CHAPTER ONE #2
Imani had died on the table at 7:14 in the evening from internal hemorrhaging.
Three years old. She called me Daddy-J for reasons no one could explain and it made me laugh every single time.
She was obsessed with the colour yellow.
She had a stuffed elephant named Peanut who went everywhere with her, and I thought about Peanut — sitting in Nadia's car or at my parents' house or somewhere in the wreckage — and I had to press my hand over my mouth.
They had done everything. Dr. Voss said this and I believed her and it did not matter.
?
I asked to see them.
There was a brief, careful pause of people deciding how to accommodate a request that existed outside normal procedure, and then someone nodded and we were led down a corridor to a small room with a window that looked out onto a parking structure.
Two cribs had been placed side by side. The room was very quiet.
There was a lamp in the corner giving off a warm light that felt almost cruel in its gentleness, as if the room were trying to be something it could never be.
I went in alone.
I do not know what I said. I know I talked to them because that is what you do, that is the only thing left to do when everything else has already happened.
I sat in the chair between their cribs and I put one hand near each of them and I talked until I had no more words and then I sat in the silence and I was there with them.
For the last time, with both of them in the same room.
A nurse knocked after fifty-four minutes. She was kind about it. She stood in the doorway with her hands folded in front of her, her expression soft and exhausted and full of a sorrow that was not performed, and she said they needed to — she did not finish the sentence. She did not have to.
I kissed Imani's forehead. I kissed Noah's. I stood up and I walked out of that room and I closed the door behind me and I have not been able to fully open myself since.
?
I went back to Mercy General. My father drove me, his hands steady on the wheel, his face set in the deliberate calm of a man who is holding himself together for someone else's sake and intends to keep doing it.
I went to where they were keeping her and I sat with her for nearly an hour and I told her everything I should have said on the phone that afternoon.
I told her I was sorry for the call. I told her she was right, that I always say that, that I have always been better at the intention than the follow-through and she deserved better.
I told her about Imani's laugh and the way Noah smelled and how I was going to figure out how to do this without her even though I had no idea how that was possible. I told her I loved her.
My father had to physically remove me at one in the morning.
He put his hands on my arms, and his grip was firm and careful the way it had been when I was a child and had needed to be carried, and he said: "Jensen.
Come on, son." His voice broke on the last word and he looked away for a moment and pressed his lips together and then looked back, and his eyes were wet, and I had never seen my father with wet eyes before.
He took me to my parents' house. I sat in the kitchen until morning.
My mother put a cup of coffee in front of me and sat across the table and looked at me the way she had been looking at me all night, with a grief that was entirely about me and not at all about herself, which was the most my-mother thing she had ever done.
I looked at the coffee and could not locate any reason to pick it up.
Outside, the night began to come apart at the edges.
The sky went from black to the dark blue that comes just before dawn, and then to grey, and I watched it happen from the kitchen table and I thought: this is the first morning.
This is the first morning of every morning for the rest of my life that I will wake up and they will still be gone.
I was right about that.
?
The funeral was on a Saturday. Late October, the kind of day that cannot decide between autumn and something harsher — pale sun, cold wind, leaves coming down in gusts that felt personal, as if the weather had read the occasion and responded accordingly.
I sat in the front row of the church in a dark suit and I looked at three caskets lined up and I felt nothing.
That is not quite accurate. I felt the specific, total silence of a man who has arrived at the outer edge of what a person can absorb.
I felt the weight of every hand that touched my shoulder.
I heard, as if from underwater, the words of the pastor and the sobs of Adaeze behind me — a sound raw and private, the sound of a woman coming undone in public because she no longer had the resources to prevent it — and the particular controlled grief of my father, who cried without making a sound, which I had never seen him do before.
His face was entirely still and entirely broken at the same time, and I understood for the first time that those two things were not contradictory.
Afterward, at the graveside, I watched them lower the caskets one by one into the ground.
The shame hit me for the first time. Not grief — I had been grieving since the corridor at Mercy General.
Shame. The specific shame of a man who was late.
Who was on the phone. Who put his hand on the car door and did the math on forty-five minutes as if time were something he had in unlimited supply.
I stood at those three graves and I made myself look at what I had done.
Not the accident. The drunk driver did that, Derek Wallis with his .
19 blood alcohol and his red light. I did not do that.
But I had been late. I had been on the phone.
And we had argued, and those were the last words, and I would carry that for the rest of my life.
I carry it still.
?
The year that followed is not something I can account for in full.
I know the broad shape of it — the drinking, the graves, the way my brother and my father held the company together while I sat in a house that still smelled like her and could not make myself change a single thing.
Her reading glasses on the nightstand. Her coat on the hook by the back door.
Imani's yellow rainboots by the front door, toes pointing out the way she always left them.
Noah's mobile above the crib he had slept in for exactly three weeks, still rotating faintly in drafts from the hallway.
I visited the graves every day. Sometimes twice. I would sit on the ground between the headstones and I would talk, or not talk, or sometimes just put my hand on the grass above where she was and try to feel something other than the particular cold of the earth in November.
The drinking was private and systematic.
I was not the kind of man who fell apart publicly.
I was the kind of man who waited until the house was quiet and the work calls were done and then poured two fingers of bourbon and then four, and sat in the study with the lights off and the photographs arranged around me, and drank until the silence became manageable.
My family had me admitted to Hargrove Recovery Center in the twelfth month.
By then I was tired in a way that had nothing to do with sleep.
Callum drove me. He did not say much on the way there.
At the entrance he got out and held the door and put his hand on the back of my neck the way he had when we were boys, when one of us was scared and the other was pretending not to be.
His face was composed and his eyes were not, and neither of us said anything about that.
He said: "You come back to us, okay?"
I went in.
Six weeks. I came out steadier. Not healed.
I came out with better tools and worse days and the same three graves waiting for me on the other side of the city.
I went back to work. I functioned. People were careful around me in the way they are careful around something that has been broken and repaired — they could see the seams, even when they pretended not to.
I went to the grave the week I returned to work. I sat on the ground the way I always had, and I told Nadia about the facility and about Callum running the Delmar account into the ground in my absence, which would have made her laugh. Then I told her what I had come to say.
"There will not be anyone else," I told her.
"I know you would probably tell me I am being dramatic.
That you would want me to be happy. But I cannot.
I have tried to imagine it and I cannot get there.
Every time I try to put someone else in the picture, it does not hold.
There is only you. And I would rather carry this than replace it with something that is not you. "
I meant it.
I meant it for two and a half years, until a Tuesday night in late spring when I walked out of the cemetery and my feet took me somewhere warm and lit, and a girl with a name I did not know yet brought me coffee without being asked and smiled at me and looked away, and something shifted in my chest that I told myself was nothing.
I was wrong about that.
But that comes later.