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night 4 of natasha’s 8 nights of chanukah | read the other nights here

how the light gets in

Noah used to be the kind of person who had a plan for everything, and now she’s the kind of person who can never remember if the laundry in her basket is clean or dirty. She blames her husband for that—he is the one who went and died on her, after all.

Noah wakes up the morning after with a crick in her neck and a burning in the back of her throat, a remnant of last night's tears. There's a cold pot of tea on the stove, leftover from yesterday morning, when she’d woken up and brewed it out of habit, not knowing it would be the last one she wouldn’t drink alone. She carries it over to the sink in her stocking feet and pours it down the drain slowly, mesmerized by the wash of light brown over the white of the basin. Then she fills the kettle with fresh water and puts it on the burner to boil.

When Noah was a child, her mother boiled a pot of water every morning, even in the deepest, hottest days of August, when the air was so muggy and sticky that traveling on the underground became a means of suffocation. For Noah's mother, tea was a habit, a ritual, something that, without which, the day would feel incomplete.

For Noah, tea is something to do with her hands.

Just a week ago, there was always too much for her hands to do. There was washing to be done and bed linens to be folded and dinner to be made (vegetables to be chopped and stew to be stirred and eggs to be scrambled, sometimes even for dinner) and, most of all, there was Jam's hand to be held.

But now Jem is gone, and there's nothing but tea.

And the cat.

There's always the damn cat.

James “Jem” Robert Carsters

16 February 1993 - 23 January 2017

James “Jem” Robert Carsters passed away last weekend after a near decade-long battle with leukemia. His parents, Marie and Joseph Carsters, were by his side, along with his wife of six months, Noah Monroe. Despite being ill since childhood, Jem was dedicated throughout his life to the pursuit of others’ happiness. He will be remembered as a kind, generous, warm-hearted man who always put others first. He is survived by his parents, his wife, various aunts, uncles, and grandparents, and his cat, Bertie.

"Bertie, come on."

"Bertie, come on. Don't be like this. "

Not for the first time in the last hour, Noah wishes that she and Jem had gone with the dog they'd been eyeing at the shelter instead of this mangy, grey monstrosity of a feline. They both knew at the time that neither of them had the attention or presence of mind to care for a dog, but at least it wouldn't be trapped on top of the highest cupboard in the kitchen right now, meowing furiously.

"Bertie, I really don't know what to do with you anymore," Noah says, also not for the first time in the last hour. She hasn't known what to do with Bertie since Jem died, but that hurts to say out loud, and not because it sucks not being the cat's favorite.

Bertie hisses at her, but it's less menacing and more petulant, like a toddler refusing to eat the beans on the end of his careening fork. The sound affects Noah nonetheless; she throws her hands up and spins around in a huff. Across the kitchen, she puts the kettle on before she sits down at the kitchen table and reaches for her laptop. Vita's new episode went live a few hours ago, and Noah knows she'll get an earful if she doesn't listen to it tonight.

It takes her a minute to pull up the webpage and another few seconds for the audio stream to buffer, and then Vita's voice fills the small kitchen.

"Knock knock? Who's there? It's Vita! Vita who? Vita of Veritas with Vita! This is series 2, episode 3, and I'm your host, Vita Carver," Vita says in her posh accent. "First up tonight is a new track from a good friend of mine who happens to be here with me today, Louisa Taylor. It's called 'Rhododendron,' and it's available for download on her website, the address of which I'll be giving you shortly. But first, let's have a listen."

Louisa's voice is melancholic and coppery, rhythmic like an ocean's waves, and it soothes Noah into a moment of forgetfulness. There's no one sitting across from her, slipping his foot up the ankle of her pajamas, because of course there isn't, because she lives alone and that's the way it should be and this is normal, this is a normal Friday night and there's nothing to cry about—

Eeeeeee!

The kettle whistles on the stove, yanking Noah out of her moment of solitude. She stands abruptly from her chair, sending it squeaking across the linoleum so violently that Bertie lets out a yelp and leaps down from his cupboard perch. He lands beside the sink, ever so graceful on his cat feet, and when Noah reaches for him, his fur stands on end and his back arches. She pulls her hand back and lets him dart away. The song comes to an end as she chooses a tea bag and drops it in the pot.

"That was 'Rhododendron' by Louisa Taylor," Vita says, her sharp voice cutting through Noah's kitchen. "I've been absolutely ensnared by that track since I first heard it, Louisa. It's absolutely an honor to have you here today."

"It's a pleasure to be here," Louisa says. "I love your show, Vita. It's great that you're so dedicated to the truth."

Vita laughs. It's her fake laugh, Noah can tell, and she doesn't seem as enamored with Louisa Taylor as she's pretending to be.Truth, my arse, Noah thinks. She pours herself a mug of tea and dumps exactly three sugar cubes in, plonk plonk plonk, watching them dissolve as she listens to Louisa and Vita talk.

Vita's podcast is only an hour, and Louisa drones on for most of it, talking about her dream of having a legacy like that of Paul McCartney (Impossible, Noah scoffs) and her cat, a Scottish Fold with a penchant for lying about in sinks. The cat, Louisa claims, is her most prized possession.

Noah wonders what her most prized possession is. It's certainly not, no one would be surprised to find out, Bertie. Nor is it the baby blanket her gran knitted for her when she was but a bit of wishful thinking. And it certainly isn't the collection of dusty Christmas cards, all addressed to James and Noah Carsters, that have remained on the mantel since December, growing dusty because Noah can't bear to throw them away.

Prized possessions, Noah decides firmly, are a waste. Everything withers away eventually.

"So that's it for this week, and don't forget to hit up this space again next Thursday for this month's edition of Vita Makes Her Mates Uncomfortable!"

The mate in question is Noah, who’s uncomfortable enough as it is, uncomfortable just in her sheer existence, and agreed to participate only so that Vita would leave her alone. Noah suspects Vita has other motives: she wants to get Noah up off her arse, out of her head, and back into the world. But Noah thinks it's going to take more than an hour’s worth of conversation to accomplish that. She likes her solitude.

When she’s not alone, people look at her funny. They look at her like she’s lost something huge that she’ll never get back, or, worse, they look at her like she’s pathetic for not putting her life back together by now. Sometimes even she thinks she’s pathetic.

She’s living as a ghost in her own life. She realized this several months ago, when she was halfway through her morning routine, scooping brown sugar into her porridge. She spilled a bit of the brown sugar on the floor and, in a moment of uncharacteristic agility, Bertie had hopped onto the floor and began to lick it up.

“Oh, Bertie, no!” Noah had cried, and then she’d realized that there wasn’t really any reason that Bertie shouldn’t have the brown sugar. So she poured a bit into a dish and put it on the floor for him.

Of course, he hadn’t touched it, just sat there on the floor looking up at her as if asking, “Who are you and what are you doing in my house?”

Noah hadn’t had an answer.

But two months later, very little has changed. She wakes up in the morning, feeds Bertie, feeds herself, leaves the house. She goes to work, sits in her cubicle, answers her emails, works on her projects, leaves at precisely 5 PM. Goes home, feeds Bertie, feeds herself, does nothing of consequence until bedtime.

At Noah’s mum’s insistence, she met with a therapist three times. They’d made a deal—three times (“minimum, Noah!” her mum had decried) and her mum would stop calling every night to report on the status of the ficus in the front yard, which Noah’s dad insisted was growing a centimeter every day. The therapist was utterly useless, but the sessions did help Noah realize that she was grieving wrong.

“There’s no wrong way to grieve,” the therapist had said when Noah voiced this concern, but everything she said afterward belied this statement.

“It’s alright if you feel guilty,” the therapist had said, but Noah did not feel guilty. Noah does not feel guilty that Jem is gone and she is here, sitting at an empty kitchen table by herself on a Thursday night, having a staring contest with the cat.

To: [email protected]

From: [email protected]

Re: Darling

Noah, remember when you were 7 and the neighbor’s cat, Mr. Whiskers, died? You loved Mr. Whiskers, said you loved him more than anything on earth. You were absolutely shattered. And I told you that your heart had an infinite capacity for love, and even though Mr. Whiskers was gone, you would still love him, and you’d love other cats someday too.

Your heart has an infinite capacity for love, my Noah. Don’t keep that love from the world.

Love,

Mum

Niall is sure that he made a terrible mistake when he decided to become a vet. As he sticks his fingertips up a dog’s butt (the third this morning), he considers exactly when the mistake was made. Was it when he decided to take an extra science course instead of an art elective in his last year of college? Was it at uni, when he dropped his poetry lecture because he kept falling asleep? Or maybe it was even earlier, year three, perhaps, when he copied Billy Marx’s photosynthesis homework and was declared by the teacher to be “a true science prodigy.”

“Easy does it,” he tells the dog, who’s begun to squirm in the tech’s grasp. “We’re almost done.”

“Shh, shh,” the tech, a vet student at the uni up the road, tells the dog. “Dr. Horan’s getting you all fixed up.”

Doctor Horan. Oh right, that’s when it all got fucked up. It was when Niall was in fifth year and the teacher asked him what he wanted to be when he grew up. She listed some options, the usual -- teacher, doctor, lawyer—and when Niall thought them over, “Doctor Horan” sounded the best to him.

He really has no one to blame for this but himself. And his huge, stupid ego.

“Okay, okay, there we go,” Niall says, releasing his grip on the dog’s backside. He takes off his glove and pets the dog’s head, scratching between its ears. “Penny, would you take him out front? I’ll be up with the prescriptions in a second.”

“Sure,” Penny says, cooing to the dog as she lifts him onto the floor. As they leave the room, Niall heads for the sink.

As he’s washing his hands, he thinks about all of the things that he has to do on the way home from work tonight. First, he has to remember to set the alarm when he locks the door, because the last time he worked until closing and forgot to alarm the building, Dr. Friedman nearly killed him. Then he has to stop by the dry cleaners to pick up the shirt he needs for dinner, and he ought to go to an ATM, too, so he has enough cash on hand in case he has to pay a valet.

Niall hates valets. He also hates fancy restaurants, especially ones where the menu has two pages of wines but only six types of beer. But tonight is the night that his sister is announcing her engagement to their parents, so he really can’t miss it.

A cat and two dogs later and he’s on his way out. He nods to the girls on his front desk as he leaves, lifting a hand in response to their calls of “have a good evening, Dr. Horan!” It’s raining outside, and he curses himself for not grabbing an umbrella from the basket on the counter in the clinic. Now he’s going to have wet hair at dinner, and there’s no way his mum won’t comment on that.

The restaurant is crowded, and Niall has to push through half a dozen overdressed couples in order to get to the hostess stand. The hostess looks up at him, annoyance clear on her face, and Niall looks over her shoulder into the depths of the dimly lit dining room.

“Niall! Over here!”

“That’s my party,” Niall tells the hostess. He doesn’t wait for her reply before he heads for the sound of his sister’s voice.

This restaurant is much too trendy for Niall’s parents, he thinks as he makes his way past a bar overflowing with uni students dressed in head-to-toe black. He tries not to grow annoyed at their raucous laughter, but it’s hard. Ever since his flatmate moved out last year, he’s become a curmudgeon of the worst sort. He’s even grown to dislike himself a bit for it.

“God, Niall, finally!”

Niall comes to a stop at his family’s table, all of them rising to greet him, aside from his dad. There’s Emmy, wearing a dress so white it seems to be glowing, and her fiance, whose name might be Bobby or Brooks or… Shit.

And then there’s Niall’s mum, who nearly trips over the leg of her chair in her hurry to get to him. She smells like her going out perfume, the one she’s worn since he was a kid, and as her arms come around him, he finds himself relaxing for a bit. His mum has always been overly affectionate,

“Oh, Niall, your hair’s damp,” his mum says, ruffling his hair as he pulls out of the hug. “Don’t you have an umbrella?”

“Forgot it at work.” Niall extends his hand to the fiance for a shake. “How’s it going, Brent?”

A grimace crosses his face for a second before he manages to relax it into a smile. “It’s Blake.”

Shit again. Niall offers Emmy an apologetic smile over Blake’s shoulder. “God, sorry mate. I’ve got the worst memory for names.”

“That’s right, he does!” Niall’s mum says unhelpfully. “When he was in school he used to get all of his teachers mixed up, call them by each other’s names, you know. Drove them absolutely bonkers.”

Great, Mum, thanks, Niall says in his head. In his adult life he’s gotten better about keeping his sarcastic remarks in his mind, no small thanks to the rubber band around his right wrist. His therapist (thanks, Mum) had suggested it nearly a year ago, that he wear a rubber band on his wrist and snap it against his skin whenever he got the urge to say something snarky. He can control himself just fine without the rubber band now, but he still wears it anyway. It’s a great reminder of why he much prefers the company of animals to humans.

“How’ve you been, Blake?” Niall asks, sitting down in the chair at his mother’s left elbow. Across from him sits Blake, beside him Emmy, with Niall’s father, who, Niall suspects, is trying not to laugh, at the head of the table.

“Oh, good,” Blake says. “Emmy and I have been considering—”

The waitress interrupts him, popping up at the end of the table and reciting the specials in such a bored tone that Niall wonders if she’s a robot. When she disappears, Emmy starts up, detailing the proposal in such vivid detail that Niall practically feels like he’s there, and then almost immediately wants to throw up. Blake had proposed on the top of the London Eye.

“It was so beautiful,” Emmy says, her hands crossed on the table so that her ring is prominently displayed. Niall doesn’t know very much about engagement rings, but from the size of the diamond, he can tell it’s expensive. He can’t for the life of him remember what Blake’s job is, though, so he can’t verify the cost based on his assumed income. “I wish you’d been there, Mum. Well, obviously I don’t wish you’d actually been there, but, you know—”

“Yes, I know, dear,” Niall’s mum says, saving Emmy from finishing that sentence. Niall eyes her half-empty wine glass and wonders if he’d arrived later to dinner than he thought. “It really is a beautiful ring. Gram would be so excited.”

Here we go, Niall thinks. His mum’s already tearing up.

“Oh, Mum,” Emmy says, reaching across the table to grasp her mother’s hand. “I feel her with me sometimes, you know? Remember those white chocolate chip brownies she made? I tested the recipe the other night, but they just weren’t the same.”

Niall shifts in his seat. He knows exactly the white chocolate chip brownies Emmy is talking about. As a kid he rarely ate them, always insisting that white chocolate was only posing as chocolate. And now he’ll never get the chance.

“Emmy,” Niall’s mum manages to say just before she squeezes her eyes shut, tears leaking out at the corners.

Niall looks away, accidentally meeting Blake’s eyes across the table. Blake lifts the edges of his mouth in a women, what can you do? smile that isn’t comforting. Instead it makes him think about how the things that are supposed to bring people closer together often end up driving them apart instead.

“I’m going to the restroom,” Niall says, pushing his chair back so suddenly it screeches against the floor.

“Niall—” his mother starts, but he doesn’t answer her.

In the restroom, he stares at the ceiling until his eyes stop watering. He’s not crying; Niall doesn’t cry. His eyes just water sometimes, like when he thinks about his grandmum’s white chocolate chip brownies and how her skin stretched thin over her cheekbones during her last days.

Fuck, he thinks.

Niall doesn’t cry, but he can admit, at least to himself when he’s alone in a bathroom, that this is harder than he thought it would be. When Gram first got sick, he never imagined that nearly a year later, he still wouldn’t be able to speak about her without feeling like this.

When he gets back to the table, the conversation has been interrupted by the waiter, who’s arrived to take their orders. He looks to be younger than Niall, probably a uni student, and he can’t stop staring at Emmy. Niall watches as Blake’s fist grows tighter on the table and is grateful for the distraction.

After a few minutes, the waiter leaves and Emmy turns on Niall.

“Did you call that girl?” Emmy asks, giving him the eye, a look she mastered around age 5 as soon as her parents brought Niall home from the hospital. “Mary Jane’s sister?”

“No,” Niall says flatly. “I don’t want to be set up.”

“She’s very nice,” Emmy says. “I mean, she did just get out of a long term relationship, and you know that’s never a good deal, being the rebound and all, but—”

“Emmy,” Niall says a bit too sharply. “No thank you.”

Emmy’s fiance shifts uncomfortably in his seat as Emmy rolls her eyes at Niall. “It’s like you want to be alone forever,” she says, unphased by his oafishness.

“Not forever,” Niall says, jabbing a ravioli with his fork a bit more violently than necessary. “But for right now. I’ve got time.”

Now Emmy’s fiance looks even more uncomfortable, and Niall recalls that he’s two years younger than Emmy. Maybe Emmy’s forced him into this somehow, guilted him into it because she’s coming up on 30 and he’s still a few years away.

“Still—” Emmy starts, but Niall’s mum cuts her off.

“We just want you to be happy,” she says, turning a meaningful eye on Niall. “You’ve been so lonely ever since—”

“I’m not lonely,” Niall insists, not caring that he’s probably protesting too much. He doesn’t want to talk about Liam or Sharon or how colossally he’d misjudged them. “Emmy, I’m happy for you, but have you ever considered that maybe I don’t want to get married? Maybe I don’t want to settle down. Maybe that kind of thing isn’t for me.”

“That kind of thing?” Emmy is not to be deterred. “Niall, companionship is not a thing. It’s a necessity. It’s the point of being human. I think if you just call Mary Jane’s sister you’ll see that—”

“Emmy,” Niall says again. His sister pauses at the growl in his voice and sits back a bit in her chair. “Fuck off.”

His mother sighs beside him so deeply that Niall glances over to make sure she hasn’t deflated. Nope, she’s still sitting there, spoon poised above her bowl of soup, looking at Niall with such disappointment that he considers leaving the table here and now.

But that would probably make things worse. If he leaves now, without apologizing to Emmy and the fiance for his rudeness, his mum will probably put coal in his stocking at Christmas.

So he goes back to eating and nodding at everything Emmy says and not remarking on how rude it is that Emmy never lets her betrothed speak, and he learns that the wedding will be in four months and it will be held outdoors (his mum isn’t pleased to hear that—February is basically still winter so there’s no predicting what the weather will be). Niall will serve as a groomsmen and he will wear whatever color boutonniere the wedding planner selects for him, even if it has teeny tiny succulents in it.

Dear God, he thinks when Emmy voices that idea.

It’s not that Niall doesn’t like weddings, it’s just that he, well, doesn’t like weddings. There’s something so trite about fabricating perfection, about planning a day down to the most minute detail so that everything goes just so in hopes that the rest of your life together will follow suit.

But he congratulates Emmy and Blake anyway when he says goodbye, and as he hugs his sister, he whispers an apology in her ear and fully expects her to send him Mary Jane’s sister’s contact information before the night is up.

Emmy’s not known for taking “no” for an answer. Niall expects Blake is well familiar with that by now.

To: [email protected]

From: [email protected]

Re: Dinner

Attachment: rubyjones.contact

Thanks for not being a complete arse at dinner. Just a small arse. I’m grateful, really. But do please try to remember Blake’s name next time. As I’m going to marry the bloke, it’s the least you can do.

And you should be grateful, too. Here is Mary Jane’s sister’s number. Her name is Ruby and she lives in Lewisham. Call her. Also, fuck off too.

Noah shifts on the couch, pulling her legs up underneath her. The last time she recorded a podcast with Vita, they sat at the kitchen table and their voices bounced around the room wildly and echoed into the microphone. Jem was alive then; he and Noah had just moved into the house and there were still boxes on the kitchen counters waiting to be unpacked and they didn’t have a couch for the living room yet. Jem leaned against the counter while Noah and Vita talked, and if you listen closely enough to the recording, you can just about hear Jem laughing.

If Noah were dumber she might think that the bad acoustics in the kitchen are why they’re in the living room this time, but she knows better. Vita is not only Noah’s best mate, she’s also her confidant, and she has reason to suspect that this conversation isn’t going to be easy for Noah. It's an illusion, the idea that the couch will somehow make this easier than the hard-backed kitchen chairs, but Noah doesn't plan to argue.

Vita sets a steaming mug of hot cocoa on the coffee table in front of Noah and adjusts the fluffy covering on the microphone. “You ready?”

“Mmhm,” Noah says, though she’s not sure that she is. She’s never spoken about Jem’s death in this way before. She’s never spoken about it with the knowledge that so many people might someday hear what she says. And when they hear what she says, they’re going to judge her.

“Remember, I can always cut things out, okay?” Vita waits for Noah’s nod and then hits some keys on her laptop before flipping a switch that turns the microphone on. “Welcome back to Veritas with Vita!” she chirps. “I’m Vita Carver, and I’m happy you’ll be joining us today. On this edition of Vita Makes Her Mates Uncomfortable, I’ve got here with me my mate Natalie, and we’re going to be talking about grief. Hello, Natalie.”

“Hi Vita,” Noah says. They decided on the pseudonym when Noah agreed to this shenanigan. It wouldn't be too hard for a listener to stalk Vita’s social media and find out that Natalie is really Noah (they are best mates, after all, and Noah’s been on the podcast before, though not recently), but Noah hopes no one will try. Even though she's about to share some of her most intimate thoughts with God knows how many anonymous souls via the internet, she'd still like to keep her anonymity mostly intact. “Thanks for having me on today.”

“Thank you for being here,” Vita says, putting a reassuring hand on Noah’s arm. Before they began, she told Noah that they could stop recording at any time, and if it turned out that Noah couldn’t talk about it, that was okay too. There's nothing riding on this, she'd said. “Can you give us a bit of background, tell us your story?”

Noah fumbles with the piece of paper on the table in front of her. Vita helped her make some notes earlier, though there isn't anything in them that she doesn't already know. She will never be able to forget what it felt like the first time she kissed Jem, or what it felt like the last time she kissed him. What she's more worried about is not being able to manage the words to describe those memories when it comes time to share them.

“Sure,” she says, trying to match the easy confidence in Vita’s voice. “Jem and I, Jem’s my husband, we were sweethearts at uni, got married just after we finished. He studied science, was hoping to be a doctor, and I studied architecture. He'd been sick as a teenager, leukemia, but it’d been in remission. And then just before our wedding—” Noah’s voice catches in her throat as she remembers the day, the white dress her mum hemmed for her and the sprig of lavender on Jem’s lapel, and she feels Vita’s reassuring hand on her arm.

“It's alright,” Vita says. “Take your time.”

Noah swallows and glances down at the paper in front of her. These are just facts, nothing to get emotional about. “I'm fine,” she says. “Jem was having trouble walking long distances, becoming breathless quickly. He was always tired. I think he knew even before we went to the doctor that the cancer was back, but he kept it to himself.”

“That must've been quite a shock, then, finding out he was sick again,” Vita says. “Just before your wedding.”

Vita knows this is the case, because she was there at Noah’s side the whole time, taking her out for coffee or manicures whenever Noah could spare an hour. You deserve some time away, Vita always said. Meanwhile, Noah was fearing the future, the eventuality that she might have nothing but time away, time to herself. Time to herself was the last thing she wanted.

“It was, I suppose,” Noah says, closing her eyes as she remembers. Jem had the sweetest face—that was one of the things she first noticed about him, his babyface. It was so hard to accept his illness when she first found out about it. It was so hard to imagine that someone so young, no visible smile lines beside his mouth, could be so sick. “We were already engaged, but Jem tried to break up with me. He asked me to leave him, but I couldn't. I loved him too much. He wanted me to have a chance at lifelong love, something he knew he couldn't give me, but—”

“So you knew he was terminal?” Vita interrupts, and it’s good timing, because Noah feels her throat tightening. “ That chemo wasn't going to work?”

Noah swallows. She remembers the conversation they had, in the kitchen just on the other side of the wall, mugs of tea growing cold in front of them. Get your affairs in order, the doctors had said. A few months left. They argued about it for hours, but the night ended with a decision: move the wedding up, so they could do it before Jem became too weak to leave the hospital.

“Yes, we knew,” Noah says. “ That's why he wanted to cancel the wedding, to allow me to live life without him. But I didn't want that.”

“Why not?”

Noah didn't need to practice this answer. “Because I love, loved him. I wanted to spend every day with him that I could.”

Vita hesitates, and Noah knows before she speaks what she's going to press on. “Loved, Natalie, or love?”

“I don't know,” Noah says. For a couple months after Jem passed, Noah went to group therapy and listened to the same conversations over and over again as her peers progressed through the five stages of grief. And as she, too, progressed. It was when she felt like she wasn't moving forward anymore that she stopped attending the meetings. “Both, maybe. I love Jem and I'll love him forever. He was my family.”

Vita nods. “I get that. The ones we love, they become family over time, and that doesn't change easily, even when they’re taken from us.”

“Mmhm.” Noah winds a piece of hair around her finger. Jem always liked her hair short, so—or maybe that's not true. She had her hair cut above her shoulders when she met him, and since he liked it, she never considered growing it out much further. But now that there's no one around to compliment her hair and compel her to get a trim, she's let it grow, the ends now brushing her shoulder blades.

The conversation turns, Vita prompting Noah to speak more about what life was like before Jem passed, about what they were like together, Noah and Jem, Jem and Noah. After a while, they take a break, Vita insisting that they need more tea. Vita stays in the kitchen for a few minutes, giving Noah time to catch her breath. When she comes back in, she sets a newly full mug on the table in front of Noah.

“Thank you for doing this,” Vita says, sitting down beside Noah. “I know it’s tough for you. And I think you’re really brave for doing it.”

Noah tries to smile. “I think it’s helping me, talking about it. To somebody who isn’t my therapist, you know? Sometimes talking to my therapist feels like I’m just circling through all of my own thoughts over and over again, and they’re never becoming clearer.”

Vita nods. Noah can tell she’s trying to understand. As her best mate, Vita has seen Noah climb mountains and trip over molehills. She’s seen Noah’s recovery process, and she’s seen how hard it’s been.

But in all the time that they've been mates, throughout all of the hours Vita spent with Noah while Jem was sick and afterward, Noah has never cried in front of her. Never broken down sobbing, breath turning to hiccups, chest shaking. Noah suspects that Vita has been waiting for that to happen for months now.

Noah takes a sip of her refreshed cocoa and adjusts herself on the cushions. “I’m ready to go again.”

“You sure?”

When Noah nods, Vita turns on the microphone again and leans forward. “So now, Natalie, I was wondering if you could talk a bit about what the grieving process has been like for you, continuing to live your life after Jem’s passing and how that’s been for you.”

“Well,” Noah says. Vita had given her this question a few weeks ago, and Noah had spent some time pondering it, but when she sat down to write out her notes, she didn’t know what she wanted to say. She’s still not sure that she knows. “It's been nine months, but sometimes it's like he's still here, still living alongside of me. We lived here before we got married, before he relapsed, so all the good memories are here, alongside the bad ones.”

“Do you ever think about moving?”

Noah doesn't have an answer to that one. She looks across the room, where a poster from the Royal Shakespeare Company’s production Macbeth hangs above the television. She and Jem saw it back when they were in uni on one of their first dates. “No… maybe. I don't know. Maybe someday I'll want to start over, but I don't think that's real life. You can't start over. You just… move forward.”

You move forward. Sometimes, Noah’s discovered, that’s all you can do. You cut your bereavement leave short and go back to work before everyone else thinks you’re ready. You’re not sure you’re ready, either. You wake up every day and tell yourself that you are okay on your own. You feed the damn cat even though it hates you, and you always chase away the thought of finding it a new mum, because it’s the only bit of him you have left. When somebody asks you how you’re doing, you look up at the sky and think that it hasn’t fallen down on you yet, so you must be doing okay. You’re managing, and sometimes that’s the best anyone could ask for.

“So how are you doing with that?” Vita asks. “Moving forward?”

Initially Noah’s instinct is to lie. She should lie and say she’s doing okay, doing better everyday, because that’s what she tells everyone. That’s what she tells Merrell at the firm and that’s what she tells her mum whenever she calls and that’s what she tells herself.

But the truth of it is, things don’t get better every day. Grief is a roller coaster. Some days you’re going up and you think you’ll never drop. You think you’re finally free of the pain. But then you turn a corner, and you drop so suddenly you think you’re going to die.

“Not so great,” Noah finally says, something that's half laugh and half cry forming in her throat. “It's… it's hard. Some days are harder than others But no matter what, I get up everyday and I go to work, and sometimes I can go a few minutes without thinking about him. It’s not that I don’t want to think about him. He was part of my life for so long, you know? He’s part of who I was and who I am still.”

Vita nods but doesn’t say anything, and Noah knows she wants her to continue. These are thoughts that Noah only ever voices to her therapist and in her journal, and now she’s sharing them with God only knows who. But she shakes that terrifying thought away and reminds her that the only person she’s really talking to right now is Vita.

“I guess…” Noah says, trying to explain further. “I guess I believe that everyone we meet affects us in some way, and Jem affected me in a big way. So letting go of him, that isn’t something that’s easy to do, and I’m not sure it’s something I could do even if I wanted to.”

Vita doesn’t say anything, just looks at Noah with that probing look of hers. When they first met years ago, that look made Noah uncomfortable. She thought Vita was nosy, a gossip, maybe, but it didn’t take her long to discover that neither of those things were true. Vita was, and still is, one of the most astute observers of people that Noah has ever met. And sometimes that can be a good thing.

“Is there anything else you’d like to say?” Vita asks. Noah glances over at the laptop screen, where the recording is now over an hour long. She hadn’t realized she’d been talking for that long. “Before we end?”

“Sure,” Noah says, but she isn’t sure what to say.

So Vita prompts her. “Anything else you’d like someone in a similar situation to hear? To know?”

Now Noah nods, thinking of what she would’ve wanted someone to say to her nine months ago.

“I think I just want anyone who’s going through a loss to know that grief can feel like an island sometimes, but it doesn’t have to be one. Let people help you. I… I have trouble doing that sometimes, as Vita can attest.” Noah meets Vita’s eye and smiles softly. “Keep your friends close anyway, though, because they’ll be there for you when you’re ready.”

Niall decides not to call Ruby, but that doesn’t matter much because Ruby calls him anyway.

He’s leaving work on a Friday evening when he gets the call. He’s just spent three hours trying to save a litter of premature puppies, and he was in a decent enough mood until he lost one. Now he feels like utter shit, just like what he stepped in right after lunch today on his way into exam room 3. All he wants to do is go home, take a long, hot shower, and drink a beer on the couch.

But then his mobile rings.

He fishes it out of his coat pocket and doesn’t bother looking at the screen before he raises it to his ear and gives a gruff, “Hello?”

“Hi, is this Niall?” the voice says.

“Yes,” he says, flustered for a second because no one aside from his mother and sister ever call him. “Who’s this?”

“This is Ruby Jones.”

“Oh, hi,” he says like he knows who Ruby Jones is. He’s not sure he’s ever met anyone named Ruby Jones, but if the girl knows his name, then it’s probably not a case of a wrong number. “How are you?”

“I’m quite well,” she says. “And yourself?”

“Just fine,” he says. She doesn’t reply right away, and he wonders what he ought to say next. Just when he’s about to ask her what he can do for her, as if this is a business call, she pipes up.

“I was wondering if you’d like to meet for drinks.”

“What?” Niall says, then tries to backtrack. “Sorry, what was that?”

“I was wondering if you’d like to meet for drinks,” she repeats. “I got your number from Emmy, and she said you like beer.”

“I like beer,” he echoes. He doesn’t like Emmy. He’s also exhausted and smells like dog urine and doesn’t much enjoy the company of other humans even when he’s showered. But, he supposes, there’s no reason to put on any airs. It’s not likely that anyone Emmy sets him up with will turn out to be the love of his life. “When? Now?”

“Now?” That’s clearly not what she was expecting him to say. “I suppose now is good.”

“Well, not now now,” he clarifies. “Maybe half an hour from now?”

“Sure,” she says. Then she names a pub in Lewisham, says she’s wearing a purple jumper, and hangs up.

Can’t believe I’m doing this, Niall thinks to himself as he looks both ways before crossing the road. Niall has always wanted to be one of those people who doesn’t look both ways before crossing the road—one of those people who just leaps out into traffic because wherever they’ve got to be is more important than their ability to walk on two legs and remember what they ate for breakfast this morning.

But as it is, Niall’s not that kind of person. He’s the kind of person who separates his whites and his colors when he does the washing even though it takes twice as long and is worse for the environment than just washing on cold.

He’s not spontaneous. He’s not adventurous. And he’s certainly not the type to make plans for a date when he’s already on his way.

But, he hears his sister’s voice in his head, you’re already halfway there, so there really isn’t any reason to turn back now, is there?

When Niall arrives at the pub, he hesitates on the pavement for a second. The pub looks just like every other pub he’s ever been to, a wooden sign above the door announcing its name (The Sheep’s Head, not very original as far as pub names go), and there are a few smokers hanging around looking moody. So it’s not the look of the place that makes Niall pause.

No, it’s what comes to mind when he thinks of pubs. Niall can’t remember the last time he went to a pub without one of his rugby mates. After their Saturday afternoon practices, they usually head to their regular spot for dinner and beers, and Niall usually comes home a bit more unstable on his feet than he’d like. Pubs are for raucous behavior and watching a match on telly, not for dates.

But, Niall reasons with himself, Ruby wouldn’t have suggested this place if she wanted to spend an evening listening to him drone on about the intricacies of feline diabetes over a candlelit table. She’s probably had an equally exhausting week at work and just wants to grab a pint.

As Niall expected, the room is full to bursting. He squints into the darkness, wondering how he’s going to find Ruby in all of this mess. What’d she say she’s wearing? A blue jumper? A red one? Maybe this was a stupid idea. Maybe he should just back out of the pub now, before anyone notices him, and then he’ll text her in an hour or so and tell her he had an emergency—

“Niall?”

Shit. Too late to leave now.

Niall turns around and plasters on what he hopes is a friendly smile. Ruby (or so he assumes) is standing behind him in the doorway, looking like she’s just walked through a hurricane. Her curly hair looks slightly damp and is blown in all different directions. As she takes a step toward him, several pieces fall over her face.

“Are you alright?” she asks, frowning at him slightly. “You look a bit peeved. We can go somewhere else if you want.”

Niall shakes his head. Emmy’s told him before that his forced smile is easily confused for a grimace, but he’s never believed her before. “No, this is great. Let’s go sit down.”

“Sure.” Ruby nods and Niall lets her past him so he can follow her through the pub.

Five minutes later, they’re back outside on the pavement. Niall takes a deep breath, glad to be outside. The pub was so crowded that they couldn’t find a table. They couldn’t even locate a free bit of bar to lean against.

“Well, that was a bust,” Ruby says, crossing her arms over her chest. She has a nice chest, Niall observes, but now that they’re standing under a street lamp, he can tell that her hair isn’t damp, it’s coated in gel.

“Should we head somewhere else?” Niall asks, hoping that Ruby will say no. While he doesn’t see anything wrong with her per say, besides the sticky-looking locks, he has absolutely no desire to spend anymore time in her presence.

That’s what Emmy doesn’t seem to understand. Niall’s favorite companion is himself, and everybody else pales in comparison. He enjoyed spending time with Sharon because it was almost like spending time alone, but slightly more exciting. And nearly impossible to replicate, because no one he’s met since has seemed anywhere near as appealing as the prospect of a night spent in his flat, cooking himself dinner and then eating it while reading or watching something on telly.

Ruby pushes up her left sleeve and looks at her watch, then shakes her head, her curls barely moving. “It’s getting a bit late, and I’ve had a long week. Rain check?”

“Sure,” Niall says, already turning away.

“Sorry this didn’t work out,” Ruby says, pursing her lips as if she’s sad about it. Niall musters up a polite smile, waves a hand, and goes home to shower.

The day after Noah records the podcast is Sunday. She sleeps in and then takes a long bath, leaning back in the tub and trying to erase everything from her mind. On his bad days, Jem would meditate, and sometimes even on his good days, too. He said it helped him see the world more clearly. And that it made him feel like less of a victim.

That was something Jem always spoke about, the desire to not be seen as a victim. He didn’t want to be someone who other people would pity, someone who they’d look away from when he entered a room just because his presence, the knit cap on his head and the cane in his hand, made them sad. Made them feel guilty about being healthy, about having a future. Jem’s tenacity, his vivaciousness—those were only two of the things Noah loved about him.

So when Vita asked her to talk about Jem on the podcast, she was reluctant. She knew that speaking about Jem would open up a monsoon of pity upon her. Even Vita was pitying her during the recording, putting her hand on Noah’s arm to comfort her and to make herself feel better. Noah knows that that’s part of what pity is—it’s what somebody does when they’re made uncomfortable by your sadness or your anger or your tragedy. They want you to feel better so they don’t have to deal with your feelings anymore.

But sometimes you don’t want to feel better. Sometimes you want to sit in the dark and cry it out without anyone there to tell you that things will be okay and someday it won’t hurt this much. That’s hard to hear, because every day it hurts less, and every day Noah wonders if she’s forgetting Jem. If her love for him is lessening.

There was a moment, when she was 19 or 20, just after she found out about Jem’s history of cancer, when her mum insisted that she was making a mistake. This is only going to end in heartache, her mum had said.

And it did. It ended in heartache, but there was plenty of good before that.

On Sunday, Noah considers sitting in the dark and crying it out. She considers letting the feelings swarm around her like flies in the stickiest depths of summer, considers taking a step backward, considers forgetting about progress. Progress, she sometimes thinks, is an illusion. Progress depends on having an end in sight, or at least an end in mind. But with a task this monumental, there’s no end.

After her bath, Noah braids her hair over her shoulder and goes for a walk. Four blocks away from her flat, there’s an animal shelter. Like she has a few times over the past month, she stops in and walks the aisles, looking in at the dogs. There are big ones and lots of little ones, ones smaller than Bertie, even. Noah thinks again that these walks she’s started taking would be so much more enjoyable with a dog by her side.

But I’m not stable enough for a dog, she reminds herself. Not yet.

Maybe that’s the end goal. Maybe that’s what she’s working toward: being stable enough, mentally stable and physically stable and independently stable, that she can get a dog and feel confident that she can take care of it like she hopes it will take care of her.

And then, a block later, she passes a vet’s office. She can’t remember the last time Bertie saw a vet. The guilt nearly knocks her over. Bertie hates her, but that doesn’t mean she should neglect him.

The dog will have to wait.

On a Thursday morning, Niall is depositing a file on Rufus the Great Dane at the front desk when he overhears something that nearly makes his heart stop.

It’s a voice, and it’s playing out of Lucy’s computer. Niall leans closer, driven by the tiny part of his brain that insists on describing the voice as having “dulcet tones,” a phrase he’s never said aloud in his life and hopes he never will.

“Turn that up, would you?” Niall asks, planting his arms on the counter. Lucy shrugs and hits the volume key on the computer a few times.

“Love isn’t a choice,” the speaker is saying. “It’s not as if I sat down beside Jem in a lecture hall when we were 18 and looked at him and thought, this is the man I’m going to marry. I choose him, for better or for worse, and it’ll be worse. It was worse than I ever could’ve imagined. But it was where I had to be.”

“What’s she talking about?” Niall asks, prompting Lucy to let out a small sigh and pause the stream.

“It’s a podcast, Veritas with Vita. She’s talking to her friend about grief. Her husband died from leukemia when they were newlyweds.”

“Hmm,” Niall says. Lucy stares at him, waiting for him to say something else, and when he doesn't, she hits play again.

The girl continues speaking, but Niall doesn’t catch any of the words. All he hears is the girl’s voice. She sounds so familiar, but he can’t place her.

“Dr. Horan? You alright?”

Niall snaps to attention, straightening up. Lucy is looking at him, one eyebrow raised.

“You zoned out there for a minute,” she says. “Marcy just took the Weaver’s cat to the back.”

“Right.” Niall nods, blinks a few times to clear his head, and follows the sound of frantic meowing.

The blinking doesn’t do any good, though, because he can hear the girl’s voice in his head for the rest of the day. By the time he gets home that evening, he’s convinced that she’s the voice on the GPS his father bought him for Christmas last year. He pulls the thing out of the hall cupboard and extracts it from its box. It’s not until he goes to put batteries in it that he realizes he’s being ridiculous. He’s never even used the thing, so there’s no way Podcast Girl (as he’s come to think of her) is the “Sexy British Woman Narration,” as the box proclaims.

As he reheats leftover Thai food, he decides that really, there’s no harm in finding the podcast online and listening to it in full, if only so he can imagine the girl’s voice saying all kinds of things to him later, such as “turn left ahead” and “keep right at the fork.”

Niall only has to google “Veritas with Vita” and the podcast pops up. The newest episode, “Of grief and gumption,” is the first link. Niall clicks on it and hits play before leaning back in his chair, his mug in his hands.

“So today we’re going to talk about grief,” Vita says. She has a nice voice, but it’s nothing like the other voice that Niall heard playing in the clinic today. Vita sounds posh, clean, like her voice has been put through a synthesizer to make it sound as pleasing to the human ear as possible.

This other voice is different. Niall only has to listen for a few seconds and then he hears it, saying, “Thanks for having me.”

Just like this afternoon, her voice barrels him over. He’s standing on the shore, wading into the water, and all of a sudden a wave comes and knocks him on his arse. That’s what her voice does to him. Which is bullshit and he knows it, because the only thing that’s barreled him over lately is the memory of his grandmother’s funeral.

Ten minutes later, he’s completely engrossed. These two women, Vita and Natalie, are best mates; he can tell from the way Vita asks questions like she already knows the answers. He imagines them in his head, no faces, of course, but two women, best friends, side by side over the course of months as one of them loses her husband. So close they’re practically sisters.

“I notice you don’t have any pictures of the two of you up,” Vita says.

Niall imagines Natalie’s flat, imagines stark, white walls, a brown sofa like the one in his own flat, a black leather recliner— No, Natalie doesn’t seem the type to go for neutrals. She probably has pops of color, bright green or coral throw pillows, accent vases, the kind that don’t serve any purpose beyond decoration.

“We don’t have many,” Natalie says. “From uni, from the wedding. But we didn’t go on a honeymoon, so—”

“You didn't have a honeymoon?” Vita asks, not sounding as surprised as Niall expects she means to. Vita clearly already knows this fact, but listeners don’t. Emmy would be horrified.

“Jem was too sick at that point,” Natalie explains. “We took a weekend and stayed in, just the two of us, but no exotic tropical trips or anything.”

“Did you—do you regret not being able to do that?”

It takes Natalie a minute to answer, and in that pause, Niall tries to predict what she’s going to say. Does she regret marrying this bloke who up and died before they could really start a life together? She sounds younger than Niall, 22, 23, maybe. To feel so much pain at such a young age—

Niall shakes his head, forcing the thoughts away. He doesn’t know this girl; there’s no reason to spend time empathizing with her. There’s no reason to picture her sitting room or make assumptions about the kind of girl she is. It’s that kind of thinking that gets people into trouble.

And it’s that kind of thinking that brings other comparisons to mind, thoughts about his own grief and how he’s not dealing with it. This girl, this Natalie, has friends that she talks to—heck, she probably even sees a shrink. And here he is, hiding out in his flat

“No. I don't regret anything about my life with Jem. And I don't want pity because of it. We didn't have a regular honeymoon, and most of the time we spent married we were going to doctors or spending nights in the hospital or feeling too tired to go anywhere. But it wasn't—it was a good life. It was sad, but we were happy anyway.”

“Even when things were terrible? You were happy?”

“Of course we were sad sometimes. Of course it felt like all of the terrible things in the world were happening to us simultaneously. But we loved each other. There was never any other choice.”

“Loving him, was that a choice?”

“No,” Natalie says, sounding completely convinced.

“Love isn't a choice,” she continues. “It's not as if I sat down beside Jem in a lecture hall when we were 18 and looked at him and thought, this is the man I'm going to marry. I choose him, for better or for worse, and it'll be worse. It was worse than I ever could've imagined. But it was where I had to be.”

“You mean fate? Destiny? Soul mates?”

Bullshit, Niall thinks. Romantic bullshit. He knows better. He knows that there’s sex and dopamine, and when it stops feeling good, when the dopamine wears off, people leave. Happiness ends. It always ends, and all that it leaves behind is an ache.

He listens to Natalie’s answer. “I don't know anything about fate or soul mates. All I know is that sometimes life happens to us, and all we can do is hold on until the wave recedes.”

“I suppose that’s what grief is like,” Vita says. “A wave. You said before that moving forward is hard, but I know you, and I know that some days are easier than others. Some days are harder.”

“Yeah,” Natalie agrees. “I guess it’s like a wave then. It’s a bit unpredictable. Sometimes all I’m doing is walking down the road and I see something that reminds me of him, and I’m sad all over again.”

“You said sometimes all you can do is hold on until the wave of life recedes. Are you in control of your life now?”

“You sound like my therapist,” Natalie says, making Niall snicker. He knew she had a therapist. “I don't know. I don't think control is the most important thing. I don't need to feel in control. Sometimes too much control means you're not really living.”

Niall looks around is perfectly ordered kitchen, looks at his alphabetized cookbooks on the bookshelf, looks at his shoes lined up neatly by the door, and thinks that she’s absolutely incorrect. Control is absolutely necessary, because the opposite of control is feeling, and when you let the feelings in, they knock you over. Before you know it, you’re showering in the middle of the day just to get a cry in, slamming your fist against the tile wall and wondering if it hurts this bad for anyone else.

From what Natalie says on the podcast, he decides that it does. Grief hurts this badly for other people, too. But the difference between other people and Niall is that other people find their way out. They find the light at the end of the tunnel and fight their way toward it.

Niall, on the other hand, sits in the dark.

When the recording finishes, he hits replay and listens to it all the way through a second time.

To: [email protected]

From: [email protected]

re: This is your mother.

Attachements: img_149324,jpg, img_149325,jpg, img_149326.jpg

Noah, I’m emailing you here as maybe there’s a chance of you actually answering me. I’m attaching some pictures from our trip to Fiji a few weeks ago. We went snorkeling and it was beautiful! I had so much fun.

Your father and I really missed having you there. I know you said you couldn’t get off work, but I also know you didn’t ask. Please consider coming on holiday with us this summer, love.

And please give your dear old mum a call soon. She misses you.

#8nights

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