Part Four: Waking
He sat on the bench opposite and waited.
His mother sat beside him, close, the way she had sat close to him during the difficult things of his childhood — not speaking, not requiring him to speak, simply present in the way that presence itself was a kind of help.
The baby in the yellow wrapping made the sound again, louder this time, and this time it crossed whatever threshold separated the sound from actual distress, and Nora opened her eyes.
She was disoriented for a second — the particular disorientation of someone whose body had given out without warning, who woke not knowing exactly where they were — and he watched her remember, in sequence: the park, the bench, the babies, and then she sat up with the immediate alertness of a mother whose sleeping brain has registered a sound before the waking brain has caught up.
She reached for the baby in yellow. She didn’t see Adrian yet.
He gave her a moment.
She soothed the baby — a practiced movement, automatic, the kind of thing the body learned — and settled it against her, and then she pushed her hair back from her face with her free hand, and she looked up, and she saw him.
The expression on her face was the most complicated thing he had seen in recent memory. It moved through several states in a very short time: shock, recognition, a flash of something that might have been fear or might have been something else, and then a kind of settling into a careful, guarded version of ordinary. The expression of someone deciding very quickly how much they were going to show.
“Adrian,” she said.
“Nora.”
A pause.
“This isn’t—” she started.
“I was walking with my mother,” he said. “We happened—”
“I know. I’m not—” She stopped. Started again. “I wasn’t planning this.”
“I know.”
His mother leaned forward slightly. “Hello, Nora. I’m sorry to startle you.”
Nora looked at Margaret with something that was unmistakably genuine — a brief unguarded moment of something softer than what she’d shown Adrian. “Hello, Mrs. Voss. I’m sorry. I just needed — I don’t usually — ” She stopped. She looked at the bench, the babies, her own clothes, and the full picture of what he had found her in reached her expression. She didn’t look embarrassed exactly. She looked exhausted past the point of embarrassment.
“How old are they?” Margaret asked.
Nora looked at her for a moment.
“Six weeks,” she said.
He did the arithmetic one final time.
