3. Sheet Music

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 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.

In the aftermath, I've felt a twisted, long overdue loyalty to her—especially when it came to my father. I couldn't seem to help it, even knowing my mother never harbored any anger toward him herself.

My own anger may not seem to make a lot of sense, then. Part of it was that he tried to take on a more daily role in my life (something he'd never had), which only exasperated my feeling that the wrong person was doing it. The other part was a strange side effect of my grief—the unmitigated grief I felt since losing my mother.

It had suddenly felt wrong to allow my father to occupy any emotional terrain in her absence. So I left the space empty, digging into that parental void on my own. Hurtling myself toward a simple, impossible mission: I could keep her as close as when she was alive.

Now that my father is gone too, I can't deny that I was on the wrong mission. The distance I kept from him didn't bring her back any more than it softened the pain of losing him now.

Where does that leave me, though? What good is knowing that you were wrong when there is no one left to hear you say that you're sorry?

The subway lurches forward, then stops completely, the lights going out.

An irritated murmur fills the car, but I feel relieved that, as my eyes fill with tears, no one else can see.

When I get off the subway, it's started to snow.

I live so far out in Brooklyn that my subway stop is aboveground, snowflakes starting to stick to my coat—to my skin—as soon as I step outside.

I love everything about my neighborhood, even how long it takes to get here. It's an area of Flatbush called Ditmas Park. It is historic Brooklyn—more small town than major city—with quiet streets, dogwood trees, old Victorian houses. A professor of mine in architecture school lived in one of those houses and rented me a room on a sliding scale. When her husband ended up taking a job in Northern California and she moved out west to join him, she let me lease the whole house until I could put together enough money to buy it from her.

My house is a mint-green Victorian, complete with its original staircase and stained-glass windows, its parquet floors. Pocket doors. Boxed vegetable gardens in the backyard.

I feel a surge of relief as my block of Marlborough Road comes into view, the respite of my home in striking distance.

But tonight, instead of heading that way, I follow the Christmas lights on Cortelyou Road into the heart of Ditmas Park's restaurants and bars—and my favorite local restaurant, Sheet Music, the name (and the small wooden sign hanging above the door) a relic from when it was a guitar shop.

Now its chef serves wood-fired pizza and elevated farm-to-table comfort food in a space I designed with him. The two of us reimagined the main room together, working to incorporate contemporary details—plaster walls, a stainless-steel canopy over a central dining counter, vintage chairs—while maintaining its former life as a music store, highlighting the tin ceilings and the baby grand piano, brown and lush, in the restaurant's far corner.

The restaurant was (and is) a passion project of mine.

This makes more sense when you know the chef is also my fiancé, Jack.

I take the side gate and walk around back to the service entrance, peeking into the dining room as I walk past. It's bustling and full, music seeping out through the windows, the lights low and inviting.

It's Friday night, which—at least in our little corner of the world—is the busiest night of the week: first dates (and last dates), after-work cocktails, parents wanting a New York City nightcap before disappearing into their family weekends.

I pull open the back door and step into the steamy kitchen, laying eyes on Jack at his station. He is wearing his chef whites and a San Francisco Giants baseball cap, his handsome face (my favorite face) sweaty and focused.

I breathe easier just at the sight of him, my heartbeat picking up. It's the same weird combination of elation and calmness that comes over me whenever I see him at the end of a long day, taking in his skin and his hands and that face. Even now. Even still.

Jack is a year and change into being my fiancé, but he started off as my boyfriend more than twenty-five years ago; though, admittedly, boyfriend is overstating what we were to each other. He sat in front of me in eighth grade woodshop. I don't remember actively clocking that he was cute, even though he was really cute: tall and lanky with curly hair and dark eyes.

What I remember about him, though, was how he carried himself. Even if I didn't know how to name it, I could feel how comfortable he was in his own skin. He was sure of himself in a way that most eighth grade boys weren't. In a way that, I'd come to learn, a lot of grown men weren't.

He made it clear in how he spoke. His voice was gentle and kind and fleshy, like he belonged on the radio as opposed to sitting on a wooden bench in last period. Like he was only going to speak if he was certain that what he was saying was true.

It made me like being around him. It made me want to be around him more.

I think this is why (though I'm not sure we really ever know why) I did something completely out of character for my eighth grade self. I tapped him on the shoulder and asked him if he wanted to come get some ice cream with me after class. Does that count as asking someone on a date? It was certainly the closest I'd ever come in my thirteen years on the planet.

Jack, to his credit, didn't make it the least bit weird, even though that was the first time in his thirteen years anyone had asked.

Sure… he said, as though his cheeks weren't turning red. I like ice cream.

That afternoon, we biked to the A and I'd try to attend his piano recitals, occasionally with my father.

I was careful to keep the lines clean, even before I started dating Jack. And I was even more careful after Austin's mother and Elliot separated for good.

It wasn't hard to keep them clean.

That is, until my father died. And Elliot started reaching out.

His presence in my life again feels like a balm. Is it just that he knew my father well? That he and my father adored each other?

Is there an innocent comfort in that? It doesn't feel so innocent at 12:08 a.m. It doesn't feel so innocent when, these days, it feels easier to talk to him than it does to talk to Jack.

That's probably because Jack is the opposite of twenty-five percent absent. He is wholly there. Talking to Jack is too much like looking in the mirror. He sees everything about me. Since losing my father, I see the reflection of it in Jack's face: the weight behind my eyes, in my skin. I'm a grown woman, but I'm also someone's child, looking for the parents to whom she didn't get to say goodbye.

I pick the phone back up. My fingers hover over Elliot's name, debating whether to reply. Whether to answer his request to talk. It's just a phone call. We're just talking. I repeat that part to myself, like an anthem.

And, still, what kind of anthem do you tell yourself in a whisper?

My phone starts buzzing before I hit reply. An incoming call, the ID coming up UNKNOWN NUMBER .

I nearly drop the phone. My first thought is that it's Elliot calling from the hospital landline. But my second thought fires in before I can stop it. Someone else is hurt. Since the loss of my parents, whenever an unknown call comes up on the caller ID, especially late at night, I'm sure it's going to be someone else I love in the type of trouble I can't save them from.

I click accept.

"Did you decide?" Sam's voice jolts me.

"What the hell, Sam? Why are you calling so late?"

"Same reason you're picking up, probably," he says. "Can't sleep."

I close my eyes, irritated, trying to slow my heartbeat. I force myself to take a few deep breaths, to find my center.

"You scared the crap out of me."

He ignores this. "Did you look through the documents yet?"

"Some of them."

"And?"

I reach for the blue folder and open it back up. The obituary, the will, the rest of it.

I flip to the Windbreak deed, pull it out. My father's signature stares back at me, stamped and dated, from more than three decades ago. The first home my father ever bought for himself. His favorite place in the world.

"Hello?" Sam says.

I hear the creak of my porch door opening, Jack pushing past the screen, keying our front lock, home safely. I don't call out to Jack to let him know I'm downstairs, to let him know I'm still awake.

I don't say anything to Sam for a moment, either. I rub my eyes, a wave of exhaustion coming over me. Grief is exhausting. No one talks about that. Or, at least, no one told me. No one told me just how exhausting it feels to carry it around with you. And it uses the same muscle as love. Because with real love you have to show up and give. You have to show up and be given to. And it's not so much that I've forgotten how. It's that it's all added up to be so heavy.

"What are you thinking?" Sam says.

I shake my head as though he can see me. And I start to say it will be a wild goose chase, that this seems like nothing to me. I want to believe it's nothing. But I feel a rush of something else. Maybe it's just guilt that I pulled away from my father. Maybe it's the need to be somewhere other than where I am.

But it might be something else—something closer to instinct, a deep-felt instinct, that my brother may not be entirely wrong. Did it take him showing up at the brownstone to see it? Maybe. Or maybe his showing up at the brownstone has finally encouraged me to say it out loud.

"I'm thinking Dad has taken quite a few night walks around Windbreak to screw one up now," I say.

"So… you'll come with me?"

I'm silent. We are both silent, for what feels like a long time. Then he breaks it, sounding not at all like himself.

"Nora…" he says. Like a prayer. "Please."

This is when I agree.