Page 11 of The Night We Lost Him

I push the phone across my table, try to push away the guilt that comes with it.

I tell myself Elliot could just be reaching out about Austin. I tell myself it could even be Austin texting me himself—even though I know Austin is not texting, not after midnight.

Austin Abrams: eight-year-old piano prodigy, world-class brownie baker, one of my favorite people on the planet. Elliot’s son.

Elliot and I started dating four years ago, shortly after he separated from Austin’s mother. He moved into the same West Village apartment building as my father. Elliot hadn’t yet gotten Austin a piano for the new apartment, so Austin would do his practice sessions on the old upright in the apartment building lobby after he got home from school, after Elliot got home from the hospital.

My father heard him playing one evening and invited Austin and Elliot to use the Steinway grand piano in his apartment instead. They accepted his offer, happily.

And one night, when I went to meet my father for an early dinner, Elliot answered the door. Six-foot-six Elliot in his hoodie and wire-rim glasses, sweet Austin walking up to the door right behind him, the four-foot-four version of his father. Sporting a matching hoodie and glasses.

It was easy between us from the jump—easy, if not too intense. I was inundated at my new firm and Elliot was focused on handling his medical practice (he’s a pediatric cardiologist) while navigating his new co-parenting role. I’d joke that we were half dating, half ships passing in the night. That joke hit a nerve, though. One reason he was getting divorced was that his wife felt Elliot was never able to leave the hospital at the hospital. She’d tell me that I was always twenty-five percent absent, he said.

I didn’t feel that from him, but it’s possible I was too busy to notice. I was actually so focused on my own work that I decided we should take a step back. Not long after that, Austin’s mother decided she wanted another chance to make the marriage work, and I was quick to extricate myself entirely. I wanted nothing to do with keeping their family apart.

Austin wanted me in his life still—a decision that Elliot and I were happy to support—but I stayed in their lives in the gentlest of ways. I’d take Austin for an occasional hot chocolate after school on the days when Elliot was staying at the hospital late; and I’d try to attend his piano recitals, occasionally with my father.

I was careful to keep the lines clean, even before I started dating Jack. And I was even more careful after Austin’s mother and Elliot separated for good.

It wasn’t hard to keep them clean.

That is, until my father died. And Elliot started reaching out.

His presence in my life again feels like a balm. Is it just that he knew my father well? That he and my father adored each other?

Is there an innocent comfort in that? It doesn’t feel so innocent at 12:08 a.m. It doesn’t feel so innocent when, these days, it feels easier to talk to him than it does to talk to Jack.

That’s probably because Jack is the opposite of twenty-five percent absent. He is wholly there. Talking to Jack is too much like looking in the mirror. He sees everything about me. Since losing my father, I see the reflection of it in Jack’s face: the weight behind my eyes, in my skin. I’m a grown woman, but I’m also someone’s child, looking for the parents to whom she didn’t get to say goodbye.

I pick the phone back up. My fingers hover over Elliot’s name, debating whether to reply. Whether to answer his request to talk. It’s just a phone call. We’re just talking. I repeat that part to myself, like an anthem.

And, still, what kind of anthem do you tell yourself in a whisper?

My phone starts buzzing before I hit reply. An incoming call, the ID coming up UNKNOWN NUMBER.

I nearly drop the phone. My first thought is that it’s Elliot calling from the hospital landline. But my second thought fires in before I can stop it. Someone else is hurt. Since the loss of my parents, whenever an unknown call comes up on the caller ID, especially late at night, I’m sure it’s going to be someone else I love in the type of trouble I can’t save them from.

I click accept.

“Did you decide?” Sam’s voice jolts me.

“What the hell, Sam? Why are you calling so late?”

“Same reason you’re picking up, probably,” he says. “Can’t sleep.”

I close my eyes, irritated, trying to slow my heartbeat. I force myself to take a few deep breaths, to find my center.

“You scared the crap out of me.”

He ignores this. “Did you look through the documents yet?”

“Some of them.”

“And?”

I reach for the blue folder and open it back up. The obituary, the will, the rest of it.

I flip to the Windbreak deed, pull it out. My father’s signature stares back at me, stamped and dated, from more than three decades ago. The first home my father ever bought for himself. His favorite place in the world.

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