She looks up at me with wet, green eyes and says with a scratchy voice, “It only makes sense. I’m one of two sisters.”
I resist the urge to tell her that the father determines the sex. “Actually—” Declan starts, and Rowan elbows him. Stifling a laugh, I smile back at Willow and lean over to kiss her on the mouth upside down. It’s gentle and quick, but it still gets a tiny moan of contentedness out of her.
Rowan edges down by her side, leaning on the arm of her wheelchair and squatting down. He holds her cheek and asks, “Are you ready to go in and see them, are you?”
She shakes her head, and Declan crouches down too, saying, “Hard part’s over, Willow.”
“I just don’t know if I can do it,” she whispers.
I keep petting her hair, gathering it in my hands and running the chestnut curls through my fingers. “You already are,” I say, and hear how unfunny my voice is. I always want to make the fire less hot by joking at it. This isn’t a fire for that. This is a hearth. “You’re doing it, Willow, you are.”
“Okay,” Willow says—just that one word, the little boat she’s paddled through all of today. “Okay.”
With an okay, all that I need, I roll her inside so I can hold my babies for the first time.
Rowan
Marta greets her with a gentle smile, like Willow’s the premature baby. “You ready, Mama?”
Willow nods and then looks like she’s going to shake her head. Her laugh is a broken diamond—sharp, sparkling, pressurized. “I guess I have to be,” she says truthfully.
Marta turns to us and lifts an eyebrow. “And y’all? Are y’all ready?”
I’m more ready for this than I’ve ever been for anything. It feels like the first time I got to kiss Willow—a deep knowing that kissing her was what I was made for. Nodding eagerly, I sit down in a chair next to Willow and hold out my hands.
Marta laughs and drapes a warm blanket over Willow and me while Sean and Declan sit down next to us. Another nurse moves to cover them while Marta turns to open the lid of the little chamber that holds Baby Girl Abel C.
Marta’s hands look enormous, then careful, then exactly the size of trust as she lifts her and lays her onto Willow’s sternum. Willow shakes her head and lifts her chin to me. So Marta lowers her onto my chest, this tiny red thing, and the air changes. There’s a feeding tube taped at her cheek, and her hand is the size of my thumbprint. She’s a cathedral. She’s a fistful of stars.
“Hi,pet,” I say, and my voice breaks onpetbecause I don’t know how to fit this in my chest. “We’ve been fierce excited to meet you.”
The other nurse is, at the same time, lowering Baby Girl Abel A onto Declan’s chest. Marta turns and lowers Baby Girl Abel B onto Sean’s chest. Willow watches like a proud mother seeing her child’s play for the first time—like she orchestrated all this. In a way, she did.
Willow exhale-laughs, leaning over her knees to look into Baby C’s face. “Hi,” she whispers. “Hi, hi. This is your dada.”
Willow says, “She’s perfect,” and the wordperfectmakes something teenage and ridiculous burn in me because I want to say,Yes, and I want to say,So are you, look at you,and I want to say every prayer I never learned.
Instead I say, “We brought a book,” and pull out the smallest board book I could find at the gift shop, the one with a lion who looks suspiciously like a golden retriever.
I read it in a voice I’ve never used for anyone. Sean doesn’t even make fun of me. Willow laughs exactly once, a tiny snort at a badly drawn duck. Baby A sleeps, then rouses, then sleeps again exactly where she is. I watch the little waveforms like they’re the weather.
“Hey,” Willow murmurs, lifting her feet up and resting them on Declan’s knees. “What’s your mom’s name?”
Startled, not able to tear his eyes away from the wrinkled, red face of the girl in his hands, he murmurs, “Fiona.” His thumbs run along the soft skin of the baby’s cheeks.
“Fiona it is then. Fiona Camille after my sister. Because it just sounds better than Fiona Nina, don’t you agree?” She peers into the sleeping face of Fiona, and Declan looks up at her with bright blue eyes.
“I—Willow, that’s?—”
“I know,” she says. Declan reaches across her knees and grips her fingers. He pulls them up to kiss them, but he can’t reach, so she has to lower her legs, laughing. She leans forward and kisses him on the mouth, and I feel nothing. Not a twinge of jealousy.
She looks up at Sean. “Okay, how about you, Sean Byrne? What’s your mom’s name?”
He grins at her, palming the baby in one hand like a football. “Aw, you treasure, you mean it?”
“Out with it, come on.”
“Aisling.”
