Page 67

“Take them,” she says. “They are beautiful, and I am never doing this again. I have done the math. My uterus is officially retired. Tell Catherine the cheque had better clear.”

“Elena–”

“Take them, Lucas. My arms are jelly and your daughter has been yelling at me for twenty minutes. She’s yours. I recognise the distinctive management style, there’s no question who made that one.”

I take my daughter.

Here’s what I know about holding things. I’ve held retractors steady for six hours. I’ve held a heart, actually held one, mid-massage, while Max and Jax operated on a patient beside me in the ER, waiting for it to remember its job. My hands are the most trained part of me; they hold things for a living.

Now, it’s as if they have never held anything before. That’s clear to me, at 12:31, in this room. Everything else was just practice for this.

She weighs almost nothing. The nurse said the number and I heard it and I’m not going to write it down, not this one; someone else can have her numbers. My brain runs an APGAR on reflex – colour good, tone good, cry outstanding and ongoing – and then I take the whole medical apparatus, the boards and protocols and years of training, and I set it down outside the door, because none of it applies. None of it matters here. There’s a weight on my forearm and a warmth against my chest and a very small amount of breathing that isn’t mine, arriving in a rhythm I don’t run and can’t chart and will be listening for, I understand suddenly, for the rest of my life.

She has a temper already. Rosenthal’s right about the lungs. She yells one more round, then stops mid-syllable when I settle her against my chest – exactly there, over the spot where Preston’s hand usually lands – and works one arm free of the swaddle, and rests her chubby fist against me like she’s holding pressure on something.

Maybe she is.

I spent so long afraid of what would happen if I had children, a foundation. That was my word for it, in every argument about the brownstone, about the money, about whose name holds up what. I fought a gift because I couldn’t find my own weight or place in it.

The foundation weighs six-and-some pounds and is now fast asleep on my chest, breathing slowly and steadily.

It was never the house. Nobody could have told me. Everybody told me.

Beside me, Preston is holding our son, and Preston is gone.

I mean the apparatus. The wit, the parentheses, the York finish, the Spare, the performance he wears the way I wear a trauma shear – all of it gone, unplugged at the wall, and what’s left is a man standing very still beside me with a baby in his arms and tears running down his face he isn’t even aware of. Our son has the York jaw, Rosenthal’s right, and one hand out of the swaddle the same as his sister – they invented that separately, in the same hour, which already tells you what we’re in for – and Preston is looking down at him and breathing wrong and smiling and leaking, all at once, and not one syllable of commentary.

He glances up at me. I look at him. Neither of us says anything, because there’s nothing being withheld. It’s just all of it, out in the open, for once too big to perform.

The door opens, and Mamá comes back in. She didn’t leave the room the entire time Elena was in labour, but nature calls and eventually even she succumbed and left after the babies were born.

She stops two steps inside. She looks at Elena. She looks at the bundle in Preston’s arms, then at the one on my chest, and her hand comes up over her mouth – both hands, then, one over the other – and she stands there, my mother, present for more first breaths than anyone else in this building, and she doesn’t say a word. She nods. Once. That’s the whole speech.

She goes to Elena and takes her face in both hands and says something in Spanish too low for the room, and Elena, my sister, the retired uterus, closes her eyes and lets her mother hold her face.

And behind her, in the doorway, is Catherine.

She has the genealogy under one arm and the calligraphy pen already uncapped, and she has clearly been walking at speed. She takes in the room – her son crying, the babies, Rosa’s hands on Elena’s face – and something in her posture concedes one centimetre to all of it, and she opens the book on the bedside table.

Her hand is shaking. The ink, I was told earlier, needs eleven minutes to dry, and she doesn’t wait for her hand to become steady before she looks up at the two of us, her son and her son-in-law, each holding one-half of the next line of the page.

“Names,” Catherine says. “I need their names.”

“I think, actually–” I clear my throat, and glance at Preston questioningly. “I want to name her Carmen. Is that okay?”

Preston nods, a smile flashing across his face as he mouths her name fondly while looking over at her.

“As long as you’re fine with naming our son Henry?”

“Henry. I like it,” I reply, looking at my boy wrapped tightly in his father’s arms. “Welcome to the family, Henry Silva-York.”

Chapter 19

The Doorbell

PRESTON

The guest room is officially a nursery, now that it has two babies in it.