Ask Again, Yes

by Mary Beth Keane

To Francis, Dublin felt as far from Galway as New York did, but to a Yank, he supposed, it was all the same.

tipo o povo do sudeste que acha q recife é do lado de fortaleza, rs

“Might be a sign of intelligence, keeping away from our lot,”

francis prefere n se misturar com irlandeses e já me pergunto pq

The other young cop looked a little disgusted. He’d joined because his father was a cop. And two of his uncles. And his grandfather. It was in his blood.

a superioridade do outro por ser de família de legado policial diante do cara q virou policial pq era o que tinha praquele dia

There was no real way for a person to try something out, see if he liked it—the words he’d chosen when he told his uncle Patsy that he’d gotten into the police academy—because you try it and try it and try it a little longer and next thing it’s who you are.

For the first time she wondered if she’d known him well enough to marry him.

a velha história da pessoa que se apaixona por estar apaixonada e não conhece o parceiro direito até ser tarde demais

He couldn’t explain to her that he needed the trees and the quiet as a correction for what he saw on the job, how crossing a bridge and having that physical barrier between him and his beat felt like leaving one life and entering another. In his imagination he had it all organized: Officer Gleeson could exist there, and Francis Gleeson could exist here.

And though he told Lena none of this, only that work was fine, things were busy, she sensed the thing he wasn’t saying and looked at the house again.

Lately she felt so tired it was hard to hold a thought in her head.

A pobi tá total isolada

Now she wondered if presence was the thing her new neighbor had, if it was something a person had to be born with and could never be learned.

isso foi tipo eu com 6-7 anos querendo saber onde eu podia arrumar tendência a não engordar.

For the rest of her life, when asked to recall her earliest memory, Kate would remember watching him run around the side of his house with a red ball in his hand and already knowing his name.

esse trecho me deixou TÃO curiosa

It was a tragedy, clearly, from her view, that she’d left one life and ended up in another. A path had diverged in a wood and she chose the one she’d regret forever.

His father seemed to go on with life as if his mother were merely at work, or at the store. He didn’t seem to notice when she began to skip meals, when her teeth became dull and thick with plaque, when her posture changed. Even if she stayed mostly up in her bedroom for three, four, five days, his father still ate his cereal standing at the sink.

a construção de que a Anne tinha problemas, mas ninguém queria lidar. O Brian é o oposto da Kate no futuro

It occurred to Peter that his father actually liked these periods where she disappeared to her room for a few days. He seemed lighter, more relaxed.

He felt lonely all of a sudden. Everything in their house was lonely: the dark china cabinet filled with fragile things no one ever touched, the fake plant sitting next to the sofa, the crooked window shade, a silence so violent he wanted to clap his hands over his ears.

He doesn’t want to be here, Peter thought. He wants to leave. The idea landed lightly and easily, and as soon as Peter noticed it there, everything that hadn’t quite made sense made sense again.

It was as if she’d pried open Kate’s secret and stuck her finger in it, stirring it around until the most shameful part emerged.

None of that mattered. They were tied now by what he’d said, by the kiss, by knowing each other their entire lives.

But as she waved and yelled her goodbyes across the twilit lawn, she always felt relieved, completely exhausted, like these departures could not have come too soon.

Depois de ter perdido o melhor amigo, como que ela ia se conectar com outra pessoa

and yet sometimes, after being with him for a few hours, she felt lonelier than she had before.

When he thought about that—that Kate was basically a stranger to him now—a feeling like fear would shiver through him.

essa parte do Peter incerto sobre se ele reencontraria a Kate me deixou bem agoniada

If he didn’t come to see her, who would? How would she feel if not a single person in the world cared enough about her to go see her for an hour or two?

tem vezes que é só isso que basta

“The thing is, Peter, grown-ups don’t know what they’re doing any better than kids do. That’s the truth.”

a frase mais marcada desse livro, mas é bem real

He should have at least stood on her front lawn and shouted her name.

Chorando

She wondered if she was simply very, very mean.

acho que todo muita gente já pensou isso quando não tem razão nenhuma pra certas atitudes,

Why was he so sure she didn’t mean it?

Essa parte sobre a Anne seguindo em frente com as atitudes questionáveis mesmo entendendo que o Peter não acreditava nas atitudes dela é muito sobre conhecer uma pessoa tão bem aponto de desvendar os jogos.

It had nothing to do with Lena, whom he loved as much as he did the day they married. It only had to do with him, and the things he wanted, and the things he missed about himself, the things he missed feeling.

Depois do tiro, ele deixou de ser quem era, mas no casamento, ele deixou de ser marido pra ser enfermo. O Francis precisava se sentir recuperado inclusive nesse aspecto

Just sliding behind the wheel made him feel younger, more like himself than he’d been since the accident. And Joan didn’t seem the least bit worried about being his passenger.

“It’ll all be okay soon, Francis. But not yet.”

Peter could no better explain that than he could explain his feelings for Kate to guys on the Dutch Kills track team. It made sense in his heart and in his gut, but to his brain the logic was incoherent.

they’d already gone through all the heavy stuff couples go through so why not enjoy the light stuff now? Peter agreed. It was time to have fun. And he’d figured out that the fun was often not the thing itself—the party, the keg stand, the naked running into the duck pond—but the endless talking about it after, the reliving and describing, and laughing about it in front of people who wished they’d been there.

Ele sentiu falta de conexão com ela, por toda a juventude.

In the passenger seat, Peter sat up straight, felt a tug of such force it seemed impossible that it had come from within.

já tive esse tipo de conversa sobre policiais várias vezes

She wondered, as she did once in a great while, why he’d never returned to Ireland, why he’d never brought them there, how it was possible he’d lived a whole life before she was even born. She’d always felt sort of sad for him, leaving his parents forever when he was still so young, but now she saw how much freedom that had given him, with no one hovering on the sidelines telling him what to do.

“You mean Peter’s mother? He doesn’t even see her. He never talks about her. She doesn’t matter anymore.” “Doesn’t matter? Katie. Love. She’s the person who made him. She’s always going to matter.”

Não tem como fugir de quem fez a gente. Aqui nesse trecho é mais no sentido biológico, mas com certeza isso vale sobre professores, vizinhos, pessoas que nos impactam quando crianças e só vamos entender mesmo como no futuro.

WHAT HAD BEEN DONE to Anne at twelve by their neighbor, Mr. Kilcoyne, kept being done until she turned sixteen and left for England.

uma frase e já bastou pra entender que antes de perder o filho, a Anne já tinha histórico de trauma.

She’d turned her back on Ireland the day she left but it was still there, behind her, like a shadow that followed her from place to place to place.

O passado vai com a gente pra onde a gente for.

The beginning mattered for Peter, too, whether he knew that yet or not. All those years of moving carefully around the house in Gillam had made an imprint on him, somewhere.

A gente não se tornaria quem somos se não fossem essas experiências, inclusive que estão além do nosso controle, e o impacto delas em nós.

but that was the story with men and women since the beginning of time. They never saw each other clearly until it was too late.

Essa frase me lembrou a do começo do livro sobre a Lena se perguntar se ela realmente conhecia o Francis quando eles se casaram. Eles queriam coisas diferentes.

Yet it took something out of him, each time they went, whether he realized it or not.

Voltar pro passado e pro lugar que causou trauma tem consequências ainda mais quando esse trauma não é verbalizado e vira essa coisa mal resolvida

No one ever asked for his mother or his father, and one time, when he pointed that out to Kate as the reason he found the encounters so exhausting, everyone dancing around what was there in front of them, Kate said that was out of respect for him, that they didn’t want Peter to think they’d lumped him with those people.

parece que as pessoas ficam pisando em ovos ao falar com ele. dá pra entender pq ele n se sente à vontade, é tipo "vc deu certo apesar dos seus pais fudidos"

She felt angry sometimes, but mostly she felt nervous, like she should apologize for something, like she, too, had done something wrong, though what, exactly, she wouldn’t have been able to say.

Later, she couldn’t decide if she’d done it to be cruel or to be kind.

and it wasn’t the help that shook Peter but the fact that they so easily let each other into the most intimate parts of each other’s homes.

novamente a desconexão do Peter com outras pessoas. tudo bem que ele é introspectivo, mas tirando a Kate, ele não deixa as pessoas entrarem, talvez por medo de afastar. ao mesmo tempo, ele quer ter essa camaradagem, mas como estender a mão? e antes, num trecho em que o foco é a Kate, o discurso dela informa que ela não entende a dificuldade que as pessoas tem de fazer amigos, a ironia.

but it was exhausting to think about it all the time, to drag the weight of their shared history around with them every minute of the day. They won. They were together. Why go over it again and again? Kate thought about their wedding day as a conclusion to something, where he thought about it as a beginning. Rising action versus falling action. They were reading different books.

For so long, Kate had thought of Anne only as the person who shot her father. She’d forgotten that she was also Peter’s mother.

eu gosto dela não enxergar a ausência da Anne na vida do Peter como algo ruim pq até ela consegue ser obtusa. mas acho que ela é superprotetora com o Peter por causa do que eles passaram tbm.

Don’t leave him, she begged Kate, silently, desperately. Do not leave him. He’s been left too many times already.

Eu morri de chorar aqui. A Kate é o oposto do Brian, que largou a Anne com uma arma. Claro que ela não é super homem e cogita desistir, mas ela sabe o que é perder quem ela mais ama, e ela não desistiria sem lutar.

But things are meant to change, Peter said. Because life changes and people change. As long as we change together, we’re okay.

As he’d tried to explain to her before, he never doubted that his mother loved him. But as Francis Gleeson had once told Kate, love is only part of the story.

Would you have said yes back then if you’d known?”

“Then and now, I say yes.”

And then he saw what he’d never seen before, which was that Peter was fine. And Kate was fine. Lena was fine. And he, Francis Gleeson, was fine. And that all the things that had happened in their lives had not hurt them in any essential way, despite what they may have believed at times. He had not lost anything; he’d only gained. Was the same true for Peter? For Kate? Yes. And yes. Would they be somewhere more magnificent than this were it not for everything that had happened? Would their lives have been fuller and happier? Looking at them now, he didn’t see how it would be possible. For the very first time, he felt that Peter was his blood.

é isso. maravilhoso. pode parecer glorificação do sofrimento, mas não é sobre isso. é sobre como as nossas experiências nos moldam, e nos dão chance de sermos pessoas melhores ao enfrentar os revés e superá-los. aqui no livro as pessoas conseguem se manter juntas, mas claro que tem situações que o que nos salva é se afastar. mas a autora sempre deixa claro que enquanto o Peter buscava ajuda, a Kate estava lá. se ele não estivesse disposto e desistisse, ela poderia voltar pra casa.