Fourth

Tomorrow, Jessica will be four.

She has been too excited to sleep and has popped in and out of bed several times in the past hour.
She asks for a toy from the shelf and I can't understand which one it is that she wants.
So I lift her up and she makes the selection herself.

A tiny blue hippo with a hospital ID band tied around its middle. The ID band reads that 'this belongs to Jessica Walsh' and I've never had the heart to snip it off.

That hippo hung in her incubator from two days old. When my husband went back to retrieve some things from our home. We had come with no spare clothes, no toothbrushes, no towels, no cameras, no phones. Nothing.

He brought back a hippo and an elephant, dangling toys from the bouncy chairs we had purchased the previous week as a celebration for an 'all clear' scan.

And when I looked at the tiny babies I had produced, with their mighty toys dangling down upon them. I felt despairing. And a fool. To have been so complacent.

But Georgina's blood pressure was stabilising and I felt a stab of hope. Idiot that I was. I am.

Jessica grasps the hippo and curls around it. And I can scarcely stop my jaw dropping with wonder. With amazement. It still feels like fingers poking in my heart, blocking up the arteries and veins, fiddling with the valves.

That the tiny baby with a head the size of a tennis ball. With limbs like sticks. Is now four.
I find myself clutching her solidity. Terrified that she will vanish into the ether, like her sister. Because when you are that tiny, it's terribly easy to disappear entirely. To ash. One trapped here, another gone.

'You're my friend,' she says.
'Thank you,' I say. 'I might not always be your friend. But I will always, always be your mummy.'

She seems content and turns over to go to sleep. Until five minutes have passed when she appears on the landing once again. Looking for birthday presents.

***

We moved to our current house slightly less than a year before the twins were born. Our previous house had a nice garden. I used to enjoy planting and watering and pruning. The slow, slow growth of roots travelling downward, shoots unfurling upwards.

Our current garden has not been so successful. It feels blighted. It's overlooked and shadowy. No plants. We have a lawn and a trellis with a clematis growing up it. Or at least, we did. After a couple of years of beautiful blooms and growth, I fear that our clematis may not flower again next year. Although it does have a bit of a habit of merely resembling dead. All form and no substance.

I had a pink miniature rose bush that somebody bought me for Georgina on Jessica's first birthday. But I didn't bring it in soon enough and it was killed by last winter's frost. I felt terrible. So neglectful and careless. But, by the time I had moved it in to the carport, it was too late and Georgina's rose was dead.

This week I bought a small rosemary plant. Because it seemed right. I decanted compost and fed and watered. I cared. For the first time in a while. I hope it grows. I feel as though I like this plant, its wiriness, its determination, its smell, its utility and its beauty.

Let's hope I remember to bring it in this winter eh?

So a small wiry plant. A thin white candle. That burns this evening. For you and for another. This eve of the 26th of August.

That's all my darling. My dear Georgina.
I'm sorry it's not more. But, in comparison to what I wanted to offer you, it could never be enough.

I miss you. I love you. I'm proud of you.

There's rosemary, that's for remembrance; pray,
love, remember: and there is pansies, that's for thoughts.

There's fennel for you, and columbines: there's rue
for you; and here's some for me: we may call it
herb-grace o'Sundays: O you must wear your rue with
a difference. There's a daisy: I would give you 
some violets, but they withered all when my father
died:

Here your mother stands. 
With rosemary. 
Rue enough for two. 
No violets. 
Perhaps a daisy? For your sister?