Page 9

I brush the tip of my finger along her cheekbone. She doesn't stir.

“I told her to get rid of you,” I say, into the quiet of the room. The words are ones I say to her often, not because I am proud of them but because she deserves my honesty from the start and this is where the honesty starts. “I said it to her face. Standing on a beach. And I meant it when I said it because I was terrified, genuinely, structurally terrified in a way I hadn't been since the night I couldn’t save your aunt and uncles. I had decided that night that I was never going to be terrified of anything again. I was wrong.” I keep rocking. “You should know that about me.”

She breathes.

“I've never told her,” I say. The shift in topic is abrupt, but she is two months old and she’s not tracking the transitions. “Your mother. I have never said the words. I have said things around them, I’ve said things that only make sense if the words are true, I’ve done things that only a person who means the words would do but I haven’t said them. Out loud. To her face. Directly.” I exhale. “I keep not saying them because the saying of them is the thing that makes them real and I have had real things taken from me and I have spent a long time understanding that lesson in the most devastating ways possible and I have let that understanding make me a coward.”

I look at her face.

“That’s not courage,” I say. “I’m naming it accurately. I’m a man who has done things that most people consider very brave and I’m a coward about the most important thing in my life, which is your mother, and I am aware of the irony. I don’t find it amusing.”

Her fist opens in sleep. Fingers spread, reaching for nothing, and then slowly curl back in. She does this at least twice a night. I have no idea what she is reaching for in her sleep and I find myself hoping it is nothing specific. I find myself hoping she is simply a person whose hands open toward the world, even unconscious, which is either her mother's grace or something she arrived with entirely her own.

“I knew the moment you were born,” I say. “That's the truth of it. The second I put my hand on the two of you and understood that you were both real and alive and in that room, I knew what I had been refusing to say. You did that. You arrived in the world in the early hours of the morning and you rearranged everything that was already in it and I have not been the same since. I don’t want to be.” I pause. “I knew the night she almost died. I knew it and I went to a beach and told her to end the pregnancy because I was terrified of exactly this, of loving something this completely and having it taken. I’ve had things taken. I know how that works. I know the specific architecture of that loss and I didn’t want to build it again.”

I let the quiet sit.

“I was fucking wrong,” I say again. “And I will say that to her. I will say all of it to her. The words specifically and the rest of it too, the beach, the warehouse, the months of being exactly the kind of man I had to be, but I never should have done any of it to her. I will say it. I am building toward it. Your Uncle Cas will tell you that I have been building toward it for two months and he will use a tone that implies I am taking too long, which is rich from a man who once spent three weeks pretending he hadn't noticed that the wardrobe drawer was upside down.”

A pause.

“That stays in this room.”

Emmerson sleeps on. She’s unbothered by my confessions. I appreciate this about her.

“And I love you,” I say, and the words land the way they always land when I say them to her, without ceremony, without the weight of everything I have been carrying up to them, just the plain fact of the thing, as simple and as enormous as gravity. “I loved you before I was willing to admit I wanted you. I loved you in a warehouse when your mother held your future in front of me and I was too broken to receive it with anything but fear. I love you in this chair, in the dark, in this life I didn’t plan and wouldn’t trade for anything that has ever existed.”

My jaw tightens. Not grief. The opposite of grief.

“And if anyone hurts you, anyone, at any point, for any reason, in any way, I will find them. I will take my time. I will make it thorough and deliberate. I will make certain they understand exactly what decision they made when they decided to put their hands on something that belongs to me.” I look at her face. “That’s not a threat. Threats are for people I’m not certain about. That is a fact. The first one I am giving you. Keep it.”

I sit with her for a long time after that.

The apartment is quiet around us. Toren is asleep down the hall, finally, properly asleep, the deep sleep she has been fighting off for weeks because she startles at every sound and I have taken to sitting up so she doesn't have to. Colorado is dark beyond the windows. No sirens, no movement, nothing but the particular silence of a city that has decided it can rest for a few hours.

I rock my daughter in the armchair in the corner of her room and I let it be exactly this.

Eventually I stand.

I carry her to the crib with both hands doing exactly what they are supposed to do and I lower her down and she settles without waking and I tuck the blanket in the way the nurse showed me. I made her show me four times, I’m not ashamed of this, and I straighten up.

She’s so tiny in the crib.

Yet, she’s the largest thing in my life.

I stand there for a long moment. Then I turn for the door.

Toren’s in the hallway.

She’s standing just outside the nursery door in one of my shirts. She’s been wearing my shirts since before she gave birth and I haven’t said a single word about it and I never will because the truth of it is that she looks better in them than I do. Also because the alternative is her not wearing them and that is not a direction I am willing to go. Her hair is loose and her feet are bare on the floorboards.

She has both hands pressed over her mouth.

Her shoulders are moving in the small, contained way that means she is crying and has been trying not to and is losing.

She heard me.

I know it the moment I see her.