My son stayed with me. In the apartment first, while the legal process moved, and then in the new home I found six weeks after leaving the hospital, a place with good light in the mornings and a balcony that looked out over the city and a room that I painted myself over two weekends while he slept in a carrier on my chest. Six months later I stood on that balcony in the early morning holding him while the city below us was still mostly quiet.
He had grown heavier in a way that still surprised me sometimes, the continuous fact of him, the way he changed incrementally and constantly and was always exactly himself. I adjusted his weight against my shoulder and he turned his face toward me and made a small sound of contentment. My phone buzzed once on the railing beside me.
Final settlement approved. I read it. Then I set the phone face down and looked out at the morning.
I thought about the hospital room and the clock and the three minutes. I thought about Martin answering on the second ring and the sound of his voice shifting when I said yes. I thought about my mother’s letter, the one in her careful handwriting about the difference between showing your hand and holding it, the one I had read so many times that I no longer needed to read it to hear her voice.
I kissed my son’s forehead. “Let’s go out,” I whispered. We took the elevator down and walked through the lobby into the morning air.
The light was the particular gold of early hours and my son looked at everything with the absolute focused attention of someone for whom the world is still entirely new. A bus went past on the street below us. We watched it go.
We walked in the other direction. Forward, on a path that finally, completely, without condition or debt or performance, belonged to us.
