Page 86 of The Night We Lost Him

“May have just lost him.”

“This is turning into a depressing conversation.”

She lets out a small laugh. And maybe it’s a bit too loud—the promising sound of her mother—because the baby starts to gurgle in my arms. The mother puts her hand on the baby’s back, and she starts to settle again.

“This little one’s daddy is having a bit of a hard time adjusting to parenthood, so I’m going to stay with my sister for a bit. Give him a little room.”

“That sounds like a needed trip.”

“Let’s hope. My sister is pretty much the smartest person I know, and she told me to get on the plane. She said if you are looking for answers you can’t find, you need to change the question.”

That hits me, how true that is. “Sounds like she is operating on a different level.”

“Well, she’s living with five roommates and they’re all unemployed, so…” she says. “Bit of a mixed bag.”

I smile, adjusting the baby, trying to keep her comfortable. “So, what’s your new question?”

“Will my being gone knock it out of him?” She shrugs. “The parts I don’t recognize.”

I nod. That’s what we are often fighting against, isn’t it? The parts in someone we don’t recognize. The parts we are trying to reconcile. Aren’t my current questions, as large and impossible as they are, circling around that exact thing? What happened to my father that I wasn’t there to see? What did I miss about who he was? Where do those things intersect?

Also this. What should I be asking instead that will get me to a clearer picture of what happened on the cliff that night? That will get me somewhere better. Meredith Cooper comes into my head: There are no wrong questions when you’re grieving. Jonathan: He was nothing if not loyal. Inez: He loved all of us, the best he could.

My mother: Oh, for Pete’s sake… It’s like you don’t know your father at all.

Maybe. Maybe not. Maybe the question is not only who my father was. Maybe it has more to do with this—for all of us, doesn’t it have more to do with this? Who, at the end of the day, did my father wish he could have been?

“So,” she says. “Now that I overshared, you go. What’s so urgent that you’re heading across the country last-minute?”

“How did you know this is last-minute?”

“Middle seat. Last row. What’s going on?”

But, just then, the baby’s gurgles get louder, and suddenly she is awake, taking me in, a woman she doesn’t belong to, and starts clawing to get back to her mother, her cries turning into loud shrieks.

“Cancel that,” she says. “You’re on your own.”

A Wintery Beach Tells a Story

At Windbreak, I walk the beach.

I start at Loon Point, and I walk east first, as though I’m the jogger. Then I walk down to the Velasquez property and turn back in the direction of Windbreak, as the Coopers did, envisioning the night from that vantage point. I study the exact area where my father was discovered, on the high sand, fifteen feet from the entrance to the rickety stairs, leading up to his property. I look up at the bluffs, take in those stairs from below, take in the next-door neighbor’s high wall, my father’s gentle palisades.

I try to re-create it. The pattern of it. The order.

What exactly happened that night? If someone pushed him, then where did they go, if not down those stairs, landing on this beach too? Did they jump the fence separating Windbreak from the neighbors? That would have been captured. If they went out Windbreak’s front gate, that would have been captured too. Unless someone knew how to erase what was seen.

“Nora?”

I turn around and see an older man in a Yale baseball cap, a white mustache matching the hair peeking out from beneath the cap. Two large dogs are running in wide circles around him.

He looks vaguely familiar to me, but I’m having trouble placing him until he puts his hand to his chest by way of introduction.

“I thought that was you,” he says. “Ben King.”

I smile at him as I remember. This is Ben, my father’s friend from college. The reason my father found himself on Padaro Lane three decades ago. The reason he saw Windbreak in the first place.

“Ben, of course,” I say. “I’m sorry I didn’t recognize you.”

---