curt hastings. d4. fin.

I still remember the day the twins were born. Just like I can still remember the colour of the waiting room tiles and the grain of the little wooden stool I had to wait on while Charlie screamed herself hoarse in the hospital bed.

She was the strongest person I'd ever met, tough as nails, but it was the early hours, misty air and cutting light, and I'd never been so afraid.

I think I even prayed.

I was only seventeen when Charlie got pregnant, and she was only nineteen. We were set up at a fundraiser for one of the smaller training centers, a new business venture of my father's, and our parents watched from across the room while we tried to make small talk. We'd both grown up with winding staircases and white picket fences, but when the babies eventually came, it was out of wedlock.

We were cut off, left a little rough around the edges, but we were both stubborn enough to make it work.

We got a little place together, somewhere close to the docks so I could work double shifts, and I painted the walls of the nursery for her. She bought me a little badge she'd seen on her morning walk, as a joke, it said Best Dad Ever and I told her she was setting her expectations a little high.

"I'm still scared," she said when she pinned it to my chest and smoothed over the wrinkles in my shirt, "Because I don't think I love you. Not yet."

I watched the light catch her hair and told her that it was okay.

We still had time.

It was so hot that summer that we had to leave the door propped open, and it made the windows sweat and the flies gather and I remember for three weeks straight just passing out on the couch as soon I stepped through the door. And I felt bad, I swear, because I knew Charlie didn't want to be a housewife, and I knew the pregnancy was rough on her. But if I didn't make enough money by the time the babies were due, she'd have to give birth in our bathtub, or in our bed, and no matter how many times the couple down the street seemed to suggest otherwise, we weren't a charity case.

Ernest even offered to fix our roof when it started leaking after a downpour in August, but I didn't trust my brother with a stick, let alone a hammer.

Kody and Blue were born in September, and it took a little over twenty-four for them to become my everything. When Charlie fought with her sister out on the porch, I drew a veil over the twins' eyes with coloured crayons and fairytales. I held their sticky hands and wiped their eyes, did more than my own old man ever could. I learnt how to change diapers, tried to remember every bit of knowledge I picked up from raising my brothers - I tried.

But after the first week of being home, they decided that they tolerated Charlie and absolutely hated me.

Blue would scream every time I walked in the room, and Kody wouldn't let me hold him for longer than a minute. I'd pace the kitchen while they both slept and Charlie would sit at the table with a pitcher of boxed wine and listen to me ramble on "Ripred, Char, they hate me." And she tried to help, she really did, baby-talked the word dada over and over again but I could tell that the crying and the fits were getting to her too.

I picked up more shifts, half to get a break from the noise and half so we could afford new cots when the kids outgrew their cribs. Charlie slept in their room so she could shush them at night and I slept on the couch so I'd hear her call if she needed anything.

I don't know if it was because it was something she wanted to do on her own or not, but even on the nights where I heard Blue cry, she never called.

Kody warmed up to me first, and maybe it was because Charlie had finally decided she had had enough and shoved him into my arms one morning, told me to take him out because Blue was still being fussy.

We stared at each other for a while after the front door closed, Kody and I, sizing each other up, and I waited for him to start crying again. When he didn't, I figured that was permission for us to start our day. I remember taking him to the docks first, to see the fish and all the guys I worked with. They knew more about the twins than their own grandparents did, and they ribbed me for not bringing Blue and Charlie down too.

When I sat Kody down on the sand and watched him chew on his fist, gazing out at the water with his big brown eyes, everything seemed to settle into place.

One Sunday, I gathered the loose change I had saved up over the last month and took Charlie dancing, just the two of us, and left the twins with one of our neighbours. I spun her around and watched the light filter back into her eyes and gazed at the stars in her smile, savoured the time she took to laugh.

I always thought there was an adventurer in her soul, I thought there was something great in her that whispered to run and never look back. But she stayed. A bright flare in the backdrop of dying house plants and stinking fish, shining like something out of the kids' picture books.

It had started to rain then, so hard that it felt like the sky had cracked open, all-mighty and thundering, like it was trying to cleanse us. We ran through the streets and jumped through puddles like kids again and when I held her that night, the twins tucked between us, she fell asleep in one of my old tournament jerseys.

Something in us, some driven part of our career DNA made it impossible to be anything but strong, rigid, solitary.

"We can't do this alone anymore," I whispered through the dark, into the curls of her hair, "I'm gonna do better for you baby, I promise."