16. In Ditmas Park, the Moon Turns Purple

In Ditmas Park, the Moon Turns Purple

The house is dark when I get home.

It's 10:00 p.m., Jack is still at the restaurant. Instead of going into the empty house, I pull my coat tight and take a seat on the front steps. The block is quiet this time of night, serene. The Ushers are walking their dog, but most of my neighbors are inside for the night—their windows lit up with late-night dinner and bedside lamps, the blue light of their televisions.

One of the last times my father came to see me in Ditmas Park, it was late at night, a little over a year ago, not too long after my mother died. I remember because it had been two months since she died. Two months exactly. I was still counting the days then. I'm still counting the days now.

My father was on his way back from an event in Midwood. Going back there was something he rarely did.

He had texted me to meet him at Sheet Music, but I was still working, so he said he would come to me instead and bring a little Sheet Music with him.

We sat on the steps and shared a strawberry sofrito pie and drank champagne out of coffee mugs.

"Are we celebrating something?" I asked.

"If I've learned anything it's that you don't need a reason for champagne," my father said.

I smiled at him.

"But if you'd like a reason, I was supposed to go to my high school reunion tonight." He shrugged. "And then I remembered I don't have to go anywhere anymore that I don't want to be."

I laughed. "That seems worthy of a celebration."

While we ate he asked me what I was working on, and I walked him through a commission in Connecticut. It was a memory care facility that I was building out with a geriatric specialist. Our goal was to create the type of coherent space that would aid orientation, alleviate confusion. We were leaning into a biophilic design concept to ensure all thirty occupants would be closely connected to nature and lots of natural light, a calming environment.

I thought I was boring him, but he kept asking more questions, wanting every detail. Pouring more champagne and asking more questions. It was his MO: He couldn't be prouder about what I was doing. He couldn't learn enough about what mattered to me.

But, that night, there was another layer to it. It felt like there was something my father wanted to tell me too. Something that he kept coming right up to the edge of saying. But he didn't.

I wondered if it had something to do with the distance I was keeping from him—if he was trying to figure out how to broach the topic. But that didn't seem like what it was. It seemed like it was good news he was trying to figure out how to share—something that was making him happy.

I didn't push him. Even if he didn't want to say it yet, whatever was bringing him joy just then, it was enough for him to be able to sit in it, with me. But I wish I had pushed. What I would give now to know exactly what had been going through his mind.

I pull my cell phone from my bag. And I click on his name before I let myself think about it.

Elliot answers on the first ring.

"Your ears must be burning," he says. "Austin was talking about you at dinner tonight."

"Really? What was he saying?"

"He wanted me to remind you about his piano recital on Tuesday."

I feel a twinge in my chest, thinking about Austin's last recital, last spring, his rhapsodic focus on his latest piece. My father was there with me, holding a big box of cookies on his lap. Proud.

"I'll be there," I say.

"So you're back?"

"I'm back."

"What were you doing in California?"

"That's a long story."

"I dropped Austin back at his mother's," he says. "I've got nothing but time."

I hear him adjust his position, his voice getting lower, like he's lying down. And I can picture him there, his arm behind his head, long legs hanging off the bed, his glasses beside him on the bedside table.

"Can I ask you something first?" I say. "Do you remember the last time you saw my father?"

"Where did that come from?"

"Part of the long story."

He pauses, considering. "We grabbed dinner probably five or six weeks ago."

I sit up, taller. It isn't weird that Elliot and my father saw each other that recently. They'd often run into each other in their building. And they stayed close. Shortly after Elliot and I ended things, my father made sure that their continued friendship was okay with me. I had no problem with it. When my father let someone in, the way he had let Elliot in, he didn't like to turn them out.

"Wait," I say. "So two weeks before he died?"

"Something like that. Why?"

"Do you remember what you talked about?"

"What we talked about?"

I try to get more specific, figure out what I want to know. "Did you talk about his work at all?"

"Not much. Nora, what's going on?"

"There are some things that aren't adding up about how he died, so I'm just trying… I'm pulling at every thread to see what I'm missing. Or what I missed."

"Okay…" I hear the concern in his voice. "Well, your father definitely asked about Austin," he says. "We talked a little about what was happening at the hospital. I think he asked about a patient of mine—"

"He didn't say that anything was upsetting him?"

"He didn't really talk much about himself. You know how your father was. He wanted to know what was going on with me."

That was true. My father did always like to focus on whoever he was with, especially the people he cared the most about. But, suddenly, I'm not sure that's the entire reason he tended to stay quiet. I doubt that I can explain that to Elliot or explain to him how it feels just beyond my grasp—what I'm missing about what was happening with my father, at the very end. How I'm increasingly certain that if I can figure that out, the rest of what I want to know about him will follow.

"Can I ask you something else? Do you have someone at the hospital who studies fall patterns? Like a pathologist who could look at an autopsy report and help me determine if someone fell or was pushed?"

"Okay, this conversation took a weird turn," he says.

"Hey there…"

Jack's voice jolts me, and I drop the phone. I turn to see him standing in our doorway, between the open door and the screen. His hair is rumpled, his feet bare. The house is dark behind him, Jack looking too much like a shadow from where I'm sitting on the porch steps.

"Holy shit," I say. "You scared me half to death."

"Didn't mean to. I come in peace."

I scoop up the phone and click off the call without saying goodbye. "I thought you were still at the restaurant," I say.

He walks onto the porch, sits down next to me on the front steps. "I cut out early," he says. "I wanted to be here when you got back."

I'm still working to catch my breath when the phone buzzes in my hand, ELLIOT coming up on the screen. I click decline as Jack looks at the phone in my hand and then back up at me. Not saying anything.

"Sorry," I say. "I'm just a little jumpy."

"I can see that."

He kisses my shoulder, moves closer to me. And I turn and take him in—his T-shirt wrinkled, his eyes glassy, pillow marks lining his face. My favorite face. I reach over and touch it.

"You fell asleep on the couch?" I ask.

"I think maybe."

"Just maybe?"

He leans into my fingers, giving me a smile. So happy, it seems, just to share that smile, for an honest moment of connection.

"How did it go?" he says. "At Windbreak?"

"Well. I'm starting to think that maybe Sam is right."

"Really?" he says.

I nod, something solidifying, now that I'm saying it out loud to him.

"I know you think that it's just my grief talking."

"I wouldn't say that…"

"What would you say?"

"I think that you're doing what you need to do. Figuring out what you need to figure out." He pauses, lowers his already low voice. "What are you figuring out?"

I'm figuring out that my father may have been hiding something. And I'm trying to understand how that coalesces with strange phone calls, on a phone that is now missing, and a mysterious jogger who could be in possession of it. And, you know, the rest of the story.

I'm figuring out that there is a reason I keep picturing the moment before my father went over the edge. In none of the scenarios do I think he was there alone.

I look at Jack and don't say any of that. I offer only the part I don't need to figure out. The part I know for sure.

"I was a pretty lousy daughter at the end," I say.

"Nora…" he says. Soft. Kind. He holds on to my gaze, as if promising me the opposite is true, and I fight the tears loading up in my eyes.

But he doesn't argue. He doesn't try to convince me that I'm wrong. Instead, he moves closer to me—his leg against my leg, his shoulder against mine, his hand reaching behind my back to hold my head, his fingers strong and steadying.

I can feel it. I can feel it beneath his fingers, pulsating, like a heartbeat. The soft little bug of a thing. This soft little bug that lives between us. A living, breathing reminder that we belong to each other.

I flinch against it, against the intensity of his touch, before I even know that I'm doing it. It's primal, something in me needing to shut that kind of closeness all the way down. Something in me shutting down.

Jack feels it and reacts, pulls his hand back, almost in an apology. This is when my phone buzzes again, ELLIOT coming up again on the caller ID.

I toss it in my bag, push it away from us. "I thought I shut that off," I say.

Jack offers a small laugh.

"No," he says. "Sure."

He moves back, away from me. But he holds my gaze for another moment, a short and terrible standoff. It's worse than if he just called me out. Aren't I begging him to call me out for the phone call, for the distancing, for what I'm giving away?

"Tell Elliot I say hello," he says.

Then he stands up and heads back inside.