Chapter 502: Everything He Missed

The second waking came easier than the first, which was the only reason Franz trusted it enough to ask for anything at all. Someone had raised the head of the bed sometime while he slept, high enough that he no longer had to hold his own neck up to take in the room, and the twins had reclaimed their spots on either side of him like they’d never left, Leo narrating something about a science project with a level of detail that told Franz he’d been rescued from having to talk much himself.

"Where’s your grandfather?" Franz asked, when Leo finally paused for breath.

"Getting Grandma coffee. She wouldn’t stop crying long enough to make it herself." Lily reported it the way she reported everything lately, careful and exact, like getting the facts right was the one thing she could control. "I want to show you my project too, but Leo says you’re supposed to rest."

"I can rest and look at a project." Franz found his voice held together better this time, thinner than it should have been but no longer costing him the way it had that morning. He let a beat pass, weighing how much of himself he actually had to spend, then asked the question he’d been circling since he first understood the number six months belonged to him now. "Where’s Lexx?"

The twins traded a look that told him this required an adult.

"He’s with Aunt Estella." Leo said it slowly, the way he’d say something he wasn’t sure was allowed. "He walks now. He can say words too, not just Dada."

"He walks."

"Really fast," Lily added, with the air of someone delivering a warning. "You have to watch him or he gets into everything."

Franz let that sit a moment, another piece of the six months landing in a way he hadn’t braced for. He’d left a baby who could barely sit upright without a hand behind him. The boy the twins were describing now had learned to stand, to walk, to talk, all of it happening somewhere Franz hadn’t been present to see any of it start.

"Can somebody bring him in?"

Amanda appeared in the doorway before either twin could answer, a phone in her hand and Vincent a step behind her carrying two cups of coffee he hadn’t gotten to drink. "Estella’s already on her way up with him. She’s been keeping him three doors down so the noise wouldn’t wake you before you were ready."

"I’m ready."

Amanda studied him a moment, the same assessing look she’d given him since he was small enough for her to fix his collar without asking, and whatever she found seemed to satisfy her. She stepped back into the hallway and called Aunt Estella’s name, and it wasn’t thirty seconds before small, quick footsteps announced themselves ahead of anyone adult-sized.

Lexx stopped in the doorway first, one hand fisted in the fabric of Aunt Estella’s skirt, and studied the room the way any stranger might, deciding whether it was worth the trip inside. He was dressed for a nap that had been cut short, a soft gray romper with a dinosaur stitched across the front and one sock missing, his hair sticking up on one side the way it did when he’d been lying down. He was taller than the picture Franz carried behind his eyes — sturdier through the legs, that same hair grown past where it used to curl at his ears — a whole different child standing where the last one had been. He didn’t run to the bed. His eyes went from the twins to Amanda to the man in it, cautious, unconvinced, and Franz felt that absence land harder than the weight loss or the useless arm or any of it.

"Hey, buddy." Franz kept his voice low, careful not to spend more of it than the moment could hold. "It’s me."

Lexx didn’t move. Aunt Estella crouched down beside him, one hand at his back. "That’s Daddy, sweetheart. He’s been sleeping a long time, but he’s awake now."

"Dada?" Lexx said it like a question aimed at Aunt Estella rather than at Franz, testing whether the word applied to the man in the bed at all.

"That’s right." Aunt Estella didn’t push him forward, only stayed crouched beside him and waited, unhurried, the way she’d waited out every one of the twins’ hesitations before this one. "You can go say hello. He’s missed you."

Lexx let go of her skirt one finger at a time, and crossed the last stretch of floor on his own, small steady steps that had a toddler’s wobble built into them, both hands finding the edge of the mattress before he tried to climb. Franz reached down with the arm that answered and helped him up, and the weight of him landing against Franz’s chest, solid and real and heavier than any memory Franz had of holding him, undid something in his own throat he hadn’t expected to have to manage in front of an audience.

"Dada," Lexx said again, more certain this time, patting at Franz’s jaw with an open palm the way he apparently patted at everything these days, and Franz held on with the one arm that worked and let the boy’s weight ground him to the bed in a way nothing else in the room had managed yet.

"I’m sorry I missed it." Franz said it low, meant for no one but the small, warm weight against him. "All of it. Walking. Talking. I missed the whole thing."

Lexx, uninterested in apologies he had no framework for yet, grabbed a fistful of Franz’s hospital gown and tugged, already bored, already looking for the next thing to investigate.

Running footsteps reached the hallway before Franz had finished laughing at that, quick and uneven in a way that didn’t match anyone already in the room, and Gio’s voice carried ahead of them both. "Slow down. He’s not going anywhere. Slow down, Arianne, you’ll—"

She was already in the doorway by the time Gio caught up to the sentence, one hand braced against the frame, breathing like she’d taken the stairs instead of whatever elevator the private wing actually had, and for a full second neither of them said anything at all, the twins and Lexx and the whole rest of the room going somewhere neither Franz nor Arianne had the attention left to track.

"Hi," he said, because it was the only word that fit through the space in his chest big enough to let anything out.

She crossed the room the way Amanda had, fast and without any of her usual calculation in it, and when her arms came around him she was already crying, harder than he’d ever once seen her cry in three years of marriage, like she’d rationed the sound out in careful pieces for six months and finally let herself spend all of it at once. Franz held on with the arm that worked, and it was the press of her body into his that told him first, a shape that hadn’t been there the last time he’d held her, round and unmistakable against his side.

He pulled back enough to look down between them, then up at her face, and whatever he’d expected this reunion to hold, it hadn’t been this. "Arianne."

"I know." She almost laughed, wet and unsteady, watching him do the same math she must have done a hundred times alone in this room. "It’s a lot to land on you the same day you woke up."

"How far along?"

Arianne pulled back just enough to look at him, her face wrecked in a way she’d have hidden from anyone else in this family and hadn’t bothered hiding from him. "Twenty-eight weeks."

Twenty-eight weeks. Franz sat with the number a moment, not fully believing it even with his hand a few inches from proving it, a grin pulling at him that had nothing to do with guilt at all, before the rest of the math caught up to him and turned it over into something heavier — her finding out alone, waiting alone, carrying every week of it in a chair beside a bed that gave her nothing back. "You found out and I wasn’t here for any of it. You’ve been doing this whole thing by yourself."

"I wasn’t by myself." She said it plainly, no room in it for the comfort he’d braced to have to give her instead of take.

"You shouldn’t have had to carry it without me at all." Franz kept his eyes on hers, needing her to hear the rest of it as much as he needed to say it. "I’m sorry. For all of it. For not being here when you needed someone to be scared with you instead of for you."

"I was scared plenty. I just didn’t get to do it in front of you." Something in her composure gave way for the first time since she’d crossed the room, a crack she let him see instead of smoothing over the way she would have for anyone else in the building. "There was a night early on I thought I was losing it before I’d even had the chance to tell you it existed. Gilbert sat with me until I could breathe right again. I’m not telling you that to make you feel worse. I’m telling you because you asked, and because I’m done being the only one who carries it now that you’re back to hear it."

"You didn’t do this to me." Arianne took his hand, the one that worked, and pressed it flat against the curve of her stomach like she needed him to feel it as proof rather than take her word for it. "You’re here now. That’s the part I get to keep."

Franz let his hand stay where she’d put it, something moving under his palm that hadn’t existed the last time this body had been his to know, and understood, with the twins gone hushed and Lexx already climbing back down off the bed to investigate the coffee cups Vincent had abandoned on the side table, that whatever the next six months asked of him, he intended to be present for every hour of it this time.