Page 101 of The Night We Lost Him

Paul wipes at his face, tears sliding down his cheeks. He tries to stop them, the tears he doesn’t feel he deserves to shed. But he can’t. He is crying so hard that he can’t even talk anymore.

Sam moves away from him, from both of us, holding his knuckles so tight that they’re turning white. His eyes fill with tears too, as much as I see him trying to fight it, angry tears that are starting to spill down his face.

I turn back to Paul. And I can start to see the rest of it without anyone saying it—without Paul saying it. The shock of it. My father there one minute, gone the next. Paul’s heart racing. No one there to hear it.

The aftermath. My father disappearing in the night sky. What just happened? How did that happen? What had he just done? The world moving into a weird slow-motion, and also going faster than it ever had before: Paul taking the steps down to the beach, two at a time, calling 911. Getting to my father, to the body, just as the couple did. The couple and their loud barking dog. They’re also on the phone with 911. The EMT holding her hand over my father’s pulse, shaking her head. She is shaking her head at her husband.

Paul is running before he even knows he’s running. Before he can think about the rest of it. Get out of there. He has a pregnant daughter, Grace’s pregnant daughter. He’s about to have his first grandbaby. There’s nothing he can do now even if he stays. The EMT is holding her hand on his chest still, her husband is talking to 911. We have no pulse. We have a broken skull, a broken brain. There’s nothing left to do for him. There’s nothing, at all, to do. But, for his daughter, his granddaughter—for Grace’s daughter and granddaughter—he can get away from there.

He looks up at me, needing me to hear this part. “I’ll do whatever you want now. We can go to the police together. Not that you should have to bear that burden. But just tell me and I’ll do it…”

What can I tell him? Probably not what he wants to hear: that I can feel how heavy the word burden sounds coming from his mouth, the weight of it surrounding him, visible in his skin and on his hair and in his smell. What he has lost, what he never quite had.

That I understand, looking at him, the grief we carry, that small hollow circle. We can love someone and they love someone else. We can spend a lifetime trying to understand them, without accepting they weren’t really ours to understand. We can look someone straight in the eye and never bear witness to the most private part of them—the part they saved just for themselves.

But, oh to know it now, to know the part that my father saved for himself. To know what made him move and turn and breathe.

She loved you, Dad. Didn’t she? That was her life. And, despite all the noise, all the beautiful and necessary noise, loving her was yours.

So I do what you would do if you were here. What you would do for her.

I reach out slowly. I take his hand.

The East River Shows You Everything

We walk for a long time.

We are too stunned to do much else. So we walk the tree-lined streets of Brooklyn Heights, moving slowly but deliberately away from what we just went through. Neither of us speaks for a while, like it will break something to say it out loud, like it will make it real.

Then, Sam turns to me. “Do you believe him?” he asks.

We have just circled around to the promenade. The Brooklyn Bridge is not too far in front of us, the East River and Pier 6, downtown Manhattan lit up with its night-lights.

I think about what I saw in Paul’s eyes, the sorrow there and the regret. That was the last thing he wanted. All of this is the last thing he wanted.

“I do believe him,” I say. “If that makes it any better.”

“Which way is better?” he asks.

But then he lets out a breath. Because it does make it a little better. It makes it better to let our father be in peace now. It makes it a little better to put the bigger pieces together.

Pieces help. They help to make you whole. They strip away the shock. They strip it away until, slowly but surely, the shock isn’t your entire story. Even when the thing you truly want—the thing my brother and I both still want—is the thing we can’t have anymore. Our father standing here with his mysteries intact. Closer, and farther, at the same time.

“I just miss him,” Sam says.

I turn and meet his eyes.

“It catches me off guard. How much I miss him.”

I nod. “Me too.”

“Will it get easier?”

I think of my mother, who has been gone longer. I think about how being without her feels like being without my skin. You might only notice it when you touch something. But you’re always touching something.

“Kind of,” I say.

“You’re such a liar. But I appreciate it.”

---