Chapter 31: What Changes and What Doesn't

The pregnancy changed some things.

It changed the way I moved through the studio. A new awareness of my own body as something that was doing more than one thing simultaneously, that was making something in the background of everything else I was making, and that deserved to be moved through with a slightly different quality of attention.

It changed the coffee situation permanently and without mercy. The smell alone was enough. Damien switched to making his in his study with the door closed and did not complain about this once which was the kind of love that did not announce itself and did not need to.

It changed the way Noah looked at me approximately three days after the bathroom Tuesday.

He had not been told. We had agreed to wait. To let the first appointment happen and the first confirmation arrive from a source other than a pharmacy on the corner before we said anything to anyone including a four year old who had already decided the rabbit was called Gerald and had moved on from that with the decisive efficiency of someone who did not revisit resolved matters.

But Noah looked at me on the Thursday morning with those serious dark eyes that missed nothing and said "Mia are you growing something."

I stared at him.

"In your tummy," he clarified helpfully.

Damien appeared in the kitchen doorway with an expression of controlled alarm.

"Why do you ask that," I said very carefully.

Noah considered the question. "You stopped drinking the brown drink," he said. "And you make a face sometimes when Daddy makes it." He looked at me with the focused diagnostic interest that was entirely his own and entirely his father's simultaneously. "My friend Cora's mummy stopped drinking the brown drink and then there was a baby."

I looked at Damien.

Damien looked at me.

"You're very observant," I said to Noah.

"I know," he said, with the serene certainty of someone who considered this a simple fact rather than a compliment.

"We were going to tell you soon," I said.

Noah processed this.

"Is it a dinosaur baby," he said.

"It is not a dinosaur baby," Damien said.

"Can it be a girl," Noah said. "Cora has a sister. She says it is annoying but I think she likes it."

Something happened in my chest that was warm and enormous and entirely without warning.

"We don't know yet," I said.

"I want a sister," Noah said with complete conviction. "Gerald agrees."

He slid off his stool and walked to his room with the decisive air of someone who had received information, processed it, reached a conclusion, and was now moving on to other business.

Damien and I stood in the kitchen.

"Gerald agrees," Damien said quietly.

"Gerald agrees," I confirmed.

He looked at the doorway through which his son had just disappeared and the expression on his face was the large quiet certain one that I had finally named and intended to go on seeing for a very long time.

The first appointment was on a Friday.

Damien came with me.

He sat beside me in the waiting room of the clinic on the Upper East Side with his hands folded in his lap and his posture entirely composed and his left knee moving up and down in a small rapid rhythm that was the only visible evidence of what was happening beneath the composure and that he appeared to be entirely unaware of.

I put my hand on his knee.

It stilled.

He looked at me.

"Okay," I said softly.

"I know," he said. He turned his hand over and held mine and we sat in the waiting room together and the composed exterior held but the hand around mine was gripping considerably harder than necessary and I did not say anything about that.

The appointment confirmed what the pharmacy on the corner had already told us.

Eight weeks.

The sonographer showed us the screen and I looked at something that was very small and was not yet anything I could have drawn and was already, completely and without negotiation, everything.

Damien was very still beside me.

I looked at his face.

He was looking at the screen with an expression I had never seen on him before and that I understood immediately was something he had also never felt before, because it was different from the way he looked at Noah and different from the way he looked at me and different from the way he looked at anything I had seen him look at.

It was the expression of a man encountering something that had no precedent in his experience and that he was receiving without any of the architecture he usually brought to new things.

Raw. Open. Completely without defense.

He looked like someone who had just understood something about himself that all the previous understanding had been preparation for.

He looked at me.

His eyes were bright again.

"Hi," I said softly.

He kissed me once in the middle of the clinic room with the sonographer professionally occupied with her equipment and I felt his hand at my jaw and the warmth of it and the particular quality of being kissed by someone who is doing it because they cannot do anything else.

We walked out into the November morning.

The city was doing its November thing. Cold and bright and stripped of the last October warmth, the sky very blue and the air very clear in the way New York air got when the season finally committed to itself.

We stood on the pavement.

"Lunch," Damien said.

"Lunch," I agreed.

We walked.

Not toward anywhere specific. Just walked the way we had learned to walk together in the past six weeks, at the same pace, in comfortable silence that had things moving through it without needing to be spoken, the city around us doing its indifferent beautiful thing.

"I want to tell you something," Damien said.

"Tell me," I said.

"I have been thinking about the arrangement," he said.

I looked at him.

"The original one," he said. "Eight events. Twelve weeks. The number on the cream colored card." He paused. "We have been to three events. We have nine weeks remaining."

"I know," I said.

"I would like to renegotiate the terms," he said.

I looked at him as we walked. "Renegotiate how."

He stopped walking.

I stopped beside him.

We were on a pavement on the Upper East Side in the November morning with the city moving around us and he turned to face me and reached into the inside pocket of his coat and I went very still because this man did not reach into pockets casually.

He was holding something small.

Not a box. A ring, held simply between his fingers, in the plain direct way he did everything that mattered most to him without theatrical framing because the thing itself was enough and he knew it.

It was not an enormous ring. It was not the architectural statement of a man spending money to communicate significance. It was a single stone, deep blue, almost the color of the midnight dress I had worn to the first dinner, set in something simple and entirely precise and so specifically and exactly me that I understood he had not gone to a jeweler and pointed at something in a case.

He had thought about this.

He had thought about me.

"The new terms," he said quietly, "are considerably simpler than the original ones. One event. Lifelong. You choose the date."

I looked at the ring.

Then at him.

"Damien," I said.

"I am not asking because of the appointment this morning," he said immediately. "I need you to know that. This has been in my pocket for eleven days. Since the Sunday with Eleanor and the pancakes and the flowers." He held my gaze. "I was waiting for the right moment and then I understood that there was no right moment because every moment with you is the right one and I was simply delaying because I was afraid you would say it was too fast."

"It is too fast," I said.

"I know," he said.

"We have known each other six weeks," I said.

"I know," he said.

"You are holding a ring on a pavement in November," I said.

"I am aware of that yes," he said.

I looked at him.

This man.

"Ask me properly," I said.

Something moved across his face. The ghost of the almost smile becoming the real one, the rare devastating one, and then becoming something even more open than that.

He took my hand.

"Mia Santos," he said quietly. "Will you stay."

Not will you marry me. Will you stay. The same word he had been saying since the rain. Since the car and the note and the restaurant and the studio and the bathroom Tuesday and every morning in between.

Will you stay.

I looked at the ring and at the man holding it and the city burning around us on a cold November morning.

"Yes," I said. "I'll stay."

He put the ring on my finger.

It fit perfectly.

Of course it did.

He kissed me on the pavement with the city going on around us entirely indifferent and I kissed him back and his arms came around me and I felt the warmth of him and the certainty of him and the particular specific gravity of a man who had decided and was entirely at peace with the decision.

When we broke apart he pressed his forehead to mine.

"Too fast," he said softly.

"Completely," I said.

"And," he said.

"And entirely right," I said.

He exhaled.

We stood on the pavement.

And then my phone rang.

Not a message. A call. From Rosa.

I answered.

"Mia," Rosa said. Her voice was strange. Not her excited voice or her worried voice. Something I had not heard before.

"Rosa what's wrong," I said.

"I need you to come to the diner," she said. "Now. There is a man here. He has been here for an hour. He says his name is Jonathan Cole." A pause. "Mia he says he is Damien's father."

The November morning went very still.

I lowered the phone and looked at Damien.

His face had gone completely pale.

"Damien," I said carefully. "Your father."

He stared at me.

"He is at the diner," I said. "He is asking for me."

Damien looked at me for three seconds that contained several lifetimes.

Then he said one word.

"Impossible."