Page 12 of The Night We Lost Him

“Hello?” Sam says.

I hear the creak of my porch door opening, Jack pushing past the screen, keying our front lock, home safely. I don’t call out to Jack to let him know I’m downstairs, to let him know I’m still awake.

I don’t say anything to Sam for a moment, either. I rub my eyes, a wave of exhaustion coming over me. Grief is exhausting. No one talks about that. Or, at least, no one told me. No one told me just how exhausting it feels to carry it around with you. And it uses the same muscle as love. Because with real love you have to show up and give. You have to show up and be given to. And it’s not so much that I’ve forgotten how. It’s that it’s all added up to be so heavy.

“What are you thinking?” Sam says.

I shake my head as though he can see me. And I start to say it will be a wild goose chase, that this seems like nothing to me. I want to believe it’s nothing. But I feel a rush of something else. Maybe it’s just guilt that I pulled away from my father. Maybe it’s the need to be somewhere other than where I am.

But it might be something else—something closer to instinct, a deep-felt instinct, that my brother may not be entirely wrong. Did it take him showing up at the brownstone to see it? Maybe. Or maybe his showing up at the brownstone has finally encouraged me to say it out loud.

“I’m thinking Dad has taken quite a few night walks around Windbreak to screw one up now,” I say.

“So… you’ll come with me?”

I’m silent. We are both silent, for what feels like a long time. Then he breaks it, sounding not at all like himself.

“Nora…” he says. Like a prayer. “Please.”

This is when I agree.

An Early Departure

I don’t see Sam at the gate.

I board the plane without him and settle myself into the window seat. Sam has gotten us business class tickets. This is something I don’t normally treat myself to, Jack and I choosing to invest our earnings back into my firm, into his restaurant. I sit back and stare out the window, watch the flurries that are starting to pick up, water plinking on the glass. After my mostly sleepless night, it’s all I can do not to doze off. I down the rest of my coffee and reach into my messenger bag, pulling out the blue folder. I want to share with Sam what I learned about Windbreak. At three in the morning. At five.

My father had two different architects draw up plans to expand on Windbreak’s original footprint. The first time was more than two decades ago, when he was still married to Sam and Tommy’s mother, Sylvia. It doesn’t surprise me that Sylvia’s plans involved razing the house and building a ten-thousand-square-foot Mediterranean palace in its place, a four-thousand-foot guesthouse by its side. Everything my former stepmother did was ostentatious, large. I’m also not surprised they didn’t move forward with doing any of it. After marrying my father, Sylvia stopped working, but she remained wedded to New York City and her society events and her very active social life. While she probably liked the idea of a West Coast estate in theory, Sylvia has been to Windbreak even fewer times than I have.

What did surprise me was that my father also had a set of design plans from a little less than a year ago. Instead of razing the bungalow, the plans called for updating it: pitching the ceilings in my father’s bedroom, expanding the galley kitchen so it was a place to gather. The design choices were simple and elegant, much closer to how I would choose to renovate the house myself. But I have no idea what (or who) motivated my father to consider renovating the house recently. What motivated him to stop.

Which brings me back to that recent conversation with my father. He wanted me to fly with him to Windbreak. He wanted my opinion on it, all over again. I’m looking to make some changes. Was he planning to have me reenvision a version of the most recent plans? Or was he going to ask me to start with him all over again? Either way, why now?

“I wanted the window.”

I look up to see Sam standing above me in the aisle, wearing jeans and a Minnesota Twins baseball cap. He is struggling to catch his breath, his forehead dripping with sweat.

He throws his backpack into the overhead compartment and drops down into the aisle seat.

“I almost missed the flight…” he says.

“Nice to know this is important to you.”

“It is important. I’m just not used to flying commercial. And I forgot about, you know, leaving enough time for security.”

“You’re kidding, right?”

“I thought about flying us in the company jet, but I wanted you to know I’m a regular guy.”

“A regular guy doesn’t say those words in a sentence.”

He buckles himself in. Then he motions to the flight attendant, who is holding a tray of orange juice and champagne.

“Can I trouble you for one of those? Thanks…” He picks a glass of champagne off the tray. “I’ll also take a whiskey when you have a chance. Straight up, please.”

Sam takes a large pull of the champagne. I stare at him.

“Why are you looking at me like that?” he says.

---