This Must Be the Place

by Maggie O'Farrell

She has the baby on her back, she is wearing the kind of sou’wester hood usually sported by North Sea fishermen, and she is holding a shotgun. She is also my wife.

The latter fact I still have trouble adjusting to, not only because the idea of this creature ever agreeing to marry me is highly improbable, but also because she pulls unexpected shit like this all the time.

I slide the car into first gear and let off the brake, with a perverse feeling of accomplishment, as if getting my family to leave ten minutes late is a major achievement,

This triggers some preverbal synapse in the baby: his neurology tells him that the sight of his mother’s retreating back is bad news, that she may never return, that he will be left here to perish, that the company of his somewhat-scatterbrained and only occasionally present father is not sufficient to ensure his survival (he has a point). He lets out a howl of despair, a signal to the mothership: Abort mission, request immediate return.

To all appearances, I am a husband, a father, a teacher, a citizen, but when tilted toward the light I become a deserter, a sham, a killer, a thief. On the surface I am one thing, but underneath I am riddled with holes and caverns, like a limestone landscape.

He decided there and then that his life needed footnotes and that he, Niall, should be the one to provide them.

There is him and there is his condition. They are two entities, forced to live in one body.

“Instead they insult us by implying the condition is unphotogenic, unpalatable. It’s hypocrisy of the most heinous kind. Why should we, of all people, be forced to look at this crap?”

“Half,” Dad says, and it strikes me that he does the thing Niall does, missing out words that other people consider mandatory, and I wonder if Niall got it from him.

walked toward him across the floor. It wasn’t so much a case of recognition, more a sensation of rightness, the idea of something being where it should be, something finding its place. He knows now how a locksmith must feel when he creates the key that finally releases an old rust-shut lock, or a composer when he finds the note to complete a chord. They had changed, Niall and Phoebe, yet were exactly the same, and

Apologize, she would say, apologize, and people’s defenses come down and everything will be better.

parental reflexes weren’t that rusty. You see a kid flying through the air, and you reach out, you make sure you’re there to cushion the landing.

threw him up in the air, of course, because that’s what you do when a kid leaps into your arms. There’s no written rule on this, but everyone knows it’s next on the agenda. I didn’t even have to warn him before I tossed him up. He knew it was coming and so did I.

‘Complex,’ maybe, or ‘labyrinthine.’ ‘Tortuous,’ ‘convoluted,’ ‘tricky,’ ‘byzantine.’ Any of those might be more apt.” I managed, with great effort, to shut my mouth, and my gabbling mercifully ceased.

What redemption there is in being loved: we are always our best selves when loved by another. Nothing can replace this.

I grip the bench in something close to terror, wanting to close my eyes but not being able to, wondering, as she stands there, looking toward the fountain, if I am witnessing the beginning of the end, if this is it, the tipping point we all dread. Am I living through the moment when all the tiny lights begin

It is possible, I think as I sit there on the cold wood of the bandstand bench, to see ailing marriages as brains that have undergone a stroke. Certain connections short-circuit, abilities are lost, cognition suffers, a thousand neural pathways close down forever. Some strokes are massive, seminal, unignorable; others imperceptible. I’m told it’s perfectly possible to suffer one and not realize it until much later.

please know what to say to me, you always do.

Not to this man, who has based whole papers on ownership of expression, on the importance of squaring up to semantics, to using the most perspicuous and apt word for something.

and he knows instantly, without a shadow of doubt, that he is where he is meant to be.

was amazed to find that he was shaking, that he had been under the impression that she wasn’t interested, that he was barking up the wrong tree. No, she’d said, putting her arms around his neck, the right tree, absolutely the right tree.

“Whatever it is you wish you’d said to her years ago, when you were still together. I have a theory,” she says, looking far ahead, at where salt meets sky, “that marriages end not because of something you did say but because of something you didn’t. All you have to do now is work out what it is.”

“Were you not listening?” Rosalind says. “It’s not exactly straightforward. It’s going to require fortitude and courage, determination and insight.

the slow leaf-rich paths of worms. Soil is memory made flesh, is past and present combined: nothing goes away.

at a crossroads in Donegal, finding a woman and a boy sitting on the roof of their car, looking up at two hawks and a buzzard. Claudette would still have happened, either way. I think about this, how she is my unavoidable constant.

think about an afternoon in a drugstore where I might have put myself between my child and that boy, absorbed that bullet into my own guts, my own head. How different it all might have been, how minuscule the causes and how devastating their effects.

This, I want to communicate to her. I choose this. The here and now. I almost gesture around me, at her, the mysterious room, the floor above, where our children lie sleeping, but manage to stop myself. We must pursue what’s in front of us, not what we can’t have or what we have lost. We must grasp what we can reach and hold on, fast.

as if I don’t think about this place, these paths, these borders, this sky, every day, as if I don’t map this place in my head every night as I am falling

asleep in Manhattan.

need to look her in the eye and say sorry, but what comes out is something quite different. “You have done such an amazing job with them. You really have. They are so lucky to have you.”