Chapter 12 – One Address
Nine weeks after the moving truck arrived too early, Maya went into labor.
Ray came to Hawthorn Street with an overnight bag and the same little screwdriver. He was staying with Eli in Eli’s own home.
The boy watched Nate put the hospital bag into the car.
“Do I go somewhere now?”
Nate closed the trunk and came back to the doorway.
“You stay here with Grandpa. We’ll call you. When Mom and the baby are ready, we’ll bring them here.”
“Both of them?”
“Both of them.”
Ray lifted the dinosaur book from the table.
“I was hoping you’d help me with these names.”
Eli stayed in the doorway until the car turned out of the street. Then he went back inside with his grandfather.
His sister was named Wren.
When he met her, he stood beside Maya’s hospital bed with his hands behind his back because he did not know what to do with them.
“She’s loud,” he observed after her first hungry cry.
“Sometimes,” Maya said.
He looked at Nate.
“I can still be loud sometimes too?”
Nate smiled.
“We’ll all need a little patience with each other.”
Maya showed him how to touch the baby’s tiny hand. Wren gripped his finger, and Eli looked startled, then pleased.
The first weeks at home were crowded and tiring. Wren woke during the night. A bottle leaked into the clean laundry. Nate once fell asleep beside Eli’s bed halfway through a sentence about a triceratops.
They did not handle every day perfectly. Sometimes Maya needed quiet. Sometimes Nate needed to finish one task before starting another. They told Eli what was happening instead of leaving him to decide whether he was the problem.
Ruth asked before sending a parcel. The card inside was addressed to Eli and Wren. Nate and Maya read it first and let Eli decide whether he wanted to put it on his shelf.
Ruth’s first visit would wait until Maya felt ready. They had agreed to discuss it after the first tired weeks of newborn life.
One afternoon, while Wren slept against Maya’s shoulder, Eli brought the blue box into the living room. The stegosaurus on its side had lost some color where a strip of tape had been pulled away.
“Can we fix him?”
Maya found the green crayons. Nate brought a piece of clean paper to cover the old delivery label.
Eli drew four small people beneath a roof. This time he did not rub anyone out.
He was working on the smallest face when Wren woke. Maya stayed beside him while Nate picked up the baby, and the drawing was finished with only a brief pause.
Later, Nate lifted the box and waited for instructions.
“Where does this one go?”
Eli looked at his mother, his father, and the little sister tucked against his father’s chest.
“Same place as the rest of us.”