Chapter 106 The Baby Shower
Tessa said, just a small gathering.
Those exact words. Small gathering, just the people closest to you, nothing overwhelming. I had believed her because I wanted to believe her and because I was twenty-eight weeks pregnant and my feet hurt by noon and the idea of anything overwhelming felt like something to be avoided.
I walked into the estate on a Saturday afternoon in late March and found the entire main room transformed.
Cream and soft gold streamers hang from the ceiling in long gentle loops. Tables covered in white cloth loaded with food and flowers and small candles in glass jars throwing warm circles of light across everything. Every person I loved was standing in the middle of it wearing expressions that said they had been waiting for exactly this moment and were very pleased with how it had turned out.
Tessa appeared at my elbow. “Small gathering,” I said.
“These are all close people,” she said simply, and looped her arm through mine and walked me inside before I could respond.
The room smelled like vanilla and flowers and the particular sweetness of whatever Aunt Clara had been baking since morning. April light came through the long windows and caught the streamers and threw soft shapes across the floor. Twenty-eight weeks and I stood in the doorway looking at what they had built for me and felt something move through my chest that had no clean name.
Lycian found me almost immediately. He had been here an hour already, recruited into moving furniture and hanging things wherever Tessa directed with the focused authority of someone who had planned every inch of this. He looked slightly tired and completely happy. He pressed his lips to my temple and kept his hand on my back and let me have the room.
Aunt Clara was by the food table.
She had baked everything on it. I could tell by the particular arrangement of it, precise and considered, nothing placed without thought. She had been baking since early morning, I knew this because she had sent me a message at seven saying do not come before two and do not ask why. She was in a dress I had not seen before, her hair done properly, the whole of her carrying the particular energy of someone who had prepared for this day with care.
She looked well. She looked better than well. She had been looking this way for months, since the return to practice, since the appointments and the notebook and the clean room in the east wing. The illness had taken a particular quality of light from her face for years and it had come back gradually, so gradually that I had not noticed each increment, only the total, only the distance between who she had been at her sickest and who she was now standing by a food table in a dress she had bought for this specific afternoon.
She caught me looking. Crossed the room.
She did not say anything immediately. Just put both hands on my face the way she had done since I was small, her palms against my cheeks, looking at me with the directness that was entirely hers.
“You gave me this,” she said quietly. Not performing it. Not making a speech. Just saying a true thing plainly the way she said everything. “All of it. This room and this day and the ability to stand here and be the one taking care of you instead of the one being taken care of.” Her thumbs moved slightly against my cheeks. “I will spend the rest of my practice making sure your daughter arrives safely in the world. That is not enough but it is what I have to give.”
My throat tightened.
“It’s everything,” I said.
She nodded once. Dropped her hands. Looked at my stomach with the clinical warmth that was entirely hers, the doctor and the aunt occupying the same space without conflict.
“You’re carrying low today,” she said. “How’s the pressure?”
And just like that we were back to normal, which was its own kind of love.
We ate. We laughed. The afternoon moved the way these afternoons moved when the right people were in the same room, easy and unhurried, full of the comfortable noise of people who had stopped being careful around each other.
Then the gifts.
Damien went first. He had built something. A small wooden chest, smooth and pale, the baby’s name space left blank on the lid deliberately, waiting. For keepsakes, he said, looking at the table while he said it. For the things worth keeping. I ran my fingers across the surface and felt the hours in it, the careful sanding, the oil rubbed into the grain until it showed through warm and deep.
I looked at him. At his large hands on the table and his eyes anywhere but my face.
“Damien,” I said.
“It’s just wood,” he said.
It was not just wood.
Tessa gave books. A carefully chosen stack, children’s stories with beautiful illustrations, the kind that were as much for the parents reading them as for the child hearing them. Tucked between two of them was a small card in her handwriting. For all the nights you read these until you have them memorized. I looked at her over the stack and she lifted her shoulders in that small honest way she had when she meant something more than she knew how to say out loud.
Aunt Clara gave practical things. The right practical things, the ones you did not know you needed until the moment you desperately did. She had wrapped each item individually and explained each one as I opened it, what it was for, and when it would matter, the knowledge of a doctor who had been paying close attention for seven months and was now channeling all of it into making sure I had everything I needed.
She had also made a small notebook. Handwritten. Every observation from every appointment since she had taken over my care. Measurements and heartbeat readings and notes in her careful script. On the first page she had written, everything I know how to do is yours.
I held it for a long moment.
My father was last. He reached into the bag beside his chair and brought out something wrapped in brown paper tied with twine. I unwrapped it carefully.
A photo album. The first pages were filled with photographs I had never seen. My mother is young, laughing at something outside the frame, her face completely open. My mother was in a hospital room holding something small and wrapped in white, looking down with an expression that needed no words.
Me. Newborn. My mother’s face was above mine like I was everything in the room.
More pages. My mother at different ages. My father was younger, before loss changed the way he stood. Then newer photographs. The past year. Lycian and I are leaving the Council building, his hand around mine. Me on the graduation stage with the diploma raised and my father is in the audience with the camera lowered because he had been watching instead of photographing.
The remaining pages were empty.
Waiting.
I closed the album and pressed it to my chest and did not try to stop what happened to my face because there were too many feelings and none of them were worth stopping.
My father leaned forward and covered my hand with his.
“She’s on every page,” he said quietly. “Even the ones that aren’t filled yet.”
The room was very still.
The baby kicked. Slow and certain. Once, twice, three times.
I felt my mother at the edges of everything, warm and close, present in the way she was always present in this house that held her now.
Aunt Clara’s hand found my shoulder from behind. She did not say anything. Just stood there with her hand on my shoulder and let me feel everything without trying to move me through it faster than it needed to go.
Tessa said someone should take a photo right now and Clara already had her phone out and my father was still holding my hand and Lycian’s arm came around me from behind and the flash went off.
A new page is filled.
Just like that.