Afterward, at the graveside, I watched them lower the caskets one by one into the ground. The shame hit me for the first time. Not grief — I had been grieving since the corridor at Mercy General. Shame. The specific shame of a man who was late. Who was on the phone. Who put his hand on the car door and did the math on forty-five minutes as if time were something he had in unlimited supply.
I stood at those three graves and I made myself look at what I had done. Not the accident. The drunk driver did that, Derek Wallis with his .19 blood alcohol and his red light. I did not do that. But I had been late. I had been on the phone. And we had argued, and those were the last words, and I would carry that for the rest of my life.
I carry it still.
?
The year that followed is not something I can account for in full. I know the broad shape of it — the drinking, the graves, the way my brother and my father held the company together while I sat in a house that still smelled like her and could not make myself change a single thing. Her reading glasses on the nightstand. Her coat on the hook by the back door. Imani's yellow rainboots by the front door, toes pointing out the way she always left them. Noah's mobile above the crib he had slept in for exactly three weeks, still rotating faintly in drafts from the hallway.
I visited the graves every day. Sometimes twice. I would sit on the ground between the headstones and I would talk, or not talk, or sometimes just put my hand on the grass above where she was and try to feel something other than the particular cold of the earth in November.
The drinking was private and systematic. I was not the kind of man who fell apart publicly. I was the kind of man who waited until the house was quiet and the work calls were done and then poured two fingers of bourbon and then four, and sat in the study with the lights off and the photographs arranged around me, and drank until the silence became manageable.
My family had me admitted to Hargrove Recovery Center in the twelfth month. By then I was tired in a way that had nothing to do with sleep. Callum drove me. He did not say much on the way there. At the entrance he got out and held the door and put his hand on the back of my neck the way he had when we were boys, when one of us was scared and the other was pretending not to be. His face was composed and his eyes were not, and neither of us said anything about that.
He said: "You come back to us, okay?"
I went in.
Six weeks. I came out steadier. Not healed. I came out with better tools and worse days and the same three graves waiting for me on the other side of the city. I went back to work. I functioned. People were careful around me in the way they are careful around something that has been broken and repaired — they could see the seams, even when they pretended not to.
I went to the grave the week I returned to work. I sat on the ground the way I always had, and I told Nadia about the facility and about Callum running the Delmar account into the ground in my absence, which would have made her laugh. Then I told her what I had come to say.
"There will not be anyone else," I told her. "I know you would probably tell me I am being dramatic. That you would want me to be happy. But I cannot. I have tried to imagine it and I cannot get there. Every time I try to put someone else in the picture, it does not hold. There is only you. And I would rather carry this than replace it with something that is not you."
I meant it.
I meant it for two and a half years, until a Tuesday night in late spring when I walked out of the cemetery and my feet took me somewhere warm and lit, and a girl with a name I did not know yet brought me coffee without being asked and smiled at me and looked away, and something shifted in my chest that I told myself was nothing.
I was wrong about that.
But that comes later.
CHAPTER
TWO
The Shape of Grief
Jensen
People grieve differently. I know this because I watched an entire network of people grieve the same loss from different angles, and not one of them did it the way another one did. My mother cooked. In the weeks after the funeral she filled every surface of her kitchen with food nobody asked for and nobody wanted, and when I visited she moved from counter to counter with a purposefulness that was barely contained, her hands always occupied, her back often turned, because turning her back meant she did not have to let me see her face. My father went quiet in a way that was different from his usual quiet. He had always been a man of few words, deliberate and measured, but this was something else. This was the quiet of a man who had run out of the right thing to say and was too honest to fill the silence with the wrong thing. He would sit with me and look at his hands and occasionally look up at me with an expression that held more than he knew how to give words to.
Callum called me every morning at seven o'clock. He never said much on those calls. He would ask how I had slept, and I would say fine, which was never true, and he would say okay, and we would stay on the line for a few minutes without talking, and then he would say he would check in later and hang up. He did this every day for eleven months without missing a single one. I never told him what those calls meant to me.
Adaeze Okafor stopped sleeping. I know this because Charles told my mother, and my mother told me with the particular careful gentleness she uses when she is delivering information she thinks might break something. Adaeze would sit in Nadia's childhood bedroom in the dark and be there when Charles woke at two in the morning and still there when he woke again at five. She did not return to the grief counsellor the hospital had referred them to. She did not want, she told Charles, to be counselled out of her grief. Her grief was her daughter. She was keeping it.
I understood that completely.
?
The house was the problem and also the solution, in the way that the things which are destroying you are sometimes the only thing keeping you standing. I could not leave it. I stayed. I moved through the rooms carefully, touching nothing that was hers, maintaining everything exactly as she had left it, as if she had only stepped out and would be back shortly and would notice if I had moved so much as a glass.
Her reading glasses were on the nightstand on her side of the bed. She had been farsighted since her late twenties and resisted the glasses for two years before I talked her into them, and she had never quite made peace with needing them. She used to take them off whenever she thought someone might take a photograph. She would tip her chin up slightly and say nothing, as if the glasses had simply ceased to be there by her refusal to acknowledge them. I used to tease her about it. I would give a great deal to tease her about it one more time.
Imani's yellow rainboots were by the front door for four months. Toes pointing outward, the way she always left them, because she could never quite get the knack of placing her shoes neatly. I walked past them every time I left the house and every time I came back. In March, four months after the accident, mymother came to the house and moved the boots. She did it while I was in the shower, quietly and without announcement, and when I came downstairs and saw the empty space by the door I stood there for a long time without moving.
When she came to find me she had the boots in her hands and her eyes were full and there was a guilt on her face that was also a kind of love, the face of someone who has done something on your behalf that she was not certain you wanted and is waiting to hear whether she got it wrong. She said, "I'm sorry. I should have asked." I told her it was all right. I was not all right. But I understood why she had done it. She could not watch me walk past them one more time.
