Iris
Six weeks is a long time to hold a smile.
I know exactly how long it is because I've been keeping score without meaning to, the way you keep touching a bruise to check if it still hurts.
Six Sunday dinners. Six Monday mornings where Ma looks at me over the teapot and I look back at her and say I slept fine, thanks, and she lets me have the lie because she's decided the lie is what I need.
Forty-two days of being home, safe, surrounded, loved beyond measure.
Forty-two days of an empty doorway.
Killian stops arguing when I walk into a room now, which is how I know it's serious, because Killian would keep arguing through his own funeral.
Aidan started leaving books on my bed, thrillers with the covers facing down, as if he's worried the wrong picture might set me off.
Grace hugs me for a beat too long. Liam watches me the way he used to watch the gates.
They think it's Sicily.
I let them. It's kinder than the truth, which is that Sicily is not the thing that wakes me at four in the morning.
I survived Sicily. I came off that island with more mental fortitude than I went on with.
What I can't seem to survive is knowing Yakob was in my kitchen doorway, then wasn’t.
How do I explain it? How do I say that the worst thing that happened to me is that the man you hired did his job and left?
That I don't know his last name, and I don't know what country he's in.
That I check the corners of every room I walk into, and he's in none of them.
I don't say it. I pass the potatoes. I do the voices when I read to the kids at night. I am the sunshine, because the sunshine is a load-bearing wall in this house and everyone has been through enough.
So I hold the smile. And in the afternoons, when the kitchen empties out and holding it stops being possible, I go down to the gym.
It smells of rubber and my brothers' egos, but it's the one room in this house where nobody expects me to be delightful.
Today I get eight minutes into it before my body starts complaining.
Eight minutes. A warmup jog on the treadmill, barely faster than a walk, and my legs turn to wet sand and the room does a slow, greasy quarter-turn around me.
I grab the rail and ride it out and stare at my own reflection in the mirror, hair scraped back, cheekbones sharper than they've ever been, and I inform the woman in the glass that this is pathetic.
Seven weeks ago I helped carry a bleeding man the size of a wardrobe up a stone ramp with my whole body braced like a wall, and I did it on no sleep and no food and pure furious determination. Now I can't jog to the end of a song.
I tell myself it's deconditioning. Ten pounds, Ma said, the day I came home, holding my face in her hands.
You don't lose that and bounce back on soup and stubbornness.
I put the incline down. I slow the belt.
I last another four minutes, and then I sit down on the weight bench between Liam's plates and Killian's chalk and I put my head between my knees like a seasick tourist. I stay there until the floor stops moving.
This is the part nobody sees. This is the part I've gotten very good at nobody seeing.
The weeks keep going. That's the thing about time; it keeps marching forwards no matter what’s happening to you.
The lace becomes a summer dress under my hands, seam by seam, because Ma asked me to make it and because sewing is the one thing my body still does perfectly while my mind is elsewhere.
There is a mercy in work you can do sitting down.
éirinn grows a double chin that I am personally obsessed with tickling.
Tanya gets bigger and complains magnificently.
She is due any day now and the nursery is finally finished.
Life roars on, and I sit in the middle of it doing all my old tricks, the coffee, the teasing, the verdicts, and the whole time there's a version of me standing a small quiet distance away, watching me perform myself, taking notes.
And I'm tired. Not tired like after a bad night’s sleep.
Tired like gravity got personal. I fall asleep at two in the afternoon with a needle in my hand and wake up an hour later with a lace line pressed into my cheek and no memory of going under.
Smells have started arriving in the kitchen like unwelcome guests, the lamb fat, the coffee I have loved my entire adult life and now, some mornings, smells like a personal insult.
I stand at the counter and pour away my sacred first cup and my stomach lifts and rolls like I’m back on the boat.
It ends up poured down the sink and I tell Grace I'm switching to tea for my nerves.
Grace nods like this is wisdom, because everything I do now gets added to what she went through.
Woozy. That's the word I settle on, because it sounds harmless. Woozy like a Victorian aunt. I get woozy on the stairs. Woozy in the shower. I eat crackers and sleep for ten hours before waking up feeling like I've been dredged off the sea floor.
Stress, I tell the mirror. Grief, says the quiet version of me from her small distance, because you can grieve a living man, it turns out.
You can grieve a man whose heartbeat you've slept on.
Weight loss, says the practical woman in me, the one who does the accounts.
Your body took a hit. Bodies keep their own books.
They pay you back on their own schedule.
It's that last thought that does it. Bodies keeping their own books.
Because I'm sitting on my bed on a warm Tuesday evening with the summer dress across my knees, and I've just done the math on how long it’s taken to stitch.
Counting weeks on my fingers, when a different count starts itself up underneath the first one like a second heartbeat.
Quietly. Uninvited. The kind of count your body has apparently been keeping in the basement for some time and has finally decided to send upstairs.
When did I last...
I sit very still.
I'm not a calendar person about it, I've never had to be, I run like tide tables, you could navigate by me.
But I write it down anyway, I've written it down since I was twelve, one small dot in the corner of the day, a habit Ma installed in me along with thank-you notes and scissor safety.
It's in the diary. It's always in the diary.
The diary lives in the drawer of my nightstand, under the hand cream and the emergency chocolate, a fat unglamorous week-to-a-page thing with a pen looped into the spine.
My thumb knows the way in. I flick back through the weeks and my whole ridiculous life flutters past in reverse, dress notes, fabric swatches stapled to a Sunday, éirinn - one month drawn at the top of a page and decorated in coloured pens to look like confetti bursting around it, Tanya's scan picture, a recipe for Grace scribbled sideways up a margin. Back. Back.
And then the streak.
I did it the second week I was home. I remember doing it.
I took the fattest black marker in the kitchen drawer and I drew one line through those dates, corner to corner, all of them at once.
The taking, the cell, and the vineyard, so that I would never again have to turn a page and see them sitting there in my own handwriting.
Ma watched me do it from the doorway and said nothing, which is her way of saying she understands.
The line is starting to go gray-brown at the edges the way black marker does.
It's the ugliest thing in this diary. It was supposed to be a wall.
Now it's a landmark.
Because there, on the Thursday before the streak begins, in the bottom corner of the day, in my own hand, is the dot. Small. Round. Certain. The last dot.
I turn the pages forward again, slowly this time, week over week over week.
My fingers pinch the pages as I turn them through the streak, through the blank days I never filled in because I was on an island surviving with a ghost. Through the homecoming, through six weeks of dinners and chit chat, and I’m looking for a dot and there is no dot, there is no dot anywhere.
I turn pages long after I know, the way you keep patting your pockets for keys you watched fall down a drain.
“Stress,” I tell the empty room, and the word comes out in a voice I don't recognize. It happens. It's documented. Trauma messes with this stuff... The weight loss alone.... Any doctor would say so.
The quiet version of me, the one who stands at a small distance and watches, doesn't say anything at all. She just looks at the diary in my hands, at the black streak, at the dot before it and the nothing after it.
And I sit on my bed with a pretty summer dress across my knees, doing sums a woman can do in half a second and refusing to finish. The house goes on breathing around me, warm and loud and safely oblivious. Five brothers and their wives and their babies and no idea, no idea at all.
My hands are completely steady. That's the strangest part. My hands are steady, and my heart is going like a stolen car, and somewhere out there in the dark of the world is a man whose last name I don't even know and have no way of contacting.
I thought I was alone in that cell. I thought I knew what total and complete loneliness felt like.
But it was nothing in comparison to this.