After the girl

Alexandria’s POV

We didn’t name her that day.

The subject came up that evening, Jamie at the island with his laptop closed for once, me on the couch in the living room with my feet up because my back had been making increasingly urgent arguments for horizontal surfaces. He brought it up carefully, the way he brought things up now, like he was aware that some topics needed a particular kind of handling.

“Have you thought about names?” he said.

“Some,” I said. “Nothing serious yet.”

“What have you thought?”

I looked at the ceiling. “Clara. Maybe. Or something older. My grandmother’s name was Edith and I know that sounds like a woman who makes jam and reads the newspaper but I’ve always—”

“Edith,” he said. Testing it.

“I know.”

“I don’t hate it.”

“You don’t have to decide tonight,” I said. “Neither do us do.”

He was quiet. “My mother’s name was Catherine.”

I looked over at him. He was looking at his closed laptop, not at me.

“You’ve never talked about her,” I said carefully.

“I know.” He turned his water glass on the counter. “She died when I was eleven. Before that she was—” A pause. Long enough that I didn’t fill it. “She was warm. Which sounds simple but in the context of my father it was an act of daily courage.”

I said nothing. Just let the room hold it.

“She used to sit with me when I was scared of something,” he said. “She didn’t ask what was wrong or try to fix it. She just sat there. Like presence was its own answer.” He looked at his hands. “I think I’ve been trying to replicate the control my father had because it was the thing I understood. But the thing I actually wanted—” He stopped.

“Was the sitting,” I said quietly.

He looked at me. Something crossed his face that was a long time arriving.

“Yes,” he said.

I thought about a girl with his eyes. About what she would learn from watching us.

“Catherine,” I said. “It’s a good name.”

“We don’t have to—”

“I know. I’m just saying it’s good.” I shifted on the couch, getting comfortable around the growing weight of twenty weeks. “Maybe something in between. Something that has room for both of us in it.”

He looked at me across the living room in the evening light and his expression was the open one, the one I’d stopped being afraid of.

“Yeah,” he said. “Something like that.”

Wednesday he went to therapy and came home quieter than usual.

Not the old quiet, not the cold silence I used to navigate around like furniture. The newer kind, the kind that meant something had been touched in the session and he was still with it. He came in, changed out of his jacket, and came to find me in the garden without being asked.

I was in the chair by the jasmine with my notebook, not writing, just sitting in the late afternoon with the heat finally becoming bearable. He sat on the low garden wall across from me.

“He asked about the baby today,” he said. “My therapist.”

“What about her?”

“About what I was afraid of.” He looked at the garden. “About the ways I might replicate things I don’t want to replicate.”

“What did you say?”

“I said I was afraid of becoming my father in the small ways. Not the obvious ones — I know what the obvious ones look like and I know how to avoid them. It’s the small ones. Treating her like she needs to earn her place in my life. Making her feel like she’s only valuable when she’s useful.” His jaw tightened slightly. “Making her feel like she’s only as good as what she produces.”

I watched him. “You said that out loud. In the session.”

“Yes.”

“That’s the work,” I said.

“It’s uncomfortable.”

“I know.” I shifted my notebook to my other knee. “But you’re doing it.”

He looked at me. “Do you think I’ll be good at it? Being a father.”

The question was so unguarded that it took me a moment to receive it properly. Jamie Grayson asking if he’d be good at something. Jamie Grayson sitting on a garden wall in the late afternoon sun admitting he didn’t know.

“I think you’ll try,” I said. “And I think trying will make you better than you think.”

“That’s not the same as yes.”

“No,” I said. “But it’s honest. And honest is more useful to you right now than reassurance.”

He thought about that. Then nodded once in the way that meant he’d received it.

Thursday I went through the room.

The nursery that had been a gym for three years.

I hadn’t planned to. I’d walked past it on the way to the linen closet and stopped in the doorway and stood there looking at the equipment and the rubber floor tiles and the rack of weights in the corner and felt the particular weight of what that room had been before it was this.

We’d painted it together. Before the miscarriage. I’d chosen a pale green and Jamie had stood on a stepladder with a roller and complained about the coverage and we’d laughed about something I couldn’t remember the specifics of anymore, just the quality of it — easy, unguarded, one of those early marriage moments that you store without realizing because you think there will be more of them.

There hadn’t been more of them.

I stood in the doorway for a long time.

Then I went and found Jamie in the study.

He looked up from his desk.

“I want to redo the gym room,” I said.

He held my gaze for a moment. He knew what room I meant. He’d always known what room it was even when we were both pretending it was just a gym.

“Okay,” he said.

“Not because I’m making a decision about anything,” I said. “Just because she’s going to need a room and that one has been empty of the right thing for three years and I think it’s time.”

He was quiet. Something moved through his expression that had no clean name.

“What color?” he said.

“I don’t know yet.”

“We could look,” he said. “Tomorrow. If you want.”

I looked at him in his study, at his desk with the city behind him through the window and the afternoon doing what afternoons do in this city, and I thought about the stepladder and the pale green paint and the thing that had been lost in that room and the thing that was going to come into it.

“Okay,” I said. “Tomorrow.”

He nodded.

I went back to the hallway and stood outside the room again and pressed my hand flat to the door.

Not a goodbye. Not exactly.

More like telling it something.

That the waiting was almost over.

That she was coming.

That the room was going to be what it was always supposed to be, just later than it should have been, and in a life that had taken a longer and harder road to get here than anyone had planned.

But here.

Still here.