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 awakeand 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."
CHAPTER
TWENTY-NINE
The Sublet
Aoife
“To love at all is to be vulnerable.” — C.S. Lewis
Itold him on a Tuesday morning, six days after we came home from the hospital. The babies were asleep in the room that had been the guest room and was now the nursery. I had fed them both at five and they were down again, and the house had the held-breath calm between one need and the next.
I came downstairs. Jensen was in the kitchen with his coffee. He looked up when I came in, and his expression was the easy one he wore in the mornings now, open and unhurried, the one that had replaced the careful containment of the first weeks.
He poured me a tea without being asked and pushed it across the counter. I stood there for a moment and I thought: say it now. Say it before the day gets going and before you talk yourself out of it again.
"I've arranged a sublet," I said. "14C Alderton Street. Near my old apartment, actually. It has two bedrooms and it's available from the first of next month. It will give me time to find something more permanent once I go back to work."
Jensen put his coffee cup down. He looked at me with an expression that I could not immediately place, something between confusion and a sharpness that was working to conceal itself. His brow drew slightly together, not a frown exactly,something more like a person trying to understand how the thing they were hearing could be true.
"I want to say thank you," I said. "For everything. The last twelve weeks have been more than I had any right to ask for, and I am genuinely grateful. I would like to work out an arrangement for you to see the babies, whatever makes sense, whenever you want. I am not going to make that difficult." I had rehearsed this. The practiced quality of it was probably visible. "But I think it's the right time for me to be in my own space, and I think it is also the right thing for you."
