CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER
TWO
The Shape of Grief
Jensen
People grieve differently. I know this because I watched an entire network of people grieve the same loss from different angles, and not one of them did it the way another one did.
My mother cooked. In the weeks after the funeral she filled every surface of her kitchen with food nobody asked for and nobody wanted, and when I visited she moved from counter to counter with a purposefulness that was barely contained, her hands always occupied, her back often turned, because turning her back meant she did not have to let me see her face.
My father went quiet in a way that was different from his usual quiet.
He had always been a man of few words, deliberate and measured, but this was something else.
This was the quiet of a man who had run out of the right thing to say and was too honest to fill the silence with the wrong thing.
He would sit with me and look at his hands and occasionally look up at me with an expression that held more than he knew how to give words to.
Callum called me every morning at seven o'clock.
He never said much on those calls. He would ask how I had slept, and I would say fine, which was never true, and he would say okay, and we would stay on the line for a few minutes without talking, and then he would say he would check in later and hang up.
He did this every day for eleven months without missing a single one.
I never told him what those calls meant to me.
Adaeze Okafor stopped sleeping. I know this because Charles told my mother, and my mother told me with the particular careful gentleness she uses when she is delivering information she thinks might break something.
Adaeze would sit in Nadia's childhood bedroom in the dark and be there when Charles woke at two in the morning and still there when he woke again at five.
She did not return to the grief counsellor the hospital had referred them to.
She did not want, she told Charles, to be counselled out of her grief.
Her grief was her daughter. She was keeping it.
I understood that completely.
?
The house was the problem and also the solution, in the way that the things which are destroying you are sometimes the only thing keeping you standing.
I could not leave it. I stayed. I moved through the rooms carefully, touching nothing that was hers, maintaining everything exactly as she had left it, as if she had only stepped out and would be back shortly and would notice if I had moved so much as a glass.
Her reading glasses were on the nightstand on her side of the bed.
She had been farsighted since her late twenties and resisted the glasses for two years before I talked her into them, and she had never quite made peace with needing them.
She used to take them off whenever she thought someone might take a photograph.
She would tip her chin up slightly and say nothing, as if the glasses had simply ceased to be there by her refusal to acknowledge them.
I used to tease her about it. I would give a great deal to tease her about it one more time.
Imani's yellow rainboots were by the front door for four months.
Toes pointing outward, the way she always left them, because she could never quite get the knack of placing her shoes neatly.
I walked past them every time I left the house and every time I came back.
In March, four months after the accident, my mother came to the house and moved the boots.
She did it while I was in the shower, quietly and without announcement, and when I came downstairs and saw the empty space by the door I stood there for a long time without moving.
When she came to find me she had the boots in her hands and her eyes were full and there was a guilt on her face that was also a kind of love, the face of someone who has done something on your behalf that she was not certain you wanted and is waiting to hear whether she got it wrong.
She said, "I'm sorry. I should have asked.
" I told her it was all right. I was not all right.
But I understood why she had done it. She could not watch me walk past them one more time.
She put them in the study, on the shelf with the photographs. That was where things went that I could not look at daily but could not get rid of. The study became a room I stopped entering.
?
The drinking began, as most things do, with the best of intentions.
A glass of bourbon after dinner because the evenings were the worst part.
One glass became two. Two became the bottle on the desk.
I was not falling-down drunk. I was not drunk in a way that anyone could have pointed to from the outside and named.
I was the kind of drunk that keeps its tie on, that answers emails coherently, that wakes up the next morning and functions and then does it all again.
Callum found me in the office at nine in the evening in month nine with a glass in my hand and three empty bottles in the trash.
He sat down across from me without saying anything for a moment.
He looked at the desk. He looked at me. There was no anger on his face, which surprised me.
There was something that was less comfortable than anger, a steady, exhausted disappointment that he was not trying to hide from me.
He picked up the bottle and looked at the label and set it back down.
"How long has this been going on?" he said.
I told him it was manageable. He said, "I didn't ask if it was manageable. I asked how long." His voice was quiet and even. He did not raise it. Callum almost never raised his voice, which was more effective than shouting.
I told him since November. He looked at the desk again for a moment, something moving across his face that he pressed flat before I could read it properly. Then he said, "All right. I'm not going to lecture you tonight. But we are going to talk about this."
We did not talk about it that night. It took three more months and my father and my mother and both sets of in-laws in a room together before we talked about it properly.
?
The intervention was a Thursday. My father opened the door and I saw over his shoulder the full assembly of people I loved most in the world sitting in the living room with the particular posture of people who have agreed in advance on something, and my first thought was that someone else had died.
"Nobody's hurt," my father said, reading my face the way he always had, his expression deliberate and composed. "Come and sit down, son."
I sat down. My mother was beside my father on the sofa, her hands clasped in her lap, her eyes already showing that she had been crying before I arrived and was working to keep herself from resuming.
Callum sat to my right and he did not look at me when I sat down, which told me he had been the one to organise it and was not entirely sure I would forgive him for it.
Adaeze and Charles sat across from me. Charles's face was the quietest face in the room, holding something interior that he was not prepared to release.
Adaeze's jaw was set and her eyes were sharp and she was already looking at me before I had finished sitting down, the look of a woman who had something to say and had been waiting for the forum in which to say it.
My mother spoke first. She said, "We love you.
That is why we are here. That is the only reason, and I want you to hear that before anything else.
" Her voice was steady and her face was the face she used when she was being brave about something, the careful composure of a woman who had cried already and was not going to cry again in front of me if she could help it.
Then my father spoke. Then Callum. Then Charles, quietly and briefly, which surprised me because Charles had been so absent in his grief that I had almost forgotten he was capable of speech.
Each of them said some version of the same thing: we are losing you, and we cannot lose you too, and you have to let us help.
Adaeze did not speak for a long time. When she finally did, her voice was different from how I had heard it before, smaller and more controlled and more dangerous for both of those things.
She said, "Nadia would not want this for you.
" She stopped. She pressed her lips together hard and looked at the floor for a moment.
Then she raised her eyes to me and said, "I do not say that to diminish what you are feeling.
I say it because I knew my daughter, and she loved you, and she would be angry with both of us right now for the state we are in. "
I went to Hargrove Recovery Center six days later.
Callum drove me. Six weeks, and I came out with better tools and worse days and the same three graves waiting.
I went back to work. I kept the promise I had made at that grave for two and a half years, and I intended to keep it for the rest of my life.
I was, as I have said, wrong about that.