“Don’t you dare be happy. Their little hearts aren’t beating anymore. You need to see a doctor urgently if you want to stay alive.”
The ice cream slipped from Verochka’s hands. Instinctively, she grabbed her huge belly.
“Wait!” Verochka shouted after the woman in the old beret, but she had already disappeared from sight.
The woman blinked rapidly, trying either to let the tears gathering in her eyes spill out or force them back. So her intuition had not failed her. Something was wrong with the babies. Neither a walk in the fresh air nor her favorite ice cream would help now. She had to go to the hospital immediately.
The doctor looked at Verochka seriously and sighed heavily. He did not even need to say anything; the woman understood everything.
The twin boys would not have a birthday. They would only have a date of death.
Verochka howled with grief, refusing to let them take away the children she had not even seen yet. But she already loved them so much.
The following week passed like a nightmare.
The woman stared at the wall, her face buried in a baby blanket. Tolya skillfully hid his tears from his wife and only sat beside her, holding her hand. The young family had no idea how to cope with this loss.
When the woman felt a little better, she wandered out into the street. To the place where she had met the woman in the old beret, the one who had seen the tragedy. Verochka walked with her head lowered so no one would notice the tears streaming from her eyes.
“Don’t cry,” the woman heard behind her and immediately turned around. “That means it had to be this way. Leave your tears in this day and walk into tomorrow. Raise your head, straighten your shoulders. You will still have everything. Your children will celebrate their birthday.”
“How do you know all this?” Verochka looked at the woman pleadingly.
“I’m just the town madwoman,” she replied gloomily and, turning around, quickly walked away.
Verochka wiped away her tears and sniffled. If she ignored all the strangeness of what was happening, that woman was right about something. Grief would never disappear completely. But with time, the sharp pain would dull a little. Verochka and her husband would survive this loss together. Someday, they would be able to step into the future with a smile.
“You will still have everything. Your children will celebrate their birthday,” Verochka repeated the woman’s words.
FIVE YEARS PASSED
Verochka and Tolya held hands in the doctor’s office. The woman’s palm was as icy as if she had been making snowballs without mittens. Tolya tried to warm it and glanced at his wife from time to time. Verochka waited with a smile for what the doctor would say. But from the doctor’s face, the man understood: the verdict was not comforting.
“Well,” the doctor looked at the couple, “I’ll say it plainly. My personal professional conclusion is infertility. But…”
Tears began flowing from Verochka’s eyes. Her lips were still stretched into a smile, but thin rivers ran down her cheeks. Tolik jumped to his feet and helped his wife up.
“Excuse us, we’ll go now. We’ll make another appointment for another day,” Tolik nodded toward his wife, who was on the verge of hysteria. “We can’t do this right now, you understand?”
“I can’t do it anymore, Tolik. Truly. I’ll either lose my mind or do something to myself. I can’t. Even though that woman said my children would have a birthday, she was just…”
“Verochka, this is another trial that we will get through. The main thing is that we’re together,” the man embraced his wife. “And don’t go anymore. Don’t look for that woman. She’s just crazy.”
After those words, Verochka fell silent and sank into thought.
Whenever Tolya went to work, Verochka would first go outside. She spent several hours near the park where she had met the woman in the beret. Only after that would she go home and take care of her chores. For some reason, Verochka felt that she needed advice, a word, or one more prediction from that town madwoman.
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Once again, after failing to meet her, the woman slowly walked home. Suddenly, Verochka saw the familiar old beret. The woman was rummaging through a trash bin near a bench.
“Hello! Hello,” Verochka immediately felt her nose begin to tingle and rubbed it so she would not start crying again. “You said my children would have a birthday. But… I can’t have children…”
The woman pulled a newspaper from the bin, quickly glanced through it, and said:
“Who are you? I’m not stealing anything… Ah, yesterday’s one.”
She slapped the newspaper hard onto the bench and quickly walked away.
Verochka sat down and gave way to her tears. No. This woman would not help her. How could she have thought otherwise? She was just the town madwoman. The woman wiped her tears and looked at the newspaper. Among the many sales advertisements, one stood out.
“Here,” Verochka showed Tolya the newspaper. “We can’t give the world a new person. But we can raise one.”
Tolik looked at the advertisement. A smiling baby looked out from the picture, and beside it was written: Am I not yours?
“You want to take a child from a baby home?”
“Yes!”
After long discussions, the spouses made their decision. They wanted specifically an infant. They wanted to experience all the first joys and difficulties of parenthood together with the child.
“Choosing a child… It sounds as if we’re picking potatoes in a store,” Verochka muttered.
“It’s an official procedure,” Tolik hissed at her without looking away from the photographs, then suddenly stopped short.
Verochka followed her husband’s gaze. He was looking at a baby. But Tolik was not interested in the little one’s appearance.
“Birthday,” Verochka said quietly. “Ours were supposed to be born around this time… His eyes are black, like ripe cherries. Like yours. And he himself is fair-haired, with a little birthmark on his forehead. He looks like me…”
The spouses did not look at anyone else. They had already found their child: three-month-old Denis.
“Verochka, you’re too nervous. We prepared all the documents, everything is fine. They can’t refuse us!”
The woman wiped cold sweat from her forehead.
“I’m not nervous. I feel sick. I must have caught some kind of virus somewhere,” Verochka covered her mouth with her hand and ran out of the room.
A couple of minutes later, Tolik knocked on the bathroom door.
“Vera, this is the third morning in a row you’ve been sitting in the bathroom all hunched over. Maybe it could be that…”
“No!” the woman came out. “It’s a virus. The doctor told you I can’t have children.”
“All right,” Tolik did not argue. But he decided he would definitely buy a test at the pharmacy and simply leave it on the shelf.
A few days later, the woman finally decided to check her husband’s guess.
“Are you sure? The second line is faint, I think. Maybe it’s a mistake? A defective test,” Verochka was chewing on her second fingernail. “Of course! The doctor said…”
“I bought three. Will you take another one?”
Verochka nodded. By the time all her nails had been chewed down, the spouses were finally convinced: there were two bright lines on the test.
Verochka proudly walked down the street with a stroller. Denis, whom they had taken from the baby home, was sleeping inside it. In her belly, a second little boy was kicking. They had not yet come up with a name for him.
The woman was happy. Of course, she had already calculated all the dates. It turned out that the new person would be born when Denis turned one. In other words, in two months. The two boys would celebrate their birthdays one after the other. She wondered what her second son would look like. Fair-haired like Verochka? Or dark-haired like Tolik?
The woman looked at sleeping Denis. The older he became, the more similar features he shared with both spouses. Strangers, seeing the whole family together, would say: “It’s amazing how much the baby looks like both of you.”
“Lovely,” Verochka heard behind her and turned around. “Almost one year old, isn’t he?”
The woman in the old beret was standing there. She looked at Denis with a smile.
“Just don’t think there will be two birthdays.”
The woman nodded toward Verochka’s belly and, as usual, ran off into the crowd.
The woman’s legs almost gave way, and her breath caught. She could not lose a child again.
“I’ll repeat it to you again and again: everything is absolutely normal. There is no reason to be afraid. I cannot admit you for observation! There are no indications! Besides, you have a little one… Denis. He needs you too!” the doctor was firm. “Please don’t wind yourself up. Don’t be nervous.”
But Verochka could not help being nervous. She secretly cried when Tolik was at work. Denis would climb onto his mother, hug her belly, and laugh joyfully when his little brother greeted him from inside.
Two months flew by quickly. Denis was celebrating his first birthday, eating apple porridge for breakfast with great appetite. Relatives were supposed to arrive a little later. In the refrigerator, there was already a cake that Verochka had made the day before. Tolik scraped out the last spoonful for his son when a frightened Verochka came out of the room.
“My water…”
“What water?” Tolik did not understand.
“It broke. Call an ambulance!”
Denis was sleeping sweetly in his crib, and Tolik had already been staring at his phone screen for several minutes.
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“I gave birth to Dima. He’s healthy. We’re both fine,” he read aloud and, without embarrassment, burst into tears of happiness. “Our sons have the same birthday. Just one year apart.”
SIX YEARS PASSED
“Denis, catch up!” Dima shot forward, leaving clouds of dust behind him.
“Children, please calm down! By the time we get to the entertainment center, you’ll be completely filthy!” Verochka squeezed Tolik’s hand and shouted loudly.
The brothers stopped and turned around. Two absolutely identical boys looked at the spouses. Only one was a little taller.
“Boys… What can you do with them?” Verochka heard a familiar voice.
The woman in the old beret was smiling. Dima and Denis had already run up to their parents.
“Hello!” they said in chorus, as if they knew this woman.
“It’s our birthday today.”
“I know! Only you,” she pointed her finger at Dima, “were delayed by a year.”
“That’s how it happened,” the boy said shyly. “But I came, didn’t I?”
The spouses watched this strange dialogue in astonishment.
“I told you there would be one birthday!” the woman turned to the parents.
Verochka’s nose began to sting, and she immediately rubbed it so tears would not burst from her eyes.
Later, the spouses asked the boys whether they knew this auntie and why Dima had answered her that way. But their son frowned.
“I don’t remember any aunties. Do you, Denis?”
“I don’t remember either! Mom, you and Dad should wear Panama hats so the sun doesn’t bake your heads,” the boy said, then turned to his brother and slyly winked at him.