The Night We Lost Him, page 14
“I’m good,” I say.
“I would get on it sooner rather than later,” she continues, ignoring me. “No offense, but the clock is ticking for you way more than it was for me.”
Then she heads back into the main living area.
I smile at Sam. “She’s charming.”
Sam lets out a laugh. And we follow her into the other room, where she sits down in the window seat. The uninterrupted ridge is lit up behind her, its hills and trees jutting up against a cloudless hidden valley.
“It’s freezing here. I can’t handle it.”
“Not a bad view, at least,” I say.
She closes her eyes and wraps herself tightly in a blanket. “I couldn’t care less.”
It doesn’t feel like it would go any better to compliment the interior design of this cabin and by extension what will be the zeitgeist of The Acres, which Kira is at least partially responsible for. She is the interior design director for Noone Properties, and this one has her signature all over it: reclaimed furniture, antique pieces, and botanical prints, everything bright and vivid and lush, like the ridge it’s highlighting.
Kira cups her belly, sighs. “There are waters in the fridge. I have nothing else to offer you but ginger lollipops.”
“We’re just looking for Tommy,” Sam says.
“They’re trying to finish up out by the natural playground. Do you even know where that is, Sam?”
He laughs off her overt dig. Her insinuation that instead of Kira and Tommy being holed up here, it should be him. Or, at least, Sam should be there, sharing in the work. Maybe he should be. Either way, Sam is smart to let it lie. If she feels that way, it’s being filtered through the person who would be reporting it that way: Tommy. He isn’t going to convince her that she’s wrong.
“Take a map with you.”
“I’ve got a good idea where I’m going,” he says. “Thanks, though.”
“Don’t be a fucking hero, Sam. Property map is in the crate on the porch. Spoiler alert, it’s a hike.”
Then she closes her eyes, apparently done with us. So, I walk back out of the cabin, Sam following.
He closes the door behind us. “Wow,” Sam says. “That’s the nicest she’s been to me in a while. Worrying I’d get lost.”
I smile. “Is that what that was?”
“Clearly. Plus, you know, the concern she was showing for you.”
I look at him, confused.
“She’s right. You’re not getting younger.”
My smile disappears. “Very funny.”
“I’m just saying. Maybe you should patch things up with the veterinarian. You really like his kid…”
“Get the map,” I say.
Playgrounds Come in Different Shapes and Sizes
Kira isn’t wrong. The property paths haven’t been carved out yet and it isn’t an easy hike, especially in the wind and the cold, walking through woodlands and over steep hills, until we find our way to the natural playground.
Despite the cold, we are both sweaty and breathless by the time we walk over the final hill and into the clearing, where there is a team of construction workers busy at work. There is a zipline being built into the trees, a rock-climbing wall embedded into a high bolder, an in-ground trampoline secured into the valley.
The trampoline is where we find Tommy. He is bouncing on it, in his puffy vest and jeans, talking to one of the construction workers.
From a distance it could look like he is enjoying himself. But, from what I know about him, Tommy doesn’t believe in enjoying himself. He is probably trying to squeeze in a bit of exercise while he works. Because what Tommy believes in is achievement.
He looks up and sees us approaching him. And it’s jarring, as it always is. His eyes, so much like mine, staring back at me. That face, just like my face.
“Well, I’ll be damned. What are you doing here? And together?” he says. “I’d guess that Dad died, but that’s already happened.”
I shake my head, done with him already. “That’s hilarious, Tommy,” I say.
He offers a half-smile. “Just trying to break the ice,” he says. “Kira texted that you two are on the warpath about something. Or did she get that wrong? Are you just here to check in on me? Offer your condolences?”
“Cut it out, Tommy,” Sam says. “Why the fuck are you talking to Paul Turner about Cece Salinger?”
Tommy turns toward Sam. “Who told you that?”
“Who told me that?” Sam says. “That’s what you have to say?”
Tommy stares at Sam, his smile disappearing. Then he steps off the trampoline and turns to me.
“We need somewhere private if you guys want to get into this,” he says.
“Lead the way,” Sam says.
Tommy motions toward the Airstream. And we follow him up the small stairs and inside. The cabin is hot and tight, a space heater going at full blast. Tommy pulls off his puffy vest, sweat pooling under each arm.
He grabs a kombucha and takes a seat behind his makeshift desk, leaving us to find room on the built-in couch, covered with boxes of files and endless cases of additional kombucha.
“Before you go losing your shit,” he says, “it’s not like Dad told me about any of this. I just found out he was planning to sell to her a couple of weeks ago.”
“How?” Sam says.
“One of the lawyers was talking to Joe after the will reading and I overheard him say something about Salinger, so I started digging. I got the sale confirmed by a couple of people who are in-house with Cece.”
“And you didn’t think to tell me?”
“How do you want me to answer that?”
“By explaining why you didn’t think to tell me, for starters.”
Sam holds Tommy’s eyes and I see it pass between them: this mix of anger and love and resentment. This quiet understanding that the two of them are always in it together and somehow, like now, the opposite of that.
“You’re seriously going to give me a hard time? You’ve been totally fucking absent, man.”
“Since Dad died?” Sam says. “I think that’s understandable.”
“It’s been a lot worse since then, sure. But if we are going to be honest, then let’s be honest,” he says. “You’re not exactly the partner around here you say you want to be.”
“That’s such bullshit,” Sam says. “You just want to believe it should be you here without me.”
“You know that isn’t it,” he says. “You’re perfectly good at your job when you choose to be.”
“Don’t make me blush.”
Tommy shakes his head, like the last thing he has time for is to convince Sam of what is true. And I certainly don’t know if what Tommy is saying is accurate, but I can see how small it’s making Sam feel. I feel a pull to lean in and make it stop.
“We don’t need to get into all of this, Tommy,” I say. “We are just trying to figure out what was going on with Dad.”
“I literally don’t even know what you are doing here,” he says.
“Quite honestly, that makes two of us.”
He looks at me and softens.
“There were things going on with Dad that we didn’t know,” I say. “That none of us knew…”
“Like the fact that he was involved with Cece?” Tommy asks.
Like the fact he may have been murdered.
I nod. “Among other things.”
“Well, for what it’s worth, Joe told me, categorically, that whatever happened with them happened a really long time ago.”
“So… how did that end up with you reaching out to Paul Turner?” I ask.
He reaches into his desk and pulls out a copy of Forbes magazine—Cece Salinger on the cover, staring back at us, her arms folded across her chest.
He hands me the magazine, has one of the pages earmarked. “This was from five months ago,” he says. “Page eighty-three.”
I open the magazine to the earmarked page and am greeted with a large photograph of Cece walking through the small vineyard on her property in Los Alamos—the property Sam and I were turned away from two days ago.
I read the headers to each section. They focus on Cece’s outsize success, on how she is rebranding the Salinger Group portfolio on the other side of her divorce, particularly as it relates to her lifestyle division.
I study the photograph and the bolded quote beneath it, which I read out loud: “ ‘Salinger’s next chapter will be focused on building out her hospitality and resort portfolio, focusing on luxury-driven, private retreat experiences.’ ”
“Just below that,” Tommy says. “Right above the jump.”
“ ‘While Salinger was hesitant to discuss her personal life in great depth, she did confirm she designed her new home for herself and her current partner, whom she coyly describes as an old friend. “But that’s for another day,” Salinger says, declining to discuss her personal life in any detail.’ ”
“Sound familiar?” Tommy asks.
“Sounds like it could be Dad,” Sam says.
“What does this have to do with Paul Turner?” I ask.
“One guess who the photographer for this profile was…”
I look up and meet Tommy’s eyes.
He nods. And I add that piece of information to my growing list of things that aren’t adding up, not on their face, living in that strange space between uncomfortable and weird.
“That’s some coincidence,” Sam says.
“He does a lot of work for the magazine, apparently. But still, I thought he might have insight into what was going on with Dad and Cece. And no vested interest in keeping it to himself.”
“Did he confirm anything?” I ask.
“Not what I thought he would,” he says. “He seemed to confirm that, from the little he knew, anything that had happened between Cece and Dad was ancient history. Paul seemed pretty confident that if she is involved with someone at the company, he didn’t think it had anything to do with Dad.”
Sam looks at him, confused. Which is when I put it together.
“You mean Cece and Uncle Joe?” I ask.
“That’s where I went,” Tommy says. I feel my jaw tighten, just as Sam’s does.
“Paul said they were together?”
Tommy shakes his head. “It’s what he didn’t say when I put it out there.”
“And what’s that?” I ask.
“That I was wrong.”
Thirty-Nine Years Ago
“I very much like her,” Cory said. “Rachel.”
They were sitting in a sandwich shop near Liam’s office in Midtown, sharing a slice of coconut cream pie, Cory’s finger circling her coffee mug.
She was home, again. She had moved back to New York, back to Brooklyn. One year had turned into three and a half, just like he’d known it would. She wasn’t even back now because she wanted to be here, but because her mother was sick and her father was useless and someone had to take care of them.
She was, apparently, the someone.
She loved graduate school. She loved the writing program and loved spending the day with people who wanted to talk about books and plays and poetry. She loved the apartment that she shared with two other graduate students. It was an old firehouse that had been converted into open-air lofts with enormous, pitched ceilings and a large bookshelf that ran the length of the living room. This was the first photograph she showed him: the photograph of that beautiful, endless white bookshelf that housed all her books, all her textbooks, all the used books she thrifted every weekend.
She was wearing it on her face—how miserable she felt to be back in her parents’ house. What choice did she have? Her mother’s pension wasn’t enough. Her father was unemployed. Cory was three semesters shy of finishing her PhD and nowhere close to finishing a book. Teaching jobs would be fairly impossible to secure. As would any kind of jobs at New York publishers. They were impossible to acquire and low paying, at least when you were starting out.
She didn’t have time to get into all that. She was interviewing for a job at the marketing company her friend Sally worked for. She was going to be a copywriter. They liked that they could tell clients she had a master’s. And they would probably inflate it to tell clients that she had a PhD too. They were in marketing, after all. The bottom line was she’d make plenty of money to properly care for her parents. She would figure out the rest later.
Liam reached across the table, toward her. It was killing him to see her unhappy. But he didn’t know how to fix it for her. She didn’t want his fixes anyway. He wasn’t an artist. He didn’t have that compulsion. He knew that she had, in a way, been more comfortable discussing the situation with Rachel, even though Cory and Rachel had only just met. Rachel knew what it meant to move away from your art (or at least to move away from the idea that your art could also operate as your livelihood) and to try and build a different kind of life. That understanding was one of many reasons they had gotten along. That they’d genuinely gotten along. Somehow, for Liam, that made it harder.
Now Rachel had gone to catch the train back to Croton, and it was just the two of them. Just Cory and Liam. Cory kept looking away from him, her eyes focused on that damn mug, refusing to let him deeper in.
“I can call off the wedding,” he said.
“Don’t be ridiculous. She is lovely. I like her. And more importantly you like her. There’s a reason you want to marry her.”
“I didn’t think you were coming back.”
“Yet here I am.”
“Cory…”
“Don’t call me Cory,” she said. “It makes me think of my father.”
“What can I tell you? Old habits die hard.”
She smiled in spite of herself.
“Let me help,” he said. “With your parents.”
“Already offered. Already rejected.”
“You’re very stubborn,” he said.
“Maybe,” she said. “Maybe that’s true.”
She shrugged and tried to play it off, but that wasn’t possible between them. He knew, even if she wasn’t going to say it, that it wasn’t just the turn that things had taken for her. Maybe it was also something she couldn’t exactly access. She was so used to him asking her to marry him that she never thought the day would come when he stopped asking. He didn’t want to stop asking. How had they gotten here?
“I hate the reason you’re back, I do, but—”
“But what?”
“I’m also glad you’re back,” he said. “I know that’s selfish. I know that’s the most selfish thing I can say.”
“Just honest. Besides, I get it.”
“You do?”
She met his eyes, finally. “We can’t be apart this long again.”
“No,” he said. “No, we’ll never do that again.”
“But what will we do?”
He started to speak, but she shook her head and stopped him.
“Not for you to answer. Not what I’m looking for.”
“So what are you looking for?”
He took her hand, her soft palm, wrapped it between both of his.
“Right now?” she said. “Some more pie.”
Detours Are the Only Way Home
“Cece and Joe,” Sam says. “Fuck. Of course.”
“It may start to explain some things,” I say.
“It may?”
We are hiking back toward the main grounds and the car, the wind and the cold burning my cheeks, my skin.
Sam pulls out his phone, starts searching. “Cece Salinger and her husband of thirty-one years finalize their divorce.”
He looks up at me.
“That was eight months ago. Timing lines up,” he says. “Joe probably talked Dad into selling to his girlfriend—”
“When has someone talked Dad into anything?”
“The point is, it would also explain why Dad was off these past couple of months, especially if Uncle Joe kept the relationship from him. Pretty terrible betrayal after everything Dad tried to do for him.”
I look at Sam, wondering which betrayal he is talking about: Joe convincing our father to sell the company to someone he was involved with? Or Joe being involved with Cece in the first place? Either way, it feels like a big jump—and maybe the wrong jump. Because even if Paul (and Tommy) are correct about Uncle Joe and Cece being involved, who says my father wasn’t aware? What kind of deep history would my father have needed to have had with her for Uncle Joe to keep that from him?
We walk over another hill, the parking lot appearing in the distance. Sam holds out his hands for the keys.
“None of that tells us who was on the cliff with Dad that night,” I say.
“Not yet. But if Joe and Cece kept this from Dad, you’ve got to ask yourself what they are keeping from us now.”
“Except then why would Cece volunteer that she heard from Dad the night that he died? Wouldn’t that encourage us to do exactly what we are doing? Ask more questions about her as opposed to fewer?”
He shakes his head, like I’m refusing to see what’s right in front of me.
“Maybe she just knew we’d get here either way,” he says.
“That doesn’t follow, Sam. And it doesn’t follow from what I felt when I looked at her.”
“Which is?”
I think of the sadness I saw in her eyes that she had missed those calls. Especially when they were the last chance.
“She really cared about Dad.”
“Both things can exist.”
He opens the car door and gets in.
I don’t want to rile Sam up further, so I get in the car too, closing the door behind myself. And I refrain from saying what I’m also thinking: If both things do exist, how compromised did that leave our father?
Sam puts his hands on the steering wheel, the ignition off.
“I’m not trying to play the game of who knew Dad better,” he says. “I’m really not. But, working with him every day, I do think that Tommy and I understood something about Dad that maybe you didn’t.”
“Which is?”
“This company was everything to him.”
“I don’t think it’s that simple.”
