Jensen
She let me back in. I knew, when she opened the door wider, that I had not earned it and that she was giving it to me anyway, and I accepted it the way I had been accepting things from her since the beginning, without examining what it cost her.
What I know now is that she saw me clearly, probably from earlier than I understood, and she stayed anyway, not out of naivety but out of the courage of someone who has chosen a thing with both eyes open and is willing to bear the consequences. There was nothing naive about Aoife Walsh. The idea that she did not know what was happening is one I have had to revise entirely. She knew. She stayed. That is something I have to hold alongside everything else.
We continued as before, through month eight and into the next, and I told myself this could go on indefinitely. I was at the graves on Thursdays and her apartment when I called and between the two I was functional and present at work and whatever Callum could see in my face when he looked at me too carefully he chose not to name yet.
The truth is that somewhere in month eight I began to notice her differently. The way she looked when she was reading, which was with a complete absorption that shut out everything else, her chin tipped slightly forward, her hand around her tea. The way she talked about the daycare children not as anecdotesbut as individual people she had actually thought about. The way she had made her apartment into something with her grandmother's curtains and her herbs and her secondhand books, the insistence on making a home out of what you had. I noticed these things. I filed them in the category of things I was not going to examine and I moved on. She is just someone who is around, I continued to tell myself, with decreasing conviction.
?
I was at the graves on a Thursday in month eight when I understood, without wanting to, that this was not entirely true.
I was talking to Nadia the way I always did, and I started talking about the evening before, which I had spent at Aoife's, and I found myself describing her with a specificity and a warmth that stopped me mid-sentence. I had told Nadia about Aoife before, in the vague terms of the arrangement, the way you update someone on logistics. But I was not describing logistics now. I was telling Nadia about the way Aoife had laughed at something on the television, helplessly, covering her face with both hands the way she did when something caught her fully off guard, and how she had looked afterward, still undone by it, and I had thought in that moment, watching her, that she was the most unguarded person I had ever been near.
I stopped talking. I sat in the cold between the headstones and I looked at my wife's name carved in stone and I felt the full force of the thought. Stop, I told myself, with a sharpness that surprised me. That is enough. You stop that right now.
I went home. I lasted four days without contacting her.
On the fifth day I was in a meeting about the Carmichael acquisition and Diana slid a note onto the desk in front of me that said the Singapore office needed a callback in the next twenty minutes, and I looked at the note and I thought about Aoife. The complete irrelevance of the thought to the meetingand the note and Singapore was more information than I wanted to have.
I called Singapore. I went home. I poured a drink and I sat in the study and I said: "I am not doing anything wrong. It's just company. It doesn't mean anything." The photograph did not respond. I had never found this comforting.
I called Aoife.
CHAPTER
ELEVEN
The Test
Aoife
“New life always starts in the dark.” — Barbara Brown Taylor
Strep throat, the children at Sunflower Days used to say, was the price you paid for working in a room with twenty small people who had not yet fully committed to the concept of covering their mouths when they coughed. I had had it twice since starting at the daycare and I had managed it both times with the pragmatism of someone who could not afford to slow down.
Patricia sent me home at lunch on a Tuesday. She looked at me with the focused attention she brought to everything and said, "You have a fever and your voice sounds like gravel. Go home, Aoife." I went home.
The doctor at the clinic prescribed antibiotics, the standard first-line treatment for strep, and I filled the prescription and took the first dose that evening. I was not thinking about my birth control. I found out later, much later, that certain antibiotics could interfere with hormonal contraception. I do not imagine many people know this, because if they did the information would be more prominently placed than it apparently is.
I was sick for five days. Simone came over on the second day. She sat on the end of my bed and told me about a man shehad been seeing, quietly and for longer than she had told me, named Desmond, who worked at a restaurant two blocks from Mae's and had the most ridiculous laugh she had ever heard. She said this with the particular mixture of delight and self-consciousness of a person who has been surprised by their own feelings, her eyes bright and her mouth slightly curved, as if she had not entirely decided whether to be pleased about it yet and the pleasure kept arriving anyway. I told her she deserved something good and she rolled her eyes but I could see she was pleased.
Six weeks after the strep throat I was standing in the bathroom on a Sunday morning looking at a test, and the two lines were visible within thirty seconds, and I sat down on the edge of the bath and I held the test in both hands and I did not move for a very long time.
He will not want this, I thought, and the thought was very quiet and very clear and carried the particular quality of a thing you already know before you have fully admitted that you know it.
I got up. I put the test in my cardigan pocket. I went to the kitchen and I made tea, my grandmother's cup with the chipped handle, and I sat at the table and I looked at the herbs on the windowsill and I talked to her, quietly, the way I sometimes did when I needed to hear a sensible voice and there was no one else to provide it.
"Well," I said. "Here we are."
I was going to keep the baby. I knew this before I had consciously framed it as a decision. This child will not be given up. This child will not grow up wondering, the way I did, whether there was a version of events in which they were wanted. Whatever else happens, this child will know that they were wanted.
I sat there until the tea went cold. Then I rinsed my cup and got dressed and I texted Jensen to ask if he could come over on Tuesday evening.
He said he would be there at seven.
CHAPTER
