Chapter 119 Catherine

Chapter 119 Catherine
Lara's POV

We named her Catherine.

After my mother.

I had known for weeks that if she was a girl that was what I wanted to call her, but I hadn't said it out loud to Damien until the night before I went into labour, lying in bed in the dark, my hand on my stomach, and I had just said it quietly into the room.

Catherine.

He had been quiet for a moment.

Then he had said yes. Just that. Just yes, in a voice that told me he understood exactly why and didn't need me to explain it.

My mother had been gone for a long time. Long enough that the grief of her had become something else, something quieter, the particular kind of missing that didn't hurt the way it once had but that you carried with you regardless, a permanent passenger that you stopped noticing most of the time until something happened that made you think she should be here for this.

She should have been here for all of it.

For the company and the IPO and Richie's birthday parties and Ethan growing into the person he was becoming. She should have been here to see her daughter rebuild what her husband spent his life building, to see that it had been worth it, that all of it had been worth it.

She wasn't.

But her name was.

And her name was going to be carried by this small loud person who had arrived on a Tuesday morning with considerable opinions and dark eyes that were going to be something specific and beautiful once they finished deciding what colour they wanted to be.

Catherine.

Richie came to the hospital that afternoon.

Mrs. Abara brought him, driving him in herself because Ethan had stayed at the hospital after arriving that morning and nobody had thought to arrange proper transport for Richie until mid morning when everyone's attention had mostly been on the new person who had just arrived.

He came into the room in his nursery uniform, which meant Mrs. Abara had brought him straight from drop off, and he stood in the doorway for a moment looking at me in the hospital bed with the particular expression of a child who has been told something enormous is happening and is now seeing the evidence of it and is processing accordingly.

"You had the baby," he said.

"I had the baby," I confirmed.

He came closer slowly. Looked at the small bundle in my arms.

"That's her?" he said.

"That's her," I said.

He studied her for a long moment with great seriousness.

"She's very wrinkly," he said.

"Richie," Ethan said from the chair in the corner, his voice carrying the particular warning tone he had started using with his brother when Richie said things that were true but possibly not the most diplomatic framing.

"It's okay," I said. "She is a little wrinkly. She just arrived. She'll smooth out."

Richie considered this information.

"Can I touch her?" he asked.

"Gently," I said. "Very gently."

He reached out one finger and touched the back of her hand with it, delicately, more carefully than I had ever seen Richie do anything in his five years of life.

Catherine, who had been asleep, opened her eyes briefly at the touch, looked at nothing in particular with the unfocused gaze she had been deploying since birth, and then closed them again.

Richie looked up at me with an expression I had never seen on his face before.

Wonder.

Pure uncomplicated wonder, the kind that five year olds had access to in a way that adults spent their whole lives trying to get back to.

"She looked at me," he said.

"She did," I said.

"Did she know it was me?"

"Not yet," I said. "But she will. She's going to know exactly who you are very soon."

He looked back at her.

"I'm going to teach her things," he said, with the same energy and conviction he brought to all his best plans.

"What kind of things?" Ethan asked from the corner.

"Everything I know," Richie said.

Ethan and I looked at each other over Richie's head and had the entire conversation about what that meant with our eyes.

Damien came back into the room then, returning from wherever he had gone, and stopped when he saw Richie standing beside the bed with his finger still hovering near Catherine's hand.

"Hey," he said to Richie. "What do you think?"

Richie looked at him very seriously.

"She's small," he said. "And wrinkly. But she looked at me."

"She did," Damien said.

"I think she likes me," Richie said.

"I think she does too," Damien said, and sat down beside me on the edge of the bed and looked at our daughter and then at me and something in his face was so completely at peace that I had to look away for a moment because it was almost too much to take in all at once.

The hospital kept us for two days, which was standard, routine, nothing concerning.

Two days of the particular suspended reality of a hospital stay, where time moved differently and the outside world was muffled by walls and routines and the particular focus that a new person required. Feeding and sleeping and the careful navigation of a body that had just done something enormous and needed time to understand what had happened to it.

Damien stayed both nights, sleeping in the reclining chair that the nurses wheeled in without being asked, because they had apparently taken one look at him and understood that telling him to go home was going to be a very inefficient use of everyone's time.

On the first night, when Catherine was asleep in the little hospital cot beside my bed and Damien was asleep in the chair and the ward was quiet in the particular way of hospitals at two in the morning, I lay awake and looked at her.

She was so small.

I knew she was small, I had been told she was a good size for her gestation, a healthy weight, everything normal, but she was still so small in the way that all new people were small, that particular smallness that made you understand properly for the first time the scale of what a human being started as before it became everything it was going to be.

I thought about my mother lying in a hospital room looking at me for the first time.

I thought about what she might have felt, whether it was anything like this, this particular mixture of overwhelming love and terror and responsibility and something underneath all of it that was pure and simple and had no other word for it than love, just love, enormous and uncomplicated.

I thought about what I would tell Catherine one day about this year. About what had happened. About the fear and the endurance and the particular stubbornness required to keep your ordinary life going while extraordinary things were happening around it.

I would tell her that her mother was not a woman who ran.

I would tell her that her father was not a man who gave up.

I would tell her about her brothers, one who had sat in a hospital waiting room and watched cameras on a laptop screen to keep his family safe, and one who had touched her hand so gently on the day she arrived and said I'm going to teach you things.

I would tell her that she came into the world in a year that had asked everything of the people who loved her before she even arrived, and that those people had given everything asked of them and still had enough left to welcome her properly.

I would tell her all of it one day.

When she was old enough.

When she had the context to understand it.

For now she was two days old and completely unaware of any of it, which was exactly right and exactly how it should be.

On the second afternoon Marcus came.

He came alone, without Sarah and Lily, because he had apparently understood without being told that this particular visit needed to be just him, and he sat beside my bed and looked at Catherine for a long time without saying anything.

I watched him look at her.

There was something in his face that was complicated in a way I had never quite seen on Marcus before. Not sadness exactly. Something more layered than that. The face of a man who understood, better than almost anyone, the biological miracle of what he was looking at.

"The bone marrow," he said finally.

"The bone marrow," I confirmed.

He shook his head slightly.

"I have spent my career studying what the body can do," he said quietly. "And it still surprises me."

"She surprised all of us," I said.

He looked up at me.

"She's beautiful," he said.

"She's wrinkly," I said.

"She's beautifully wrinkly," he said.

I laughed.

He asked to hold her and I said yes and he held her the way doctors held babies, with a particular competence that was different from the careful terrified way Ethan had held her and the reverential wonder of how Damien held her, just completely comfortable, like someone whose hands knew what to do with a new person.

Catherine looked up at him with her unfocused gaze.

"Hello," Marcus said to her. "I'm the reason you exist, in a very roundabout way, which is a complicated thing to explain to someone who is two days old, so I'll leave that conversation for later."

I looked at this man.

This man who had donated bone marrow to save my life years ago and in doing so had set in motion a chain of biological events that had led, against all medical probability, to this small person lying in his arms looking at nothing in particular.

"Thank you," I said.

He looked up at me.

"For what?" he said.

"For all of it," I said. "For being who you are. For all of it."

He looked back at Catherine.

"She has your mouth," he said.

"Everyone says that," I said.

"And Damien's frown," he said.

"She doesn't frown," I said.

"She's frowning right now," he said, tilting her slightly so I could see.

She was, in fact, frowning. A small determined frown, the expression of someone who had opinions about things and was not yet able to articulate them but was absolutely going to.

"She's going to be trouble," Marcus said, with great affection.

"She's going to be exactly what she needs to be," I said.

He smiled at that.

Handed her back to me.

And I held my daughter in a hospital room in the city where I had been born and my mother had been born and my father had built something that I had rebuilt and that would one day, in whatever form it took, belong to all of them, all three of them, this loud wrinkly wonderful small person and her brothers, all of it theirs.

Catherine.

My mother's name.

My daughter's name.

Hello.