Page 51 of Beneath the Poet's House

“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 ofmy 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.

“Itisa response to the trauma,” Emmit says softly. “You have such a quiet, creative soul. There’s no way you could have gone through allthat 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 Iknowthat’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.

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