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Helen has always been a light sleeper. Max, on the other hand, sleeps like the dead, so when she rolls over in the middle of the night a few weeks after moving in and catches the echo of a tiny cough, she lies completely still for a second, not sure what to do. The bedroom is bathed in the pale beams of fading moonlight which stream through the gap in the curtains they never fully close, because Luna's afraid of the dark. At first, the world is completely silent, but then it comes again, staccato and breathy, and it's definitely her. Frowning, Helen extricates herself from the warmth of Max's arms and pads across the floor to check.
"Feeling poorly, Lu?" She whispers, crouching down beside Luna's bed and noticing, now that she's closer, a high-pitched whistle accompanying every breath.
Luna nods and stretches both arms out towards her, which Helen vaguely remembers her doing as a baby when she wanted to be picked up. Back then, Max had tried to avoid muddying the waters between them by keeping Helen and Luna apart from each other, though he would never have admitted it, so all they had was a string of tiny accidental moments together at the hospital. She knows it's probably because Max had still been caught in the depths of trying to be everything for Luna himself, refusing to depend on anyone, but Helen still wonders—mostly when she feels the dull ache in her lower back which precedes the first wave of cramps every month—if part of it hadn't been about Luna at all. If, in some misguided act of unintentional cruelty, he'd been trying to spare Helen from what she didn't have.
She contemplates waking him. He'd be out of bed in a fraction of a second, rubbing the sleep from his eyes as he called out Luna's name to tell her 'it's okay, dada's coming'. She can't put her finger on why she doesn't. Maybe it's because she'd spent so long wondering what it would be like to care for Luna, and now that they're here she feels out of her depth and clumsy and full of self-doubt, the imaginary world where she'd slotted seamlessly into motherhood proving no match for the harsh reality of any of it. Try as she might, Helen can't shake off the nagging feeling that she has something to prove.
Scooping Luna up into her arms, she holds the back of her palm against the toddler's clammy forehead. "Let's get you a drink, sweetheart," she says, reaching down to the tiny bedside table for the sippy cup Max leaves there every night and holding it up to Luna's mouth so she can drink. When the next round of labored coughing comes, Helen feels the full force of it rack the tiny body in her arms, Luna's head lolling forwards against her chest as it becomes clear she's too tired to hold it up. It tugs at Helen's heartstrings like physical pain, forcing her to catch her breath. "Do you want dada?" She asks, her hand going to Luna's neck to keep her tired head steady as she settles two fingers in the soft hollow over her carotid, checking her pulse. No matter what Helen herself needs, it's Max who Luna probably wants in this moment, and she's not so blinded by insecurity that she could ever stand in the way of that.
To her surprise though, Luna doesn't nod, or give any kind of answer to the affirmative. Instead she wraps both of her tiny arms around Helen's neck and croaks out something that sounds like "Helen," her tears so quiet that Helen only realizes she's crying at all when she feels the hem of her t-shirt growing damp against her skin. She moves quickly, having seen enough hacking coughs in young children with terrified parents to know what this probably is, but only now understanding the feeling of helplessness they must all have been consumed by.
The bathroom light is fluorescent and severe at the best of times, so she leaves it off, instead flicking on the tiny bulb over the mirror which casts a dull yellow glow over the old white porcelain. It gives them just enough light to see by as she closes the door and reaches for the faucet over the bathtub, turning the shower on as hot as it will go.
"It's going to feel really warm in here," she says as she sits on the edge of the tub with Luna cradled in her lap, the shower curtain pulled behind them keeping them both dry. "But the steam will help your cough and make you feel better." Luna doesn't say a thing, she just slumps against Helen's chest again like a dead weight. Helen holds her up. "I've got you," she says, a lump forming in her throat.
It takes what feels like an eternity for the steam to rise up around them, making the air thick and heavy, every one of Luna's coughs and cries echoing off the dark walls and feeling ten times louder than it should. All Helen can do is rub slow circles into Luna's back and whisper 'shhhhhh' when the tears resurface so she doesn't tire herself out, until eventually, she can barely see three feet in front of her, but Luna's breathing has started to calm, her coughs coming further and further apart.
"You're doing so well, Lu. Keep taking those nice big breaths for me," Helen yawns, feeling her own eyelids growing heavier. She thinks of Max, up every night with Luna as a newborn even while he was half-dead from the combination of the cancer and the chemo as it left his system, and it's such a lonely image, so wrought with grief and exhaustion that Helen has to blink back tears of her own. He'd had to do it all by himself. Even if he'd been able to ask for help, there was no way she could have been what he needed in those weeks. She'd been too busy pushing the accident to the very corners of her mind and trying to exert control in any way she could—IVF, fundraising, running away—as she tore across the country like a woman possessed, refusing to stand still. Until, one morning in a TV station bathroom, when a single drop of blood in her underwear had flooded her with both an awful kind of relief and a sense of loneliness so overwhelming it had felt for a while like she was drowning. She'd cancelled everything she hadn't yet finished in Chicago and booked the first flight home, only for Max—freshly pulled back from the brink of death, but not quite walking among the living yet—to brush her off. Before that point, she'd been too numb to cry. After seeing him, she'd hidden out of sight alone on the roof, and cried for both of them.
The door opens, just a crack, and the steam must take him by surprise because it takes a moment for his silhouette to reappear as he slips inside and joins them. Helen's quietly grateful that it's too dark for him to see the look on her face, as she starts to put away the memories which had made their way, unwelcome, to the forefront of her mind.
"I think she's got croup," she says quietly, nodding down at Luna as if the steam-filled room wasn't enough of a giveaway.
"You could have woken me," he says, and the small part of his face she can make out in the dim light coupled with the softness of his tone make it clear that it's out of love, not accusation.
"We were okay."
Max takes a seat on the edge of the tub next to them, slipping an arm around Helen's shoulders at the same time as he cups Luna's head in his other hand, stroking her hair, gently. "She's lucky to have you," he murmurs. "We both are."
"I don't know how you did it all on your own." Helen blurts out, and it's far more direct than she'd been intending to say, the words slipping out of her grasp like water through her fingertips before she quite realizes she's said them. The implied 'especially given everything else' hangs between them as heavy as the air, and she can't take it back, so she sits with the silence until she feels his hand squeeze the top of her arm, a small gesture of comfort that he's worked out she must need.
"To tell you the truth, I can barely remember." His expression is far-away as he talks. "I was a complete mess, I was sick, I was in shock, but I knew I was all she had and I didn't have a choice, so I did it. Knowing that she needed me..." He pauses, lets the hand which had been stroking Luna's unruly mop of hair fall back into his lap and then bringing it to the base of his throat. "It was the only thing that kept me going." Ruefully, like he doesn't want to sink too far into the memories tonight, he adds, "I was making it all up as I went along, though. I had no idea what I was doing. Next time—"
They both freeze as he cuts himself off. Helen is acutely aware that they haven't had this conversation yet, so Max must be too; they've skirted around it a few times but with the chaos of the move and everything going on at the hospital, the luxury of being able to sit down onto the couch together and have a theoretical conversation about the future has been out of reach.
"Next time, eh?" She asks, not making any effort to hide the smile she can feel spreading across her face. She'd been fearful in the abstract sense—because nothing he's said or done has actually implied he didn't want another child, but she tends to spend too long dwelling on worst case scenarios—that he might not want any more children, but it's pretty clear from what she can make out of his eyes as they gaze at each other in the dim light and lay the groundwork for the conversation without any words at all, that he's already daydreaming about it. For a long second, she's able to suspend every pessimistic thought in her mind and let herself go there too.
Eventually, she pulls them both quietly out of their daydreams as her eyes settle back onto Luna. "She hasn't coughed in while," she muses. "I think it's working."
"What do you think, back to bed?"
It doesn't go amiss that he asks her, rather than just getting up, and she loves him just a little bit more for it as she nods and gets to her feet, steadying herself on the damp tiles. Max ducks behind the curtain to turn the shower off while Helen carries Luna back into the bedroom, feeling a fresh wave of tiredness wash over her as the cold air hits them. As they reach Luna's bed, Helen stoops to lower her into it, only for Luna to let out a heartbreaking whimper, her hands scrabbling for purchase on Helen's T-shirt in a panicked and frantic attempt to hold on. With the kind of ease that has previously evaded her, Helen doesn't fight it. Instead, she stands back up, holds Luna close and whispers, "How about you sleep in our bed tonight?"
Luna hums in sleepy agreement, her face calm again, tears abated.
So that's how it goes; they tuck Luna up in between them with an extra blanket round her and both lay propped up on their elbows, watching the even rise and fall of her chest as she drops back off to sleep. In the space between breaths, Helen realizes she can do this—that she and Max can do this together. It's not the easiest or the hardest night they'll share, but it's the first one they share as a family.
A long way off on the distant horizon, dawn begins to break.