Part Five: The Story She Told
It came out in pieces, over the next thirty minutes, sitting on the benches in the October afternoon while the light changed and the babies slept in their alternating rhythms and Margaret provided the quiet that made talking possible.
Nora had known she was pregnant three weeks after they had finalized the divorce. She had taken four tests. She had sat in her bathroom in the apartment she had moved into — smaller than the one they’d shared, on the north side of the city, on a street she’d chosen specifically because it had no associations — and she had understood her situation with the clarity that impossible things sometimes produced.
She had not told him.
She had been going to, she said. She had written the message three times. She had his number still. She could have called.
But she had not told him because the marriage had been a thing they had both agreed was finished, and telling him felt like asking for something she hadn’t decided she wanted to ask for. It felt, she said, looking at her hands, like using the pregnancy to accomplish something the pregnancy didn’t have the right to accomplish.
“I didn’t want you to come back,” she said, very quietly, “because of them.”
He said nothing for a moment.
“I would have,” he said.
“I know.”
“That’s why you didn’t tell me.”
She looked at him. It was the first time she had held his gaze for more than a moment and in it he saw — he was familiar with this look, had always been able to read her, which was part of what had made the marriage both good and eventually unsustainable — a full accounting, clear and without sentiment. Not accusing. Just accurate.
“Yes,” she said. “That’s why.”
He sat with this.
The twins were a boy and a girl, she told him. The boy — in the yellow — was named Luca. The girl — in the blue — was Mia. They had been six weeks premature, which had added two weeks in the hospital to what had already been a pregnancy managed alone, without the presence of someone who would know to worry with her when there was something to worry about.
The apartment had been fine. The work — she had returned to the non-profit on a reduced schedule, managing what she could remotely — had been manageable. The money was tight but not impossible.
And then, twelve days ago, the boiler had failed.
The landlord had promised to fix it within forty-eight hours. That had become four days. Four days had become eight. The apartment was cold in a way that was manageable for an adult and not manageable for six-week-old infants, and the hotel she had moved into while she waited had eaten through the emergency fund she had been maintaining with the discipline of someone who knew their margin was narrow.
She had moved back into the apartment four days ago when the landlord promised the repair was done. It was not done. The temperature in the apartment last night had been twelve degrees Celsius.
“I called my sister,” she said. “She’s coming tonight. She’s driving from Łódź. But I needed to — ” She gestured at the bench. “The park is warmer than the apartment in the afternoon. The sun.”
“You’ve been sleeping here,” he said.
“Just in the afternoons. When they sleep. I can’t—” She stopped. “I haven’t been sleeping much. You don’t, with twins. And when they sleep at the same time, I just—”
She didn’t finish the sentence. She didn’t need to.
