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Timothy realized he had read the page of his history textbook four times without understanding a word of it. He sighed, flipping it closed and lying down on the sofa. It was getting late, the house hushed. Dad was out on a call, Angela had gone to bed, and he could hear Mum singing softly to the baby, who had stopped crying a few minutes ago.
It was a song he remembered her singing to Angela, though not, he thought, something that had been sung to him. Her songs were familiar and unfamiliar like that, and sometimes he wished he could better remember some of the songs Mummy used to sing, so that his siblings could have those, too. Probably he could ask Dad, or Granny Parker; they might remember. But he always felt a little strange about it, so he didn’t. There was one about a piper, and Mummy would change the name to make the piper called Timothy. With his eyes closed in the quiet house, he could almost hear it, but then it got all mixed up with Mum’s song about someone bringing dreams to the baby.
He supposed he should stop thinking of him just as “the baby.” He had a name. But he’d just been “the baby” for all those months of gestation, and Timothy suspected Mum and Dad had been half afraid the whole time that he would never manage to be born in the first place, and potential names would just make that harder.
Timothy had been comparing a lot to when Angela first came home. She was Angela immediately, as he remembered, but maybe that was just because there wasn’t a lot of concrete planning for her, specifically, before she got here. No speculating about the growing belly, no uncertainty about whether it would be a brother or a sister, no Mum gone to hospital for weeks while everyone tried to pretend everything was alright. She just arrived, all at once, and she was his sister Angela, and he loved her, all at once and ever since.
With his brother, everything has been different, and he’s been rubbish at working out why. Mum and Dad were over the moon, Angela was delighted and fascinated by the baby, and Timothy was happy, really. He just…didn’t always feel happy, and he thought things would change as the baby got more familiar and things settled a bit. But it had been a couple of weeks, everything still felt out of place, and he was starting to worry that it might stay that way.
At first he’d been excited about the things he might be able to do with his little brother; he could teach him to play cricket and chess, and watch while he read all of Tim’s favorite comics for the first time. Then, of course, it occurred to him that he would be off to university before the baby was even Angela’s age, that he might scarcely know him at all.
Already Angela and the baby were “the little ones,” and the dynamic of their family that before had been parents and children was now parents, little children, and then him, neither here nor there. He wasn’t sure why the baby had disrupted all of this when Angela hadn’t. Maybe the baby felt like he was just Mum and Dad’s; when Angela arrived, she belonged to all of them.
He opened his eyes and shut off that line of thinking as he heard Mum come into the sitting room. She glanced at the chair piled up with clean but unfolded nappies and baby vests, and instead tapped his stocking feet where they rested on the arm of the sofa. “Share, please?”
He grinned at her and pulled himself up to sit, making room for her on the sofa and refraining from a teasing comment lest he find himself folding nappies. “All well?” he asked.
“Mm, for the moment, yes.” She tilted her head against the back of the sofa, pulled off her glasses, and rubbed the bridge of her nose. She hid a yawn behind her hand, which made him yawn, as well. She looked at him. “Has he been waking you up when he cries at night?”
He considered whether to tell her. “Not the baby,” he confessed, “but Angela has been.”
“Angela?” Mum was startled.
“She’s still getting used to being in her own room. When she wakes up she comes into mine.” It would worry Mum, he knew, but he also figured she would find out eventually and be annoyed he hadn’t told her.
“Oh, no, and here we thought she’d been adjusting so well! Dearest, you know you can send her in to us. She’s not your responsibility.”
“I know,” he admitted. But how to tell her the rest. That she started doing this at Granny Parker’s when Mum and Dad were in South Africa, not just sitting at the end of his bed waiting for him to wake up like she was doing lately, but clinging to him in the middle of the night, crying for their parents. That once or twice, when Mum had been in hospital and he’d awakened to dreadful dreams of things that happened when mothers went into hospital, he’d been the one to sit by his sister’s bed, promising to be there for her, no matter what. “She’s just worried about making noise and waking him up,” he said, which was also true, so far as it went.
She frowned, and he suspected she knew he was holding back. He expected her to ask more about Angela, but instead she reached out and tugged lightly on the sleeve of his jumper. “And how are you doing with all of these changes?”
He felt his mouth drop open in surprise before he could catch it. His instinct was to pretend everything was fine, but she’d already seen through him and gave him a look that told him so. He sighed, defeated and relieved. “It’s only that—“ he paused, thinking of the weeks at Granny Parker’s, the weeks of Mum in hospital, the house move, the baby. “So much has happened. The whole year.”
“Yes,” she agreed.
When she had been in hospital, Dad had assured him that the baby wouldn’t change their family. Tim hadn’t really believed him. He’d pointed out that he would change, but so would they all. Everything always changed, and if that had seemed a little philosophical over a beer and darts with his father a few months ago, tonight it felt more like a cold knot in his stomach.
He didn’t know how Mum managed to see all that in his face, but apparently she did. Her face went soft like it did when she wanted to hug him, and she tugged again on his sleeve. “Are you too old to indulge your mum in a cuddle?”
He smiled weakly as he let himself tip over on the sofa to lay his head in her lap, not letting himself think too hard about her question. He certainly thought himself too old, most of the time. He’d had a bad stomach virus more than a year ago, and Mum had sat up with him half the night on the bathroom floor while he’d been sick; that was the last time he’d let her do anything like this. But for now, she smoothed his hair back from his forehead, and he thought of all the times she did this years ago, when he would come home exhausted from walking in his calipers and angry that he had to, and she would sit with him on the sofa, just like this. Involuntarily, he clutched the fabric of her dressing gown in his hand.
“Oh, my grown up wee boy,” she murmured. “You know none of this changes my relationship with you and Angela, right? I’ve tried to be very intentional and reassuring with her, but I fear I may have taken your understanding for granted.”
He did understand, but was also caught up by a pang that told him he might have been worried anyway. “I know,” he said. He tried to think of how to put it. “I guess I just thought we were really good and really happy, and everything was settled and how it was supposed to be.”
It had taken so long, too, he thought. He tried to think back to what “normal” and “settled” might have been, before Angela, before they all properly became their family, and he couldn’t. There was the time when Mum was becoming part of them, and she and Dad were upset because they couldn’t have a baby, and before that he was sick, and before that Mummy was dead, and before that she was sick, and before that…he didn’t remember a lot of before that. “And now it’s all changed, and you’ve got your miracle baby, and I don’t know how we all fit yet. I know you still love us just the same. But it’s still all different.” The words came tumbling out all in a rush, things he hadn’t intended to say out loud because he didn’t want to hurt her.
The rhythm of Mum’s hand stroking his hair didn’t falter, but her other hand squeezed his shoulder, just a little. “Oh dearest,” she said, half as a sigh, and it reminded him of when he was first out of his calipers, trying to be a normal boy again, and he could tell she wanted to hold him tight and make everything better, but it wouldn’t work, and he wouldn’t let her anyway.
She was quiet for another moment. “First of all,” she began, “all three of you are my miracle children. I’ll never forget, in those months of falling in love with your father and trying to discern what I should do about it, the realization that I didn’t just want to be a mother, I wanted to be your mother.”
He swallowed. Looking back, he realized he hadn’t considered any of that from her perspective. They talked about it a lot, once she and Dad were engaged, but it was usually about how she wasn’t trying to take Mummy’s place, and it was important that he still remembered Mummy. He’d been entirely focused on working out what it meant to want both Mummy and her. He hadn’t seen, then, how badly she wanted him, too.
“Then,” Mum continued, “just as I thought I would be your mother, we almost lost you, and I’ve never been more terrified in my life, before or since.” He had never known that, and it sobered him. “And then each of your siblings, in turn, was another child I thought I’d never be able to have. All three of you.”
He nodded against her lap. Everything she said made sense, if he had thought about it, but lately the things he knew and the things he felt didn’t always match up. It made him feel better for her to say it.
“As for all the changes, you’re right, this has been a challenging year, in ways we never expected. And I think that’s been especially hard on you and Angela, and I’m sorry for that. Angela won’t remember all this in the long run, I expect. But we’ve asked you to carry a lot, and you’ve done it with such grace. I think we’ve taken that for granted, and I’m sorry.”
“It’s okay,” he replied. “I want to help.” And he did.
“Which we appreciate. But Tim, the help, the responsibility, all of that—I don’t want it to be because you think everything will fall apart otherwise.” He got a funny feeling in his gut, and his breath caught a little, which Mum heard, he thought, because she squeezed his shoulder again.
He didn’t want to think too hard about that yet, and for some long moments he simply listened to the quiet. He could hear her breathing, and something told him she was collecting her thoughts; he could imagine the look she got on her face when she had something serious to say and wanted to get it right. He wasn’t yet used to the way the shadows fell in the new house, but the ticking of the clock was familiar and somehow reassuring. The same clock that they’d had since before he could remember.
Mum’s fingers continued to thread through his hair as she started talking again, slowly and deliberately. “The thing about children who lose their mothers young, we have to grow up too fast. It happened to me, and it happened to you. That never goes away, dearest. It’s made us who we are, at least in part.” He knew he’d been forced into a lot of independence when Mummy died, but he hadn’t thought about how the same experience might have shaped Mum. All her energy, her drive always to be doing things, fixing things, making everything better for everyone else. He wondered whether that came from not having her mum there to make things better for her.
“But Tim, you don’t have to be so very grown up all the time if you don’t want to be. And when you’re unhappy, or worried, or when it’s all too much, you can tell us.”
He nodded again, not quite trusting himself to say anything. He thought of the day, years ago, when he was sent home from school with a scraped elbow, and Mum—Sister Bernadette—had bandaged it. She listened to his complaints about his father, and she understood it meant he missed his mother. That was the day she told him about losing her own mother, and he had wanted so badly to crawl into her arms and not let go, but he already knew that boys his age didn’t do things like that.
And boys his age now didn’t lie with their heads in their mothers’ laps, and Timothy knew, somehow, that he wouldn’t ever do this again and that they both would be a little sad for it. In a few minutes, the baby would cry again, or Dad would come in, or Mum would remember that it was late and he should go to bed. “Thanks, Mum,” he said, for this talk, he meant, but really for everything since that day in the old church hall when she patched him up and loved him for the first time.
“I love you, Timothy,” she replied, and he could hear the smile in her voice.