CONTENT WARNING: this bonus content contains a scene with active childbirth (non-graphic).
SIX YEARS LATER
“Push, Christine!”
“IT’S CHRIS!” I scream. I didn’t mean to scream it. But this shit is intense “PLEASE!” I scream again.
The OB, an older woman with short silver hair blinks. “My apologies. Chris.”
“I’m sorry,” I cry. Like, literally cry. “I’m a whole mess. I thought I was an expert. I’ve done this before, but I—I forgot how hard it is. I don’t want to do this. Can we cancel? Can I—”
“Hey,” Hopper says, gently interrupting my fevered blathering before the doctor can speak.
His face appears at my side. No, it doesn’t appear. It’s been there the whole time. He’s smiling. Because I just gave the doctor—who isn’t even our doctor—attitude. Our doctor’s been following my high-risk pregnancy just like the first time. I’m at high risk because of my abdominal scarring and this time, because I’m a geriatric pregnancy. I turned 35 this year. But our doctor got stuck at another high-risk birth, and everything feels like it’s gone downhill since then.
“Hey,” I whisper, crushing Hopper’s hand. I’ve already got his arm against my chest like a security blanket, our intertwined knuckles under my chin, my other hand in a vice grip around his forearm.
Hopper’s face is the picture of calm. Unlike our last go-around, when he was hyperventilating so hard they made him leave the room. This time his dark eyebrows are unfurrowed, eyes intent on mine. “You’ve done this before, right?”
I nod.
“You can do this again, okay?”
I shake my head. “I don’t believe I can, Mr. Donnach.”
His lips quirk, and I know it’s because of my wording. Under normal circumstances, he might call me grandpa. But these are not normal circumstances, and all he says is, “Then I’ll believe for the both of us.”
He’s right, of course. Whenever it comes to reassuring me, Hopper’s always right. He told me after the birth of our daughter that I needed to start a second business that involves scaling mountains. Or maybe wrestling bears.
“Don’t tempt me,” I’d said woozily, kissing our little girl’s fuzzy, dopamine-scented head for the thousandth time.
Now? He’s right again, of course.
So I go on. It feels like forever, but it’s only an hour later that I scream, Hopper’s eyes streaming with tears as he stares only at me, whispering encouragement in my ear, and give birth to our eleven pound son.
That’s right, eleven pounds.
“Hopper Junior?” Hopper whispers, and I throw him a glare that only softens when I look down at my little boy. He made the same joke with Beatrix, our daughter. But we’ve already decided on a name. We’re naming this guy August—for the month he’s born, for the meaning of the word. And because that was my father’s name, too. Well, it was Gus. But it feels right to have him be a part of us like this.
We go home the first day, and are greeted with a teenage boy holding a squealing blonde toddler on his hip.
James was fourteen when we adopted him three years ago. Now, the strapping seventeen-year-old helps our squirming two-year-old birth-daughter Beatrix onto her feet, where she comes flying at us as fast as her little legs will carry her.
We didn’t mean to have this next one so soon. And this is probably it for us. For bio-kids anyway.
I sob as I take both kids into my arms. But Bea is already shoving me aside, needing to see her baby brother.
“So little!” she exclaims in her sweet baby voice.
“Little!” I balk, still very much out of it. Still, I hold her hand as we approach the carrier Hopper’s set down on the path.
Hopper grins proudly. “He’s a behemoth. Aren’t you proud of Mama?”
Beatrix nods almost reverently.
“I wish I knew how much I weighed when I was born,” James says as he helps me up the stairs.
I squeeze James’s hand, looking into his soft brown eyes. “We can keep looking,” I say. Our eldest’s heritage is a mystery—almost as big a mystery as how he managed to maintain his calm, old soul personality despite what he’s been through; a childhood that makes mine and Hopper’s look like a blessed existence.
“Someday,” he says as he gets me settled inside. “Right now I want to hold my baby brother.”
That night, and the one after, and the one after that, after we tuck Beatrix into bed and James is sequestered in the family room with one of his many friends watching movies or playing video games, Hopper and I sit out on the couch on the back balcony off our room. From here, there’s a breathtaking view over the curve of Redbeard Cove beach of sand and rock and trees and ocean. Of what feels like the whole world, in our backyard.
This spot is our favorite place to be after the day winds down, and Hopper’s favorite position is with his feet on the stool in front of us, August sleeping on his broad chest, his arm wrapped around my shoulders. “Perfection,” he says now, his lips pressed to his son’s downy head.
We talk about the baby as we watch the approaching sunset; how different he is than Beatrix, how much the same. How we wish we’d been able to cuddle James like this. How we’re happy no matter how we get to have him.
The light on the water in the distance shimmers in pinks and oranges over the shadows of the islands, and as our conversation eases to a deeply comfortable silence, I kiss my baby’s chubby palm absently.
And a realization strikes me, as deep and true as something I’ve always known.
This is home.
Yes, this is home in the truest sense of the word: the house we built together on the ocean, a stone’s throw from our friends, with the water and trees all around us.
But it’s here, with our family complete, knowing we could be out there on the sailboat cutting through the shimmering water, or on one of the islands right there. We could be in Bolivia, like we were last year for Hopper’s latest film. Or somehow with nothing, in the backwater town Hopper grew up in where we visited to open a new park last summer. None of that matters. We could be staring at a culvert, and I would still feel at home, because home will always be this little world Hopper and I ahve created between us. Home will always be a feeling in my chest—of knowing no matter what, I belong to something—to people—to this world. That I’m wanted. That I’m loved.
“I’ll never get tired of this view,” Hopper says as the sun begins to dip between the pink-tinged clouds into the sea.
“I know,” I whisper, still feeling the magic of my little epiphany.
Hopper chuckles, the sound low in his chest. “I wasn’t talking about the landscape.”
I look over to find my husband looking not at the world around us, but at that world between us. At me, with my messy ‘I’ve got a one-month-old and a toddler’ bun. Me, with I’m sure a smear of flour on my cheek from the cake Bea and I made earlier. Me with all my imperfections, all my cracks.
“Stop,” I say softly. “I’m a mess.”
Hopper gently cups the back of my neck as he kisses my forehead. “You’re perfect,” he says. “You’re you. You’re my home.”
Stunned, I stare at him a moment longer, my eyes growing wet. Somehow I both can’t believe and fully believe that he had the same thought as I did only a moment ago.
But it’s like that with Hopper. No matter where we are or how messy things get, we’re on the same path. I think we were always meant to come crashing together, and now that we’re here, it doesn’t matter where our lives take us. Because we’ll always find our way back together.
Because that’s what home is. It’s what we made. We went through so much sorrow before we found each other. But as I lean into my love once more, I know I wouldn’t change a single thing.
***
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