The First Morning

Saoirse POV

I woke at six twelve AM on Friday morning with the name in my mouth.

Not in any literal sense the name was not the first word I said, because the first word a person says on waking is usually a word the body produces without consulting the conscious mind, and the word my body produced that morning was the same neutral *oh* it had been producing on waking for some time but in the small, present, located way a name lives in a person’s mouth when she has, the night before, used it on the man it belongs to and not yet decided how often she is going to use it again.

*Marcus.*

I said it once, into the pillow.

I noted, lying in my own bed in my apartment with the trees outside the window, that the name had a different weight in my mouth than the names of the people I had known across the rest of my life. It was not a heavy weight. It was the weight of a word I was, even now, in some small fundamental way, still deciding whether to fully accept.

I got up.

I made coffee in the French press. I sat at the kitchen table. I looked at my grandmother’s photograph on the windowsill. I looked at my own hands wrapped around the mug the right hand, no longer wrapped, the fracture healed weeks ago, the small inner discipline I had developed of holding hot things in it again and I considered, with the small honest precision I had been carrying into this autumn, what kind of woman I was going to be on Friday.

──

I called my client in Tribeca.

I told him, with the calm professional voice I had been using for eight years, that I needed to push his Friday afternoon install to Tuesday. I gave him the small bare reason  *I have a family thing* and I did not elaborate, because he was a client and he was a man of a certain age and he had, like Mr. Tilden, learned somewhere in his sixty years that *I have a family thing* was a sentence a woman uses when she means *I am not coming, please do not ask me to explain.* He said, easily: *Of course. Tuesday. Same time.* I said thank you. We hung up.

I cleared the rest of the day.

I had not, in eight years of running my own business, cleared a Friday on the morning of the Friday in question. The capacity to clear a Friday, when I had no client meeting and no court deadline and no medical appointment, was a capacity I had not been allowing myself to use, because the not-using of it had been a thing the version of me that was with Derek had learned to do, and the not-using had simply persisted into the version of me that had moved into the apartment with the trees.

I cleared the day.

I called my mother.

I said: “Mam. Are you home.”

She said: “I am, love.”

I said: “I’m coming over.”

She said: “Come.”

She did not, in the small space of the three words, ask me why or whether anything was wrong. She had spent three years not asking. She was, by now, an expert in the small unrequiring hospitality of a kitchen always available to her daughter.

I drove to Sunnyside.

──

Siobhán had soda bread on the counter when I got there.

I want to tell you about the soda bread, because the soda bread was the thing my mother had stopped making for about six years during the period of her own widowhood, when she had not, she had eventually admitted to me, been able to face the small specific morning labor of mixing the ingredients in the bowl that had been my father’s mother’s, and which my father had used every Sunday of their marriage to make breakfast for the two of them.

Six years she had not made it.

She had started making it again the morning after I arrived at four AM in November with a wrap on my wrist.

I had not, until this Friday, asked her about that timing.

I sat at the kitchen table. She put a slice of bread on a plate in front of me with butter and a small bowl of marmalade. She poured me a cup of tea. She sat across from me with her own cup.

I said: “Mam.”

She said: “Love.”

I said: “Why did you start making the bread again.”

She looked at me.

She did not answer for a while.

Then she said in the small specific voice she had used my whole life when she was telling me a thing she had not been planning to tell me that morning but had decided, in real time, to tell , “When you came in that night, love, I knew the marriage was finished. I did not know how it was finished. I did not know whether you were going to tell me, or whether he was going to come looking, or whether the police were going to come. I did not know any of that. What I knew was that my daughter was at my door at four in the morning, and the daughter at my door was not the daughter who had left this kitchen the last time. The daughter at my door was the daughter I had thought I was going to bury alive a long time ago.”

I held my cup of tea.

Siobhán said: “I started making the bread the next morning because I had my daughter back. I had not had my daughter for three years. The bread was the thing I made for my own mother. I made it because my daughter was sleeping upstairs in the bed she slept in as a girl, and I needed, in the morning when she woke, for there to be a thing on the counter that said *the kitchen has gotten its woman back.*”

I did not say anything.

I had not, until that morning, understood that my mother had spent three years grieving me alive.

I had known she had been worried. I had known she had been at the wedding without crying. I had known she had asked me in the bathroom of the restaurant *are you sure* and respected the answer. I had not known that the not-being-allowed-to-grieve-aloud had cost her the morning labor of bread for six years before that, and that the resumption of the morning labor had been her quiet private declaration that her child had come back to her.

I put down the cup.

I said: “Mam. I have to tell you something.”

She looked at me.

I said not the confession. Not Marcus, not the night, not the Verdict Killer, not the count. Not yet. Possibly not ever in the form I had received it. What I said instead was the one true sentence I had not, in three years, been able to say to her aloud.

I said: “I was very afraid of him, Mam. For a long time. I am sorry I did not tell you.”

Siobhán’s eyes filled.

She did not let them spill. She reached across the table. She put her hand on my hand. She held it.

She said: “I knew, love. I always knew. You do not have to be sorry to me for what he did.”

I let her hold my hand.

I let myself, for the first time in three years, be the daughter who was being held.

I did not cry.

I had cried the night before in the dark of my own kitchen, and the body had given me the cry it needed to give, and the cry that morning at my mother’s table did not arrive because the morning at my mother’s table did not require it. The mother’s hand was the holding. The holding was enough.

We sat at the table like that for some time.

──

I left at eleven fifteen.

At the door, Siobhán said: “Where are you going now, love.”

I said: “Home.”

She said: “Are you alright.”

I said: “I am, Mam.”

She did not press.

I drove back to Brooklyn. I drove the long route along the river because I needed the river that morning, and I did not need to be home immediately. I drove and I let the city move past the windows, and I considered the four days ahead.

Friday afternoon: I was going to buy the book.

Saturday: I was going to go to the bookstore again, and I was going to read in the chair by the window of the café, and I was going to do nothing else that demanded a decision.

Sunday: I was going to drive to Brooklyn Heights at seven thirty PM.

Monday: I was going to think about Eddie Doyle, somewhere quiet, while Marcus did the thing he had told me he was going to do.

I had a plan.

The plan was the first plan I had made for a four-day stretch of my own life, by myself, with no one else’s evening in it but my own and the man I was choosing to walk back into.

That was Friday.

I drove home.