Aaron and Katelyn don’t initially plan on having kids. They’re both extremely busy and honestly, the thought kind of terrifies Aaron. What if he ends up like Tilda? What if he’s too angry, too apathetic, too much? Not enough?
But a few years into their practice, Katelyn starts talking about it more. Not pushing, just envisioning.
Aaron hates telling Katelyn no and she doesn’t ask because she knows he’ll say yes. For her, he would say yes.
But he knows she’s craving that experience; motherhood. And Katelyn? Katelyn would be a great mom. She’s unendingly patient, resoundingly kind. She loves people who don’t even deserve to be loved. She loves Aaron.
Aaron is a coward though. He won’t be a good father. He doesn’t even know where to begin.
Then one day, it happens. He’s working at the ER and a woman brings two little girls in.
Aaron can tell immediately that they’re twins, about four years old or so, but small for their age. They both have dirty faces and one’s is tear-streaked, though she isn’t crying now. She’s holding her arm delicately to her body, her eyes trained on some distant spot.
She fell, climbing from a tree, the woman says. She’s their Foster mother, she tells him. The girls are so clumsy and they never mind.
Their names are Kallie and Kacie. Kallie has the broken arm and Kacie doesn’t leave her side. She hovers nervously over her sister and screams and cries when they take Kallie back for X-rays. The foster mother leans down and hisses something in Kacie’s ear and Aaron feels a sick twist in his gut. He let’s Kacie come back into the room with the tech so she can watch her sister a safe distance from the radiation.
They cast Kallie’s arm. CPS has already been called, it’s protocol for injured foster children. But Aaron is watching closely, that sick feeling lingering.
He gets paged and goes to leave, but as he’s closing the door, he catches sight of the foster mother grabbing Kallie’s arm and jerking her close to her, whispering harshly into her ear.
The fear, the pain, is so clear on the little girl’s face.
Aaron’s whole body tenses with fury, fury like he has only experienced once before.
Fury that brings to mind a bloody bedroom and the slick feel of a racquet beneath his fingers.
He steps back into the room. It’s all he can do to swallow his fury, to make his voice something human. “You’re needed at the front desk,” he tells her, so coldly the room chills by degrees.
She looks nervous, but she complies, with one last look at the girls.
“A nurse will watch you, okay?” He tells the girls, making his voice as gentle as possible.
He turns to call for a nurse, but feels a little tug at his coat. He looks down at Kacie’s upturned face, her wide blue eyes, the dirt on her cheeks.
“Please don’t let her hurt my sister anymore,” she says in a whisper. A tiny plea that fractures Aaron’s heart in places he thought were long untouchable. “I’ll be good. I’ll be a good girl. Please, don’t let them hurt her anymore.”
CPS takes the girls away, but not before Aaron gets every scrap of information on them that he can. Not before Aaron takes Kacie’s little face between his hands and tells her his name, gives her a card with his number. “You call me, any time, if you ever need anything. I won’t let anyone hurt you or your sister again.”
He calls Katelyn on his way home. He tells her what happened today. He can’t help the tears that come when he reveals how helpless he felt for those girls who needed him. For a little girl begging for her sister. For another sibling, sitting in a courtroom, telling the jury what he had done for his own brother.
Katelyn starts the process to be fosters that night. They call and they make inquiries. They use every connection they have. Wymack, Kevin Day, doctors they knew from their residencies.
Three months later, Kacie and Kallie come home. There are fresh bruises on their skin, apprehension in their eyes. Katelyn cries quietly, but doesn’t let the girls see. They have made the spare room into a little girl’s kingdom. My Little Pony threw up rainbows on the walls. Princess bedspreads and lavender rugs and race cars in the corner, just in case.
Kallie and Kacie smile, for the first time Aaron has ever seen. They are resplendent and wonderful and Aaron would paint the whole world pink and lavender if it made them smile like that.
After the girls go to bed that night, Aaron makes a call.
It’s obvious he woke him up. Sleep makes his voice gruff, his speech slurred.
Aaron doesn’t wait for him to speak, “You’re an uncle.”
There is a pause. “Okay,” Andrew says.
“It’s not official, but it’s going to be,” Aaron says, cradling the phone in his hands. “It’s two little girls; identical twins. Katelyn and I, we’re adopting.”
“Okay,” Andrew says again.
“Something… Things have happened to them, Andrew,” Aaron says quietly. “I don’t know the extent. Kallie has a cast and Kacie jumps whenever a door slams. I don’t know how I’m going to do this, but I am.”
Andrew says nothing, so Aaron presses on.
“They shouldn’t have to wait for college for their second chance. We shouldn’t have had to wait for ours.”
Aaron hears a door open and close, the soft inhale that means his brother is outside, taking a slow drag off a cigarette.
“Do you want me to come down?” The question is blunt, just like everything else about Andrew. Blunt as a brick to the head.
Aaron closes his eyes and leans against the wall. He hears Katelyn singing softly to the girls in their room, singing away nightmares.
No one ever sang Aaron to sleep. Aaron knows no one sang to Andrew, either.
He’s tired, down to his bones, to his worn-out soul. Perhaps it’s exhaustion, or perhaps some other, rawer, emotion, that makes his voice thick when he says, “Yeah.”
There’s a click. Andrew has hung up, no salutations, no lingering presence, just the static of a dropped call.
Aaron is not at all surprised when twelve hours later, his brother shows up at his door.
Andrew’s face doesn’t change when the girls stumble out, Kallie’s arm still wrapped in a blue cast covered in her sister’s crayon doodles, but he looks over the top of their heads at Aaron and for once, Aaron understands what people mean when they say “it’s a twin thing”.
He can read worlds in his brother’s eyes. For once, he’s not left guessing what his twin is thinking.
“Girls, this is your Uncle Andrew.”
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