Chapter 107 Building It Together
The nursery was finished on a Sunday in late April.
Not finished the way a room was finished when the last box was unpacked and the furniture was in place. Finished the way a room was finished when it finally felt like itself. When you stood in the doorway and the whole of it settled into something complete and you knew without being able to explain exactly why that nothing needed moving and nothing needed adding and it was exactly right.
Pale grey walls. Damien’s crib against the far wall, solid and smooth, the wood he had chosen warm in the afternoon. Cream curtains are moving slightly in the draft from the vent. The moon watercolor print we had found together at the weekend market, not planned, just seen and both of us stopped at the same moment in front of the same stall, which felt like enough of a reason.
The rocking chair in the corner. The lamp that would not be harsh at night. The small bookshelf with Tessa’s books arranged by size because Lycian had arranged them that way and I had not moved them because it was so entirely him that moving them would have felt like a small loss.
Aunt Clara’s notebook is on the shelf beside the books.
I had put it there deliberately. Everything I know how to do is yours, she had written on the first page. It belonged in this room. It belonged near the crib where my daughter would sleep and where Aunt Clara would come to check on her with the same careful attention she had brought to every appointment for seven months.
Thirty weeks. I stood in the doorway and looked at the room we had made and felt the weight of everything that had gone into it. Not just the furniture and the paint and the curtains chosen and re-chosen until they were right. The people whose hands had touched every piece of it. Damien’s hours in the woods. Tessa’s careful book selections. Aunt Clara’s notebook on the shelf.
Lycian appeared behind me.
He stood with me in the doorway for a moment, both of us looking at the room on Sunday afternoon. His hand found the small of my back.
“It’s right,” he said.
“Yes,” I said. “It is.”
We went in.
This was the thing about the nursery. It pulled you in. We had noticed this over the weeks of putting it together, the way we would come to add one thing and stay for an hour. Sitting on the floor. Talking quietly. The room was doing something to the quality of time inside it that made leaving feel unnecessary.
We sat on the floor now. His back against the crib, mine against the wall, our legs stretched out on the soft rug that had been the last thing added, chosen for how it felt under bare feet at two in the morning which was the specification I had given and which Lycian had taken completely seriously.
The baby moved. A slow comfortable roll, the unhurried movement of someone who had found a position they liked and was settling in.
I pressed my hand against the roll. Felt it continue under my palm, long and deliberate.
“Ten weeks,” Lycian said.
“Ten weeks.”
He looked at the moon print on the wall. At the lamp in the corner. At the crib, his hands and Damien’s hands had assembled on a Wednesday afternoon with a level of focused male concentration that I had watched from the doorway with considerable affection.
“I used to think about what kind of father I would be,” he said. Not looking at me. Looking at the room. “When I was younger. Before everything. I had a very clear idea of it. Controlled. Capable. The kind of father who always knew the right thing to do.”
I waited.
“I don’t think that anymore,” he said.
“What do you think now?”
He was quiet for a moment. The curtains moved. The afternoon light shifted across the floor in a slow long stripe.
“I think I’ll make mistakes,” he said. “I think there will be moments I don’t handle well and things I don’t understand and days when I have no idea what I’m doing.” He looked at me. “And I think that’s completely different from what I used to imagine and also completely fine.” His hand moved to my stomach. “Because she’ll know. Whatever I get wrong, she’ll know that I’m there. That I’m choosing to be there every single day.” He paused. “That’s what matters. Not the capability. The choosing.”
I thought about my father. About the years he had not been there, not by choice, by circumstance, by fear, and the impossible position he had been placed in. About the man he was now, showing up every two weeks with food and the photo album and the particular presence of someone making up for lost time without ever saying that was what he was doing.
Choosing, every Sunday, every visit, every time he walked through the door and took Selene, took our daughter before she was even born, into the space of his attention and held her there like she was the most important thing in the room.
Which she was.
Which they all made her.
“You won’t be doing it alone,” I said. “She has Aunt Clara who gave her whole practice back just to make sure she arrives safely. She has Damien who built her crib and will probably build her approximately fourteen other things before she’s two. She has Tessa and my father and the whole pack.” I looked at him. “She is the most prepared person who has ever arrived.”
He smiled. The real one. The private one.
“She is,” he said.
The baby kicked. Sharp and sudden. Right against his palm.
He went still. Then laughed, the surprised real kind, the one that came before he could manage it. She kicked again and he laughed again and I watched his face do the thing it did, unmade and remade, refusing to be ordinary.
“She heard you,” I said.
“She always hears,” he said. He looked down at my stomach with an expression that had no name. “I know you’re listening,” he said quietly. To her. “I know you understand more than we think you do.” His hand pressed gently. “You’re coming into the best possible version of everything we could build for you. I need you to know that before you arrive.”
The room was very quiet around those words.
Outside, the April afternoon was full and bright. The garden below the nursery window is green and growing.
Inside the room we had built held us all three in the afternoon light, the crib and the curtains and notebook on the shelf and the moon on the wall and ten weeks between now and the moment I still could not fully imagine.
I thought about Aunt Clara standing in her clean room with steady hands doing the work she had been given back. About what she had said at the baby shower. Everything I know how to do is yours.
My daughter was coming into a world full of people who had fought their own battles and survived their own losses and came out the other side choosing to pour everything they had into her arrival.
That was nothing.
That was everything.
“Ten weeks,” I said again.
Lycian covered my hand with his on my stomach.
The afternoon felt warm and unhurried, the way good things moved when nothing was chasing them.
We stayed on the floor until it was gone.