize what I can see, though I know I'd never be able to draw it afterward.
When she finishes, she lets us look once more before ending the examination. Bogdan releases my hand so I can sit up. The movement feels strange now, as though I should have learned a new way to do it between lying down and rising.
“I'll arrange a maternal-fetal medicine referral,” Dr. Blair says. “Triplets need specialist care and closer monitoring. We'll go through the next appointments together. You don't have to absorb everything today.”
Specialist makes me stop smiling.
I hadn't thought beyond three bassinets and Bogdan's face. Now I notice the desk again, the computer, the closed record waiting for information I won't understand without help.
“Are they all right?”
“What we're seeing today is reassuring. It's still early, and we'll keep checking their development and your health.”
The answer leaves room for things I don't want to think about. I nod because I understand she can't promise me what I'm asking for. Beside me, Bogdan has started to rise. He sits again when I tighten my grip on his sleeve.
Dr. Blair gives us privacy while I dress, saying she'll return with the printed images and follow-up information. When the door closes, I stay on the couch with the drape across my knees.
Three babies.
The words keep arriving as if I haven't already heard them. I picture my narrow worktable, the stairs at my flat, the little patch of floor where a crib might have fit. None of those pictures had space for two more.
Bogdan crouches enough to bring his face near mine without making me look up.
“What do you need?”
I could ask him for a bigger home, a different car, a room full of people who know what to do. He could make calls before we left this building. He'd enjoy doing it for us. I know that about him now, and the knowledge is a comfort until it catches against the other thing I know.
He wants these babies. I've just seen how much.
“Would you still be here if there wasn't a baby?” I ask.
His expression changes. I look down before I can watch the hurt reach his eyes.
“I know you've already told me. But now it's three, and you're so happy, and I've been thinking about going back to a house where you'd have to keep wanting me even when I'm difficult.”
The last word comes out thin. I hate it. I hate that I can tell a client her favorite costume makes her look like a cheap lampshade and still find it almost impossible to ask this man whether he wants me.
He sits beside me on the edge of the couch, leaving enough room that the drape doesn't pull. The paper wrinkles under his weight. He takes my hand from his sleeve and holds it between both of his.
“I wanted you before the test,” he says. “Before I had any reason to imagine this room.”
I make myself look at him.
“I bought the necklace because I wanted to see you wear it. I wanted you at breakfast. I wanted your things beside mine. None of that began with a baby.”
I remember the shoes in their tissue paper, his expression while I turned one over to look at the sole. I'd been so pleased. For one bright afternoon, I hadn't questioned why someone would want to give me something beautiful.
“Even after I left?”
“I kept reaching for you in my sleep.”
That does it. The tears come before I can make them tidy, and he draws me against him, careful of the drape and the cramped edge of the couch.
I press my face into the warm wool at his shoulder.
His coat carries the faint scent of his cologne, and for the first time all morning I can take a full breath.
I don't tell him everything is forgiven. The hurt is still there, tied to a week I can't make unhappen. But I believe he misses me. I believe the man who stared at that screen would've wanted my hand in his even if the answer had been different.
His fingers settle at the back of my head. I stay against him until my breathing steadies, then pull back to wipe my face with a tissue from the box beside the couch.
“We're going to need more hands,” I say.
His mouth curves. “I employ quite a few.”
I laugh into the tissue. The idea of his captains carrying diaper bags is so ridiculous and so immediately satisfying that I want to keep it. I want a world where those men argue about strollers instead of people shooting through a loading shutter.
“I don't even know how to hold one,” I admit.
“We'll learn.” He looks at the dark monitor, then back at me. “Together, if you'll let me.”
I nod before the tears can start again. That much I can give him today.
He gives me space to dress. Behind the screen, I pull up my skirt and smooth it over my hips. My waist looks exactly as it did this morning. I put a hand there anyway, feeling the warmth of my own skin through the fabric.
When Dr. Blair returns, she brings a small envelope and the next steps written down. Bogdan listens beside me while she answers the questions I can think of now. He takes out his phone to note the referral details, then puts it away when we're finished.
The envelope rests in my lap with our names on it.
Back in the waiting room, he brings me water while I take a peppermint from beneath the crooked witch. The wrapper sticks to my damp fingertips. I finally get it open, and the cool sweetness spreads over my tongue, sharp enough to make me feel properly awake.
Bogdan sits beside me with my coat across his knees again. I slide the photographs from the envelope. He holds one edge so I won't bend them, and we look without speaking for a while.
Peggy is waiting for my call. I want to hear what she'll say when I tell her, want to hand her some good news that has nothing to do with a man hurting her. I take out my phone, then stop with her name beneath my thumb.
“One minute,” I say. “Can we have it just us for one more minute?”
Bogdan puts his arm along the back of my chair. “Of course.”
I lean into him, keeping the pictures flat between us. Through the waiting-room window, a few yellow leaves cling to the branches above the sidewalk. People pass beneath them carrying shopping bags, going somewhere that has become less important to me than this patch of grainy gray paper.
I touch the edge of the first picture, then the next.
There are three of them.
And he keeps looking at me.