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.
CHAPTER
TWENTY-FOUR
The Names
Jensen
Iwrote the names on a piece of paper three days after the two in the morning conversation and I put it on the kitchen counter before she came down for breakfast. I said in the note that these were only options, nothing more, and that she did not have to use them.
She came downstairs at six-thirty. I heard her in the kitchen from the study. There was a silence that was longer than the silence of reading a short note. Then I heard her move, and the sound of the kettle, and nothing further for some time.
At eight o'clock I came into the kitchen for coffee. She was at the counter. She looked up at me when I came in, and there was something on her face that was doing its best to be neutral and was not entirely succeeding. Her eyes were bright, briefly, before she looked back at her cup. I poured my coffee. I did not ask about the note.
Later that afternoon I walked past the living room and she was on the couch with her hand on her stomach, not reading anything, entirely still in the full and quiet way rather than the managed way, the way of a person who is very present with something that matters to them.
I thought about what my father had said at the intervention: I did not know her last name. I knew it now because the hospital had it on the forms. Walsh. Aoife Walsh. I thought about the names on the paper, Seamus, for a boy, Brigid, for a girl, andI thought: I am naming children for her grandparents. Four months ago I put four hundred dollars on her table. And here I am.
I did not examine what this meant. I simply filed it where it needed to go.
She told me on a Sunday, a week later, that she liked the names. She said it simply, without any of the discussion I had not asked for and would not have known how to have, and then she said she had been thinking about middle names and she wanted to know what she would need to do to give them both his name alongside Walsh. I said I would have the solicitor look into it.
She said, "Thank you."
I said, "Thank you for letting them have mine."
She looked at me for a moment in the particular way she looked at me when I had surprised her, something opening briefly in her expression before she drew it back, and then she went back to her book, and I went back to mine.
?
I picked her up from the daycare on a Thursday in week thirty-three and I was early, which was habit, and I parked on the street and waited.
Through the glass panel in the door I could see the corner of the main room. A small boy of perhaps two or three appeared in my line of sight, moving at the particular speed of a toddler who has determined a destination. He had clearly been crying recently. Aoife appeared behind him. She came across the room with a steadiness and an unhurriedness that communicated she had all the time in the world, and she crouched down beside him, which at thirty-three weeks required visible effort, and she said something I could not hear. The boy looked at her. She said something else. He reached up and put both his arms around her neck and she held him, her hands against his back, and theystayed like that for a while. Then she pulled back and looked at his face and said something that made him smile.
I sat in the car and I watched this and I thought about nothing very coherent for a moment. I thought: Oh.
Then she stood up and took the boy's hand and walked him back across the room, and I got out of the car when she came out and held the door and she said, "You didn't have to do that," and I said, "I know," and we drove home.
CHAPTER
TWENTY-FIVE
Almost
