The Night We Lost Him, page 19
“I think someone might say that I’m hitting a nerve,” he said.
“Don’t give yourself so much credit,” she said. “Besides, who says I’m not still writing anyway?”
That stopped him. “Really?”
“Yes. Really.”
“How did I not know that?” he asked.
“There are a lot of things you don’t know about me.”
He put his hands on the ladder. She stepped down several rungs and turned toward him, so that his hands were right over her head, encircling her. His face inches from her face. Just the two of them breathing in that air, like a halo, like a safety valve.
“I pray every day that’s not true,” he said, sincerely.
“Okay. Well.” She met his eyes. “Do you remember Mrs. Dixon?”
“Mrs. Dixon?”
“Sophomore English. Had lots of turtle paraphernalia in the classroom.”
He never had her as a teacher, but he searched his memory to properly place her. Fidelity is who you tell your stories to. He could feel how important it was that he really showed up for this one.
“With the red hair, yeah?” he said. “She made Joe join the literary review or she was going to fail him?”
“Exactly. She had a New Yorker writer come into the class to speak to us, a short story writer, and he sat on the floor in front of the class, and he told us that when he’s writing his stories, they’re each a love letter to one person. A love letter that other people are just peeking in on.” She shrugged. “I still think about it when I write and it takes it away.”
“Takes what away?”
“Any idea that I should be writing for anyone but me.”
“And the person.”
“Yes. And the person.”
“Who’s the person?”
She smiled, not answering. “Don’t miss the point.”
“Fair enough. Tell me the point.”
“I know that it’s your favorite pastime, to focus on what should have been, but I don’t like to focus on it. It’s a waste. And to be honest, it feels like just another thing that gets in the way of you finding it. Holding on to it.”
“What’s that?”
“Happiness.”
“How did this become a referendum on me?”
“You interrupted my wallpaper install.”
“So you don’t ever think about the alternative life?” He shrugged. “The one where I get to be with you every day and all the babies we’ve had running around, we are raising them together. And you write in this room all day and at night, I bring us some tea, and sit in that chair there. And watch you work.”
“I like my life,” she said. “Plus, you’re watching me now. And I’m finding it quite annoying.”
“That’s not an answer,” he said.
He pushed the hair out of her face, her thick curls. His fingers running the length of her cheek.
She leaned into him, into his fingers. “The sunset’s going to be beautiful when the rain clears. Why don’t you go save a spot on the cliff, and when you’re annoying me less, maybe I’ll come meet you out there.”
“You’re exiling me? Into the rain?”
“You have boots.”
She kissed his wrist, the edge of his palm. Then she turned away from him, headed back up the ladder.
He looked up at her. “For what it’s worth, I am happy,” he said. “I’m happy whenever I’m with you.”
“Good to hear, out you go.”
“I’m serious, Cory. How long has it been? Almost thirty years now and there’s still nothing that makes me happier than you.”
“Oh please. You always get like this when we’re here together.”
“Well, that’s because it’s our place.”
“It’s not.”
He started to walk to the porch and the sunset, to give her what she wanted. “If that’s true, then I’m taking the wallpaper down as soon as you leave.”
Frequent Flier Miles Don’t Get You What You Think They Will
I’m in the last row of the plane.
To get a ticket on the first flight out, there were no other options. I’m sitting between a mom in the window seat cradling her crying baby and a man in the aisle seat drinking straight vodka (at 8:00 a.m.) and shooting daggers at the baby, as though that will help make anyone feel better.
“It might help if I could grab her spare pacifier,” the mother says. “Or I should say the spare of her spare. The others are on the ground.”
“I’m happy to hold her while you grab it,” I say. “Is that weird to offer…”
Before I finish speaking, she drops the baby into my arms. I hold her against my chest, cradle her sweet head as her mother leaps out of the seat, climbing over me and past the guy in the aisle, who of course doesn’t sit up a modicum, or move his legs out of her way.
The mother reaches for her diaper bag in the overhead bin, searching for the pacifier. Then she crawls back into her seat. But, like a miracle, her baby is quiet and sleeping in my arms.
“Wow,” she says. “Impressive.”
“Beginner’s luck.”
She reaches her arms out to take her daughter back, but I see it in her face, the fear that any movement will wake her.
“You know, I don’t mind holding her while she’s sleeping. If you’re comfortable with that—”
“Are you sure?”
I smile and start to say I am when our surly seatmate chimes in. “Yes please! For crying out loud. Hold her!”
I shoot him a look. “We’ve got this. But thank you.”
He shakes his head and looks away. Then I turn back toward the mother.
“I’m good, honestly.”
The mother nods, gently touching her baby on the arm. “Thank you,” she says, letting out a breath. An exhale. The first of this plane ride.
She gives me a grateful smile. “You must have kids?”
“Not yet.”
“But you’d like one?”
I nod. “I would.”
“Hmm. You got the person?”
“May have just lost him.”
“This is turning into a depressing conversation.”
She lets out a small laugh. And maybe it’s a bit too loud—the promising sound of her mother—because the baby starts to gurgle in my arms. The mother puts her hand on the baby’s back, and she starts to settle again.
“This little one’s daddy is having a bit of a hard time adjusting to parenthood, so I’m going to stay with my sister for a bit. Give him a little room.”
“That sounds like a needed trip.”
“Let’s hope. My sister is pretty much the smartest person I know, and she told me to get on the plane. She said if you are looking for answers you can’t find, you need to change the question.”
That hits me, how true that is. “Sounds like she is operating on a different level.”
“Well, she’s living with five roommates and they’re all unemployed, so…” she says. “Bit of a mixed bag.”
I smile, adjusting the baby, trying to keep her comfortable. “So, what’s your new question?”
“Will my being gone knock it out of him?” She shrugs. “The parts I don’t recognize.”
I nod. That’s what we are often fighting against, isn’t it? The parts in someone we don’t recognize. The parts we are trying to reconcile. Aren’t my current questions, as large and impossible as they are, circling around that exact thing? What happened to my father that I wasn’t there to see? What did I miss about who he was? Where do those things intersect?
Also this. What should I be asking instead that will get me to a clearer picture of what happened on the cliff that night? That will get me somewhere better. Meredith Cooper comes into my head: There are no wrong questions when you’re grieving. Jonathan: He was nothing if not loyal. Inez: He loved all of us, the best he could.
My mother: Oh, for Pete’s sake… It’s like you don’t know your father at all.
Maybe. Maybe not. Maybe the question is not only who my father was. Maybe it has more to do with this—for all of us, doesn’t it have more to do with this? Who, at the end of the day, did my father wish he could have been?
“So,” she says. “Now that I overshared, you go. What’s so urgent that you’re heading across the country last-minute?”
“How did you know this is last-minute?”
“Middle seat. Last row. What’s going on?”
But, just then, the baby’s gurgles get louder, and suddenly she is awake, taking me in, a woman she doesn’t belong to, and starts clawing to get back to her mother, her cries turning into loud shrieks.
“Cancel that,” she says. “You’re on your own.”
A Wintery Beach Tells a Story
At Windbreak, I walk the beach.
I start at Loon Point, and I walk east first, as though I’m the jogger. Then I walk down to the Velasquez property and turn back in the direction of Windbreak, as the Coopers did, envisioning the night from that vantage point. I study the exact area where my father was discovered, on the high sand, fifteen feet from the entrance to the rickety stairs, leading up to his property. I look up at the bluffs, take in those stairs from below, take in the next-door neighbor’s high wall, my father’s gentle palisades.
I try to re-create it. The pattern of it. The order.
What exactly happened that night? If someone pushed him, then where did they go, if not down those stairs, landing on this beach too? Did they jump the fence separating Windbreak from the neighbors? That would have been captured. If they went out Windbreak’s front gate, that would have been captured too. Unless someone knew how to erase what was seen.
“Nora?”
I turn around and see an older man in a Yale baseball cap, a white mustache matching the hair peeking out from beneath the cap. Two large dogs are running in wide circles around him.
He looks vaguely familiar to me, but I’m having trouble placing him until he puts his hand to his chest by way of introduction.
“I thought that was you,” he says. “Ben King.”
I smile at him as I remember. This is Ben, my father’s friend from college. The reason my father found himself on Padaro Lane three decades ago. The reason he saw Windbreak in the first place.
“Ben, of course,” I say. “I’m sorry I didn’t recognize you.”
“That’s okay,” he says. “It’s been a few years. I think you were finishing college.”
“Then it was many more years ago than that.”
“They all start to bleed.” He smiles, offers a gentle shrug. “I was really sorry to hear about your father. I hope you’re hanging in okay.”
He blushes in the way that has become familiar to me. In that way I’ve noticed so many of us do when we try to offer sympathies, as if naming the grief will conjure it up, will be the thing responsible for adding to the pain that otherwise could be forgotten. It makes it feel all the kinder to me when someone takes the risk and does it anyway.
“Thank you,” I say. “I appreciate it.”
“Are you staying here for a bit?”
“Just the night, I think.”
“Famous last words,” he says. “This place grabs you fast.”
I give him a smile. And he waves goodbye. Then he starts heading down the beach, picking up a beach stick, throwing it to his dogs. They race out ahead of him, working to catch it.
I watch him for a moment, this man who is so relaxed and happy. Isn’t this who my father wanted to be? A man not unlike this one, not worrying where his next meal was coming from. In a cliffside house with his old life (the old versions of himself) shed, far behind him. But that couldn’t be my father’s story of who he wanted to be, could it? Not when he loved as intensely as he did. Not when he brought Joe along with him. When he kept all his families close. Not when he was nothing if not loyal.
No. The story was closer to something else. Something about a man holding on with as much force as he also tried to flee. But to what? Which is when it hits me.
Cece. Cece ended up in this storied corner of the coast, hadn’t she said her husband was still here, not too far from Uncle Joe? Not too far from my father?
I pull out my phone and do a search for her ex-husband. Davidson Salinger. A sales record listing his address as Sand Point Road. A five-minute drive. Davidson Salinger, a Los Angeles native who graduated from Yale University, where he met his first wife, Cece Kayne.
Yale. This shouldn’t be a surprise. Cece had said that she and my father went to school together, but I assumed she’d meant Midwood High. Why did I assume that? Because she had said they grew up near each other. Hadn’t she also said that?
I walk back up to the house, taking the steps two at a time, closing and locking the gate behind myself, and running the length of the property to the house. Until I’m inside the house, closing the door behind myself.
The house is freezing, and there are no lights on yet. I’ve called Clark to come by and turn everything on. He has to do it from a locked power breaker. I have to learn how to do it myself.
But suddenly I don’t feel like waiting. I head to the living room, head straight to the bookshelves, pulling several things down from the personal shelf: some of the playbills, the yearbooks, several of the photo albums. I move it all by the window, and into the light and the heat from the late afternoon sun.
He has one yearbook from his senior year at Midwood, one marked the Yale Banner, from his senior year there. I check the index in the Banner first, searching for any photographs of my father. There are none except for his senior portrait. I start going through the photo albums instead. Some of them are dated in the front, and I look for any that take me back to the late 1970s, when he was finishing college.
The second album I go through has a large group photograph in it. Several of his male friends are in it, but not Ben King. Not anyone else I recognize on first blush, except for my father, looking strong and young, his arms crossed over his chest, his smile large and wide. And looking so much like Sam that it startles me.
I turn the page and see another group photograph. My father is in the center, several friends circled around him. In this photograph, I recognize two people. On the far left is my uncle Joe. And, on the right, the only woman in the photo. A young and very beautiful Cece Kayne. She is standing near my father, but someone else has an arm around her. Maybe this is Davidson Salinger. Maybe it is someone else entirely.
Either way, Cece is leaning toward my father, even though this man is leaning toward her.
I pull the photograph out of the album, staring at all of their faces, holding them in my hand.
I hold it closer, hold him closer, wondering what it is that I can almost see.
Eighteen Years Ago
“I don’t want to talk about it anymore…”
Cory and Liam were standing in front of track twenty-eight at Grand Central Station. Cory was waiting on the 5:55 train to Dobbs Ferry, where she and her husband had been living for the last few months. He was a visiting lecturer at Sarah Lawrence, and they’d rented an old Victorian house for the semester. It was a house that Cory loved, on a street Cory thought maybe they should move to permanently. She was working less. She was auditing a nighttime poetry class. She was getting on that train to get back to a place that made her happier than Liam did at the moment. He had thirteen minutes to change her mind.
“Nothing is going on with Cece,” he said.
“Oh, please! You think that’s what I care about here?”
She was angry enough that he knew that was at least partially what she cared about, even if she wasn’t going to admit it. Not to him, not to herself. Cece had been a bone of contention between them since the first time she and Cory had met during Liam’s senior year of college. Cece and Liam had been in the same residential college since freshman year and had dated briefly before Cory and Liam had reconnected. They had stayed close. Friends, but close.
Cory wasn’t a jealous person, but Liam could see that she had a reaction to Cece. It wasn’t just that Cece was (quite possibly) the most beautiful woman Cory had ever seen in person. Or that Cece wasn’t trying to hide that she still had feelings for Liam, even though she had started seeing someone new. It was that Cece had been dismissive of Cory. Dismissive or threatened or both.
The bottom line was that she hadn’t been nice. Not then, and not in their subsequent meetings since.
And now, of all days, Cory had arrived early to her train and saw Liam and Cece having a drink at the Oyster Bar. They were sitting a little too close, drinking their martinis, Cece leaning into him.
“Cory. She made an offer for the company. I had to hear her out.”
“And?”
“And I declined.”
“You think you deserve praise for that?” she asked.
“Of course not.”
Cory shook her head. “You’re wasting time.”
“Hers?”
“Mine.” She met his eyes. “My time. I thought you weren’t getting back from San Francisco until next week.”
That was the plan. He was opening a property not too far from Pfeiffer Beach, a stunning private retreat with twenty treehouses high up over the ocean, offering unparalleled views of the rock and the water and that rugged coastline. And, of equal importance, offering him a place to hide. And he was—in too many ways—hiding at the moment. Most obviously, from Sylvia, his soon-to-be ex-wife, and from the second family he’d failed. He was even hiding from Cory. Which was to say he was hiding from himself.
“I tried to reach you as soon as I landed,” he said. “Check your phone.”
“I’m not checking my phone. If you say you called, you called.”
“I flew in for Sam’s game tomorrow. They made States. I couldn’t miss it.”
She paused, studied him, as if figuring out whether she believed him. This was the worst part.
“We don’t keep things from each other. That was always the deal.”
