Page 40 of The Night We Lost Him

“Did what?”

“Make it your business,” he says. “It’s starting to feel like I could use the assist.”

It’s so earnest that it catches me off guard. I don’t know if this is all new since losing our father (his emotions raw and elevated) or if he’d been like this all along. Either way, it feels like something has shifted in him, a seismic shift, where now he is doing exactly the opposite of what I’d historically known him to do. He is reaching toward me.

My desire to meet him there, to offer something like protection, comes in fierce and quick.

I lean toward him. “Were you hoping this conversation was going to the place where we realize that we’re in the same boat?”

“Which boat is that?”

“The sinking one.”

He laughs. “I guess so.”

He pulls the Velcro on his brace, taking it off, and rotating his free fingers, stretching them out. Holding that palm tight.

“You know, it wouldn’t have been the worst thing for me to have been around more when we were growing up,” I say. “I wish Dad hadn’t felt the need to…”

“Keep us apart?”

I nod. He knows as well as I do that this was the best way my father knew how to be there for us. It was easier for him to focus on each of us, separately, rather than do the more complicated work of trying to merge us all together—even though it meant that in trying to keep everyone happy, he often was letting someone down. This part I’ve known and mostly accepted, because I understood that in always insisting on only putting forth his best self for each of us, the person he was probably letting down the most was himself.

But here’s this other part that I’m starting to suspect: Maybe not merging his children’s lives together was about something else too. Maybe he thought that if we all left our respective corners, we would have started talking. And it would have revealed something he wasn’t ready to look at—or something that he didn’t want his children to look at. The version of himself he needed to keep private.

“I think that was more about him than about us,” I say. “But it doesn’t make it better.”

He looks up at me, holds my gaze. “So when do we get to the part where you tell me what to do?”

“I can’t tell you what to do, Sam.”

“Well. Then maybe it’s okay Dad kept us apart.”

* * *

A little after 2:00 a.m., I get out of bed.

I take my blanket and go sit on the small deck, the moon bright tonight, the sky so cloudless that I can see all the way out over the hills, down to the Pacific Ocean, glistening in the distance.

I take a photograph on my phone, focusing in on the shimmer coming in off that distant ocean. The blue lines skimming the bottom half of the frame.

My professor in graduate school, the one whose house I now own, taught a workshop that focused on neuroarchitecture. She opened the first lesson in a way that sits with me still, by talking about how buildings can make people sicker. Or they can make them better. And she wrote a question on the blackboard—a question that she always asks herself early in the conception stage to ensure she is doing the latter: Where does the joy come in?

For me, that axis always centers around light (or an angle of light) that I try to honor in the construction of any space. I had nothing to do with constructing this space, of course, but for a moment it brings me joy to imagine that it was built around this very seat, this very view, for a moment where someone needed it.

Because this is what I keep thinking: What happens if you lose your own axis? Since my parents died, that’s how it feels. That the axis on which I spun—like a certain angle of light, like a prayer—is gone. I can’t find it. I’m not even sure it still exists.

I think of Sam’s question to me about Jack. I think of my steadying and true answer. Yes, I want to marry him. I want to be with him and keep loving him. But what if that’s true and there’s still nothing I can do about the other part? The part that keeps me isolated from him—all my grief, all its ache—erecting an invisible wall that I can’t seem to climb over. Toward him. Toward us.

I look down at my phone and focus in on the photograph, the stream of light—the soft and gentle beauty.

Jack is probably already up, heading to the restaurant to start his morning prep. I want to call him. I want to finish our conversation from earlier. But how am I? He’ll want to hear a real answer. I’m fine. I’m lonely. I’m worried, every time I hear your voice, how and when I’ll lose you too.

So, I don’t call. I shoot off a text with the photograph attached.

Then I shut off my phone and decide to move.

* * *

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