Chapter 506: For All of Us

The house had not settled into anything resembling calm in eleven days, and Arianne had stopped waiting for it to. Two children under three and two who were technically old enough to know better meant mornings ran on their own schedule regardless of what anyone had planned, and today’s had already produced one spilled bowl of cereal, one missing shoe, and Lexx standing in the hallway in his pajama shirt and nothing else — already outraged about something no one had explained to him yet.

Lily found the shoe under the couch without being asked, and Leo abandoned his own breakfast half eaten to go check on Louis, who’d started up the thin, insistent cry that meant he was hungry rather than wet. Arianne had learned to tell the difference in the last week and a half. So, apparently, had a seven-year-old.

Lexx did not care for any of it. He’d spent most of his short life as the baby of the house, and the last two weeks had demoted him without consultation, a fact he registered mostly through an uptick in things he could do himself six months ago and now flatly refused to. He would not put on pants without an audience. He would not eat unless someone else’s plate was visibly more interesting than his own.

Arianne crouched to his level anyway, because it worked better than reasoning with him standing up, and held out the pants he’d rejected twice already. "You can wear these, or you can spend the day in your shirt. I don’t have a preference."

Lexx considered this like it required real thought, then stuck one leg out toward her, victory dressed up as compromise.

Aunt Estella arrived at seven fifteen exactly, the way she had every morning since Louis came home, took one look at the kitchen, and declared the whole room a disaster before putting herself in charge of it. She sent Arianne upstairs with an order more than a request, something about postpartum recovery not being permission to pretend otherwise, and Arianne, who would have argued the point with almost anyone else in the house, went.

Franz found her there a few minutes later, Lexx dressed and already forgiven downstairs, and held up two hands that were, for the first time in months, empty of anything he needed help carrying.

"It’s done," he said. "The crib. I got all the way through the instructions this time."

"No cramping?"

"One warning twinge around step nine. I stopped, made coffee, went back in." He said it like it was nothing, though she caught the satisfaction underneath, the kind he only let show when he thought no one was keeping track.

Amanda called at nine to ask if the crib had won. Arianne put the phone on speaker so she could hear Franz answer for himself.

"It’s built," he told his mother. "It only took two attempts, a coma’s worth of instructions I apparently forgot how to read, and one afternoon Arianne wasn’t allowed to watch."

"I watched anyway," Arianne said. "From the doorway. He didn’t notice."

"I noticed."

Daryll called an hour after that, with less charm and more relief in his voice than either of them were used to hearing from him.

"It’s wrapped," he said. "The last exterior went this morning, no incidents, no reshoots. Anton’s already talking about a wrap party you are under zero obligation to attend."

Franz took the call standing in the kitchen with Louis balanced against his shoulder, one hand cupped under him without having to think about it anymore, and said only, "Good," in a tone that carried considerably more than the word did.

Twelve years on film sets ended in under a minute on an ordinary Tuesday morning, and nobody in the house noticed except Arianne, who caught his eye across the kitchen and didn’t say anything about it either.

Retirement had always sounded like an ending whenever Franz used to talk about it, some far-off point he circled without ever quite landing on — and it turned out instead to be an ordinary Tuesday morning with no name attached to it, indistinguishable from any other except that no assistant called about tomorrow’s call sheet and no coordinator needed a decision by noon. Franz seemed unbothered by how small it turned out to be. Arianne suspected that was rather the point.

They moved Louis into the finished room that afternoon, all four children trailing the process like it required their supervision. Lily tested every rail of the crib with both hands before she’d let anyone put him in it, pronounced it acceptable, and helped Arianne smooth the sheet over the mattress. Leo argued the mobile needed more stars, was informed it had exactly the number Aunt Estella had made for Lexx’s first winter, and let the argument go without much of a fight.

Someone had already taped a paper letter L to the closet door, in handwriting Arianne recognized before she asked whose it was.

"For all of us," Lily said, before the question finished forming. "It’s not weird."

It was a little weird. Arianne left it up anyway.

Vincent stopped by before dinner, in the suit from whatever meeting had run long, and didn’t pretend he’d come for any reason other than the children. He found Lexx first, hoisted him onto one hip over Amanda’s running commentary about his back, and let the boy investigate his tie clip for a solid five minutes before Louis got a turn, held with considerably more care and considerably less commentary.

"He looks like Franz," Vincent said, which Arianne had now heard from three separate people in two weeks and privately thought was mostly wishful thinking applied to a blank, unformed newborn face. She didn’t say so. Some arguments weren’t worth having before dinner, and Vincent had driven forty minutes out of his way after a long day for the sole purpose of holding a baby who couldn’t yet appreciate the gesture. Arianne let that stand as answer enough.

Later, while she was deciding what dinner meant for a household this size, she found Franz already in the nursery with both twins, none of them sent there by her. He’d pulled a chair up beside the rocking one, one hand resting on its arm within reach of Louis the whole time. Lily sat in the rocking chair with Louis asleep against her shoulder, one hand cupped at the back of his head the way Franz had shown her weeks ago, adjusting it once when he told her to. Leo sat cross-legged on the floor beside them, narrating something about dinosaurs at a volume built for someone twice Louis’s size. Neither of the twins had been asked to be there. They’d decided, same as they decided most things in this house now, that certain jobs belonged to them whether anyone assigned them or not.

Lexx wanted in on it too, eventually, once he’d finished being furious about pants. He climbed into the rocking chair’s other arm uninvited, wedged himself against Lily’s side, and studied his brother’s face like he hadn’t decided yet whether to like him. Louis slept through the inspection completely unaware he was being judged.

"He’s smaller than I remembered," Lily said. "Lexx was bigger."

"Lexx has had two years to grow into himself. Give Louis a week."

"A week?"

"A week feels longer when you’re two weeks old than it does at seven." Arianne leaned against the doorframe, arms crossed, watching four children take up a room that had been empty boxes and unfinished paint two weeks ago. "You’ll understand eventually. Or you won’t, and it won’t matter."

Lily seemed to accept this as sufficient wisdom for one evening and went back to narrating the dinosaurs with Leo, correcting two of his facts and conceding a third.

That night, for the first time since Louis was born, every child in the house slept in the room meant for them. Arianne stood in the nursery doorway long enough to confirm it and no longer, because if she stayed any longer she’d start counting the nights before this one that hadn’t gone the way they were supposed to.

Edmund’s voice surfaced anyway, uninvited, the way it did on nights she wasn’t braced for it. She’ll lose Franz regardless, he’d told her across a detention center table, certain of it in a way she’d refused to let show on her face. She hadn’t believed him. She’d said so out loud and meant it. Alone in a hospital corridor months before this room existed, at two in the morning with nobody watching, she’d done the math he wanted her to do anyway — one more day Franz didn’t wake up, then another, then another, and no idea how she’d have put herself back together if he never did, let alone stayed the person the kids needed her to be. She’d never told anyone that part, not Gilbert, not Aunt Estella, not Franz himself once he was awake to hear it. She wasn’t going to start now, watching four children breathe evenly in a room that used to be nothing but boxes and unfinished paint. She’d promised herself months ago she was done doing that math.

Franz found her there and didn’t ask what she was thinking. He stood next to her instead, same doorway, same two feet of space, and let the house be exactly as unremarkable as it had any right to be.

"Louis has a room," he said. "Lexx has a room. The twins continue to share one, but that’s their choice, not ours."

"I know."

"I’m saying it out loud, is all. It took a while to get here."

"It did." Arianne looked at the crib, at the small shape breathing evenly inside it, at the paper letter crooked on the closet door because nobody had bothered to straighten it. "We got here anyway."

Franz didn’t answer that with words. He reached for her hand instead, laced his fingers through hers the way he’d done in a hospital room two weeks ago and a hundred ordinary moments since, and they stood there together until Louis stirred once, settled, and went back under without needing either of them to fix anything at all.