Chapter 8
CHAPTER
EIGHT
What the Bourbon Couldn’t Drown
Jensen
I had been at the graves for three hours when I called her.
It was a Thursday in December, cold enough that the ground had frozen overnight and the flowers I had left for Imani had stiffened against the headstone.
I had drunk half a bottle of bourbon over the course of the afternoon, and by the time I left it was dark and the cold had gone from uncomfortable to something sharper, and I stood at the car for a long time without getting in.
I did not want to go home. The house was very loud in its silence. Every room held the frequency of her absence, and on the nights I could not tolerate it I called Aoife.
I was aware that this was not fair to her. It is selfish, I told myself, standing at the car in the December cold. You know it is selfish. But you are going to do it anyway, and you can be ashamed of yourself in the morning.
She answered on the second ring. I went to her apartment.
She let me in with the same uncomplicated openness she always showed, no performance, no demand for explanation, simply the door opening and her face in the light and the warmth of the place settling over me like something I had not known I needed until it was there.
We talked for a while. She made tea and I drank it and I listened to her tell me about a little boy at the daycare who had learned to write his name that week and had written it on every available surface including, memorably, his own forehead, and her telling of it made me laugh, actually laugh, the full unrehearsed kind.
I saw on her face the brief unguarded pleasure of a person who has produced an effect she wanted, a brightness in her expression that she did not try to contain.
I should have gone home after the tea. I know this. I stayed.
?
I do not remember falling asleep. I know that I talked, because of what happened in the morning.
In that unguarded place between the bourbon and the sleep I went somewhere I went often when I was not carefully managing where I was, and I talked the way I talked when I was alone at the graves, or in the dark of the study.
I talked to her. Not to Aoife. To Nadia.
I talked about the park. I talked about the argument and how she had been right.
I talked about Imani not wanting to leave.
I talked about Noah, who had been three weeks old and who I had held for the first time that morning, and I talked about the room at Eastside Children's Hospital with the two cribs side by side and the quality of the light.
I do not know how much of this was out loud and how much was internal. In the morning, Aoife's face told me what I needed to know.
?
I woke to an unfamiliar ceiling, the disorientation of a room I had not yet oriented myself inside. Then I did. I was aware of Aoife beside me, awake, lying with a stillness that was different from the stillness of sleep.
She made coffee. She set it in front of me and sat down across the small table and wrapped her hands around her own cup, and she looked at me with an expression I had not seen on her before, careful and measuring and containing something I could not yet fully read.
There was no anger in it. There was a quietness that was more difficult than anger, the face of someone who has absorbed something large and is deciding, very carefully, what to do with it.
"Who are Nadia, Imani, and Noah?" she asked.
The names in her mouth undid something in me that I had been holding very tightly for a very long time. I felt the full force of it, not grief exactly, but the combined weight of having kept this separate and the awareness that the separation had now failed.
"They were my wife and children," I said. "They died three years ago. I would prefer not to discuss it."
I said it the way you say something when you are keeping a door shut through force of will.
I watched her face receive it. The quietness on her face did not change, but something beneath it shifted, a barely perceptible tightening, the way a person absorbs a blow they were half-expecting.
She did not flinch. She did not look away.
"Okay," she said. She looked at the table. Then she looked at me again and said, very quietly, "I'm sorry. For what happened to them."
I said nothing. I finished my coffee. I left.
On the walk to my car I was consumed by a shame that was not about the drinking but about something more specific, the shame of a man who had spent seven months using another woman's warmth to approximate the warmth of his dead wife, and who had now been caught doing it.
You could have told her, I thought. You could have told her what this was and what you were carrying and let her decide.
But you didn't, because telling her would have made her a person with a choice and you needed her not to leave.
She did not contact me for nearly three weeks. I visited the graves twice that week and both times I sat between the headstones and I felt not the usual release of talking out loud but only the particular guilt of a man who has been unkind to someone who did not deserve it.
Three weeks felt like a long time.