Chapter 18
CHAPTER
EIGHTEEN
The Museum
Aoife
The house was large. This was the first thing I noticed, and then I noticed everything else.
There was a photograph on the wall to the right of the door, large, framed in dark wood, a wedding photograph.
The woman in it was beautiful, warm-faced and laughing at something out of frame, her dress white against the dark background.
The man beside her was Jensen, younger by some years, and he was looking at her with an expression I had never once seen on him in the months I had known him.
Uncomplicated happiness. Not managed, not contained. Just there, fully, on his face.
I looked at her. She was laughing with her whole face and looking at someone just off camera and there was in her expression a completeness that I recognised as the look of a person who is exactly where they want to be and knows it.
I looked at her for a moment and I thought: she was real.
Of course she was real. I have always known she was real.
But she was real in a way that was different standing in his house looking at her photograph than she was as a name spoken in the dark.
I moved through the house behind him. In the living room there was a framed photograph of a little girl in a yellow dress, three or four years old, grinning at the camera with the uninhibited joy of a child who has not yet learned that photographs require composure.
On the windowsill there was a small wooden giraffe, worn smooth at the edges from handling.
On the staircase wall a series of family photographs, chronological, the last ones showing a woman visibly pregnant and then holding a newborn and then a family of four in autumn light, all of them on someone's porch, Jensen's arm around her shoulders, a little girl sitting on his knee, the new baby in Nadia's arms. They were all looking at the camera.
All four of them, whole and together and entirely unaware of what was coming.
In the hallway there was her coat on the hook by the back door, a grey wool coat with a belt that hung loose.
I set my two bags down on the guest room floor.
I sat on the edge of the bed. I looked at the window and the garden and I thought: this is the house where he lived with them.
This is the house where he is still living with them, in every sense of that phrase that does not involve their physical presence.
He has changed nothing. He is living inside a monument to what he has lost, and I am going to be in this monument for the foreseeable future and I need to be able to be here without it breaking me.
I unpacked the curtains and the throw and the herbs and the books. I hung the yellow curtains at the window, and when the afternoon light came through them it made the room warmer and more mine, and I sat on the bed and I breathed.
"All right," I told my grandmother. "This is where we are. We are making the best of it. That is what we do."
I heard Jensen in the kitchen below, the sounds of cabinets opening, water running. I put my hand on my stomach, where the babies were.
"We are going to be all right," I told them. I said it until it felt more true than not. It took a while.