Chapter 2 — Six Pounds, One Ounce
Stiles did not sleep.
He laid on his back in the dark with his hands folded on his chest like a man in a coffin and listened to the house. The heater came on at half past midnight and shut off at one. A car went by outside and the light off its windshield crawled across the ceiling and left. At some point after that he heard the floor creak at the end of the hall, and then the small, thin, furious sound of a baby deciding she had been patient long enough.
He was up before he decided to be.
The hall light was off and the guest room door was open a few inches with warm lamplight in the gap. He stopped outside it with his hand raised and did not knock.
"You can come in," Hope said. "You've been standing in the hallway for eleven minutes."
Stiles pushed the door open.
She was sitting up against the headboard with her knees bent and Mira along her forearm, and she had a bottle in her other hand and the duffel bag open on the floor with about a hundred things spilling out of it. Bottles. A folded pack of wipes. A stuffed rabbit with one ear chewed flat.
"I wasn't standing in the hallway," Stiles said.
"You were breathing in the hallway. It's very distinctive."
"That's a rude thing to say about a person's breathing."
"You breathe like you're about to say something." Hope did not look up. "You've been doing it since New Orleans."
Stiles came in and stood by the dresser and put his hands in his pockets.
Mira had both hands on the bottle, which was to say she had one hand near it and the other one waving, and she was making a sound in her throat between each swallow, a small, aggressive hum, like she was arguing with the milk.
"Is she supposed to sound like that?"
"Like what?"
"Like she's losing a fight."
"That's just how she eats," Hope said. "She's angry about it. She's been angry about it since the first night."
"Angry about food."
"Angry that she has to ask for it."
Stiles laughed before he could stop himself, and Mira's eyes rolled toward the sound and lost the bottle, and Hope tipped it back into her mouth without breaking rhythm.
"Sit down," Hope said. "The chair's right there. You're making the room smaller."
He sat down in the chair by the window. He put his elbows on his knees. He watched.
"Tell me about the birth," he said.
Hope glanced up.
"You want the whole thing?"
"I want the whole thing."
"It's not a nice story."
"I don't need a nice one," Stiles said. "I need the real one. I wasn't there. That's — " He stopped. Started over. "I'd like to at least know what I missed."
Hope was quiet for a second. She shifted Mira higher on her arm.
"Forty-one hours," she said.
"Of what?"
"Labor."
"*Forty-one hours?*"
"Yes."
"That's not — that's almost two days. That's two days."
"It's one day and seventeen hours, and I know exactly how many because there was a clock on the wall directly across from the bed and I looked at it approximately nine thousand times." She said it flat. "My aunt Freya had a spell ready for the pain. I told her no. Then at hour thirty I told her yes and she couldn't do it anymore, because of what I am, because by then the wolf part was up and it burns spellwork off me when I'm scared. So that was a fun conversation to have at four centimeters."
Stiles rubbed his mouth with his hand.
"There was a midwife," Hope said. "A witch. Very old, very rude, the only person in the city my father was actually afraid of. She kept telling me to stop talking and breathe and I kept telling her that talking *was* how I breathed."
"That's — " Stiles said. "Yeah, that tracks. That's a thing I do too."
"I know." Hope looked at him. "That's the part I kept thinking about."
He didn't say anything.
"Six pounds, one ounce," she said. "Nine in the morning. And she came out silent, and there were about four seconds where nobody in that room said a word, and I've never been that frightened in my entire life and I grew up in a house where people get daggered at dinner."
"But she was okay."
"She was furious," Hope said. "She just took her time about announcing it. And then she screamed for four hours."
"You said that. In the living room."
"I said it because it's the only detail I've been carrying around like a rock in my pocket." She shifted the bottle. "She screamed until the sun came up and my aunt Rebekah walked her the whole length of that courtyard about six hundred times, and somewhere around five in the morning Rebekah looked up at me and she was crying, and she said, *she's the first one of us who was ever wanted from the beginning.*"
The heater clicked on downstairs.
"And I sat there," Hope said, "and I thought: her father doesn't know she exists."
Stiles looked at the floor for a while.
"Was anyone with you?" he asked. "At the actual — were you alone in there?"
"My mother. And Freya. My father was in the hallway."
"In the hallway."
"For nineteen hours," Hope said. "He does not sit. He walked a groove in that floor. When it was over Elijah told him he could come in and he stood in the doorway and didn't move, and my mother had to say his name twice."
Stiles was quiet.
"And then what?" he said.
"Then he came over and he looked at her, and he said, *she has your hands.*" Hope's mouth moved, not quite a smile. "And that was it. That was the whole speech. From a man who has made speeches over people he was in the process of killing."
"He was against it," Stiles said. "Wasn't he. At the start."
Hope's face did not change much.
"Yes."
"How against it?"
"He didn't say it out loud for eight days." She set the empty bottle on the nightstand and turned Mira up against her shoulder and began patting her back, slow and flat-handed. "He just stopped speaking to me. Eight days. And then he came into my room at two in the morning and sat on the end of the bed and said that the world had spent his entire existence trying to take things away from him, and that he did not know how to let me hand it something this size on purpose."
"What'd you say?"
"I said it wasn't his to allow." She kept patting. "And he said, *no. It isn't.* And then he asked me what I needed."
Mira burped, enormously, into her mother's shoulder.
"And that was that?" Stiles asked.
"That was that. He's been impossible ever since, but in the other direction. He built her a crib. With his hands. He does not build things, Stiles, he *acquires* things, and he spent three weeks in a workshop on Chartres Street with sawdust in his hair pretending it was somebody else's project."
"Okay," Stiles said. "Okay, that's — that's a lot of information about a guy I've never met."
"You're going to meet him."
"Yeah, I got that."
"Soon."
"I got that too."
Hope looked at him over the top of Mira's head.
"You're not asking the question," she said.
"Which one?"
"The one you've been sitting on since the porch."
Stiles leaned back in the chair.
"Was there ever a version where you didn't come?" he said.
"Yes."
"How close was it?"
"Very," Hope said. "I had your address for two months."
He nodded slowly.
"I drove to a gas station outside Tuscaloosa and sat in the car for an hour and a half deciding to turn around," she said. "I want you to know that, because I'm not going to pretend this was some noble instant decision. It wasn't. I was terrified you'd open that door and look at me like I'd come to serve you a bill."
"I didn't."
"No," Hope said. "You didn't."
She was quiet a second.
"Do you want to hold her?"
Stiles did not move.
"She's asleep," he said. "She's — she just got to sleep, I don't want to — "
"Stiles."
"I'm gonna do it wrong."
"You're going to do it wrong for about four minutes and then you'll be fine," Hope said. "Come here. Sit on the bed."
He got up like the chair had been assigned to him by a court and sat down on the edge of the mattress.
"Arm," Hope said.
He put his arm out.
"Other one under. No, like — " she pushed his elbow up with her knuckle — "her head goes in the bend. There. Now take her weight, I'm not carrying both of you."
And then Mira was in his arms.
She was heavier than he expected and she was warm in a way that went straight through his shirt and she smelled like milk and laundry and something underneath it that was not like anything. Her head fit in the crook of his elbow with room left over. She did not wake up. She made one small sound and turned her face in toward his chest and stopped.
Stiles sat absolutely still.
"Breathe," Hope said.
"I'm gonna breathe in a minute."
"Stiles."
"I'm *working up* to breathing."
He looked down at her. There was a crease under her chin. There was a whorl in the hair at her crown that went the wrong way, the same way his did, the same way his mother used to flatten with her palm and sigh about. Her fingernails were so small they did not look real.
"She's got a cowlick," he said.
"She has three."
"Three."
"One in the back, one on the side, one that shows up when she's wet and then leaves." Hope watched him. "I stopped trying to fix them around week six."
Stiles moved his thumb, very slightly, against the blanket.
"Hi," he said.
Mira did not respond.
"That's fair," he said.
Hope pulled her knees up and wrapped her arms around them and just looked at the two of them for a while, and she did not say anything, and Stiles was aware that she was not saying anything, and neither of them fixed it.
"I'm going to be bad at this," he said eventually.
"Probably."
"Thanks."
"You asked."
"I asked in a way where you were supposed to say something comforting."
"You'll be bad at the parts everyone's bad at," Hope said. "You won't be bad at the part where you'd stand in front of a car for her. I already know that about you."
Stiles's hands went still.
Hope did not notice, or she did and did not chase it.
"You should sleep," she said.
"Yeah."
"You're not going to."
"No," Stiles said. "No, I'm really not."
"Neither am I." She pushed her hair back off her face. "Is there coffee in this house?"
"There's coffee in this house."
"Then bring her down," Hope said, "and make me some, and then you're going to tell me why there was that much of your blood on a sleeve with nothing underneath it. Because I've been polite about it for four hours and I'm out."
Stiles stood up, slowly, with his daughter on his arm, and he found that he had somehow already learned how to do it without jostling her.
"Yeah," he said. "Okay."