“Of course he is. Look at his mother.”
He laughed through the tears. Leaned down and pressed his mouth against my forehead, then against Alex’s head, so gently, like he was afraid of breaking him. “Thank you,” he whispered against the baby’s hair. “Thank you, Andrea.”
Mary was crying on the other side. Wiping her face with her jacket sleeve and taking photos on her phone at the same time because Mary multitasked even during emotional breakdowns.
“I’m sending these to Peter,” she said, sniffling. “He’s going to lose it.”
“Mary, I look like a disaster.”
“You look like a mom. Shut up. These are going on the wall.”
An hour later the door opened and Grandma walked in.
She was still in her travel coat, suitcase handle in one hand, Luca behind her looking like he’d driven from the airport at the same speed Mary had driven from her house. She saw me holding Alex and stopped in the doorway.
Her face folded. All the composure, all the toughness, all the seventy-three years of holding everything together for everyone else, it just crumpled. She dropped the suitcase by the door, walked to the chair by the window, the empty chair, the one where my mother should have been sitting, and sat down. She put her hand over her mouth and cried.
I started crying again too because Grandma crying was my kryptonite and always had been.
She wiped her eyes after a minute, stood up, and came to the bed. She looked down at Alex in my arms, touched his cheek with one finger, and her chin trembled.
“He has your mother’s nose,” she said, her voice cracking. “Same little button. She’d be raising hell right now if she were here. Bossing the nurses around, rearranging the room, telling your young man where to stand.” She looked at Finneas. “She would’ve liked you, by the way. She always had a thing for the stubborn ones.”
“Runs in the family,” Finneas said quietly.
Grandma almost smiled. She looked back at Alex. “Can I hold him?”
I passed him over carefully, this tiny warm bundle, and Grandma took him like she’d been holding babies her whole life, which she had. She settled him in the crook of her arm, her travel coat still on, her suitcase still by the door, tears still wet on her face.
“Hello, Alexander,” she said softly. “I’m your great-grandmother. I flew first class to meet you, so you better be worth it.” She pressed her lips against his forehead. “You are. You absolutely are.”
I looked at her. At Grandma in the chair with Alex in her arms, looking at him the way she must have looked at me when I was born, the way my mother must have looked at me. At Finneas beside the bed, eyes red, watching them. At Mary taking photos through smudged mascara. At Luca hovering in the doorway trying to look casual and failing completely, his eyes suspiciously bright.
The room was full. Full of people who showed up. Not because of duty or tradition or pack law. Because they loved me. Because they chose to be here, in this room, for this.
I pressed my face against Alex’s head and breathed him in. He smelled like nothing I could compare because he was new and mine and here.
“Welcome to the family, kid,” I whispered. “It’s a weird one. But it’s yours.”
48
— • —
Finneas
Alex was three weeks old and I was obsessed.
I knew I was obsessed because Luca told me I was obsessed, Andrea told me I was obsessed, the night nurse told me I was obsessed, and I didn’t give a shit because my son was the most remarkable thing that had ever existed and everyone else was underreacting.
I was terrible at diapers. The first one took eleven minutes and Andrea timed it from the bed, calling out the seconds like a sports commentator, and by the end she was laughing so hard she had to hold a pillow against her stomach because it hurt the stitches. The second one was faster. The third one I somehow got backward and Andrea laughed until she cried and then yelled at me for making her laugh because it pulled the stitches.
By the end of the first week I could do it in under two minutes.
“Congratulations,” Andrea said. “You’ve reached basic human competency.”
I took it as the highest praise I’d ever received.
I was excellent at the three am feeds. Better than excellent. I got up before Andrea, lifted Alex out of the bassinet I’d built with the rail that was definitely ambiguous regardless of what the label said, and carried him downstairs. I heated the bottle the way the nurse showed me and sat in the kitchen in the dark with my son in my arms and watched him eat.
