Chapter 14
CHAPTER
FOURTEEN
The Intervention
Jensen
Callum found me in the office on a Tuesday at nine in the evening.
He stood in the doorway and looked at me and at the glass in my hand and at the bottle on the desk, and he did not say anything immediately.
He came in and sat down across from me. He did not look angry.
He looked tired in a way that went deeper than the hour, the face of someone who has been watching something happen for a long time and is done waiting for it to stop on its own.
"How long," he said.
"I've had a difficult few weeks," I said.
"Jensen." He waited. "How long has it been this bad again?"
I looked at the glass. I said, "Since she left."
A pause. "Since who left?"
I told him. I told him about Aoife, and the months, and the pregnancy, and what I had said and done and left on her table.
I told him in the flat, careful voice I used when I was reporting information I had not yet fully processed emotionally, and Callum listened with his forearms on the desk and his eyes on my face, not moving, not interrupting, absorbing it the way he had always absorbed things from me, completely and without performing his reaction.
He was quiet for a long time after I finished. Then he said, "She's pregnant and you don't know where she is."
"Her phone has been disconnected. I don’t know her last name. I don’t know where she is."
Callum put his elbows on the desk and his hands over his face and sat like that for a moment.
When he lowered his hands his expression had settled into something that was not anger exactly but was close to it, and something underneath it that was sadder than anger.
He looked at me with the face of a man who loves his brother and is not going to pretend, in this moment, that love means not saying the true thing.
"I'm going to call Dad," he said.
"Callum."
"I'm calling Dad. And then we're going to figure out what you owe that woman and make sure you pay it." He stood up. "I'll get us both coffee," he said. "And then I'm making the call."
He made the call.
?
The intervention was at my parents' house four days later.
I told them everything, sober, which made it harder in some ways and necessary in all of them.
I told the whole of it from the beginning, the diner and the months and the name in the dark and the morning after and the pregnancy and the money on the table and the door.
The room received it in different ways. My mother looked at the floor for a moment, and when she looked up her face had the colour of someone who has just felt something physical, a woman receiving news she had been hoping would not arrive.
My father looked at me with the expression he used when he was arriving at a judgment, not unkind, but unsparing, and he did not look away while I was talking.
Callum's jaw was set in the way that meant he had already decided what he thought.
Adaeze erupted. She called Aoife names that no one in the room repeated afterward.
She said Jensen was dishonouring Nadia's memory, that he had made a promise at her grave and it had apparently meant nothing, that he had been out sleeping with some woman for months, getting her pregnant, while her daughter and grandchildren had been in the ground barely three years.
Her voice was shaking. She pressed her hands flat on her knees as she spoke, as if anchoring herself, and she did not look at me when she said the worst things, she looked at the wall.
She was not wrong about the promise. That was the worst part.
Charles put his hand on his wife's arm and said her name quietly. She did not stop, but she lowered her voice.
My father waited until the room was quiet again. Then he looked at me and spoke in the way he spoke when he had something to say that he was not going to ornament.
"You got a woman pregnant," he said, "and you put money on her table and you walked out.
You don't know where she is. You don't know if she is all right.
You don't know if she kept the baby. You sat in this room and told us about a woman you spent seven months with and you do not know her last name.
" He let that stand. "She did not do anything to you.
She walked into something without understanding what it was and you let her stay in it because it suited you.
And when the consequences arrived, you left her alone with them and four hundred dollars and a door slammed in her face. "
I had nothing to say to this. Everything he said was accurate.
My mother said, quietly, "I want to meet her." Her voice was careful, controlled, but there was something in her eyes when she said it that was not controlled at all.
My father told me I was on leave from the company for six months. I did not discuss it.
On the drive home I sat in the car outside my house for a long time before going in.
I thought about a girl on the other side of the city working I didn't know how many jobs with a pregnancy she had not planned and no family and a disconnected phone and a new address I did not have.
I thought about what my father had said. She did not do anything to you.
He was right. She had done nothing to me. She had been kind to me, consistently and without conditions, for seven months, and I had taken the kindness and given her nothing in return except access to a grief I had never explained and a door I slammed on my way out.