“The long phone charger,” I said. I was sitting on the edge of the bed with both hands on my belly. “I didn’t pack it.”
“Side pocket.” Andrew was kneeling on the bedroom floor beside the hospital bag. “Charger, slippers, and that lavender lotion you pretend you don’t love.”
“I don’t love it.”
“You put it on every night, Em.”
“Socks?”
“Two pairs. The fuzzy ones.” He zipped the pocket. Then he reached under the folded clothes and pulled something out, grinning like a kid who’d hidden a frog in his teacher’s desk. “And this. For afterward.”
It was my caramel-filled chocolate bar, the expensive kind in the gold wrapper that I only let myself buy on birthdays. It crinkled in his fingers. I laughed so hard the girls kicked, both of them at once, one high and one low, like they were in on the joke.
“You’re ridiculous,” I said.
“I’m prepared. There’s a difference.”
He tucked the chocolate bar back into the bag, right on top, where I’d see it first.
His phone buzzed on the dresser.
He got up, glanced at the screen, and his shoulders sank a little. It was a small thing. Most people wouldn’t have noticed. I’d been married to him for eleven years. I noticed.
“It’s Mom,” he said.
He put her on speaker and set the phone on the bed between us, which is what he always did with his mother. I think it made him feel less alone with her.
“Andrew, darling,” she said. Her voice was as sweet as cough syrup. “I’ve been thinking. I’ll come stay with you after the discharge. Someone has to help properly.”
Andrew rubbed his eyes.
“Thanks, Mom. But Helen’s already coming. She’ll be with us for the whole recovery. It’s all settled.”
There was a pause on the line.
“Helen,” his mother said. “Well. How lovely for Helen.”
“Mom.”
“I only meant it’s lovely. Really. Call me the second anything happens. I am the grandmother, after all.”
The line clicked off.
I stared at the phone on the bedspread.
“Is she upset?” I asked.
“That was just Mom being Mom,” Andrew said, rubbing the back of his neck.
I let it go. It was our day. We’d waited ten years for it, and I wasn’t going to give one minute of it to Carol.
Carol was Andrew’s mother.
She was sixty-four and had raised Andrew mostly by herself after his father left when Andrew was nine. She wore pearls to the grocery store. She sent thank-you cards for thank-you cards. She called Andrew every single day, sometimes twice, and if he didn’t pick up, she’d call me to ask if he was alive.
She’d never liked me. She’d never said so. She didn’t have to.
At our wedding, she’d hugged me in the receiving line and whispered, “He’s very sensitive, you know. Be careful with him.” I thought it was sweet at the time. I was twenty-four. I didn’t know yet that Carol said almost everything in a way that sounded sweet and wasn’t.
Helen is my mother. She’s the opposite of Carol in every way that matters. She wears sweatpants to the grocery store. She forgets birthdays. She once drove four hours in a snowstorm because I’d called her crying about a work presentation. She’d planned to stay with us for six weeks after the birth. She’d already bought an air mattress.
I think that was the part Carol couldn’t stand.
Later, when the bag was by the door and my coat was on, Andrew went quiet.
I found him standing in the nursery doorway.
He was looking at the two white cribs he’d built with his own hands. He’d done it in March, over two weekends, with the instructions laid out on the floor in order and every screw sorted into little paper cups. He’d made a schedule for it. An actual written schedule. Saturday a.m.: crib one, frame. Saturday p.m.: crib one, slats.
Above the cribs were two wooden letters he’d painted himself, one yellow and one green. I and N. Ivy and Nora. We’d picked the names three years before we were even pregnant, on a night when we weren’t sure we ever would be.
“Can I say something dumb?” he asked.
“Only smart things allowed today.”
He didn’t smile.
“Ten years,” he said. He swallowed. “All those needles. All those waiting rooms. The doctors said it plain, you know. It was me. My numbers.”
He went quiet. Then he hung his head.
“If I’d just been different,” he said, “you wouldn’t have had to go through any of it.”
I had heard him blame himself before. Lots of times, in the car after appointments, at two in the morning, on anniversaries.
I hadn’t expected to hear it today.
I crossed the room as fast as a woman carrying twins can cross a room, which is not very fast. I took his face in my hands.
“Listen to me,” I said. “I don’t see our girls as something you failed to give me. They’re ours.”
He didn’t look up.
I smiled.
“Your side, my side, a lab dish, and a whole lot of luck,” I said. “We did this together.”
“I know. I just…”
“We did it together,” I said again. “And in a few hours, we get to meet them.”
His forehead dropped against mine. He let out a shaky breath.
I remembered the bathroom floor then, just for a second.
It was the cold tile against my back and the test on the rim of the tub with its one stubborn line.
That was the fourth round, maybe. Or the fifth. After a while, they blurred together. I just remember that I’d been so sure. My breasts had been sore. I’d been tired. I’d let myself believe it.
I sat down on the bathroom floor and cried until I couldn’t breathe.
Andrew had come home from work and found me there. He didn’t turn on the light. He just slid down the wall and sat beside me without a word.
He didn’t say it would be okay.
He didn’t have an answer.
He just sat there, his shoulder pressed against mine, for an hour. Maybe longer. Until the light from the window went orange and then gray.
That was what mattered. He stayed.
I’d thought about that night a hundred times over the years. Whenever I wondered whether I’d married the right man, I thought about him sitting on that cold tile in his work clothes, not leaving.
Today, we would finally meet the babies we’d bring home.
Andrew picked up the bag. He held the front door open for me. He walked me down the steps to the car one at a time, like I was made of glass.
“You’ve got the chocolate?” I said.
“I’ve got the chocolate.”
“Don’t eat it.”
“I would never.”
“You ate my Easter eggs.”
“That was 2019. I’ve grown as a person.”
I laughed all the way down the driveway.