They brought me to a room. Someone — a nurse, a young woman with careful eyes and a gentleness that belonged to a person who had done this before and had not yet learned to do it from a distance — said something about taking a moment, about the doctors wanting to speak with me. I sat in a chair. My father had his hand on my shoulder and I could feel the weight of it but it was coming from very far away.
The children.
I said it out loud. My father's jaw tightened, the way it did when he was holding something in, and he said, "I know, son," very quietly, and Callum was already at the door.
I did not want to leave her. The physical impossibility of walking away from the room where she was. She was in there, behind a closed door I had not been able to make myself open, and if I left the building that distance would become real in a way it was not yet. If I left, I was leaving her again. I had already been late once tonight.
It was Callum who said it. He came to stand in front of me and he put both hands on my shoulders and he looked at me with an expression I had never seen on him before, something past grief, something determined and almost fierce, and he said: "Jensen. The babies are at Eastside. We have to go right now."
The word babies did something to my legs that nothing else had managed, and I stood up.
I looked at the door to her room. I told her I was coming back. I turned around and followed my brother out of the building into the October night and I did not look back because if I looked back I would not have been able to keep walking.
?
At Eastside Children's Hospital they put us in a small consultation room with chairs arranged in a way that told you everything before anyone spoke. There is a specific geometry to rooms where people are given the worst news. They aredesigned, I think, to prevent falling. Low chairs. Nothing with hard edges. A box of tissues on a table that everyone sees and nobody reaches for until they need it.
The attending physician was a woman named Dr. Renata Voss. She came in and she sat down, which I have since learned is what they are trained to do — to sit, to bring themselves to your level. She had dark hair pulled back and the kind of face that does not retreat from what it has to do, and she looked at me directly, without flinching, and I respected that later, when I was capable of respecting anything.
She said: "I am so sorry to tell you this."
Noah had been pronounced dead on arrival. Three weeks old. He had Nadia's nose and I had held him for the first time that morning and thought I have never seen anything this perfect. I had said it out loud. Nadia had laughed, still raw from the birth, still soft and more herself than she had been in weeks, and she said: "You said the same thing about Imani." And I said: "I meant it then too."
Imani had died on the table at 7:14 in the evening from internal hemorrhaging. Three years old. She called me Daddy-J for reasons no one could explain and it made me laugh every single time. She was obsessed with the colour yellow. She had a stuffed elephant named Peanut who went everywhere with her, and I thought about Peanut — sitting in Nadia's car or at my parents' house or somewhere in the wreckage — and I had to press my hand over my mouth.
They had done everything. Dr. Voss said this and I believed her and it did not matter.
?
I asked to see them.
There was a brief, careful pause of people deciding how to accommodate a request that existed outside normal procedure, and then someone nodded and we were led down a corridorto a small room with a window that looked out onto a parking structure. Two cribs had been placed side by side. The room was very quiet. There was a lamp in the corner giving off a warm light that felt almost cruel in its gentleness, as if the room were trying to be something it could never be.
I went in alone.
I do not know what I said. I know I talked to them because that is what you do, that is the only thing left to do when everything else has already happened. I sat in the chair between their cribs and I put one hand near each of them and I talked until I had no more words and then I sat in the silence and I was there with them. For the last time, with both of them in the same room.
A nurse knocked after fifty-four minutes. She was kind about it. She stood in the doorway with her hands folded in front of her, her expression soft and exhausted and full of a sorrow that was not performed, and she said they needed to — she did not finish the sentence. She did not have to.
I kissed Imani's forehead. I kissed Noah's. I stood up and I walked out of that room and I closed the door behind me and I have not been able to fully open myself since.
?
I went back to Mercy General. My father drove me, his hands steady on the wheel, his face set in the deliberate calm of a man who is holding himself together for someone else's sake and intends to keep doing it. I went to where they were keeping her and I sat with her for nearly an hour and I told her everything I should have said on the phone that afternoon. I told her I was sorry for the call. I told her she was right, that I always say that, that I have always been better at the intention than the follow-through and she deserved better. I told her about Imani's laugh and the way Noah smelled and how I was going to figure out howto do this without her even though I had no idea how that was possible. I told her I loved her.
My father had to physically remove me at one in the morning. He put his hands on my arms, and his grip was firm and careful the way it had been when I was a child and had needed to be carried, and he said: "Jensen. Come on, son." His voice broke on the last word and he looked away for a moment and pressed his lips together and then looked back, and his eyes were wet, and I had never seen my father with wet eyes before.
He took me to my parents' house. I sat in the kitchen until morning. My mother put a cup of coffee in front of me and sat across the table and looked at me the way she had been looking at me all night, with a grief that was entirely about me and not at all about herself, which was the most my-mother thing she had ever done. I looked at the coffee and could not locate any reason to pick it up.
Outside, the night began to come apart at the edges. The sky went from black to the dark blue that comes just before dawn, and then to grey, and I watched it happen from the kitchen table and I thought: this is the first morning. This is the first morning of every morning for the rest of my life that I will wake up and they will still be gone.
I was right about that.
?
The funeral was on a Saturday. Late October, the kind of day that cannot decide between autumn and something harsher — pale sun, cold wind, leaves coming down in gusts that felt personal, as if the weather had read the occasion and responded accordingly. I sat in the front row of the church in a dark suit and I looked at three caskets lined up and I felt nothing.
That is not quite accurate. I felt the specific, total silence of a man who has arrived at the outer edge of what a person can absorb. I felt the weight of every hand that touched my shoulder.I heard, as if from underwater, the words of the pastor and the sobs of Adaeze behind me — a sound raw and private, the sound of a woman coming undone in public because she no longer had the resources to prevent it — and the particular controlled grief of my father, who cried without making a sound, which I had never seen him do before. His face was entirely still and entirely broken at the same time, and I understood for the first time that those two things were not contradictory.
