I don't care.
I came home on the evening of the fourth of June and Grant's truck was in the drive.
He was in the kitchen. My mother had already gone — I'd called her from Colvert and told her, and she had driven straight to her sister's because she said if she stayed in that house she'd do something.
He looked at my face and he sat down on one of the stools, hard, like his legs had gone.
I said, "She's got dark hair."
He put his head in his hands.
We talked for six hours. I've written down some of it and burned some of it.
The only piece I'll put here is the end, at about two in the morning, when he said, "I was going to tell you. I had a date. I was going to tell you when she came off the tube feeds, because then I could say she's coming home."
And I said, "You were going to keep her from me for another three weeks so that the sentence would be easier for you to say."
And he didn't answer, because there isn't one.
Orla came home on the twenty-fourth of June.
She weighed six pounds one ounce. She came home to a yellow room that had had its door shut for a month and a half and that Roslyn and my mother and I repainted over two days anyway, because I could not have her sleep in a room that had been a shrine.
Elias had Pim waiting in the crib. He'd kept it under his own bed the entire time, which I did not know until that day.
He put it in next to her and stood there with his hands on the rail for about ten minutes, not saying anything, which for Elias is a form of prayer.
Grant moved out on the eleventh of June.
I'm not going to pretend I've resolved this. It's been ten months.
We're not divorced yet; the paperwork moves at the speed it moves. He sees the children on Wednesdays and every other weekend, and for the first four months those visits were supervised, not because a court ordered it but because I said so and he did not fight me on it, which is the single most useful thing he's done since May.
He is in therapy. He's been in therapy since June. He gave me permission to say that.
People ask me if I'll take him back and I have stopped being polite about the question. What I say now is: I don't know how to be married to a man who watched me grieve a living child for twenty days and brought me tea.
