Chapter 20
CHAPTER
TWENTY
Noah’s Birthday
Aoife
“Grief is the price we pay for love.” — Queen Elizabeth II
Adaeze Okafor came on a Sunday, three weeks after I moved into Jensen's house.
Jensen was at the graves. I was on the couch with my feet elevated, reading, when the doorbell rang a second time and then a third, with the persistence of someone who intended to be acknowledged.
I went to the door.
The woman standing on the step was in her early sixties, well-dressed with the bearing of someone for whom presentation is a form of dignity.
She looked at me. I looked at her. For a moment neither of us spoke.
Then her eyes moved to my stomach and back to my face, and something passed across her expression that was complicated enough that I could not name it in the second it lasted.
Pain, I thought. And underneath the pain, something that had hardened from long use.
"What are you doing in this house?" she said. Her voice was controlled, precise.
"I'm a guest," I said. "My name is Aoife. Jensen has been kind enough to let me stay while I'm on bed rest."
"I know who you are," she said. She looked at me with eyes that were sharp and direct and carrying a sorrow so profound it had curdled into something else.
She told me I had no place here. She said this house belonged to Nadia's memory and that every morning I woke up in it was an insult to the woman whose photographs were on those walls.
She said the word manipulated with a precision that told me it had been chosen carefully.
She called me things I will not repeat. She said the babies were a trap.
She said I could not give him what Nadia had given him.
She said nobody could. She said I was temporary, that he would eventually discard me, and that when he did I would find myself alone with two children and considerably less than when I arrived.
She spoke for a long time. I stood in the doorway and I did not move and I did not respond and I did not cry, because I was protecting my blood pressure, as Dr. Mehta had told me to, and because I recognised, underneath the cruelty of the words, the grief that was driving them.
This was a mother who had lost her daughter.
This was a woman whose grandchildren had died at three years and three weeks old.
Her pain had found the only outlet available to it, which was rage, and the rage had to go somewhere, and I was the easiest somewhere.
I did not agree with what she was saying. But I understood why she was saying it. She is in terrible pain, I told myself, and she is making you the container for it and you cannot do anything about that right now except not give her any more of your blood pressure.
She stopped eventually. She looked at me and I looked at her and after a moment she said, "Where is Jensen?"
"He's not here," I said.
She looked at me for a long moment more, and then she left.
I closed the door. I went back to the couch. I put my feet up and I picked up my book and I did not read a word of it for a long time.
I thought: she is not entirely wrong. He will never get over his wife.
She is in every room of this house. She is the reason he cannot sleep and the reason he drinks and the reason he made a promise at her grave that I was the consequence of him breaking, and he has not once, not in the weeks I have been here, given me any reason to believe that this is something other than obligation.
Then Jensen's car pulled into the driveway, earlier than I expected, and I heard the front door and his footsteps and he stopped in the hallway and he said, "She came here, didn't she," not as a question.
I said, "She did. I'm fine."
He came to the doorway of the living room and he looked at me. His jaw was tight and there was something working behind his eyes, but his voice was careful when he said, "What did she say?"
I said, "It doesn't matter."
He stood there for a moment, and I watched his face, the effort in it, the something he was deciding. Then he said, "She's having my kids. I didn't have a choice about any of this."
The words entered me and settled somewhere quiet. She's having my kids. I didn't have a choice.
I said, "Of course. I think I'll rest for a bit," and I went upstairs.
I lay in the guest room with my grandmother's yellow curtains dark against the window and I told myself I had always known this and that the babies were fine and that was enough. It would have to be.