We Said the Same Name at the Same Second

I am not a mystical person. I install kitchens for a living and I believe in things I can measure. But there is one thing that happened between me and my wife that I have stopped trying to explain, because the more I turn it over, the stranger it gets.

We spent most of her pregnancy unable to agree on a name for our daughter. We had lists. We had a spreadsheet, which was my idea and which she hated. Every name I loved she found ordinary, and every name she loved reminded me of some kid I disliked in school. It became a running joke that the poor girl would be born nameless and we would just call her Baby until she was old enough to choose.

Around that time I started noticing something small. I would think of a song and my wife would start humming it. I would open the fridge deciding I wanted the leftover curry and she would call from the other room asking if I wanted her to heat up the curry. We laughed it off as the ordinary telepathy of people who have been together nine years. You get like that. You share a brain around the edges.

But the night the name came was different. We were lying in the dark, not talking, both of us tired, her hand resting on the curve of her belly. I was not even thinking about names. My mind had drifted somewhere soft and wordless. And then, out of that quiet, a name rose up in me clear and complete, a name that had never once been on any of our lists. In the same breath, in the exact same second, we both said it out loud into the dark.

Maren.

We had never discussed it. It was not a family name. Neither of us could later point to where we had heard it. But we both said it at the same time with the same certainty, and then we lay there in the dark, a little scared, gripping each other's hands. My wife whispered, did you just think that. And I said, I did not think it, it just arrived.

I have gone back over that moment a hundred times looking for the trick. Maybe one of us said it a fraction earlier and the other echoed it so fast it felt simultaneous. But that is not how it felt from the inside. From the inside it felt like the name was placed into both of us at once by something outside the two of us, and we were only the speakers it came out of.

Our daughter is Maren. She is loud and funny and has her mother's exact frown. When people ask how we chose the name, my wife and I look at each other and give the short version, that it just came to us. We do not usually tell the whole thing because it sounds like we are making it up for effect.

But I know what happened in that dark bedroom. Two people who had failed to agree on anything for months opened their mouths at the same instant and the same word came out, a word that was in neither of our minds a moment before. I have felt my wife's thoughts brush against mine many times since, small ordinary overlaps. That night was the one time a whole thought crossed fully from one of us to the other, or maybe arrived in both at once. Either way, our daughter has its name.