Chapter 30

Saoirse refrains from flinching and tries to smile. “Okay.”

“It’s just that, Jonathan was wrong to pressure you about having a baby after you’d shared your feelings with him, don’t get me wrong. But do you—”

“I didn’t just ‘share my feelings with him,’” Saoirse says, cutting him off, then forces herself to take a breath. If Emmit wants to discuss her marriage in more depth, she will not get upset or angry. He’s asking because he wants to know her. Truly know her. Because he cares.

“It’s not like he and I never discussed it,” she says more slowly, relieved she’s gotten control of herself. “It’s not like I waited until after we got married to drop this bomb on him that I didn’t want children. Even before I was diagnosed, I was lukewarm on the subject, and he knew I didn’t want to risk dying in order to have a baby.” Emmit is studying her intently, hanging on her every word, so she continues.

“ Six years after we were married, he brought it up again. By then, there were a million other things wrong with our relationship. I thought he was joking. I hadn’t wanted to risk death by having a baby with Jonathan when things were good . Why would I give up my life so that a man who treated me like an empty vessel for his ideas could have a child? After enduring years of his bullshit, he was lowering me to the status of a breeding cow to be sent to the slaughterhouse when he was through with me? No, thank you.

“I dragged him to doctors’ offices. I made him listen to the statistics. At this point, some part of me must have thought something of our relationship could be salvaged. I was still trying to make him see reason. But he wouldn’t let up. Eventually, it started feeling like he didn’t care whether I lived or died. The only thing that mattered to him was that I submitted to his desire to have a child.”

She pauses and looks out over the tombstones in the cathedral’s burial ground, thinks, as she often did back then, of her name carved into a slab of enduring granite, whether Jonathan would bring their child to the cemetery in which she was laid to rest. She shudders, and Emmit wraps his arms around her.

“I’m so sorry,” he says. “That must have been awful. And then, to have Jonathan pass from a heart condition of his own. You must have felt—” He doesn’t finish.

Saoirse barks out a bitter laugh. “It’s hard to have sympathy for a man who asked the things he did of me. Harder still, to have sympathy for someone whose own selfish refusal to admit he’d formed a reliance on a dangerous mix of medication led to his heart stopping, especially when you’ve worked every day for as long as you can remember on keeping your own heart beating. It was so frustrating, Jonathan’s drug use. Such a waste. He wasn’t even really an addict. He was more of a perfectionist. His own worst enemy. Taking too much Adderall during the day to maximize his performance at work followed by handfuls of Ambien to get to sleep at night.” She stares out over the graveyard. She will not cry again. She hadn’t said anything to Emmit of Jonathan’s actual death when they’d spoken downstairs.

“Will you tell me?”

Saoirse looks up at Emmit sharply. “Tell you what?”

“About finding his body?”

Saoirse shudders. “Why would you want to hear about a thing like that?”

Emmit shrugs. “Because it’s something you went through, something that brings pain to your soul. And I want to know your soul, every inch of it, even the darkest parts.”

Saoirse closes her eyes and is transported back. She feels the cold of the January night, the weight of her suitcase in her hand. She feels the electricity in the air, feels the anticipation of the thing to come in her bones. In her teeth.

“I’d been to visit my mother,” she says, combating her apprehension by telling herself she’ll only have to tell him this once, and then they will never speak of it again. “In Connecticut. I was supposed to go from Wednesday to Sunday morning, but I stayed later than expected, and it was close to ten p.m. on Sunday, maybe even eleven, when I’d driven back. It’s strange, because I remember everything else about that night except the time. It was like time had ceased to exist in preparation for what I was about to find.

“I came in through the front door, but the house was dark, so I figured Jonathan was asleep. I started to bring my suitcase up the stairs but stopped one step up. I stood there, listening. Trying to figure out what it was I was hearing. And then, two big black flies buzzed by me, circling my face, whizzing around my ears, my hair.

“I swatted them away. I’ve always hated flies. But I didn’t go upstairs. Because I thought I heard more buzzing, farther off. I stood in the foyer, one foot on the first stair, still just listening. I was exhausted from traveling. I remember wanting to drag my suitcase up to my office—I was sleeping there by that point, in a daybed—slip into some comfortable clothes, and crawl into bed.

“Instead, another fly flew past my head and landed on the railing. I watched it crawl in the dim glow shining in from the porch light, its tiny legs and giant eyes twitching, and for the first time since entering the house, I felt afraid. ‘Jonathan?’ I called. There was no answer, so I dropped my suitcase and turned away from the stairs.

“The silence persisted, but the quiet felt hollow. Like a bell had rung somewhere in the house and its echo still lingered. The sounds of my feet on the floor were like drumbeats intended to awaken an ancient curse. Halfway across the foyer, more flies buzzed around me. A smell I hadn’t noticed while near the staircase became evident then. Something sweet and rank. Spoiled fruit or the sludgy water at the bottom of a vase of flowers left too long without rinsing.

“I crept through the rooms on the ground floor, but there was nothing in the kitchen, living room, or dining room. I looked out the back window toward the yard, wondering if something had died out there, close to the house. A foolish thought, since it was January, and none of the windows were open. Another fly buzzed close to my ear. It’s funny, because the sound of a fly buzzing has always made me break out in goose bumps. I can’t explain why. But in that moment, it wasn’t the fly that caused the chill that spread over my entire body. The only room left to explore was Jonathan’s office, and some deep, primal part of me knew what I would find.

“His door was shut, and the smell seeping from the cracks around it was so thick I thought I would choke. The feeling grew, then, the knowing, that once I opened that door, I would never be the same. A fly crawled over my hand as I reached for the knob, and my mind went blank, dissociating from the fear, my body on autopilot.

“I pushed the door open. He was lying under the window. His face was bloated and black. A highball glass must have broken in his hand when he fell. There was blood. So much blood from just a slice across his palm. And the flies. God, the flies. He’d been dead since Thursday, the night after I left. He’d been lying there for three whole days.”

Saoirse peels her eyes from the gravestones below them and turns to look at Emmit. “I still see them, you know. The flies. I’ve never told anyone that. Not my friends. Not my mother. Not my psychiatrist or the cognitive behavioral therapist assigned to ‘guide me through the trauma narrative.’ I see them all the time. Sometimes they’re real. Sometimes ...” She trails off, eyes unfocused.

“It is a response to the trauma,” Emmit says softly. “You have such a quiet, creative soul. There’s no way you could have gone through all that without suffering some negative consequences. I’m sure that, in time, the flies will go away.”

She nods but isn’t really listening. She’s too busy feeling out the new, lighter way her breath rises and falls in her chest. It feels good to have told someone. No, it feels good to have told Emmit. He’s understanding, supportive. Perhaps she could have even told him a little more.

“And thank you for sharing that with me, Saoirse,” Emmit says. “I know it couldn’t have been easy.” He cups her face, then trails his hand around to the back of her neck. He squeezes the taut muscles there and bends to kiss her.

“What did you want to ask me?” she says.

“What do you mean?”

“Before I told you everything just now, you said, Jonathan was wrong to pressure you about having a baby after you’d shared your feelings with him, don’t get me wrong. But then I cut you off. Don’t get you wrong about what?”

Now it’s Emmit’s turn to stare out at the tombstones. The sun has traveled farther west, and the shadows in the cemetery are long. “I was just going to ask, in the most nonjudgmental way possible, do you ever regret not trying to have a baby? And I mean that sincerely, not in the way your father might ask it, or because I agree with Jonathan. Your reasons are your reasons, and they’re valid even if they weren’t completely justifiable, which they are. I’m just curious as to whether you still think it was the right decision.”

Saoirse forces down a slew of reflexive urges: to pull away from him, to shout in his face, to widen her eyes in disbelief. She manages to say without too much force, “Of course I don’t regret it. Forty percent of pregnant women with cardiomyopathy succumb to heart attack, heart failure, abnormal heart rhythm, or death. Forty percent. Those seem like high enough odds to be at peace with a child-free lifestyle.” Despite her best efforts, she still sounds defensive. Emmit isn’t finished.

“I get that, and I completely agree. I’m just wondering, have you ever thought about how things might be different?”

“If I’d agreed to get pregnant?” This time, incredulity weaves its way into every word.

“Well, yes. Or, agreed to try. Maybe Jonathan would still be alive.”

Saoirse squeezes her eyes so tightly that stars explode across the backs of her lids. “No, Emmit, I haven’t thought about whether my decision to remain childless might have somehow resulted in my husband’s death, rather than the cardiac arrest from a near-lethal combination of alcohol and drugs, like the coroner said. But please explain to me how it might have. Because without a decent explanation, it sounds pretty fucking bad. It sounds dismissive and shitty and one-sided, and misogynistic, and I know that’s not how you meant to sound. Right? Right? ”

She backed him into the corner of the balcony as she spoke, but rather than hold up his hands in mock surrender or engage in some other weak cop-out behavior, he places his hands on her shoulders and stares into her eyes.

“I’m not saying you were to blame,” Emmit says. His voice is calm and even. One half of his mouth jumps up in its usual tic. “I mean, honestly, Saoirse, you know me. Of course that’s not what I’m saying. You know me, so you know I’m going to push you on this, at least a little. Why do we write? To push past death. Why do we live? To push past death. I just want you to open up to me. To talk to me more deeply than you have any other human. Maybe more deeply than you have to yourself.

“You were right to do what you did. If I were you, I would have done the same. I wouldn’t have wanted to try for a baby if there was even a ten percent chance I could die. I mean, isn’t the rate of maternal mortality in healthy women in the US less than one percent? I’m on your side here. But the new book I’m working on is all about choices. And regret. I was just curious as to whether you’d ever wished you’d at least explored other options, in a philosophical sense.”

In a philosophical sense. Can she divorce her very painful memory from a philosophical question? She isn’t sure. And is he really pushing her on this because of some theme he wants to explore in the new book? She wants to turn away from him and walk inside. She wants to end this conversation. But some small part of her brain hasn’t yet reconciled the reality of the last few days, of being with Emmit, from the radicality of sleeping with Pulitzer Prize–winning novelist Emmit Powell . And another part of her brain is stuck on the words Emmit spoke just yesterday: I’m falling in love with you.

“I don’t regret not trying to have a baby with Jonathan,” she says slowly. “Do I wish things had been different? Maybe. But only if a lot of things had been different, and where does one draw the line on their ‘I-wishes’?”

She can sense Emmit’s about to ask her to clarify, so she continues, “I wish I’d never married Jonathan. Or else, I wish I’d married Jonathan and he hadn’t turned out to be such a bastard. And if he hadn’t been such a bastard, I wish I’d never inherited cardiomyopathy from my asshole of a father. I guess I wish I’d never inherited cardiomyopathy, regardless. But if Jonathan hadn’t turned out to be such a bastard and I was healthy, I wish I’d tried to get pregnant. I wish, in a perfect world, a different world, I was a mother.

“So, to answer your ‘philosophical’ question, yes, I wish I’d been able to carry a healthy baby safely to term, to have a family with a wonderful man who respected and loved me and treated me as an equal. But if some benevolent god or drunk jinn is handing out wishes, I’ll take infinite resources and unending inspiration too. Maybe my own private island.”

She turns to Emmit again, who’s staring at her as if considering a painting he can’t quite make sense of. In a tone that is tired rather than angry, she asks, “Is that what you meant by your question? Is that what you wanted to hear?”

Emmit turns back toward the cityscape and chews his lip. That he’s considering her question is obvious, trying to determine whether her response has, in fact, satisfied his sympathetic? ... academic? ... curiosity. She tries not to mind that the most intimate and painful pieces of her life seem to be fodder for the ongoing brainstorming process of Emmit’s new novel.

His probing could be akin to their first conversation together at Carr Haus, and their exploration of whether death is the end-all, be-all topic writers set out to explore. It’s the same sort of deepening of their relationship, the same sharing of intimate information. But if she’s merely been “sharing intimate information” for the past twenty minutes, why does she feel as if the deepest parts of herself have been invaded? Why does she feel raw and used and exposed?

She watches as Emmit looks out over the Providence skyline. He never answered her question, but he’s clearly contemplating what she’s told him. Is he doing so as her lover, her partner, internalizing her trauma to know her better and to be there for her in the future, or as a novelist, conceptualizing, categorizing, and fictionalizing her pain?

Saoirse studies Emmit’s face, feeling like if she could discover the answer to that one question, she’d know whether she should move forward with their relationship. Say something, she thinks. Anything. And though the internal command goes unheeded, one side of Emmit’s mouth curls into the smallest of satisfied smiles.