Page 106 of Knights Like These
She makes the little chirp she does when she’s about to wake up. Her mouth purses. I rub my thumb in a slow circle on her back, and she settles.
I’ve done this before. The twins were preemies—five weeks early, and I lived in the NICU for two weeks while Bree healed from the C-section and we figured out how to be parents through plexiglass. I held them through hospital gowns and arm wraps,and the constant beeping of monitors. I learned how to feed a baby who couldn’t latch yet. I learned how to swaddle one-handed because the other hand was always supporting a head.
So yeah. I’ve done this. I know how to hold her. I know that the noise she’s making right now is fine, and the noise she made twenty minutes ago—the high one in her throat—was the noise that meanssomething is happening to me and I’d like an adult to acknowledge it.
I acknowledged it. We’re good.
The door cracks open, and my mother slips in, her purse over one arm and a coffee in the other. She sees Sydney asleep first. Then me. Then the baby on my chest, and her face does the same thing it did when she met Lily and Luke—her eyes go shiny, and her mouth tucks in at the corners like she’s trying not to cry.
“Oh, son.”
“Shh. Syd just fell asleep.”
She crosses to the bed on careful feet, sets the coffee on the rolling table, and leans down to look at Eden. I tilt her a little so she can see the baby’s face—the round cheek, the dark lashes, the corner of her mouth that’s still smushed into my shirt.
“Archer.”
“I know.”
“She’s so—”
“I know, Mom.”
She presses her hand over her mouth and doesn’t say anything for a minute. Sydney’s mom is on a flight from Minneapolis right now, due in around six, and my dad is in the hallway because he stepped out to call my brother. My mother stands there, looking at her granddaughter like she could burst with pride.
“Your father is going to lose his mind.”
“He already did. In the hallway. Twice.” I could hear him from here.
“What’s her middle name? You haven’t told me.”
“Sydney didn’t want to say until everyone was here.”
“Archer Daniel.”
“What?”
“Tell me her name.”
“Mom.”
“I am the woman who carried you. Tell me her middle name.”
I look down at Eden. Her eyelid twitches. The little fist on my collarbone uncurls slightly and recurls, and I think about Sydney, nine months pregnant, still teaching hip-hop to seniors and beautiful as ever.
I picked the middle name. Sydney let me. She said she’d pick the first one and I could pick the second, and I chose without telling her until the night before the induction.
“Eden Margaret,” I say.
My mother goes very still.
“Oh, Archie.”
“After Grandma.”
“You—”
“She would’ve loved Sydney, Mom. You said it yourself. So I—” I clear my throat. “So yeah. Margaret. After her.”
