Chapter 119 Three Years Later
Selene learned to run before she fully learned to walk.
Not a metaphor. She had gone from unsteady steps to a lurching determined run in the space of about two weeks, skipping the careful middle stage entirely, which Aunt Clara said was unusual and Damien said was exactly right and Lycian said nothing about because he was too busy following her around the garden making sure she didn’t run directly into things, which she had strong opinions about doing.
She was two and a half. She had her father’s nose and my stubbornness and a laugh that had not lost any of its brightness since the first time I heard it on a Thursday morning in the nursery. She had dark hair that she had recently decided she did not want brushed, a position she held with considerable conviction, and opinions about everything from which cup was the right cup to which direction they walked to the park and whether the birds were friends or strangers, a distinction she updated daily and considered very important.
She called Damien “Dam”. She called Aunt Clara ”Lala”, which Aunt Clara received with the expression of someone who found this entirely acceptable and was not going to admit how much she loved it. She called Tessa “Tessa” because she had learned it perfectly on the first try and Tessa had been unreasonably proud of this for months.
She called my father “Baba”.
He had not suggested it. She had arrived at it herself one afternoon when she was eighteen months old, sitting on the estate floor with the wooden blocks he brought specifically for visits. She had handed him a block and said Baba and he had gone completely still and then very carefully taken the block and said yes and not said anything else for a while.
He was Baba now. Permanently, irrevocably. She said it with the complete authority of someone who had named him into existence and saw no reason to revisit the decision.
The light had grown with her.
This was the thing Aunt Clara documented most carefully in the notebooks that had accumulated on the shelf in her practice room, four of them now, filled with three years of observation. The Carried Light did not stay the same. It developed with Selene the way all her other capacities developed, becoming more precise, more responsive, more specifically hers with every month.
At one year it had begun responding to other people’s emotions rather than just her own. A subtle brightening when someone near her was happy. A slight dimming when someone was distressed, as though it was registering what it perceived. The light that knows, learning to know more.
At two it had become more directed. She would look at someone with a particular quality of focused attention and the light around her eyes would warm and then she would do something, say something, or move toward someone or away, with a certainty that had no explanation in the ordinary development of a two-year-old.
She had walked directly to my father on a Sunday when he arrived looking well but carrying something difficult underneath it, something he had not mentioned, and put her small hands on his face and looked at him for a long moment and the light had been very warm and he had sat down and talked about it. He had not known she had perceived it. He had simply found himself talking.
Aunt Clara had written six pages about that Sunday.
On a Saturday in October, I stood at the kitchen window and watched the garden.
Lycian was pushing Selene on the small swing he had put up in the summer, the one that had required three attempts to hang level and a long conversation with Damien about load-bearing branches that had become something of a family story. She was in her red coat, her dark hair loose because she had removed the clip seven minutes after I put it in, her feet kicking as she swung, her face tipped back to the October sky.
She was laughing.
The sound came through the window glass, muffled but clear, that bright particular laugh that still stopped me sometimes, that I had never once taken for granted. And around her in the October light, visible even at this distance, the soft silver warmth that was simply hers, simply Selene, moving with her as she swung.
Lycian pushed her and said something and she laughed harder and said something back with great authority and he laughed at whatever it was and pushed her again.
I pressed my hand flat against my stomach.
Twelve weeks.
We had found out five weeks ago. I had stood in the bathroom on a Tuesday morning and felt the particular feeling of something arriving that you had been quietly hoping for without letting yourself hope too directly. Then I had walked into the bedroom and held the test out and watched Lycian’s face do the unmade and remade thing, the expression with no name.
He had put everything down. Looked at the test. Looked at me.
Then pulled me in and held me the way he held me when something was too large for any other response.
Aunt Clara had been the first person we told. She had looked at the test and looked at my face and opened her notebook to a fresh page and said, right then, let’s begin. And something about that, the immediate practical love of it, had made me laugh and cry at the same time.
She was already thinking about what this baby might carry.
She had not said it directly. But I had seen it in her eyes when she looked at my stomach at the first appointment, that particular focused wondering, the same expression she had worn in the early weeks of Selene’s life when she was assembling the picture piece by piece. Another Moonsilver child. Another possibility. Whatever arrived would be its own thing, its own specific person, but the wondering was already there.
We had told Selene last week.
Her response had been considered and serious. She had looked at my stomach for a long moment with that quality of attention that was so specifically hers, focused and complete, the light around her eyes warming in the way it did when she was perceiving something.
Then she had said Moon.
We had explained gently that the baby would have a real name when they arrived. She had listened to this with the polite attention of someone who had already decided and was simply waiting for everyone else to arrive at the same conclusion.
Moon, she said again.
In the garden, Lycian lifted her from the swing and she pointed at the back fence and he carried her toward the large orange cat that appeared there sometimes and that Selene considered a personal friend despite the cat’s complete indifference to this arrangement. She reached toward it, fingers spread, the light around her hand visible even from here, and the cat looked at her with the flat calm of a creature that had been alive long enough to find most things unremarkable.
Then the cat reached out and touched her hand with its nose.
It had never done that before.
Lycian looked at the cat. Looked at Selene’s lit hand. Looked up at the kitchen window and found myself watching and raised my eyebrows with the expression of a man who had spent three years discovering that his daughter continued to surprise him and had made a kind of peace with the fact that this was simply how it was going to be.
The door opened. Cold air and Selene’s voice and her feet on the floor and her hands on my legs because she always came straight to me when she came inside, that immediate return, that instinctive finding.
I reached down and picked her up. Heavier every time. Warm and solid and smelling like cold air and outside. She pressed her face into my neck and I held her against me with one arm and kept my other hand on my stomach.
The light around her warmed where she pressed against me.
Lycian came in behind her. Closed the door. Met my eyes across the kitchen.
He looked at my hand on my stomach. Looked at my face. Crossed the kitchen and stood in front of us both, his hand coming to rest over mine, his other hand on Selene’s back.
The three of us in the October kitchen with the garden going gold outside.
Selene lifted her head, looked at him, then me and pressed her face back into my neck with the satisfied weight of someone who had everything exactly where she needed it.
The baby fluttered. Faint and certain. The first movement, the beginning of a rhythm that would grow over the coming months into something as familiar as breathing.
Lycian felt it through my hand. His eyes came to mine.
I nodded.
His forehead dropped to mine.
The light around Selene warmed.
She had felt it too, I was certain of it. The light that knows, perceiving the new presence, the small life beginning twelve weeks in, already known by her sister before anyone had said a word.
We stood in the kitchen in the October light. The three of us with a fourth arriving. The garden was golden outside and Harold was full and certain at the center of it. Aunt Clara’s number is in my phone ready to call tomorrow morning when she opens a fresh notebook page and says, " Right then, let’s begin.
Still building, still becoming.
And Selene between us, is glowing softly in the October afternoon, the light that knows already knows.