Chapter 125 Riche At Five

Chapter 125 Riche At Five
Lara's POV

Richie turned six in September.

We threw him a party in the garden, smaller than the previous year's, deliberately smaller, because the previous year's party had been the one where a man had stood at the fence watching and I had felt the cold feeling move through me that I still remembered clearly even now, and I wanted this year's party to be something different in every way.

Something that belonged only to Richie and to us and to the ordinary joy of a child turning six in a garden full of people who loved him.

We did dinosaurs again because Richie had been emphatic that dinosaurs were not a one year theme but a lifetime commitment and anyone who suggested otherwise was wrong.

Damien ordered a cake with a Tyrannosaurus Rex on it this time instead of the caped dinosaur from last year, which Richie approved after a brief but serious inspection, and which Lily declared to be the best cake she had ever seen, which made Richie beam in the way he beamed when Lily said something he agreed with.

The garden was full by eleven.

Mrs. Abara came with her dish of jollof rice that had apparently become a fixture at our family events, arriving at the same time she always arrived and with the same dish in her hands, and I took it from her and thanked her and she waved the thanks away as she always did and went to find somewhere to sit where she could watch everything at once which was her preferred position at any gathering.

Marcus and Sarah came with Lily. Damien's sister Funke came with her children. Ethan had invited two friends from school who stood slightly apart from the main party with the self-conscious energy of teenagers at a six year old's birthday but who both ate a great deal of cake and ended up on the floor building something with Richie's blocks at some point in the afternoon, apparently having decided that this was acceptable when nobody they knew was watching.

Catherine was four months old and attended the party in the carrier on my chest, which was where she spent most of her time at any event involving more than three people, observing everything with the focused attention she brought to all new experiences.

Richie treated her attendance as significant.

He introduced her to every single person who arrived, whether they had met her before or not.

"This is my sister Catherine," he would say, appearing beside me and gesturing at her in the carrier. "She's four months. She's very clever."

"How do you know she's clever?" Ethan asked him at some point.

"I can tell," Richie said, with complete confidence.

"What evidence do you have?" Ethan said.

Richie looked at him.

"She looks at things properly," Richie said. "Other babies just look. She looks at things like she's thinking about them."

Ethan opened his mouth and then closed it again, apparently having decided that arguing with this was not going to be productive.

"Fair enough," he said.

Which was the right response.

Because Richie was not wrong. Catherine did look at things like she was thinking about them. She had been doing it since the hospital and it had not stopped and I had personally observed her spend approximately four minutes staring at a plant on the kitchen windowsill with an intensity that suggested she had reached some kind of botanical conclusion.

Damien thought it was hilarious.

I thought it was exactly right for a person made the way she was made.

The party moved through its stages the way children's parties did, the initial chaos of arrival and the structured chaos of games and the managed chaos of cake and the winding down chaos of children who were full of sugar and affection and starting to get tired but didn't want to admit it.

Ethan ran the games.

He had not been asked to run the games. He had simply assessed the situation at some point in the late morning, determined that nobody else was going to coordinate them, and taken over with the quiet efficiency of someone who had decided that something needed doing and was going to do it.

He organised a relay race.

Then a treasure hunt that he had apparently set up the previous evening without telling anyone.

Then something involving balloons that devolved into general chaos within approximately two minutes but that produced the kind of screaming laughter from the children that was the best possible sound a garden could contain.

I watched him from across the garden.

This boy in his weekend clothes, organising games for six year olds and five year olds with the same focused competence he brought to emergency plans and camera feeds and difficult conversations at kitchen tables, completely unbothered by the fact that he was fifteen and this was a six year old's birthday party and most of his peers would have found approximately seventeen reasons to be somewhere else.

He had nowhere else he would rather be.

I knew that about him.

Damien appeared beside me at some point, having deposited Catherine with Marcus who had been very willing to take her, and he stood beside me watching Ethan too.

"He's good at this," Damien said.

"He's good at everything," I said.

"He gets that from somewhere," Damien said.

I looked at him.

"From you," I said.

"From both of us," he said.

"He gets the competence from you," I said. "The caring from somewhere else."

"He cares because he's Ethan," Damien said. "That's just who he is. We didn't do that. That was already in him."

I thought about that.

The things we passed on and the things that were simply the person themselves, present from the beginning, waiting to emerge.

Richie appeared at my elbow.

"Mom," he said.

"Yes."

"David is here."

I looked around.

"Which one is David?" I asked.

"The one eating all the crisps," Richie said, with the tone of someone reporting a serious infraction.

I located a small boy near the snack table who was indeed eating crisps with considerable commitment.

"He's allowed to eat the crisps," I said. "There are crisps for everyone."

"He's eating them very fast," Richie said.

"Richie," I said.

"I'm just observing," he said.

"Go and play," I said.

He went, but in the direction of the snack table rather than away from it, which I chose to interpret as coincidental.

Damien made a sound beside me.

"Don't," I said.

"I didn't say anything," he said.

"You were going to," I said.

"I was going to say that David has been coming to these parties for two years and Richie still treats him like an ongoing administrative problem," he said.

"They're actually friends," I said. "Richie told me last week that David was his second best friend."

"Who's the first?" Damien asked.

"Lily," I said.

"Obviously," Damien said.

The afternoon went on in the way good afternoons went on, too fast and full of the right things.

Cake was cut. Richie blew out his six candles on the first attempt and looked extremely proud of this. Everyone sang and the singing was ragged and enthusiastic in the way singing was when nobody was trying to be good at it and everyone was just present in the moment.

Richie opened his presents with the particular energy of a child who had been waiting for this part and was going to give it everything.

He thanked each person after each gift with a sincerity that I had never taught him and that appeared to be simply part of his character, this innate politeness that existed alongside the loudness and the endless observations and the David situation and the five year old logic about cats and ice cream and what Catherine was thinking.

He opened the last present and looked at it and then looked around the garden at all the people who had come to be here for him today.

"Thank you for my party," he said, loudly, to everyone in general.

"You're welcome," said everyone in general, in the overlapping way of people who had all been addressed simultaneously.

Richie nodded, satisfied.

Then he took his new toys and went to find Lily.

Later, after everyone had gone home and the garden was in the gentle state of aftermath that parties left behind, balloon scraps and plate remnants and the particular pleasant exhaustion of a day that had been exactly what it was supposed to be, I sat on the bench near the roses with Catherine on my lap while Damien tidied and Ethan helped him and Richie lay on the grass looking up at the sky with the complete relaxation of a child who had had a perfect day and knew it.

"Mom," Richie said, without looking away from the sky.

"Yes."

"Was my party good?"

"Your party was wonderful," I said.

"Better than last year?"

I thought about last year. About standing near the fence. About the cold feeling. About the man who had been watching.

"Much better than last year," I said honestly.

He was quiet for a moment.

"Next year I want a robot theme," he said.

"I thought dinosaurs were a lifetime commitment," Ethan said from across the garden.

"I can have two lifetime commitments," Richie said, with great dignity.

Ethan looked at Damien.

Damien looked at me.

I looked at Catherine in my lap, who was looking at the sky the same way Richie was, with the focused attention she brought to everything, and I thought that she was going to have a very interesting childhood with this particular brother showing her how things worked.

"Okay," Damien said. "Robots next year."

"And a dinosaur cake," Richie said immediately.

"Richie," Ethan said.

"Lifetime commitment," Richie said simply.

We sat in the garden as the afternoon turned toward evening, the five of us, in the particular golden light that late summer afternoons produced, and I held my daughter and watched my sons and felt my husband nearby and thought about how much had happened in the years that had brought us to this garden on this evening and how none of it, not one single difficult thing, had managed to prevent this moment from arriving.

It had all just been the path.

All of it.

Every difficult thing just the path to this.

Richie was still looking at the sky.

"Mom," he said.

"Yes."

"Do you think dinosaurs knew they were going extinct?"

I thought about this seriously, because Richie's questions deserved serious consideration.

"I don't think so," I said. "I think they were just living their lives."

He was quiet for a moment.

"That's sad," he said.

"Is it?" I said.

"They didn't get to say goodbye," he said.

I looked at my son lying on the grass on his sixth birthday looking at the sky thinking about dinosaurs saying goodbye.

"I think," I said carefully, "that if they were just living their lives and not worrying about the ending, that's actually quite a good way to be."

Richie considered this.

"Like us," he said.

"Like us," I said.

He went back to looking at the sky.

And I went back to looking at my family in the garden.

Just living our lives.

Just this.