Page 76 of The Backdraft
“I want as much as you’re willing to give me. I want all of you—of both of you.”
Smirking, I looked back down at where our son slept peacefully. “Good. So what were you thinking?”
I felt Archer shrug, as he squatted down beside me. “I wasn’t. I mean, I was so sure he was going to be a girl, I never thought about boy names.”
It was such an Archer thing to say, and I couldn’t say I was surprised. He’d spent the last two months talking about thebaby, so sure of his prediction, it was almost as if he’d done a gender test.
We fell into a contemplative silence, and I tried to wrack my brain for the names I’d tossed around throughout pregnancy, but none of them seemed fitting now. I spent so long thinking about names that I could almost feel the concussion the doctor had talked about, which had me thinking about the accident, and then his name came to me.
“What about Casey?”
Archer stilled beside me, and I turned to make sure he was still breathing.
“That was my mom’s name.”
I offered him a soft smile. “I know, you mentioned it a while back.”
“You don’t have to do that.” He shook his head.
“I know, but I want to. Who knows? What if she’s the reason he and I are here right now?” Looking back at our son, my smile widened. “Casey Jackson Mack.”
Archer reached a hand out and gently stroked the top of his head. “Casey.”
***
Turns out, Casey was every bit as stubborn as his father and me. He spent the following six-and-a-half weeks in the NICU, waiting for his lungs and digestive system to catch up to the rest of him, but he was a fighter through and through.
The hardest part was the day I got discharged, but he didn’t. We didn’t get to go home one happy family, but Archer and I were back at the hospital every day watching him grow and hit the doctors’ milestones they wanted him to achieve. He was able to get his feeding tube removed fairly early into his stay, taking bottles like it was his job, and after a while on the steroid theyhad him on, his lungs developed enough that he could come off the oxygen as well. In short, Casey was amazing, and we were obsessed.
It was the last week in April when we got to take him home, and it felt like I was finally being allowed to pick up a piece of my heart. The sun was shining, we were picking up our son, and Archer was doing the hot dad walk out of the hospital.
I pulled my phone out, trailing slightly behind him and Casey so I could video it. I’d gotten a good five seconds when Archer looked back at me.
“What are you doing?”
I laughed and ran to catch up to my boys. “Shayna said I had to video the walk so I could watch it again whenever I wanted to.”
“The walk?”
Shaking my head, I patted him on the shoulder. “Don’t worry about it.”
Once we were in the elevator, I bent down to peek at Casey who was looking around taking everything in. How strange it must be to spend the first two months of your life never leaving the same room.
“Ready to go home, bubbas?” I cooed, tucking his blanket in around him. When he didn’t cry, I took that as a yes.
I turned to Archer. “Ready for day one of official parenthood?” The first couple of weeks being home without Casey were hard. It felt like we were being robbed of his beginning, of our beginning as parents, and that was a tough pill to swallow. There were a lot of tears, but eventually we came to terms with it. Our start on the journey to being parents might’ve been different than the typical story, but it made us that much more appreciative of it all. We weren’t going to miss a single moment.
He smiled down at me. “More than ready.”
In the parking lot, we loaded Casey into the new blue Jetta I’d bought with the insurance payout from my old one, Archertriple checking the base was installed correctly before clicking the carrier into it. Climbing into the back seat next to Casey, I let Archer drive us home. It wasn’t that I was scared to drive, I’d driven plenty since the accident, but in the wake of everything that had happened to us all, Archer coped better if he had more control over situations.
I hadn’t noticed when Archer drove past my street, too consumed by the little human quietly snoring in the car seat next to me to pay attention. It wasn’t until we pulled into his driveway twenty minutes later that I realized we weren’t at my apartment.
“Uh, Archer? Wrong house, hun.”
His eyes met mine through the rearview mirror. “I know, I thought maybe we could come here first so I could grab some stuff.”
My eyebrows scrunched together skeptically. “I thought you already packed a bag to stay at my house for a couple of days.”
