She put them in the study, on the shelf with the photographs. That was where things went that I could not look at daily but could not get rid of. The study became a room I stopped entering.
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The drinking began, as most things do, with the best of intentions. A glass of bourbon after dinner because the evenings were the worst part. One glass became two. Two became the bottle on the desk. I was not falling-down drunk. I was not drunk in a way that anyone could have pointed to from the outside and named. I was the kind of drunk that keeps its tie on, that answers emails coherently, that wakes up the next morning and functions and then does it all again.
Callum found me in the office at nine in the evening in month nine with a glass in my hand and three empty bottles in the trash. He sat down across from me without saying anything for a moment. He looked at the desk. He looked at me. There was no anger on his face, which surprised me. There was something that was less comfortable than anger, a steady, exhausted disappointment that he was not trying to hide from me. He picked up the bottle and looked at the label and set it back down.
"How long has this been going on?" he said.
I told him it was manageable. He said, "I didn't ask if it was manageable. I asked how long." His voice was quiet and even. He did not raise it. Callum almost never raised his voice, which was more effective than shouting.
I told him since November. He looked at the desk again for a moment, something moving across his face that he pressed flat before I could read it properly. Then he said, "All right. I'm not going to lecture you tonight. But we are going to talk about this."
We did not talk about it that night. It took three more months and my father and my mother and both sets of in-laws in a room together before we talked about it properly.
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The intervention was a Thursday. My father opened the door and I saw over his shoulder the full assembly of people I loved most in the world sitting in the living room with the particular posture of people who have agreed in advance on something, and my first thought was that someone else had died.
"Nobody's hurt," my father said, reading my face the way he always had, his expression deliberate and composed. "Come and sit down, son."
I sat down. My mother was beside my father on the sofa, her hands clasped in her lap, her eyes already showing that she had been crying before I arrived and was working to keep herself from resuming. Callum sat to my right and he did not look at me when I sat down, which told me he had been the one to organise it and was not entirely sure I would forgive him for it. Adaeze and Charles sat across from me. Charles's face was the quietest face in the room, holding something interior that he was not prepared to release. Adaeze's jaw was set and her eyes were sharp and she was already looking at me before I had finishedsitting down, the look of a woman who had something to say and had been waiting for the forum in which to say it.
My mother spoke first. She said, "We love you. That is why we are here. That is the only reason, and I want you to hear that before anything else." Her voice was steady and her face was the face she used when she was being brave about something, the careful composure of a woman who had cried already and was not going to cry again in front of me if she could help it.
Then my father spoke. Then Callum. Then Charles, quietly and briefly, which surprised me because Charles had been so absent in his grief that I had almost forgotten he was capable of speech. Each of them said some version of the same thing: we are losing you, and we cannot lose you too, and you have to let us help.
Adaeze did not speak for a long time. When she finally did, her voice was different from how I had heard it before, smaller and more controlled and more dangerous for both of those things. She said, "Nadia would not want this for you." She stopped. She pressed her lips together hard and looked at the floor for a moment. Then she raised her eyes to me and said, "I do not say that to diminish what you are feeling. I say it because I knew my daughter, and she loved you, and she would be angry with both of us right now for the state we are in."
I went to Hargrove Recovery Center six days later. Callum drove me. Six weeks, and I came out with better tools and worse days and the same three graves waiting. I went back to work. I kept the promise I had made at that grave for two and a half years, and I intended to keep it for the rest of my life.
I was, as I have said, wrong about that.
CHAPTER
THREE
Tús Maith
Aoife
My grandmother used to say that the bravest thing a person could do was to begin. Not to finish, not to succeed, simply to put one foot forward into the unknown and trust that the ground would hold. She said it in Irish first, the way she said most things that mattered, and then she would say it again in English for my benefit, because my Irish was never as good as she deserved. "Tús maith, leath na hoibre." A good start is half the work. She had a saying for everything. I used to tease her about it, and she would tip her head to one side and look at me with the slight smile she kept for moments when she was quietly pleased with me and did not intend to show it fully, and then she would tell me to stop being smart and drink my tea.
I thought about that saying on the morning I flew into the city with two suitcases and forty-three hundred American dollars and the address of a cousin I had never met written on a folded piece of paper in my coat pocket. I thought: this is the beginning. I thought: the ground will hold.
The cousin's address turned out to be an apartment building that had been converted into something else three years prior, a fact I discovered at eleven in the morning on a Tuesday in late March standing on a pavement that smelled of exhaust and old rain with my two suitcases and no plan. I stood there for a moment and looked at the building, which was now somevariety of commercial space with a logo on the door I did not recognise, and I felt the particular quality of aloneness that comes not from being without people but from being without anyone who knows your name. All right, I thought. This is still the beginning. The ground is still holding. We simply need a new plan.
I found a hostel that night, a narrow building with a bunk bed above a German architecture student named Petra who snored with a dedication I found almost admirable. I lay awake looking at the ceiling and listening to the sounds of a city that did not know I was in it, and I told my grandmother, silently, that I was all right.
It took me three weeks to find the apartment on Carver Street. Four flights up, a studio small enough that you could stand in the centre and touch two walls without fully extending your arms, with a window that looked out onto the side of the building next door and a radiator that knocked every night at around two in the morning as if checking that you were still there. Three hundred and eighty dollars a month, which was the only reason I could afford it.
I scrubbed the place from top to bottom. I hung the curtains my grandmother had made me bring, yellow cotton with small white flowers, because she had said a person needed something cheerful in their windows or the mornings were too hard. I put the knitted throw she had made on the arm of the secondhand couch I found on the street two blocks over. I lined my books on the windowsill and planted three small herb pots beside them, basil and thyme and mint, because my grandmother had always grown herbs and the smell of them made a space feel like somewhere a person actually lived.
I stood in the middle of the apartment when I was done and I looked at what I had made of it, and I thought: it's not much. Then I thought of my grandmother, who had made a home outof a rented terrace in Galway for thirty years and made it feel like the warmest place in the world, and I thought: it doesn't have to be much. It just has to be yours.
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My name is Aoife Walsh, and most people cannot pronounce it. This is not a complaint, only an observation. In Ireland it was unremarkable. Here it becomes something people study with a frown, sounding out letters in combinations that make a kind of sense if you are applying English rules to an Irish word, which is almost always the wrong approach. I have been called Ay-oh-fee, and Ah-oh-fee, and, memorably, A-fuh, by a woman at a social services office who seemed personally affronted by the spelling. I correct people gently when I can and let it go when I cannot, because there are larger things to spend your energy on.
