Chapter Text
Pasar Minggu House, Jakarta - 01.00 WIB
The antique clock in the front room read one in the morning when Ibun closed the garage door, and it was lying by four minutes, the way it always did.
Rania Nazyk — Ibun, short for Ibunda, the name four boys had worn smooth with use — had just come home from the hospital where she spent her life catching other people's children as they arrived in the world. Since dawn she had ricocheted from one duty to the next: a public lecture on women's health for the undergraduates, a faculty meeting, a full theatre list. Five mothers delivered by caesarean before the day was out. And then, on her way to the car, the familiar face of an old patient in the emergency department, and the reflex she could not switch off even with her hand already on her keys — she had gone to check, just to be sure. The baby was fine. The mother was fine. No one needed her hands tonight, which meant she was finally allowed to go home and throw herself at a mattress.
Her legs felt like two lengths of iron rebar. They carried her, unsteady and grudging, through the dark house anyway — because there was one thing she did every night before she slept, and exhaustion had never once excused her from it.
She had four sons. Jeno, the tall eldest, her firstborn with the man she had once been married to. Jaemin — Nana — the first she had adopted after that marriage ended, the warmth at the centre of their small house, the same age as Jeno and his temperamental opposite. And the twins, Chenle and Jisung, whom she had fallen in love with five years ago as premature newborns, lifted from the womb of a young woman who hadn't survived the accident that brought them all to her table.
She eased open the door to Jeno's room and stopped.
She had forgotten it was Saturday.
All four of her big babies were there, bundled under one thick blanket, fast asleep. On weekends — and only weekends, so that the sacred business of school stayed undisturbed — she let them pile into one room like puppies. Jisung and Jaemin had claimed the top bunk; Jisung's enormous head rested on Nana's stomach while his foot dangled with real menace directly over Chenle's face on the slide-out bed below. Chenle slept alone there, having evidently evicted the room's actual owner, because Jeno — whose bed it was — had surrendered the whole thing and stretched out on the thick grey rug instead.
Their feet stuck out from the bottom edge of the blanket. Rania stifled a laugh. That had been their habit forever, since they were small enough to fit two to a cot, and it had never left them. Around the sleeping shapes of her children, pillows and plushies lay strewn as though the room had been shelled — the wreckage of a pillow war that had clearly ended only when its combatants dropped where they stood.
She moved among them and folded each pair of feet gently back under the blanket, looking at their slack, unguarded faces. She still caught herself astonished, some nights, at how much time had gone by. Jeno and Jaemin had grown into handsome young men, and it was only a matter of arithmetic before the twins followed. Every day of her working life, she tended other women's children, every one of them dear — and still there was no baby on this earth she loved the way she loved these four. However big they got, they would stay, in her eyes, forever small.
Yawning, she pressed a kiss to the crown of each head, one after another.
"Sleep sweetly," she whispered, her voice low and gone hoarse with the day. "Sayang-sayangnya Ibun." —my dearest darlings.
Then she went to her own room, alone, the way the captain of a small ship goes last to her rest — after the watch is set, after every soul aboard is accounted for, when there is no one left awake to need her.
It did not occur to her to want it otherwise. She had built this life with her own two hands out of the wreckage of another one, and she was proud of how seaworthy it was, how trim, how entirely hers to steer. If she had been asked that night what more she could need, she would have laughed and said: fewer things to worry about, maybe. A clock that tells the truth.
She had it backwards, of course. But it would take the floor of the world deciding to stop holding still, and an ocean, and a man she had spent a decade sailing away from, to teach her that — and all of that was still a phone call she hadn't yet received, on a morning that hadn't yet come.
For now, there was only the lying clock, and four sets of feet safe under one blanket, and the particular silence of a house where everyone you love is finally asleep at once.
Rania turned off the light.