What’s Left Of Us

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER

ONE

The Last Thing

Jensen

“The most painful thing is losing yourself in the process of loving someone too much, and forgetting that you are special too.” — Ernest Hemingway

The last thing my wife said to me was: You always say that.

I have turned those four words over in my hands every day for three years.

I have pressed my thumbs into them the way you press into a bruise to confirm it is still there.

I have wondered, in the particular cruelty of three in the morning, whether she knew — whether some part of her knew, in the way that people sometimes know things before the knowing has any right to arrive — that those would be the last words.

That there would be no correction. No Tuesday dinner with my parents to smooth it over, no drive home with her hand resting on my knee, no waking up beside her in the morning and saying I am sorry I was late, I am sorry I made you carry everything, I am sorry.

She did not know. Nobody knows. That is the thing about last words. They are only last words in hindsight. At the time they are just words, just the tail end of a conversation neither of you wanted to be having.

At the time she was standing at the edge of a park with a stroller and a three-year-old who had decided that leaving was not something she would be doing today, and I was in a conference room on the forty-first floor trying to keep three hundred and forty people from losing their jobs, and the call was already the third interruption in an hour, and I heard the exhaustion in her voice and I told myself I would make it up to her.

I told myself: forty-five minutes, and then I will be there, and I will take Imani from her arms and I will carry Noah and we will all sit at my mother's table and everything will be fine.

You always say that.

She was not wrong.

?

My phone was on Do Not Disturb from five o'clock onward.

Standard practice during a negotiation. I had learned early that the sound of a buzzing phone could shift the energy in a room, could make the other side think you had somewhere better to be.

Only Nadia could bypass it. That was a setting I had put in place when we found out she was pregnant with Imani, some instinct about being reachable to her and only her, and I had never changed it.

She could not call me. Her hands were full of our children, and then they were not.

I left work early. I told Marcus to wrap the call, that I would review the final terms in the morning, and I took the elevator down and walked to my car and drove toward my parents' house on Briar Hill Lane with the particular low-grade guilt of a husband who knows he has been less than he should be lately.

Not bad. Just less. The kind of less that accumulates quietly until someone says you always say that and you hear it differently than you were meant to.

I arrived at 6:52 in the evening. I know the time because I checked my watch in the car, calculating whether I had beaten Nadia there, and the number is printed somewhere in me now the way certain numbers get printed — the way you remember the exact figure of a bill you could not pay, or the number on a hospital door.

The neighbours were outside.

This registered as strange before anything else did.

Mrs. Parrish from across the street was standing at the end of the driveway, and two of the Kellerman boys were on the pavement, and old Mr. Dominguez had his front door open and was watching from the steps.

A Thursday evening in October, not warm enough to be outside for pleasure.

I pulled into my parents' driveway and stepped out of the car and Mrs. Parrish started walking toward me.

I have thought about her face many times.

She is a woman in her mid-sixties with silver hair she keeps short and practical, and she has always reminded me of someone's grandmother.

She was walking toward me with her hands clasped in front of her and her lips pressed together and her eyes already doing the work that her words had not yet been asked to do.

She had the look of a person carrying something she had been dreading to deliver, and she was walking toward me with the careful slowness of someone who understands that once she arrives, there is no taking it back.

I saw it before she said a single word.

I saw it and I understood it and my body understood it before my mind did, because my mind was still running the math on being forty-five minutes late, still composing the apology I owed Nadia, still figuring out which face Imani would make when she saw me come through the door.

My body just stopped. My hand was still on the car door. I could not let go of it.

She said: "Mr. Shaw. There has been an accident."

?

I do not remember much of the drive to Mercy General. Callum drove. I was in the passenger seat and the city moved past the window in the way that cities do when you are not inside yourself, just a series of lights and shapes that your eyes register without sending the information anywhere useful.

I knew she was at Mercy General. I knew the children were somewhere else — Eastside Children's, a name that meant nothing to me before that night and now means everything — but I told Callum to go to Mercy first because Nadia was closer.

Because I needed to see her first. Because some part of me still thought that closer meant something. That closer meant there was more time.

I ran through the automatic doors calling her name. I know I did this because Callum told me afterward. I remember the corridor. I remember the particular quality of hospital light, that flat, indifferent brightness that makes everyone look like they are already somewhere between living and not.

My parents were there. Her parents were there.

My mother had her hand pressed over her mouth and her eyes were red and she was looking at me the way she had looked at me when I was small and had hurt myself badly, that specific helpless expression of a person who loves you and cannot fix the thing that is happening.

Charles Okafor was looking at the floor, his shoulders folded inward, his hands loose at his sides like something had gone out of them.

Adaeze was looking at me. When our eyes met, her face crumpled for just a moment before she pressed it back together, and she shook her head. Slowly. Once.

That was how I found out my wife was dead.

Not words. Not a doctor. My mother-in-law shaking her head in a hospital corridor, and my body stopping again, my hand finding the wall because something had to hold me up, and the sound that came out of me — I do not have a word for it.

I do not think there is one. It was the sound of a man losing the main thing.

?

They brought me to a room. Someone — a nurse, a young woman with careful eyes and a gentleness that belonged to a person who had done this before and had not yet learned to do it from a distance — said something about taking a moment, about the doctors wanting to speak with me.

I sat in a chair. My father had his hand on my shoulder and I could feel the weight of it but it was coming from very far away.

The children.

I said it out loud. My father's jaw tightened, the way it did when he was holding something in, and he said, "I know, son," very quietly, and Callum was already at the door.

I did not want to leave her. The physical impossibility of walking away from the room where she was.

She was in there, behind a closed door I had not been able to make myself open, and if I left the building that distance would become real in a way it was not yet.

If I left, I was leaving her again. I had already been late once tonight.

It was Callum who said it. He came to stand in front of me and he put both hands on my shoulders and he looked at me with an expression I had never seen on him before, something past grief, something determined and almost fierce, and he said: "Jensen.

The babies are at Eastside. We have to go right now. "

The word babies did something to my legs that nothing else had managed, and I stood up.

I looked at the door to her room. I told her I was coming back. I turned around and followed my brother out of the building into the October night and I did not look back because if I looked back I would not have been able to keep walking.

?

At Eastside Children's Hospital they put us in a small consultation room with chairs arranged in a way that told you everything before anyone spoke.

There is a specific geometry to rooms where people are given the worst news.

They are designed, I think, to prevent falling.

Low chairs. Nothing with hard edges. A box of tissues on a table that everyone sees and nobody reaches for until they need it.

The attending physician was a woman named Dr. Renata Voss.

She came in and she sat down, which I have since learned is what they are trained to do — to sit, to bring themselves to your level.

She had dark hair pulled back and the kind of face that does not retreat from what it has to do, and she looked at me directly, without flinching, and I respected that later, when I was capable of respecting anything.

She said: "I am so sorry to tell you this."

Noah had been pronounced dead on arrival.

Three weeks old. He had Nadia's nose and I had held him for the first time that morning and thought I have never seen anything this perfect.

I had said it out loud. Nadia had laughed, still raw from the birth, still soft and more herself than she had been in weeks, and she said: "You said the same thing about Imani. " And I said: "I meant it then too."