THE SECOND MOON

Chapter Four - We Can Do This

The apartment on Creswell Street cost four hundred and twenty dollars a month and smelled like the previous tenant's cigarettes no matter how many times Maya opened the windows and scrubbed the cracked walls.

It had one bedroom, a bathroom with a showerhead that ran hot for exactly six minutes before turning cold, a kitchen the size of a large closet, and a living room that fit a second-hand sofa, a second-hand coffee table, and one largish second-hand crib pushed against the wall because there was nowhere else to put it.

They had painted the wall behind the crib yellow. It had taken three coats to cover the water stain underneath.

It was theirs.

Maya sat on the floor beside the crib at two in the morning with her back against the wall and her knees pulled up, listening to both her children cry. Lucas had started first with the sharp, insistent cry that meant hunger. The sound of him had woken Lily, and now they were going in stereo.

Maya had fed Lucas twelve minutes ago and Lily twenty minutes before that. She had not slept more than two consecutive hours in eleven days, and she was eighteen years old and so tired that she could feel it in her teeth.

She picked up Lily, but Lily kept crying.

"Okay," Maya whispered. "Okay, okay."

She stood and walked the four steps to the window and back, using the gentle motion and soft shushing the nurse at the hospital had shown her. Lily's crying dropped half a register but did not stop, and Lucas was still going.

Outside on Creswell Street, a car alarm started.

Maya stopped in the middle of the yellow-walled living room and closed her eyes for one second. Her throat tightened almost immediately, so she opened them again and kept moving.

If she started crying, she was not sure she would stop, and there were still two babies who needed something from her.

She heard Drake's key in the lock at two-seventeen.

The door opened, and he came in still wearing his work clothes from the warehouse. His heavy canvas shirt was wrinkled, his hair was flattened on one side from the cap he wore during his shift, and there was gray dust along one shoulder.

He looked at Maya first. Then he looked at Lily in her arms and Lucas in the crib.

He did not ask what had happened, how long they had been crying, or whether she had tried the swaddling blanket his mother had suggested.

He dropped his bag beside the door and crossed the room.

"Give me Lily."

Maya handed her over before pride could get involved.

Drake tucked Lily against his chest, and Maya sat down on the sofa and put her face in her hands. She was not crying. She was only stopping for a second and putting her face somewhere dark and quiet while somebody else carried part of the weight.

Behind her, Drake started walking.

During the first week after the twins came home, he had held the babies as if they might break if he moved the wrong way. He had been too stiff and too careful, and every strange sound they made had sent him looking at Maya like he expected her to know what it meant.

He did not move like that anymore.

Now he walked a slow circuit between the refrigerator and the window, adjusting Lily against his chest every few steps.

Under his breath, he started talking to Lily. Maya lowered her hands and listened. He was telling her about basketball.

Of course he was.

"Your problem," Drake murmured, "is that you're not setting your feet."

Maya stared at him.

Lily continued crying, although not as loudly.

"You can't just throw yourself at the basket and hope for the best. That's not a plan."

Maya's mouth twitched.

Drake kept walking.

He told Lily about the gym on game nights, about the smell of floor wax and rubber, the sound of sneakers during warmups, and the strange electric feeling that moved through a crowd when everyone decided something important was about to happen.

He spoke to her in the same quiet, serious voice he used for anything that mattered, as if a two-week-old baby might have opinions about pick-and-roll defense and deserved to have them respected.

Lily stopped crying.

Maya lifted her face completely from her hands.

Drake stood by the window with Lily against his chest, her head tucked into the curve of his neck. He was still talking, although now he had moved on to footwork.

Outside, Creswell Street carried on with its two-in-the-morning life. Orange light from the streetlamp stretched across the window, a siren sounded somewhere in the distance, and the car alarm continued complaining to nobody in particular.

Lucas had gone quiet too.

Drake turned and noticed Maya watching him.

"What?"

"Nothing."

"That's never true."

She shook her head.

He crossed the room and sat beside her with Lily still resting against his chest. Maya leaned into his shoulder before she had time to decide whether she wanted to.

Inside Drake, Ronan had gone completely still. It was not the restless stillness of a wolf being restrained. This felt older and deeper, and Drake understood exactly what Ronan felt as Lily slept against his chest.

She was theirs.

His arm tightened around Lily by the smallest amount.

Maya did not notice.

Drake's work shirt smelled like sawdust, sweat, and cold air from the loading dock. There was a bruise along his forearm that she had not seen before. It was dark and wide, and it looked like the kind of bruise that came from catching something much heavier than one person should have tried to hold.

Maya touched it.

"The bruise."

"Loading dock thing."

"That isn't an explanation."

"Heavy crate."

"You dropped it?"

"No."

"Then what happened?"

Drake looked at the bruise. "Didn't drop it."

That answer told her enough.

She ran her thumb once along the edge of the bruise.

He let her.

"Long day?" she asked.

"Mmm."

"What does that mean?"

"It means I don't want to talk about pallets."

"Fair."

They sat together in the yellow-walled living room with both of their children quiet for the first time in hours. Outside, the city kept moving without caring whether they made rent, whether the babies slept, whether Drake's arm hurt, or whether Maya could remember the last time she had finished a shower without someone crying before she got out.

Maya looked at Lily.

Her daughter's tiny fist had closed around Drake's shirt, and she held on with the absolute certainty of someone who had not yet learned that people could leave.

"I don't know what I'm doing," Maya said.

"Neither do I."

"That's not comforting."

"I know."

He turned his head and pressed his lips briefly to her hair.

"We're figuring it out."

"We've been figuring it out for months."

"Yeah."

"At some point we have to actually know."

Drake shifted Lily carefully when she made a small sound.

"Probably."

Maya waited.

"But not tonight," he said.

She looked at her daughter's face in the orange light coming through the window. Lily was impossibly small, with soft lips, dark lashes, and one hand still wrapped around Drake's shirt as if the possibility of him not being there had never entered her mind.

Maya thought about her father's face the morning after she had told him she was pregnant and how long it had taken for the grief in his expression to become something else.

She thought about her mother arriving three days later with a casserole dish and saying nothing about what had happened. Her mother had put the food in the refrigerator, washed the dishes in the sink, and held Maya for a long time before leaving.

Then Maya thought about the scholarship.

She remembered Hayes in the gray suit and the folder closing in his hands. She remembered Drake saying no.

She thought about her friends, who had texted often during the first few weeks after the babies came and then gradually texted less. They were still going to parties, games, and school events. They were still complaining about homework, teachers, parents, and all the ordinary disasters of being eighteen.

Maya could not remember the last time any of them had called.

Then she looked at Drake.

He was eighteen years old, exhausted from a warehouse shift, and sitting beside her with a bruised arm and roughened hands. It was after two in the morning, and he was holding their daughter against his chest after spending the evening lifting things that were too heavy.

He had lost basketball, but some part of it still lived inside him strongly enough that he had given it to Lily without even thinking about it.

Maya swallowed.

"We can do this."

Drake looked at her.

For a moment, he did not answer. Then he looked down at Lily, and Ronan stirred once inside him.

"Yeah," Drake said. "We can."

He sounded tired and scared, but he said it like someone who had already decided to keep going whether life became easier or not.

Maya closed her eyes against his shoulder.

In the crib, Lucas made a small sound and settled again.

Outside, the car alarm finally stopped.