Chapter 27
CHAPTER
TWENTY-SEVEN
Jensen
Seamus Robert Walsh-Shaw was born at four forty-seven in the morning, and he cried immediately, which was the best sound I had heard in three years.
Brigid Gloria Walsh-Shaw followed at four fifty-one, and she cried too, louder than her brother, with the particular authority of someone who has arrived and intends the room to know it.
They were placed on Aoife's chest, briefly, one and then the other, and I watched her receive each of them.
She looked at Seamus first, and her face did something I have never seen a face do before and do not have a word for, something total, some complete reconfiguration of a person arriving at the most important thing.
She said something very quietly in Irish and held him for thirty seconds before the NICU team took him.
Then Brigid, and the same quiet words, and she held her with her eyes closed for a moment, just holding her, and I saw on her face the transformation of a person who has been waiting for something without fully knowing they were waiting, and who has just understood that it has arrived.
They were taken to the NICU. I went with the team to the door and then I was aware that my mother was in the waiting room, that Callum had driven her, that Simone had apparently been there since before we arrived.
My mother held my face in her hands when she saw me.
She did not say anything. She did not need to.
Her eyes were full and her face was doing its best not to show how moved she was and failing entirely, and I thought: she has been waiting for a long time for something to feel like this, and here we are.
Simone was on her feet the moment I came through the waiting room door. She said, "Both of them?" I said yes. She put her face in her hands for a moment. Then she said, "Is she all right?" and I said she was, and Simone said, "Good," and sat back down.
I went to the NICU before I sat down. I stood between the two incubators and I put one hand over each, resting on the warm plastic, and I looked at them.
Seamus was already making a face. He had the slightly skeptical expression of a person who has arrived somewhere and is reserving judgment about whether he approves of the arrangement.
Brigid had her eyes closed and her fingers spread and she looked, in the particular way of newborn babies, as if she were conducting some internal audit of her own existence.
I stood there and I looked at them and I thought about Nadia, and about Imani and Noah, and about the room at Eastside Children's Hospital with the two cribs side by side.
I thought about the differences between that night and this one, and I held onto the differences.
I am here, I thought. I am here and you are here and that is not nothing. That is, in fact, everything.
I said, out loud, quietly: "I've got you. Both of you. I've got you."
?
Simone was the third person to hold Brigid, after Aoife and after me.
The nurse placed her in Simone's arms and Simone looked at her for approximately four seconds before her face crumpled completely.
She said, through what appeared to be genuine distress at her own emotional state, "She looks like nobody. "
Aoife, who was on a blood pressure drip and had not slept and was still somehow the most composed person in the room, said, "She looks like Seamus's sister."
Simone said, "That's fair," and held Brigid more tightly and cried with a thoroughness that was, given the circumstances, entirely appropriate.
My mother held Seamus. She held him with the careful reverence of a woman who has grandchildren in a cemetery and who understood completely what it meant to have grandchildren in her arms, and she looked down at his face with an expression that was too full for a single word, and she did not look up for a long time.
I sat beside Aoife's bed while all of this happened.
She was half-asleep and I could see the exhaustion on her face, and I could also see that she was watching Simone with Brigid and my mother with Seamus with the expression she wore when something was exactly as it should be, the expression that was too quiet to be happiness and too real to be anything else.
I thought about the first night at Mae's Diner.
The coffee she had brought without being asked.
The fifty-dollar bill. The months that followed.
Four hundred dollars on a table. Three jobs.
The ambulance and the hospital and the house full of photographs of my dead wife.
The doorstep with Adaeze. Two in the morning and chamomile tea.
A piece of paper with two names on it that she had folded and put in her cardigan pocket.
I looked at her, half-asleep in the hospital bed, and I thought: she is the most remarkable person I have ever been near. And I have been treating her like furniture for the better part of a year, and I owe her a debt I am going to spend a long time repaying.
She opened her eyes. She looked at me.
I said, "You should sleep."
She said, "I will in a minute," and looked back at Simone and Brigid.
I stayed beside her until she did.