A Happy Catastrophe

As I was leaving to go back upstairs, I knew what I had to do. I stopped by the nurse’s aide’s table and I leaned down and whispered to her, “Don’t let him get away. Go sit with him.”

She laughed. “No way. He looks at me every day, and he has to come talk to me.”

“Sometimes,” I said, “it happens that he provides the spark, but then you have to make the next move. I know this might sound crazy, but I wouldn’t risk letting him get away if I were you. You and he are going to be great together.”

She looked at me, just the way people do when I’m telling them something that’s true and unbelievable, and something that’s also going to change their lives. “Okay,” she said, but I didn’t know if she really would. I didn’t want to tell her that the fate of the world depended on what she did just then, but that’s how it felt.

Janelle texted me just then, so I went back to her room.

Matt had left, although there was a smear of him lingering—a slight ruffledness to the air—so I closed the door to her room, and then I stretched out beside her on the bed, with the baby sleeping between us. I held her hand. Around us was the gentleness of the baby’s soft breathing, and Janelle’s slight sniffling.

I wanted to be there with her when the sadness came for her, when the hugeness of her gift knocked her over. I didn’t want to tell her stupid stuff like it was all going to be fine, or that she was doing the right thing. Instead, I told her the truest things I knew.

That sometimes love doesn’t look like what you had in mind.

That sometimes, even when we are doing everything right, our lives can start to look like a pieced-together bundle of problems, and we’re sure a terrible mistake was made in our paperwork and we got assigned to the wrong people.

I said there was mercy to be found in a good night’s sleep, a good cry, a hot bath, a cup of tea, and dancing alone in your room with the music turned up as loud as you can.

There is love out there for all of us, I said. Your heart may be broken right now, but as the great philosopher Blix Holliday said—the woman for whom this little baby will be named—love runs the universe. And because of that, it’s out there for us all. You just have to be braver than you want to be. The person offering it might not have been your very first choice.

I kissed her on the forehead. And I stayed there, holding her hand, until she fell asleep.

I put little Blix into her bassinet and I stood there looking at her for the longest time, blinking in gratitude as I took in the soft pink cheeks, the little fringe of dark hair, the sweet little hands that looked like tiny little starfish. So new to the world, so fresh and sweet-smelling, and with such a full life ahead of her. A life that I was going to help her launch. I’m here on the ground floor of this new, splendid life, I thought, and I was so happy to be in this moment.

So I leaned down and whispered to her that I’d come back for her tomorrow, and I would be her mama forever.

And that’s what is happening. She’s made us all a family, with her giant slobbery smiles and those wet openmouthed baby kisses. We’re not getting any sleep anymore, Patrick and I, but we don’t care. It’s May again, and in the early evenings, we sit on the rooftop with our girls, and we sing songs and tell stories, and he and Fritzie make little sculptures out of toothpicks and popsicle sticks.

The thing I now know for sure—and that Patrick is learning, too—is that no matter how dark it gets, how many times you fall down, love steps in to save us, over and over and over again. Oh, and that spirits can live in the toaster. Or anywhere you need them to be.