The Night We Lost Him, page 9
I don’t look at Sam. I don’t let him stop me. “We’re trying to figure out if maybe he wasn’t alone that night.”
She looks confused until it must click, something washing over her face. Something like fear. Or is it anger?
“You think that someone hurt him?”
Sam puts his hands up. “No. Absolutely not. No one’s jumping to that,” he says, even though he is the exact person who has been jumping the fastest to that.
“What does any of that have to do with his decision to sell Noone Properties?”
“I guess that’s what we’re asking you.”
But Cece isn’t exactly listening to what Sam is saying. She is shaking her head, as if considering it—what one thing could possibly have to do with the other.
And she looks genuinely upset. She looks so upset that I realize this is precisely why I asked her the question. To see if she was as surprised by this being a possibility as I was.
“We have something of a complicated history, your father and I, but I’ve always cared for him. A great deal…”
She looks up—her eyes pained and glossy.
“We hadn’t spoken in several months. And I stand by what I said about why Joe took the lead. But it was somewhat unlike your father that he wouldn’t want to reach out in some way, to acknowledge the deal, but Joe and your father had a specific dynamic so that was between them.”
She pauses, almost as though she is torn about saying what she feels compelled to say. She closes her mouth, as if deciding against it. Then, she leans forward and does it despite herself.
“But in the spirit of things that we shouldn’t be offering up, your father did reach out to me. He didn’t leave a voice message, so I don’t know exactly why. It may have been nothing, but he did call me. Twice.”
Sam sits up. “When was this?”
“The night he died.”
Forty-Eight Years Ago
“Liam?” she said.
He knew who it was before he even turned around. He knew it from the sound of her voice, quiet beneath the snow and the wind and the loud street. He knew it from how the air shifted, making room for her again, giving all the room to her, even if Cory wanted to pretend it was a question.
This was his first Christmas going home. He’d avoided going back to Midwood for the holidays. He’d avoided going home for more than two years. The only exception had been at the end of his sophomore year, when he had to come back for Joe’s high school graduation. Which, of course, was Cory’s graduation too. He saw her standing there in her graduation gown, her floral dress peeking out beneath the lapels, her curls in a matching hair clip. She’d looked beautiful and happy and sure of herself.
He’d walked the other way, wanting to be generous to her—to not make that day about them. But that wasn’t the only reason. It was also about protecting himself. He knew what would happen if they met face-to-face. Exactly what was happening now in front of the damn liquor store on Avenue J. His unraveling.
She was wrapped in a thick scarf and a beanie, her curls long and wild around her shoulders. Snowflakes dotted her black coat, dotted the wine bottles sticking out of her paper bag. And it was as if not a second had passed, not one, looking at her again. Where had he been that mattered more than this?
“Cory,” he said.
“How are you?”
“Fine. Good.”
He was neither thing. If you had asked him yesterday, he would have insisted he was better than good. He was thriving at school in ways he could calculate (his grades, his classwork, his extracurriculars) and ways he couldn’t (his daily sunrise run from his residential college to the library where he couldn’t believe he got to study, where he couldn’t believe he belonged).
Looking at Cory again, that all disappeared. Everything disappeared. There was only her.
“How about you?” he asked.
“Oh, you know.”
She forced a smile, offered a shrug. She’d made it so easy for him to disengage from her. He’d tried calling at first, those early weeks of college, and she never came to the phone. And while he imagined taking the train home from New Haven and showing up at her front door, he never did it. And then he started to get busier and stopped imagining doing it. He eventually did his best to not allow himself to think about her at all.
“Joe told me you’re at Brooklyn College,” he said. “How’s that going?”
“I love it.”
“What happened to Wellesley?”
“What do you mean?”
“I thought there was that professor there you wanted to study with.”
“Well, Brooklyn College gave me a full ride and I can commute from home, so it made more sense…”
He nodded.
She tilted her head, took him in. “Does that disappoint you?”
“Why would it disappoint me?”
“Because I know you,” she says. “And you think I should have gone farther than across the street.”
“Brooklyn College is a good school.”
“Nothing to do with anything in your mind.”
He looked away from her. This wasn’t going how he wanted. What did he want? If he was being honest, he wanted to take her hand, like he had any right. He wanted to lean in and feel her cold breath. He wanted to put his arm around her and get her inside out of the wind and the snow. Like she needed him to do those things.
“Picking up last-minute supplies?” she asked.
“Sorry?”
She motioned toward the wine store. “Joe told me you guys are having a Christmas party tonight. He invited me.”
“Yeah. Really our folks are, and it’s not going to be much of a party. Just a few of their friends…”
“Don’t worry, I’m not coming.”
“I wasn’t worried.”
“I don’t think that’s entirely true.”
She smiled—her real smile. And it nearly killed him. Two years. Four months. Eighteen days. Wasn’t that supposed to ease what he felt when he looked at her? When he took in that smile?
“You should come,” he said. “I’d like you to. We can sneak up to the roof. Drink hot toddies.”
She nodded. She didn’t acknowledge the weakness of his invitation by responding. Two years, four months, eighteen days.
“It was good to see you, Liam. Take care.”
She hoisted her wine bag higher in her arms and turned to walk down Avenue J in the direction of her house. He didn’t say it was good to see you too. Because what he wanted to say was something else entirely. Which was that it was awful to see her. It was awful to remember how wrong it felt to not see her every day.
He watched her retreating, the angles of her hair and her back, still within reach. Let her go. Let her go. He turned and opened the door to the wine store, the forced heat and peppermint candles and holiday music making him want to vomit. The bell above the door. Let her fucking go.
This is when he heard her voice for the second time.
“I may be open to another offer though,” she said.
The relief he felt. The amount of fucking relief. He turned around. She was standing right outside the doorway.
“What did you have in mind?” he asked.
She shrugged. “I don’t want to go to your party and I don’t want to go to my house, but pretty much anything else will do.”
He let the door to the wine store close behind them. The heat gone. The cold night air and her skin and arms and face inches from him.
He took the paper bag out of her arms to carry it for her. He put his free hand on the small of her back.
“Then let’s do anything else,” he said.
Old Friends Are the Best Friends
“She’s awful,” Sam says.
“She didn’t seem awful.”
He shakes his head. “That’s what makes her so awful.”
We are walking back to the car, the sky dark and starlit, the main street now quiet and mostly emptied out. Sam is upset, too upset to be rational. So I take the keys out of his hands, work it through in my mind. Why would our father have called Cece that night? Could he have been rethinking the sale? Possibly. But it feels more likely to me that he would have reactivated that interest through other channels, more official channels. Uncle Joe.
No, it was something else. Two missed nighttime calls. No message. If I’m guessing, it was something more personal.
“She has an agenda here, I’m telling you,” Sam says.
“What does that mean, Sam?”
“There’s something she doesn’t want us to know.”
I pull my sweater more tightly around myself and consider what he’s saying. “I don’t disagree with you on that,” I say. “Cece was being evasive.”
“Thank you.”
“But when I said we had concerns about what happened to him that night, she looked worried, Sam. She looked worried about him in a way that made me wonder—”
“How deep they went?”
I nod. I picture Cece’s beautiful face, her confidence, her strength. It wasn’t a leap to picture my father being enraptured by all of it. It wasn’t a leap to picture my father being enraptured by her.
“Something like that.”
He looks down and opens the passenger-side door. I get in on the driver’s side, key the ignition, turn the headlights on. I feel it bubbling up—the possibility that’s been coming at me all day, a possibility that would explain why our father went to Windbreak unannounced. Why he tripped and fell over the edge of a landscape he knew too well.
“You don’t think Dad hurt himself, do you?” I say before I can stop myself.
Sam gives me a look. “Like jumped? No way.”
“I know Detective O’Brien says that they ruled out self-harm. But I’m not convinced by anything he said.”
“That I agree on—”
“Look, I’m just saying we should talk it through. You’re the one who keeps telling me he wasn’t himself. And he’s finalizing his will. And now we hear that he’s making weird phone calls. Don’t we have to at least consider it?”
Sam gets quiet, and I can see him turning the idea over in his head. All the details could add up to point that way, especially after today. The canceled sale, Uncle Joe’s defiance, the calls to Cece. The disconnected calls to her, which may be the weirdest puzzle piece yet.
As an architect, I often think in terms of puzzle pieces. I’ve learned, over time, that a requirement of the job is to find a simple and elegant solution that addresses all the complexities inherent in any project. That makes all the disparate pieces fit together. When I find that right answer, I can almost hear it all click into place, the whole picture coming into a unifying focus. This is the way I’m supposed to go.
But this answer isn’t clicking. Our father was wired for problem-solving—it was what made him so good at his job. He always said that he and I had that in common. Which made it feel clearer to me: even if he was facing something that felt insurmountable to him, he would be too stubborn to give in to it. He wouldn’t give in to anything, not until he believed that he had managed to come out the other side.
Plus, there was the other thing that would push him away from doing anything to hurt himself, no matter what was going on. His children. And if he couldn’t fight against his sadness (if he couldn’t overcome what ailed him), he would leave us notes, he would leave us an explanation, he would leave instructions. He wouldn’t just leave.
“No,” Sam says, getting there too. “No way. I don’t believe it. That’s not what this is.”
I’m glad that he’s gotten there too. I’m relieved that, whatever this is, we agree it’s not anything self-inflicted.
But before that can bring too much relief, I realize something else. I realize that the possibility has been swirling around in me because it’s moving me closer to it: What’s hitting me hard. What I do think is more than possible. What I believe now to be true. In someone I knew less well, I’d ascribe his strange behavior to depression, to being unsettled. But I knew that with my father it wasn’t as simple as that.
My father was up against something that maybe, for the first time, he couldn’t find his way through.
The Late-Night Special at the Holiday Inn
We settle on going to The Ranch.
Neither of us wants to go back to Windbreak or to Uncle Joe’s. And it’s too far, and too late, to start the 140-mile drive all the way back to Los Angeles.
It’s a little after nine when we turn onto The Ranch’s long cobblestone road. I drive past the guardhouse and head around to the circular drive that houses reception, where I spy the nondescript WELCOME sign by the front door.
Sam pops out to get the room keys. I stay behind the wheel and stare at the stone main house, lantern-lit and quaint. Nothing about it suggests what lies just beyond it: forty-eight vine-covered cottages, surrounded by mountain trails and gardens, graciously spaced over a five-hundred-acre estate.
After my father rebranded Hayes as Noone Properties and Resorts, he opened The Ranch. It was his first new property and the way he announced the shift in the company’s mission. They were no longer a small, regional hotel chain. This West Coast hotel, his flagship property, stood as the model for what he wanted all his hotels to deliver: luxury comfort and seminal design. Even more than that, he was rebranding the idea of what a small hotel could be. Each hotel would not only stand on its own, holding on to the specificity found in individual hotel ownership, but also adhere to global standards not historically seen in small properties, offering as many amenities as hotels three times their size.
And he was going to do it while providing the thing even the most luxurious large hotel couldn’t—complete and total privacy. No property would have more than fifty rooms, each hotel revolving around the singular principle of total retreat and sanctuary, but the type of retreat where all your needs were anticipated and cared for. The way my father described it to me (one of the few times we talked about it): He wanted to provide the opportunity to disappear from your life for a while. Or, you know, to become someone else entirely.
I would love, at this very moment, to be here for that kind of a visit. Apparently, I don’t get to stay at The Ranch under those conditions. Despite how seminal this hotel was to my father’s work life (or maybe because of it), I’ve only been here twice before—once with my parents, shortly before they told me they were separating; the next time for my father’s wedding to his second wife, Sylvia. For entirely different reasons, but in equal measure, each of those visits created the same kind of dread as I was feeling now.
“We’re all set,” Sam says, walking back to the car.
Sam called on the way and the receptionist had our keys waiting. There is only one cottage available for us to share. We’re lucky it has two bedrooms. We’re lucky, really, that the hotel has anything vacant at all, even if the reason they do is that the cottage we are staying in had a short-circuit earlier in the week and is still without electricity.
Sam hands me the map, and we head on foot toward our cottage, white lights strung through the oak trees, orange magnolias lining the trails. The nighttime air, soft and bright, centering me.
“Under different circumstances this is a vacation I could really use,” he says.
Then he keys the front door. And races to pick the better bedroom.
I stand in the foyer, take in the living room. The electricity may be out, but someone has lit the fireplace in the living area, placing candles around the room, so we aren’t walking into the pitch-dark. And it’s hard not to feel like I’ve walked into a kind of refuge—the comforting smell of that fire, those soft lights.
It’s different from the other cottage I remember staying in when I was a child—different from the cottage I stayed in a few years later attending Sylvia and my father’s wedding. And yet it carries a similar cozy and rustic feel, that nod to the Arts and Crafts Movement, full of the thoughtful fixtures and antiques that make it feel more like a home than a room frequently visited.
I get it, being here as an adult. I get why people would want to disappear here for a while.
I text Jack to let him know where I am—that I’m not making that red-eye after all. Then I drop my phone on the end table and head into the bathroom to take a shower, put on fresh clothes for the first time in eighteen hours.
When I come back into the living room, Sam is sitting by the fire, wearing a jersey and track shorts, the brace visible on his wrist. Maybe it’s that combination, but he looks like the little-boy version of himself about to head out to a Little League game, his baseball bag too big for his body.
I sit down on the couch across from him and he looks over, nods in my direction.
“Nothing from the Coopers yet,” he says.
“Is that a question?”
He shakes his head. “Not really. I looked through your phone while you were in the shower.”
“I’m choosing to ignore that.”
I lean back on the soft cushions, crossing my legs beneath myself, when I notice the covered trays on the coffee table between us.
“What’s all this?”
“I ordered dinner while you were in the shower,” he says.
He pulls the lids off the trays.
“Lettuce and tomato sandwiches, and beer.”
I look down at the tray of sandwiches, unable to hide my surprise. They’re just like the sandwiches my father used to make for me—for me and for Sam, the few times Sam and I had been at our father’s apartment at the same time. It may sound like a weird sandwich, but I relished it when I was a kid, at least the way my father would make it (which, incidentally, was the way my grandmother made it for him): thick tomato slices on griddled rustic bread, crisp romaine lettuce, mayonnaise, and flaky salt.
“This was my favorite growing up.”
“I know, that’s why I ordered it,” he said. “I’m just drinking the beer.”
It’s so kind—so kind and so surprising—that he knows that I liked it, let alone ordered it for me, that I’m not sure what to do.
“I can’t believe you remembered that.”
