She planted the olive tree the next morning, slowly, with her sister doing the digging and Clara doing the directing from a garden chair, both of them laughing at the seriousness with which they read the instructions on the tag. It seemed important that something with Gia's name attached to it should take root here, not as a reminder of danger, but as proof that people could choose better than their families had planned for them, and that the choice, tended properly, might actually grow.
Chapter 28: A Son Named Thomas
Clara's labour began on a Tuesday, in daylight, which she would later say was the first mercy of it — no storm, no lockdown, no corridor negotiations, only Marta banging cheerfully on the blue door with her morning tea, taking one look at Clara's face and the way she was gripping the kitchen counter, and saying, "Right. Bag. Car. I will telephone everyone, you breathe."
The bag had been packed for three weeks. It stood by the door with a list taped to it in Clara's hand. She checked the list anyway, breathing through the first real contraction with her forehead against the cool wood of the doorframe, because checking the list was who she was and labour was not going to take that from her.
At the hospital, the same hospital, in a different wing with windows facing the garden square, things proceeded the way the books said they should and felt nothing like books at all. Her sister held one hand. Marta, who had raised four children and buried a husband and announced she was not leaving, held the other in the intervals and argued with a vending machine in the corridor during the long middle hours. Enzo waited outside, where Clara had asked him to wait, with Gia's olive tree absurdly still in the boot of his car because he had been delivering it when Marta's call came, and he paced, the nurses said afterwards, with the disciplined uselessness of a man who could command a room full of armed elders and could do absolutely nothing useful here except not leave.
He did not leave.
Thomas Bennett was born at twenty minutes past six in the evening, indignant and loud and instantly, completely himself, with Tommy's dark hair in a wet swirl and a cry that made Clara laugh while she was still crying, which startled the midwife into laughing too.
"He is furious," her sister said, delighted.
"He has opinions," Clara said, when they laid him on her chest, warm and astonished, his small fists working. "Hello. Hello, Thomas."
She had chosen the name months ago and told no one until she could tell him. Thomas, for Tommy, but not Junior, not a replacement — she had thought about this carefully, in the cottage, in the notebook. Thomas in his own right, carrying a good man's name forward like a lamp rather than a weight. Thomas Bennett, entered that evening in the hospital register in her clear hand, because her hand was steady by then and she insisted, with the father's name written beside it in full. No blanks. No euphemisms. A record that balanced.
Enzo came in when she sent for him, an hour later, washed and quiet and more nervous than she had ever seen him, which was saying a great deal. He stopped inside the door as if the room had a threshold more serious than any council's.
"Come and meet him," Clara said. "You are not hovering correctly. You have to come closer to hover properly."
He crossed the room the way men cross ice. He looked down at the baby in her arms and his whole face changed in a way she had never witnessed in the main house, at the long table, in any of the rooms where he was Enzo Valenti. It was unguarded. It was, for a moment, young.
"He is very small," he said, in a voice that was not steady. "And entirely — Clara. He is perfect. That is not a useful word. It is the only one I have."
"Hold your arms like this." She showed him, and with the midwife's brisk help transferred the warm, wrapped weight of Thomas into the arms of a man who had held, in his life, ledgers and weapons and treaties, and never anything that mattered this much at this size. He held his godson — though neither of them knew that word yet that evening — as if the floor might object, and Thomas, who had opinions, considered him gravely and then, decisively, slept.
Clara watched them both and made her decision in the quiet, the way she had made the true ones all along: completely, and then aloud.
"Enzo. I have a question, and it is not a favour, and you may take a week to answer it, and no is an answer I will respect and it will change nothing about the cottage or anything else. Those things are separate. I want that said first."
"Ask," he said, not looking up, because looking up might wake the baby, and also, she understood, because he could not.
"Will you be his godfather? Not the family's. His. Yours and mine to arrange, at the church my sister goes to, with cake afterwards in the garden. A godfather is — in my family it is the person who promises if anything happens to me, he will not be alone in the world, and who tells him the truth about his father when he asks, and who turns up. It is mostly turning up, I think. You have —" Her voice thinned, with tiredness and with everything else. "You have some practice now at turning up."
The silence lasted long enough for Thomas to sigh in his sleep.
"Clara," Enzo said at last, roughly, "I have been given many titles. Most of them were warnings. No one has ever — " He stopped. He looked at the baby, and then at her, with wet eyes he did not trouble to hide, which from Enzo Valenti was a kind of speech in itself. "Yes. Yes, with my whole heart, and I will do it properly, and I will be afraid of doing it badly for the rest of my life, which Marta tells me is the correct qualification."
She laughed, exhausted, in the hospital bed, while her son slept in his godfather's arms, and outside the window the ordinary evening went on over the city — buses and gulls and somebody's radio — as if a new person arriving in the world were a normal event, which, she thought, holding onto the rail and the moment both, it miraculously was.