Page 106 of Just Say (Hell) No
“Hi,” she said, then took Ella in her arms and hugged her hard. “How are you? Ready for this?”
“Not really,” Ella said, and Josie froze as completely as if she were playing a game of Statues.
“P-pardon?” Josie finally asked.
Ella stepped back, tried to laugh, and said, “It’s OK. Just… feels weird. It’s hard to know how I feel. Mostly, I don’t, and then later I do. You know?”
“Oh.” Josie put a hand out and braced herself against the wall. “Yeh. I know it must be like that.”
“Wait,” Ella said. “Do you mean… you thought I wasn’t going to do it? Like, I was going to change my mind? No.No.I couldn’t do that to you. I wouldn’t want to, and I… I couldn’t. Not after I promised.” This time, she was the one who reached for Josie, and Josie was crying. Not pretty actress tears, either, any more than before. Great, gulping sobs.
“Sorry,” Josie gasped. “Sorry. I’m…”
Hugh came down the passage from the back of the house. “Josie? Sweetheart?” He was holding a baby in a striped blue onesie with a blue cap on his head, and feeding him from a bottle. A baby who wasn’t as long as Hugh’s forearm, but who looked entirely comfortable there.
“Never mind,” Josie said, trying to laugh. “I didn’t even let you get all the way inside. Sorry. I’m just…”
“She thought I was backing out,” Ella said. Her eyes were glued to the baby. “I’m not. But… which one is that?”
“Noah,” Hugh said. “Greedy little bugger. Amelia’s feeding Hunter. We’ve been trying to do both at the same time. Not too hard, as they wake each other up. They don’t seem to realize they’re two bodies sometimes.”
“They’re doing… all right, then?” Ella asked.
“They’re doing awesome,” Hugh said. “Well, not sleeping so well, but other than that. Come on back and see.”
In the kitchen, Amelia sat on the window seat looking out on the sunny back garden, holding another baby, this one in a green onesie and cap. A baby whose hand was clutching her finger and whose eyes were staring into hers as he drank from the bottle she held.
“He’s an old soul,” Josie said, seeing the direction of Ella’s gaze. “He knows us all.”
“Can you tell them apart?” Ella asked. “I’m not sure I could.”
“Yeh,” Josie said. “Somehow, I can. At first I kept their hospital bracelets on, because I was worried about it, but… yeh. They’re themselves.”
Finally, Ella looked at the other person in the room. The woman in the red suit. “Hi,” she said. “You must be the lawyer. I’m Ella. And if you’ve got those papers ready… let’s do it.”
She was the same girl, Marko thought, as Ella pulled out a chair and sat down beside the lawyer, who’d stood at the door of his laundry room six months ago in her school uniform and told him she was up the duff. The same one who’d perched on the edge of an unmade bed and asked him to help her call her mum. The same girl who’d crouched between the bed and the wall, her Barbie in her fist, and waited until the scary part was over.
She wasn’t hiding anymore. She was signing her name in two places, and remembering to add the date. Nodding as the lawyer produced a second document, and signing again.
Two forms. Two babies. A decision that would have tested the maturity and the fortitude of a woman ten years older. A hand that stayed steady, a mind that could never be anything but rational, and a heart that could break into pieces and heal again.
A woman who kept her promises.
The lawyer took her papers and stood up to leave, and Hugh walked her to the door. Ella put both palms on the table, took a deep breath, and said, “So. That was… surprisingly difficult.”
“Oh, darling,” Nyree said, then sat down beside her and held her. Something Marko probably should have done.
“I’m going to go,” Ella said as Hugh came back. “In a minute. But I thought I could give you something first, Josie. For the boys. Something that, maybe, you could give them when they’re eighteen, or whenever you think they’re ready. Maybe it could show them…” Her voice wobbled for the first time. “That I loved them.”
“Of course,” Josie said, and Ella nodded, reached into her bag, and pulled out two little packets wrapped in white tissue.
She unwrapped the first, which she’d marked with aD. A greenstone pendant on a braided black cord. A stylized dolphin, leaping out of the water. The second packet, then. Another pendant, this one the tail of a whale.
“There should be something like this for Basques,” Ella said, “but there isn’t. And something for Aborigines, too, but that’s mostly inside you, I think. They’re the same, though, in heaps of ways, Maori and Basques and Aborigines, and probably Samoans, too. Living in the world, you know? Part of it, and caring about it. Seeing the stars and knowing the creatures and hearing the stories. And these seemed like the boys, to me. Like how they felt inside me, anyway. The first part of their journey.”
She touched the dolphin with a light forefinger, tracing its curve. “This one’s for Noah. For friendship and playfulness and all his liveliness. For being the one who always kept me awake at night, letting me know he was there.”
Her finger moved on to the whale’s tail, lingered there. “And for Hunter. For being the one who calmed his brother down, and calmed me down, too. For family love, and for seeing people the way they are and knowing how to reach them. Maybe that’s not who they’ll turn out to be, but that’s who they felt like. And I want them toknow,later, that I… knew them. That I listened. That I felt them inside, and I loved them.”
