Page 7 of The Night We Lost Him

I open the folder, flipping through that thick pile of papers inside, neatly paper clipped and labeled. Color coded.

“The will’s reading was two weeks ago,” Sam says. “If you called anyone back, you would know he left it to you.”

I look up. “Left me what?”

“Windbreak.”

I try not to react, my face heating up and turning red. One of my last conversations with my father comes hurtling back. He called to ask me to come out to Windbreak with him. I didn’t often go to Windbreak with my father, only a handful of times while I was growing up, a handful as an adult.

It was the place where he went to recharge, where he often went alone. So I was surprised to get the phone call from him. A little less surprised when he said: I could use your opinion on renovating it. I’m looking to make some changes. But I put him off. I said I was too busy with work. And I was busy. But, if I were being honest with myself, it hadn’t been just about work. I was mad. I hadn’t wanted to give that to him.

I feel a pulling in my chest, my breath trying to quell it.

“Sam…”

“If you’re right, if this is totally crazy, we can be on the red-eye back tomorrow night.”

He thumbs the folder, turns to the first page. He points to the single piece of paper, on which the itinerary is written down.

“Would you just think about it?” he asks.

I stare at the information: airport, flight number, the flight time in bold. 10:08 AM. Tomorrow.

I close the folder, ready to say no.

But when I look back up, my brother is gone.

Sheet Music

I get on the subway, decide to head home.

As I squeeze onto the corner bench, I pull out the blue folder. I start scanning the documents. There’s a copy of my father’s will inside, the deed for Windbreak, the full-page obituary that ran about my father in the New York Times. All the documents that, because there was no funeral, I haven’t had to deal with yet. My father had wanted to be cremated, his ashes strewn across Windbreak, down into the ocean below. My uncle Joe was in charge of making that happen.

I pull out the obituary (the one document I’ve read before), focusing on the photograph of my father. He is standing with his arms crossed, on top of a lush hill, the San Ysidro mountains behind him. The caption beneath the photograph reads: Liam Samuel Noone, founder of Noone Properties & Resorts, photographed at his flagship hotel, The Ranch.

An asterisk next to my father’s name explains that Noone is pronounced like noon (the time of day) and not pronounced like no one. Though I know my father liked that people got the pronunciation wrong sometimes. No one Properties, he would joke, could not be a more perfect place for someone to escape.

I zero in on the photograph. My father looks strong, intense, and virile against the mountainscape backdrop. I’m not surprised that this is the photograph the newspaper used.

For one thing, The Ranch was the first property my father built after taking over at Hayes. And this photograph leans into the mythical quality of how my father’s rags-to-riches rise is often described: Liam Noone—Brooklyn born, the only child of Irish and Russian immigrants, his father a plumber and his mother, his father’s bookkeeper. He was the first person in his family to go to college, let alone to attend Yale University, where he graduated first in his class, earning his MBA at Columbia, where he finished in the top three. He took a job out of business school as director of operations at Hayes Hotels, a family-run hotel chain, which had five properties along the eastern seaboard. An odd choice, one might think, to sign on to such a small operation. An odd choice to accept a position that was far less lucrative than entry level at any of the big consulting firms or fancy investment banks courting top students to join their ranks.

But when Walter Hayes died, he left the company to my father (“the most exacting young executive he’d worked with in forty-eight years”), and my father went on to turn the small hotel chain into the most sought-after luxury boutique hotel and resort empire in North America, with thirty five-star properties, eighteen more under development. A billion-dollar empire. He turned himself into an extremely wealthy man in the process. A mostly anonymous wealthy man who never wanted to be the face of the brand, letting his properties speak for themselves. Each of the properties had its own special story—its own mythical creation that made people long to stay there. Bucket-list properties that, Liam Noone worked tirelessly to ensure, always overdelivered.

I turn to the final paragraph, which focuses on his personal life, highlighting that my father was survived by his children: a daughter from his first marriage, two sons from his second. There is no mention of his wives (or that they are now all ex-wives), which would be how my father wanted it.

My father was married three times, but he never really got divorced. Even after he and my mother ended their marriage, he was a regular fixture in our home. He worked hard to maintain a good relationship with me and insisted it should disrupt my life as little as possible. It wasn’t just about me, though. My father wanted to disrupt his life—all of his lives—as little as possible too: the one with my mother and me that he was trying to preserve; his life with his new family; and, then, the even newer family. It was as if he could only figure out a way for his worlds to never intersect; then he could get to pretend he was solely living inside each of them.

I wasn’t mad at him for this when I was growing up, especially because I had a great childhood with my mother in Croton-on-Hudson. I loved our farmhouse and my friends at school—and the history of our small, sweet town, including the pride everyone took in the downtown “dummy light,” the oldest traffic light in America. And I didn’t have any desire to spend my time shuttling to my father’s New York City penthouse and a stepmother who didn’t have any interest in my being there.

But even though I loved my father deeply, there is a limit to how much time you can spend with someone who compartmentalizes his life like that. We had our Friday nights together—and if I had a school play, or an art show, he rarely missed it. But he spent much of the rest of the time with the other families and in the other worlds he occupied. Worlds he also needed to tend to, worlds that I knew almost nothing about.

This is one of the reasons why I’m stunned at how hard a time I’m having on the other side of his death. I’m not surprised that it’s painful, of course, but it’s staggering how deeply whipped I feel by the loss of him.

It doesn’t help that my father and I had been somewhat estranged since my mother’s death last year. After losing her, I started pulling away from him. Maybe part of that was that she died so suddenly—a shocking bicycle accident during her usual evening ride home. A trucker who failed to turn on his headlights. And, like that, I was without her.

My most important person. My mother used to say that what you did first thing in the morning was what was most significant to you. While I was growing up, the first thing we did every morning was spend time together. Real time, uninterrupted time. We’d get up with the sun still rising and take a walk into town, head to the bakery when it opened for fresh bread and hot chocolate, sit by the river and talk. We kept up our morning ritual even after I left home for college—my phone ringing every morning at 8:00 a.m., wherever we both were in the world, so we could talk on my way to class, and then on my way to work, so we could have a coffee together, if a virtual one. So she could provide me with her daily reminder that nothing mattered to her more than I did.

How can I explain the way her loss has broken me open? I’ve spent the last fourteen months looking at my phone at 8:00 a.m. every morning, willing it to ring again.

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