I told her about Aoife.
I told her that Aoife's name means beauty or radiance, which she already knew because she knew things like that. I toldher that Aoife sings to the babies in Irish in the evenings and that Brigid always stops crying when she does it. I told her that Aoife puts herbs on every windowsill she occupies and talks to them, which I had initially found mildly eccentric and had since begun to find entirely reasonable.
I told Nadia that I am trying. Not doing it perfectly. But trying with everything I have.
I told her: "I did not replace you. I want you to know that. I don't know what I did, exactly. I think I just started living again. And I think you would have said it was about time."
I left the flowers and the rabbit and I walked back to the car and I drove home.
?
I have thought about this a great deal, in the year since the hallway. Whether what I feel for Aoife is real in its own right, or whether it is simply what grew in the space that grief left behind. Whether she is a choice or a consequence.
I know the answer. I knew it the morning I stood at the stove and she laughed and I looked at her and thought Oh, with the specific quality of a thought that arrives before you have decided to have it. I knew it at two in the morning when she told me about her grandfather’s laugh and I did not want her to stop talking. I knew it when I packed the hospital bag in secret two weeks before she needed it, not because I had to, not because she was carrying my children and therefore my responsibility, but because the thought of her going through that night without the right tea and her blanket was something I could not make myself accept.
Grief had a shape when I carried it alone. It was fixed and total and it left no room for anything else, and for a long time I believed that was permanent. What I have understood, slowly and imperfectly over the past year, is that the heart is not a fixed container with a limited supply. It expands. It rebuilt itselfaround her without asking my permission, and by the time I noticed it happening it had already been happening for a long time.
I did not settle. I want to be clear about that, if only to myself, if only here.
I chose her. Not because she was there. Not because of the babies or the house or the habit of her in my mornings. Because she is the person who made me want to come back to the world, and that is not something that happens by accident or proximity. That is not settling. That is the only thing I can think of that deserves to be called love.
I chose her. With everything I had left and everything I have become. I chose her.
?
Seamus and Brigid's first birthday fell on a Saturday in September. The party was small. Simone came with Desmond, who had, over the past year, become a person I had genuine affection for. He held Brigid for most of the afternoon and she regarded him with the assessing expression that was increasingly her default approach to new people, studying his face with the focused inquiry of someone who is taking notes.
My mother and father came. My mother sat on the floor and stacked blocks with Seamus, who knocked them down with a thoroughness that made her laugh, the full genuine laugh she reserved for things that had actually got to her. My father sat in the corner chair with his coffee and watched everything with the expression he used when he had approved of something and did not feel the need to say so, and when he caught my eye once across the room he simply nodded, once, and looked away, which from my father was everything.
Charles Okafor came. He arrived quietly, and he stood in the doorway for a moment before Aoife saw him and went tosay hello, which she did with a warmth I could see cost her something and which she gave anyway, because that was who she was. He held Brigid for a long time, standing in the corner with her, and he looked at her with something in his face that was private and not mine to witness. He stayed for an hour and a half. He shook my hand when he left and said, "She's good," and I knew he meant Aoife, and I said yes. He nodded and went home.
Adaeze had not come. This was a wound that had not healed. Charles had told me she had cried when she saw the birthday photographs I had sent, the ones where Seamus had cake on his forehead and Brigid was looking at it with her characteristic critical interest. I did not know what to do with this information other than keep it somewhere accessible. There was a crack of light there. I intended to keep my eye on it.
?
I asked Aoife to marry me on a Tuesday morning in July, which is when I ask her things that matter, apparently, because Tuesday mornings are when we are most ourselves, before the day has assembled its requirements.
She was eating cold fruit at the counter. Seamus had attached himself to her left leg in the way he had begun doing in the mornings, for the sheer inconvenience of it as far as anyone could tell. She was reading something on her phone and half-talking to him and eating the fruit and managing all of it with the specific competence of a person who has always been good at carrying more than one thing at once.
I said, "Aoife." She looked up. I said, "I would very much like for you to marry me, if that's something you want."
She put the phone down. She looked at me with the expression I loved most on her face, which was the one that arrived before she had decided what she was going to do with it, open and real and entirely hers. Something moved across it, allthe way through, and then her eyes filled, and she smiled, and she said yes before I had finished the sentence.
She said it in Irish first, which I did not have the word for yet, but which I understood completely, and then she said it in English. Seamus fell over in the process of looking up at us and did not cry, which was new, and looked at the ceiling with the expression that meant he was deciding whether it was worth it.
I put the ring on her finger. I had bought it from a woman on Clement Street who made them by hand, a plain gold band with a single stone that Aoife had pointed at once, months ago, while we were walking past the window, without appearing to intend for me to notice.
I had noticed.
She looked at the ring. She looked at me. Something moved across her face that was nothing like the face she had worn when she sat across from me in the apartment on Carver Street and told me she was pregnant, and nothing like the face she had worn in the doorway of Harrington's when she looked through me, and nothing like the face she had worn when she said don't make me the person you settled for. It was a different face entirely. A face I had never seen on her before, because I had never before given her the reason to make it.
"You noticed," she said.
"I notice everything about you," I said. "I have for a long time. I was simply not ready to admit it."
She laughed. The real kind. Helpless and unplanned, covering her face with both hands the way she did when something caught her fully off guard, and I stored it where I stored all of them, the specific collection I had been building since the night she brought me coffee without being asked and smiled at me and looked away.
?
