“I have a car for my Barbie. But it’s pink.” She looks at Aiden, expecting him to comment on this disclosure. He scratches his head.
“Pink is good,” he says after a while. The other three giggle and go climb in Rover’s backseat. I wish I had my camera out.
“Why do you have two cars?” Anamelia continues her interrogation.
“Ah…because you’re very important.”
She grins. “You have a lot of hair for a boy,” she announces. She is used to Javier and Antonio, who have shorter hair than Aiden. I pick her up, bite her cheek and tickle her. She squeals and reaches for Aiden who has an odd look between panic and something I can’t decipher.
I secure her in the booster seat before he runs for the West Hills.
“Aiden drives us,” Anamelia commands, pointing imperiously at Aiden. Maria turns and looks at him with a smile.
“Anamelia, Aiden has to drive the pretty car so it doesn’t break,” I say and close the door before she says she’ll ride with him to help him fix it. Her face falls and she presses her dimply hand on the window like she is waving at him.
*
The moment we enter through the doors of our home, Aiden makes a beeline for the library.
“Aiden, where you going?” Anamelia calls after him.
“I have to make a call, Anamelia. It’s okay, Elisa will be with you.”
Her bottom lip juts out but she recovers quickly. “Wait! I have a phone,” she says, digging her pink Barbie phone out of her Hello Kitty rucksack. She flips it open and hands it to him.
An endless moment passes in the foyer as the girls and Aiden look at Anamelia’s outstretched hand. Then his posture straightens, he draws a contained breath, and treads back to Anamelia, taking the phone from her gingerly.
“Er, thank you,” he says.
She grins and claps. “You have to put it in your ear.”
He puts it next to his ear (“Hello, Benson”), reaches in his back pocket and gives her his iPhone. She giggles and twirls in her Mary Janes. And with that small exchange, we troop into the living room, Aiden bringing up the rear while I squeeze his hand instead of doing something stupid like dropping on one knee and proposing.
The moment we cross the threshold, the girls zoom in on my bowls of Baci and Aiden’s piano. For his part, Aiden marches to the kitchen where Cora—bless her from her brown hair to her white apron—has laid out gingerbread cookies. He goes straight for them and eats four. I bite my lip not to laugh. He is a stress eater.
Thankfully, the girls decide to slip out on the patio before Lieutenant Hale swallows Cora’s entire roasted chicken whole. They start playing in the wild meadow, tossing a beach ball around that is making the bluebirds mental. Every few minutes, Anamelia sprints back to Aiden—who has shoved his patio chaise flush against the glass wall and has erected a barricade of immigration books around himself—and shows him a worm or ladybug, demanding that he names it. (“Er, Benson?” “No, it’s a girl!” “Elisa?” “No!” “Anamelia?” “Yaaay!”)
Eventually, we sit at the dinner table, Aiden at the head with his back to the wall.
Maybe it’s the intense day crashing down on me, or the look of a table with four kids and Aiden and me on each side, but an emotion I’ve never felt before swells inside my lungs and takes over my body. The closest thing I have felt to this is happiness. I struggle for the word… Rightness—that’s what this is! A sense of life even amid the end. A life that until now, I have avoided thinking about. My own family.
I never thought I would wish for kids after the last four years. I would never want to leave them behind if something were to happen to me. But now, seeing Aiden the most tired I’ve ever seen him, surrounded by four little angels eating mashed potatoes and feeling this fierce protective instinct inside me, I see rightness. I want this. Not as a fantasy. As reality. With him. The force of the realization makes my blood pound in my ears. As with all awakenings with Aiden, it’s sudden, immediate and—I have a feeling—irreversible.
I watch Anamelia eat Aiden’s peas. He gives them gladly, trying to barter for a cookie in return. I smile. They’re so similar, despite being thirty-one years apart. Maybe his memory is propelling him back to his own childhood. In this moment, I have no doubt he will make an incredible father. Then I remember him telling me he won’t have children just so Daddy can break them. I shiver but not in fear. I shiver with loss. Because with him, I would have enough children to field the Manchester United football—umm, soccer—team.
He looks up at me. “Do you have any peas over there? We’re having a pea crisis on this end,” he says, unaware of the life-changing epiphany I just had.