I lay beside him and I did not sleep for a long time.
I did not cry until he was gone.
?
He left before morning, the way he always did. He dressed quietly in the dark, his back to me, his movements careful and contained the way they always were, and let himself out without waking me, or without seeming to notice that I was already awake and had been for hours. When the door clicked shut behind him I listened to his footsteps on the stairs and then I put my face into the pillow and I cried with a thoroughness that left me hollow.
Not because he had said a name. Not exactly. I cried because of what the name meant. Whatever he had been coming to my apartment for, I now understood with complete andterrible clarity, it was not me. It was something I could provide the shape of, perhaps. Something I could approximate. But not me.
I thought about Simone saying: I want you to be looking at this with your whole eyes open.
I had not been. I had been looking with the eyes of a person who wanted very badly to be chosen, and that wanting had done the work of interpretation for me.
I lay on my side in the grey pre-dawn light and I thought about my grandmother, who had loved my grandfather with a totality that was one of the most real things I had ever witnessed, and who used to say that love was not a feeling that arrived and stayed on its own but a decision you made every day, for the rest of your life. I thought: whatever this is, it is not that. It has never been that. And I have been standing here waiting for it to become that with the patience of someone who does not know what else to wait for.
I got up. I made tea. I sat at the table with my grandmother's cup and I looked at the herbs on the windowsill, which were in need of watering, and I thought about the name he had said, and I thought about the heaviness behind his eyes that I had never been permitted to ask about, and I began to understand that whatever he was carrying, it was not something recent or peripheral but something central and enormous and old enough to have settled into the bones of him.
I did not know yet what it was. I only knew that it was not me, that it had never been me, and that I was going to have to decide what to do with a situation I had no roadmap for.
He came back, as he always did. And I was there, as I always was. And the name sat between us like a secret only I was carrying, which is the heaviest kind.
CHAPTER
EIGHT
What the Bourbon Couldn’t Drown
Jensen
Ihad been at the graves for three hours when I called her.
It was a Thursday in December, cold enough that the ground had frozen overnight and the flowers I had left for Imani had stiffened against the headstone. I had drunk half a bottle of bourbon over the course of the afternoon, and by the time I left it was dark and the cold had gone from uncomfortable to something sharper, and I stood at the car for a long time without getting in.
I did not want to go home. The house was very loud in its silence. Every room held the frequency of her absence, and on the nights I could not tolerate it I called Aoife.
I was aware that this was not fair to her. It is selfish, I told myself, standing at the car in the December cold. You know it is selfish. But you are going to do it anyway, and you can be ashamed of yourself in the morning.
She answered on the second ring. I went to her apartment. She let me in with the same uncomplicated openness she always showed, no performance, no demand for explanation, simply the door opening and her face in the light and the warmth of the place settling over me like something I had not known I needed until it was there.
We talked for a while. She made tea and I drank it and I listened to her tell me about a little boy at the daycare who had learned to write his name that week and had writtenit on every available surface including, memorably, his own forehead, and her telling of it made me laugh, actually laugh, the full unrehearsed kind. I saw on her face the brief unguarded pleasure of a person who has produced an effect she wanted, a brightness in her expression that she did not try to contain.
I should have gone home after the tea. I know this. I stayed.
?
I do not remember falling asleep. I know that I talked, because of what happened in the morning. In that unguarded place between the bourbon and the sleep I went somewhere I went often when I was not carefully managing where I was, and I talked the way I talked when I was alone at the graves, or in the dark of the study. I talked to her. Not to Aoife. To Nadia.
I talked about the park. I talked about the argument and how she had been right. I talked about Imani not wanting to leave. I talked about Noah, who had been three weeks old and who I had held for the first time that morning, and I talked about the room at Eastside Children's Hospital with the two cribs side by side and the quality of the light.
I do not know how much of this was out loud and how much was internal. In the morning, Aoife's face told me what I needed to know.
?
I woke to an unfamiliar ceiling, the disorientation of a room I had not yet oriented myself inside. Then I did. I was aware of Aoife beside me, awake, lying with a stillness that was different from the stillness of sleep.
She made coffee. She set it in front of me and sat down across the small table and wrapped her hands around her own cup, and she looked at me with an expression I had not seen on her before, careful and measuring and containing something I could not yet fully read. There was no anger in it. There was a quietness that was more difficult than anger, the face ofsomeone who has absorbed something large and is deciding, very carefully, what to do with it.
"Who are Nadia, Imani, and Noah?" she asked.
