“My daughters will be. They will be the safest, smartest, most ruthless little girls in the world,” he says, with the absolute conviction of a man stating fact.
I look at our daughters. I look at him. “Ruthless? That’s not the usual thing people say about newborns.”
He reaches out and touches the head of the nearest one, his hand enormous against her, impossibly gentle. “They will lead legions,” he says, quietly but with total conviction. “They are queens. Conquerors. Lions among humanity.”
I thought my heart was too big before. Now, it’s practically bursting. “You’re so sweet.”
The next day is one of those that exists outside of ordinary time. I’m sore in ways that are holistic and bone-deep. The nurses assure me it’s entirely normal, but that doesn’t help with the pain.
Pavel does not sleep. He sits in the chair beside the bassinet arrangement and watches the babies instead, and I can’t bring myself to tell him to sleep. He eats the hospital food without complaint, but the truth is, I think he simply doesn’t notice that it’s bad.
He is occupied.
The drive home is slow and careful and takes twice as long as it should because the driver has been instructed to take no road with a speed bump, which is Pavel’s doing. Again, I find myself grateful.
Igor stands in the entry with contained readiness, and when we come through the door with the carriers, our girls bypass his professional composure entirely.
He looks, for a moment, completely undone.
“May I…?” he says, which is the most uncertain I have ever heard Igor Tabakov sound about anything.
Pavel looks at me. I look at Pavel. And then, I smile at Igor. “Of course.”
He holds one of them carefully and looks at her face for a long moment. “She has your eyes,” he says to Pavel. “The color.”
“Both of them do,” Pavel says.
Igor looks at her for a long time. “Perhaps,” he says, to no one in particular, “I will settle down again, one day. After all.”
Pavel looks as surprised as I feel, but he doesn’t comment on it. Igor deserves to think about what he just said without our input, so we put the girls in the nursery. Rocking chairs are positioned by the window, and the light comes through the curtains, soft and dim.
I sit in one rocking chair. Pavel takes the other.
We sit in the quiet of the nursery in the whole of what we have built and chosen and fought for, and the quiet is the best kind—the kind that has everything in it.
I’m asleep before I am aware of falling asleep.
When I surface, briefly, much later, the room is darker. Pavel is asleep in the chair beside me, his head tilted back, his mouth slightly open. One of the girls makes a small sound in the bassinet, and then settles, and the room settles with her, and I close my eyes again, wondering what to name the monumental people who changed everything.
30
PAVEL
She fits in my hands.
This is the first thing I notice about my girls. I am a man with large hands, hands that have done things I will never speak of, and she fits in them entirely. Both of them do, though not simultaneously. I attempted this on the first morning, which Molly observed from the rocking chair with an expression that was equal parts alarm and tenderness, followed by giggling.
I hold one of them now, in the study, sitting in the armchair that has become my preferred location for this activity. The light is good, and the chair is deep enough that I can sit with proper support, more so than in the nursery room rocking chairs, which I will be replacing later this week.
She is asleep. She sleeps the way they both sleep—with the complete, uncomplicated commitment of people who have not yet learned to mistrust rest. Did I ever sleep that way? Only my parents would know, and they’ve been gone for many years. I watch her face, which is doing nothing except being her face. Unbusy, unbothered.
I should not be jealous of a newborn, but I am.
I’ve been thinking about things since the hospital. Since the moment they were placed on Molly’s chest, and I looked at their faces—the small, furious, crumpled faces of people who had just arrived and were unhappy about it. I felt something happen inside me that I don’t have the language for.
I thought that the moment everything changed was when Molly told me she was pregnant. I was wrong. That was the moment I understood that everything would change. The actual changing happened in the hospital room when I heard them cry for the first time. I felt the person I had been for forty-three years step aside for someone I’m still meeting.
It’s a disorienting experience.
