Chapter 28
CHAPTER
TWENTY-EIGHT
Nine Days
Aoife
The babies stayed in the NICU for nine days, and those nine days have a particular texture in my memory, layered and warm in a way that surprised me at the time and does not surprise me in retrospect.
Jensen came in the mornings and the evenings, and I came in the afternoons.
In the evenings we would sit on either side of the NICU bay and watch the monitors and drink the terrible coffee from the machine in the hall, and we talked, or we didn't, and the silence between us had changed into something that no longer required management.
He brought me food I actually ate, the soup from the Vietnamese place two blocks from the hospital, the fruit from the stand on Clement Street, the chamomile tea in the travel cup with the good lid. He arrived with it and put it in front of me and sat down without requiring a response.
Simone came every other day. She had taken time from Mae's, and she held the babies with the confidence of someone who has decided that uncertainty is not a luxury she has time for.
She held Brigid close and looked at her face with an expression that was soft and a little undone, and when she looked up at me there was something in her eyes that said she understood, that she had been watching this whole year and she understood.
On the fourth day Jensen arrived in the morning and sat in the chair beside me and we watched Seamus, who was awake and conducting his characteristic assessment of the ceiling, and Jensen said, very quietly, "He makes the same face Callum used to make as a baby.
According to my mother. The skeptical one. "
I looked at Seamus. He was, undeniably, looking at the ceiling with an expression of mild critical inquiry.
"That's reassuring," I said, "since Callum turned out all right."
Jensen said, "Callum turned out fine. Don't tell him I said that."
I laughed. He looked at me when I laughed, and he smiled, which was something I could count on one hand the number of times I had seen him do.
A real smile, not the managed kind, the kind that arrived in his face before he had decided to put it there, and changed his whole face when it did, the lines of it softening, the carefulness falling away.
I thought: I am in serious trouble.
I had been in serious trouble for some time. I was simply running out of ways to pretend otherwise.
On the ninth day Dr. Mehta said they could go home. I looked at Jensen. He was looking at the babies. Then he looked at me, and there was something in his face that was anticipatory, as if he had been waiting for this moment and was now deciding what it required.
I thought about Adaeze saying: the moment the babies are born, your obligation to her is complete. I thought: I need to find somewhere else to live. I need to do it now, before the feeling settles any further.
I said, "I'll need to make a call. About where we're going."
Jensen said, "We're going home."
I said, "Jensen."
He said, "We can talk about it there. But we're not making any decisions in a hospital corridor." He looked at me. "Please."
I looked at Brigid in her incubator, and at Seamus in his, and at the man standing between them with his hands in his pockets and his face open and asking. I thought: fine. We will go home and we will have the conversation and it will be whatever it will be.
"All right," I said. "We'll talk there."
He nodded. He went to find the discharge nurse.
I sat with the babies for a moment, one hand over each incubator. I said their names.
"Seamus," I said. "Brigid." I looked at them. "We're going home now. All of us. Whatever home turns out to be."