Nothing else there 29

I wake up before him. His arm is across my ribs and his breathing is slow and the gauze on his knuckles has come loose, the bruise spreading purple and yellowing at the edges.

The twins shift inside me and I press my hand against the spot and feel one push back. I stay still because I want to hold this — the warmth of him, the morning, the silence that isn’t empty.

Nick’s eyes open and he finds me already looking at him and his mouth curves. “Hi,” he says, and his voice is rough with sleep.

“Hi.” I trace the edge of the gauze on his hand. “You were so cool yesterday, you know that? Standing there telling Dominic those are my sons. Like something out of a movie.”

“My hand disagrees,” he says, flexing his fingers and wincing.

“Your hand is a hero,” I say, and I bring his knuckles to my mouth and kiss the bruised skin.

His hand slides from my ribs to my stomach, fingers spreading, and when the kick comes his whole face softens.

“This one’s doing gymnastics,” he says, palm following the movement.

“That one’s going to be trouble,” I say, and he opens one eye.

“Like his mother,” he says, and I take his face in both hands because I can’t not.

“I think I love you,” I say, my thumbs tracing his cheekbones.

His mouth curves wider and his eyes open and the look in them is so warm and so certain it makes my throat tight. “I have loved you for thirteen years. I’m winning this game.”

“It’s not a game,” I say, and my voice is doing something I can’t control.

“It’s a little bit of a game.” He turns his face into my palm and kisses it. “And I’m winning.”

From the kitchen I can hear Lily singing — badly, loudly, something from a playlist she made last week — and the butter knife scraping toast and the chorus getting louder in a voice deep and dramatic that butchers every note.

“She’s been awake ten minutes and she’s already performing,” Nick says into the pillow.

“She gets that from me,” I say, and he says “You can’t sing either?” and I hit him with the pillow and he catches it and we’re both laughing and the twins are kicking and Lily is singing in the kitchen and the apartment is full of noise and none of it is the wrong kind.

Lily appears in the doorway with toast in one hand. “Are you guys being gross? Because I can hear you being gross.”

“Go eat your toast,” Nick says, pulling the blanket up like a shield.

“I’m eating it here. Front row seats.” She leans against the doorframe, chewing. “Mom, when’s Grandma getting here?”

“Noon,” I say, and she asks if she can be the one to tell Grandma about the twins and I say no and she asks if she can at least be in the room and I say we’ll see, and she takes her toast back to the kitchen with the particular confidence of a twelve-year-old who heard we’ll see and translated it correctly into yes.

We lie there for another few minutes, his hand on my stomach, my hand on his bruised hand, the morning stretching around us.

My mother arrives at twelve-fifteen because she has never once arrived when she said she would. I called her three days ago after the custody ruling, said come visit, I have things to tell you. She said what kind. I said the kind you have to see.

She comes through the door in her good coat carrying a bag of food she cooked this morning. She sees the apartment, then me, then my stomach.

Her bag slips and Nick catches it before it hits the floor, and my mother stares at him holding her food and then at me and her eyes fill.

“Aria.” Her hand reaches for my stomach. “You’re—”

“Twins, Mom. Boys. Twenty-four weeks.” She crosses the room and puts her arms around me, holding tight, fierce.

“Mom, I’m okay,” I say into her hair, and she pulls back and wipes her eyes with both hands and looks at Nick standing by the door holding her bag.

“And you are?” she says.

“Nick Carraway,” he says, and my mother’s eyes narrow.

“Dominic’s brother.” She studies him — bandaged hand, bare feet, the way he stands like someone who lives here. “You married my daughter.”

“I did,” he says, and she holds his face the way she holds everything, looking for where the surface cracks.

“Put the food in the kitchen,” she says, pointing with her chin. “Blue lid goes in the fridge.”

Nick carries the bag without argument and my mother watches him go. “He does as he’s told,” she says, and there’s something in her voice that might be approval. “That’s new.”

Lily comes out of her room like a shot and launches herself across the apartment and my mother catches her and staggers back and laughs — real, full, the kind I haven’t heard from her in years.

We eat at the kitchen table — her stewed chicken, rice, greens, cornbread. Nick goes back for seconds and Lily for thirds and my mother looks at me across the table and her face says this is what I wanted for you without her mouth moving.

Lily pulls my mother to her room after lunch and I can hear them through the wall. Nick takes Lily for ice cream later because my mother asked for thirty minutes alone with me and he understood without needing it explained.

She sits across from me at the table with her hands around a mug of tea — the same hands, the same swollen knuckles, the same gold band.

“I was wrong,” she says, and her voice has changed — lower, heavier — and I look up from my tea.

“When you sat in that kitchen and told me what he was doing — the other women, the miscarriages.” She looks at her tea and her thumb moves across the mug. “I told you to stay. I told you a roof was more than love. You listened, and you stayed, and it nearly destroyed you.”

“Mom—” I start, and my hand tightens around hers on the table.

“Let me say this.” Her eyes are bright and wet and steady. “I was scared. I looked at your life and saw everything I never had and I couldn’t see past the marble counters to the woman dying behind them.”

The kitchen is quiet around us and I can feel the weight of what she’s carrying in the way her hands grip the mug.

“I see you now,” she says. “This apartment, that man, your daughter in that purple bedroom. You smiling in a way I haven’t seen since you were twenty.” She reaches across the table and takes my hand, her skin rough under mine — lavender cream and dish soap and the years. “You found it, baby. The real thing. Don’t let anyone take it.”

“I won’t,” I say, and I hold her hand and I mean it in a way I couldn’t have meant anything three months ago, when meaning things felt like a luxury I’d lost the right to.

She squeezes my hand once — strong, the grip of a woman who has carried heavy things her whole life — and lets go and picks up her tea.

Through the window the afternoon light is warm on the building across the street, and somewhere below us Nick and Lily are walking back. I can almost hear her voice — loud, bright, rating something on a scale she invented.

My mother drinks her tea and I drink mine and the apartment holds us, and I think about the woman I was the last time my mother sat across from me at a kitchen table — and the woman I am now, carrying two boys, loving a man who catches bags before they hit the floor — and the distance between those two women is thirteen years and I’m glad I walked every step of it.