Page 87 of The Night We Lost Him

“That’s okay,” he says. “It’s been a few years. I think you were finishing college.”

“Then it was many more years ago than that.”

“They all start to bleed.” He smiles, offers a gentle shrug. “I was really sorry to hear about your father. I hope you’re hanging in okay.”

He blushes in the way that has become familiar to me. In that way I’ve noticed so many of us do when we try to offer sympathies, as if naming the grief will conjure it up, will be the thing responsible for adding to the pain that otherwise could be forgotten. It makes it feel all the kinder to me when someone takes the risk and does it anyway.

“Thank you,” I say. “I appreciate it.”

“Are you staying here for a bit?”

“Just the night, I think.”

“Famous last words,” he says. “This place grabs you fast.”

I give him a smile. And he waves goodbye. Then he starts heading down the beach, picking up a beach stick, throwing it to his dogs. They race out ahead of him, working to catch it.

I watch him for a moment, this man who is so relaxed and happy. Isn’t this who my father wanted to be? A man not unlike this one, not worrying where his next meal was coming from. In a cliffside house with his old life (the old versions of himself) shed, far behind him. But that couldn’t be my father’s story of who he wanted to be, could it? Not when he loved as intensely as he did. Not when he brought Joe along with him. When he kept all his families close. Not when he was nothing if not loyal.

No. The story was closer to something else. Something about a man holding on with as much force as he also tried to flee. But to what? Which is when it hits me.

Cece. Cece ended up in this storied corner of the coast, hadn’t she said her husband was still here, not too far from Uncle Joe? Not too far from my father?

I pull out my phone and do a search for her ex-husband. Davidson Salinger. A sales record listing his address as Sand Point Road. A five-minute drive. Davidson Salinger, a Los Angeles native who graduated from Yale University, where he met his first wife, Cece Kayne.

Yale. This shouldn’t be a surprise. Cece had said that she and my father went to school together, but I assumed she’d meant Midwood High. Why did I assume that? Because she had said they grew up near each other. Hadn’t she also said that?

I walk back up to the house, taking the steps two at a time, closing and locking the gate behind myself, and running the length of the property to the house. Until I’m inside the house, closing the door behind myself.

The house is freezing, and there are no lights on yet. I’ve called Clark to come by and turn everything on. He has to do it from a locked power breaker. I have to learn how to do it myself.

But suddenly I don’t feel like waiting. I head to the living room, head straight to the bookshelves, pulling several things down from the personal shelf: some of the playbills, the yearbooks, several of the photo albums. I move it all by the window, and into the light and the heat from the late afternoon sun.

He has one yearbook from his senior year at Midwood, one marked the Yale Banner, from his senior year there. I check the index in the Banner first, searching for any photographs of my father. There are none except for his senior portrait. I start going through the photo albums instead. Some of them are dated in the front, and I look for any that take me back to the late 1970s, when he was finishing college.

The second album I go through has a large group photograph in it. Several of his male friends are in it, but not Ben King. Not anyone else I recognize on first blush, except for my father, looking strong and young, his arms crossed over his chest, his smile large and wide. And looking so much like Sam that it startles me.

I turn the page and see another group photograph. My father is in the center, several friends circled around him. In this photograph, I recognize two people. On the far left is my uncle Joe. And, on the right, the only woman in the photo. A young and very beautiful Cece Kayne. She is standing near my father, but someone else has an arm around her. Maybe this is Davidson Salinger. Maybe it is someone else entirely.

Either way, Cece is leaning toward my father, even though this man is leaning toward her.

I pull the photograph out of the album, staring at all of their faces, holding them in my hand.

I hold it closer, hold him closer, wondering what it is that I can almost see.

Eighteen Years Ago

“I don’t want to talk about it anymore…”

Cory and Liam were standing in front of track twenty-eight at Grand Central Station. Cory was waiting on the 5:55 train to Dobbs Ferry, where she and her husband had been living for the last few months. He was a visiting lecturer at Sarah Lawrence, and they’d rented an old Victorian house for the semester. It was a house that Cory loved, on a street Cory thought maybe they should move to permanently. She was working less. She was auditing a nighttime poetry class. She was getting on that train to get back to a place that made her happier than Liam did at the moment. He had thirteen minutes to change her mind.

“Nothing is going on with Cece,” he said.

“Oh, please! You think that’s what I care about here?”

She was angry enough that he knew that was at least partially what she cared about, even if she wasn’t going to admit it. Not to him, not to herself. Cece had been a bone of contention between them since the first time she and Cory had met during Liam’s senior year of college. Cece and Liam had been in the same residential college since freshman year and had dated briefly before Cory and Liam had reconnected. They had stayed close. Friends, but close.

Cory wasn’t a jealous person, but Liam could see that she had a reaction to Cece. It wasn’t just that Cece was (quite possibly) the most beautiful woman Cory had ever seen in person. Or that Cece wasn’t trying to hide that she still had feelings for Liam, even though she had started seeing someone new. It was that Cece had been dismissive of Cory. Dismissive or threatened or both.

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