Chapter 120 Coming Home

Chapter 120 Coming Home
Lara's POV

We brought Catherine home on a Thursday morning.

Damien drove. I sat in the back beside her car seat the way I had sat in the back beside Richie's car seat when we brought him home, watching her face the whole drive in case she needed something, which she didn't, she was asleep before we even got out of the hospital car park and stayed asleep for the entire journey with the complete unbothered peace of someone who had decided that car movement was acceptable and was going to make the most of it.

The city went past the window.

I watched it go past and thought about all the times I had sat in the back of a car this year watching this same city go past, the times it had felt threatening and the times it had felt indifferent and the times it had simply been the city, loud and alive and going about its business.

Today it just looked like home.

Ethan had asked to be there when we arrived, which meant he had arranged with the school to leave at lunchtime, which he had apparently done entirely on his own initiative without telling me, showing up at the house before us and texting Damien when he arrived to confirm he was there.

When we pulled into the driveway he was standing at the front door.

Just standing there in his school uniform, bag still on his shoulder, hands in his pockets, trying to look casual and not quite managing it.

I got out of the car first and he looked at me and I looked at him and neither of us said anything for a moment.

Then he said, "Do you need help with anything?"

"Come and see her," I said.

He came to the car and looked in at Catherine in her car seat, still asleep, still completely unbothered by the world.

He stood there for a long moment just looking at her.

"She looks different outside the hospital," he said.

"She's the same person," I said.

"She looks more real," he said. "Like she actually lives here now."

"She does actually live here now," I said.

He nodded slowly, like he was filing that away properly, making it real in his mind through the act of acknowledging it.

Damien carefully unclipped the car seat and carried Catherine inside and Ethan held the front door open and then followed us in, and the house received us the way houses received things that belonged in them, quietly and without ceremony, just opening around us and becoming the context for whatever came next.

Richie was at nursery.

We had decided not to bring him home early because Richie at full energy in a small space with a sleeping newborn was an experiment we were not ready to conduct on day one, and Mrs. Abara had agreed to do the afternoon pickup and bring him back at his normal time, which gave us a few hours of quiet first.

I sat on the sofa with Catherine on my chest, her small weight settling against me, her breathing the particular breathing of a deeply asleep infant, and looked around my living room.

Our living room.

The same living room where we had sat through so many difficult evenings this year, where Damien and I had talked through the things that needed talking through, where Ethan had come and sat beside me when he needed to be near someone, where Richie had built and rebuilt his block house with the garden big enough for all of us.

It looked the same.

It felt completely different.

Ethan came and sat on the other end of the sofa, kicked his shoes off, pulled his feet up underneath him the way he did when he was settling in properly, and looked at Catherine on my chest.

"Has she opened her eyes yet today?" he asked.

"Briefly in the car," I said. "She looked at the window and decided it wasn't interesting enough and went back to sleep."

"She has opinions," he said.

"She has a great many opinions," I said. "She just doesn't have words for them yet."

"She'll get there," he said.

"She will," I said. "And then we'll all be in trouble."

He almost smiled at that.

Damien came in from the kitchen with tea and sat in the armchair across from us and we sat there, the three of us plus Catherine, in the living room of our house on a Thursday afternoon, not saying very much, not needing to.

Just being home.

Richie arrived at three thirty.

We heard him before we saw him, his voice carrying through the front door before Mrs. Abara had even finished getting it open, asking a question about something that had happened at nursery, something about David again, the same David who was apparently his nemesis in matters of blocks and dinosaurs and general nursery life.

Then he came into the living room and stopped.

He looked at me on the sofa.

At Catherine on my chest.

His face went through the same sequence it had gone through in the hospital, the processing, the assessment, the arrival at something.

"She's here," he said.

"She's here," I said.

He came over very carefully, more carefully than Richie usually did anything, and stood beside me and looked at her.

"Is she awake?" he whispered.

"She's sleeping," I whispered back.

"Should we be quiet?" he whispered.

"Probably a good idea," I whispered.

He nodded very seriously and sat down on the floor beside the sofa and stayed there, which was the longest Richie had ever voluntarily stayed still in a single location, and he just watched her sleep with the focused attention of someone taking a responsibility seriously.

After about four minutes he whispered, "When will she wake up?"

"When she's ready," I whispered.

"Can I be here when she wakes up?"

"You can," I whispered.

He settled himself more comfortably on the floor.

"I'll wait," he announced, in a whisper that was considerably louder than his previous whispers and probably would have woken her if she hadn't been in the deep sleep of the recently born.

Damien caught my eye across the room.

I looked back at him.

We were both trying very hard not to laugh and mostly failing.

Catherine woke up at four thirty.

She woke up the way she had been waking up since she arrived, which was immediately and fully and with a clear sense that she had things to communicate and was now ready to communicate them.

Richie was still on the floor.

He had, against all odds and all precedent, stayed there for the entire hour, occasionally asking quiet questions about when she would wake up and occasionally providing updates on what he planned to teach her, which had expanded since the hospital visit to include not just everything he knew but also specific things about dinosaurs that he felt were important foundational knowledge.

When she started making noise he sat up straighter immediately.

"She's awake," he said, no longer whispering, the whispering phase apparently concluded now that she was conscious.

"She is," I said.

"Hi Catherine," he said to her, leaning in slightly. "I'm Richie. I'm your brother. I've been waiting."

She looked at him.

Actually looked at him, with more focus than she had managed for anyone yet, which might have been coincidence and might have been something else entirely, but which made Richie's face do something extraordinary.

"She knows me," he said, with complete certainty.

"She does," I said, because sometimes certainty was more important than accuracy and this was one of those times.

He beamed.

The full Richie beam, the one that started somewhere in his chest and arrived at his face with complete commitment, the one that had been making everyone around him smile back without meaning to since he was old enough to produce it.

Catherine continued to look at him.

"I'm going to be a very good brother," Richie told her seriously.

"You already are," Ethan said from the sofa, without looking up from his phone, in the tone of someone saying something true and not making a big deal of it.

Richie looked at Ethan.

Ethan looked at his phone.

Something passed between them that I wasn't supposed to see and probably wouldn't have been able to describe even if I had.

Then Richie looked back at Catherine.

"Ethan is also a good brother," he told her, generously, like he was making a formal introduction. "You'll like him. He knows a lot of things. Some of them are even useful."

From the sofa, Ethan made a sound into his phone that was definitely a laugh.

That evening, after Catherine had been fed and had expressed her opinions about various things and had eventually been settled in the bassinet in our bedroom, after Richie had been given dinner and bath and bed and had required three separate goodnight checks before he was finally satisfied, after Ethan had gone upstairs to his room and the house had settled into its evening quiet, Damien and I stood in the doorway of our bedroom looking at Catherine asleep in the bassinet.

She was very small in it.

She looked even smaller in the context of our bedroom, in our house, surrounded by all the ordinary things of our ordinary life, than she had looked in the hospital where everything was scaled to newness.

"She's really here," Damien said quietly.

"She's really here," I said.

He put his arm around me and I leaned into him and we stood there looking at our daughter sleeping in the bassinet in the room where we slept, in the house my father built, in the life we had made together out of things that had tried very hard at various points to unmake it.

"Hi Catherine," Damien said softly, to the sleeping baby who couldn't hear him or didn't know what words meant yet or both.

She slept on, unbothered.

As was apparently her approach to most things so far.

I thought she was going to be okay.

I thought all of them were going to be okay.

I thought we all were.