Chapter Twenty-Three
CHAPTER
TWENTY-THREE
The Appointments
Aoife
“The beginning of love is to let those we love be perfectly themselves.” — Thomas Merton
He started coming to the prenatal appointments in week thirty.
The first time, he simply appeared in the kitchen on a Thursday morning with his jacket on and his keys in his hand at the time I normally left for the clinic, and he said, "I'll drive you.
" I told him it was a routine check, that there was nothing that needed his attention.
He said, "I know. I'll drive you." He said it calmly, without any of the particular energy of a man staking a claim, just a statement of what was going to happen.
I stood there for a moment and then I put on my coat.
He sat in the waiting room with a book. Not his phone, an actual book. I came out after the appointment and he was in the corner chair with the book open and he looked up and said, "How did it go?" I told him. He nodded and folded down the page corner and stood up, and we walked to the car.
He came to the next one and the one after that.
On the fourth appointment, when Dr. Mehta was going over the monitoring results, she looked at him sitting in the chair by the wall and said, "Do you have questions, Mr. Shaw?
" He had written them in a small notebook.
Three questions, precise and medical. Dr. Mehta answered each one and looked at him afterward with the expression of a person who has revised their assessment of something upward.
I looked at the notebook. He has been reading about this. He sat somewhere alone with a medical book and he wrote down questions and brought them to my appointment. He did this without telling me.
After the appointment we stopped at the grocery store because I was out of chamomile tea.
He came in with me, which he had not done before.
He pushed the trolley because I could not manage it comfortably at thirty weeks with twins, and I walked beside him through the aisles and he held up the chamomile tea questioningly and I said yes, and he put it in the trolley, and we moved on to the fruit section.
It was such a completely ordinary thing that I had to look away for a moment.
I bought the fruit. He carried both bags to the car. We drove home and he made lunch while I put my feet up, and we ate it at the counter, and I thought: I am not reading anything into this. This is just what is happening.
I was reading everything into it. I could not help it. I had never been able to help it, with him. That was the problem that had been the problem from the beginning.
?
The two in the morning conversation happened the night of the chamomile tea.
I had been sleeping badly for weeks. Jensen was in the kitchen when I came downstairs, at the counter with a glass of water, and he looked up when I came in with the expression of someone who had also been awake for a while and was not surprised to have company.
He made the chamomile tea without being asked and put it in front of me and sat down across the counter and we sat together in the quiet of a house at two in the morning.
I started talking about my grandmother. I told him about the garden in Galway, the sweet peas along the back fence and the rosemary by the kitchen door and the apple tree in the corner.
I told him about her hands, which had been a gardener's hands, capable and calloused, and how she used to hold both of my hands in both of hers when she was telling me something important.
I told him about my grandfather's laugh, which started in his chest and arrived late, lopsided, like something he could not quite contain.
I told him about the sound the house made when they were gone. The specific quality of the silence of a house that has been a home and is no longer.
He listened. He did not fill the spaces with the wrong things. He let the silences be silences and the words be words, and he sat across from me with his water glass in both hands and he was entirely present.
When I finished he said, "They sound like people who did everything right."
I said, "They were. They were the best people I ever knew. I want the babies to know that about them. Even though they're gone."
He looked at the counter for a moment. Something moved in his face, something quiet and decided. Then he said, "Tell me their names again."
I told him. He did not say anything after.
He kept the names in his face in the way that you keep something you intend to remember, holding them carefully.
And we sat there for a while longer and finished our tea and then we both went back to bed, and in the morning nothing was different and everything was different, in the way that is sometimes how things change.