The girls’ cochlear implants mean that they have learned to talk only a few months behind other children. And Marie and Mike both use sign language to communicate with them, too. My nieces, whom we were all so worried about, may just end up speaking two languages. And that is in large part because Marie is a phenomenal, attentive, unstoppable motherly force.
At this point, she knows more about American Sign Language, the Deaf community, hearing aids, cochlear implants, and the inner working of the ear than possibly anything else, including all of the things she used to love, things like literature, poetry, and figuring out what authors use what pseudonyms.
But she’s also exhausted. It’s six thirty in the morning and she’s both talking and signing to her daughter to please “go pee in the potty for Mommy.”
The bags under her eyes look like the pocket on a kangaroo.
When Ava is finally done, Marie brings her to Mike, who is lying in bed with Sophie. As I’m standing in the hallway, I get a glimpse of Mike under the covers, half asleep, holding Sophie’s hand. For a moment, I get a flash of what sort of man I’d want to be the father of my own children and I’m embarrassed to say that the figure is only vague and blurry.
Marie comes back out of the bedroom and we head toward the kitchen.
“Tea?” she says as I sit down at her island.
I’m not much of a tea drinker, but it’s cold in here and something warm sounds nice. I’d ask for coffee, but I know that Marie doesn’t keep coffee in the house. “Sure, that sounds great,” I say.
Marie smiles and nods. She starts the kettle. Marie’s kitchen island is bigger than my dining room table. Our dining room table. Mine and Sam’s.
I am, instantaneously, overcome with certainty.
I don’t want to leave Sam. I don’t want to lose the life I’ve built. Not again. I love Sam. I love him. I don’t want to leave him. I want to sit down together at the piano and play “Chopsticks.”
That’s what I want to do.
Then I remember that way Jesse looked when he got off that plane. All of my certainty disappears.
“Ugh,” I say, slouching my body forward, resting my head in the nest I’ve made with my arms. “Marie, what am I going to do?”
She doesn’t stop pulling various teas out of the cupboard. She pulls them all out and puts them in front of me.
“I don’t know,” she says. “I can’t imagine being in your shoes. I feel like maybe both options are equally right and wrong. That’s probably not the answer you were looking for. But I just don’t know.”
“I don’t know, either.”
“Does it help to ask what your gut tells you?” she says. “Like, if you close your eyes, what do you see? Your life with Sam? Or your life with Jesse?”
I indulge her game, hoping that something as simple as closing my eyes might tell me what I want to do. But it doesn’t. Of course it doesn’t. I open my eyes to see Marie watching me. “That didn’t work.”
The kettle starts to whistle and Marie turns toward the stove to grab it. “You know, all you can do is just put one foot in front of the other,” she says. “This is exactly the sort of thing people are talking about when they say you have to take things one step at a time.” She pours hot water into the white mug she’s set out for me. I look up at her.
“Earl Grey?” she asks.
“English Breakfast?” I ask in return and then I start laughing and say, “I’m just messing with you. I have no idea what tea names mean.”
She laughs and picks up an English Breakfast packet, tearing off the top and pulling out a tea bag. “Here, now you’ll know what English Breakfast tastes like for next time.” She puts it in my mug and hands it to me. “Splenda?” she offers.
I shake my head. I stopped drinking artificial sweeteners six months ago and I feel entirely the same but I’m still convinced it’s for a good cause. “I’m off the sauce,” I say.
Marie rolls her eyes and puts two packets in her tea.
I laugh and look down toward my cup. I watch as the tea begins to bleed out of the bag into the water. I watch as it swirls, slowly. I can already smell the earthiness of it. I put my hands on the hot mug, letting it warm them up. I start absent-mindedly fiddling with the string.
“Do you think you can love two people at the same time?” I ask her. “That’s what I keep wondering. I feel like I love them both. Differently and equally. Is that possible? Am I kidding myself?”
She dips her tea bag in and out of the water. “I’m honestly not sure,” she says. “But the problem isn’t who you love or if you love both, I don’t think. I think the problem is that you aren’t sure who you are. You’re a different person now than you were before you lost Jesse. It changed you, fundamentally.”
Marie thinks, staring down at the counter, and then tentatively starts talking again. “I don’t think you’re trying to figure out if you love Sam more or Jesse more. I think you’re trying to figure out if you want to be the person you are with Jesse or you want to be the person you are with Sam.”
It’s like someone cracked me in half and found the rotten cancer in the deepest, most hidden part of my body. I don’t say anything back. I don’t look up. I watch as a tear falls from my face and lands right in my mug. And even though I was the one who cried it out, and I saw it fall, I have no idea what it means.
I look up.
“I think you’re probably right,” I say.
Marie nods and then looks directly at me. “I’m sorry,” she says. “It’s important to me that you know that. That you know I regret what I did.”
“Regret what? What are you talking about?”
“For that day on the roof. The day that I found you looking out . . .” It feels like yesterday and one hundred years ago all at once: the binoculars, the roof, the grave anxiety of believing I could save him just by watching the shore. “I’m sorry for convincing you Jesse was dead,” Marie says. “You knew he wasn’t . . .”
Marie isn’t much of a crier. She isn’t one to show how she feels on her face. It’s her voice that tells me just how deep her remorse is, the way some of the syllables bubble up and burst.
“I was the wrong person to be up there that day. I hadn’t supported you, at all, really, in any of the years prior. And suddenly, I was the one telling you the worst had happened? I just . . . I thought he was gone. And I thought that I was doing you a kindness by making you face reality.” She shakes her head as if disappointed in her old self. “But instead, what I did was take away your hope. Hope that you had every reason to hold on to. And I . . . I’m just very sorry. I’m deeply sorry. You have no idea how much I regret taking that away from you.”
“No,” I say. “That’s not what happened. Not at all. I was crazy up on that roof. I’d gone absolutely crazy, Marie. It was irrational to think that he was alive, let alone that I could save him, that I could spot him up there, looking at that tiny piece of the shore. That was madness.
“Anyone thinking clearly would have made the assumption that he was dead. I needed to understand that the rational conclusion was that he was gone. You helped me understand that. You kept me sane.”
For the first time, I find myself wondering if facing the truth and being sane aren’t the same thing, if they are just two things that tend to go together. I’m starting to understand that they might be correlational rather than synonyms.
And then I realize that if I don’t blame Marie for thinking he was dead—if I don’t see her belief that he died as a sign she gave up on him—then I shouldn’t be blaming myself for doing the same thing.
“Please don’t give it another thought,” I say to her. “What you did on the roof that day . . . you saved me.”
Marie looks down at her tea and then nods. “Thank you for saying that.”
“Thank you for what you did. And I’m glad it was you. I don’t know if you and I would be as close . . . I mean, I think we would have just gone on . . .”
“I know what you mean,” Marie said. “I know.”