34. New York City Misses You

New York City Misses You

When we land in New York, we go straight to his apartment.

The ornate art greets us, the steely lobby, the familiar doorman. He is helping a resident with her dinner order. He waves us up as we walk by.

"Are you sure about doing it like this?" Sam asks.

"No," I say.

But we are already getting on the elevator. We are already heading up.

Paul opens the door. He is in a sweatshirt and cargo pants. Bare feet. The day is behind him, he thinks. He is home, where he feels safe, a bourbon already in his hand.

"We know it was you, Paul."

This is what I say before he says hello.

"You know that what was me?"

"We know it was you on the cliff that night," I say.

Paul looks at me, and then back and forth between us. He looks genuinely surprised. Genuinely confused. And for a moment, for a grateful last moment, I get to think I'm wrong that it was him. That when I texted Meredith Cooper a photograph of Paul, she was also wrong that he was the jogger on the beach. That Uncle Joe was wrong that Paul owns a house in Malibu, up in Point Dume, where he spends at least half his time.

I get to believe, for that final moment, that all the signs pointing me here were signs that should have been pointed somewhere else. That I'm about to owe Paul a big apology. That I'm about to go home.

But then I notice it. His hand is shaking. The hand holding the bourbon. The hand with his wedding ring still on it.

"It's up to you what you want to do here. We can go straight to the police and let them figure out the rest," I say. "Or, I suggest, you let us in."

He gets quiet. His eyes dropping.

Then, slowly, and all at once, he steps out of the way.

"You've got to understand," Paul says. "None of this started with me."

This is how he begins. We are sitting on leather couches across from each other. Sam is standing by the windows, the large windows, Manhattan visible in the distance. Sam hasn't said a word since we've walked in, since he's come face-to-face with Paul. I know he is using every drop of his energy to try and stay calm. I can feel his energy from across the room. I try to settle him from where I am. I meet his eyes and silently ask him to trust me. I see him inhale, and I turn back to Paul.

"I met Grace back when we were in graduate school. She was studying creative writing and I was getting my master's in photography. But she was living with a couple of friends in my program, and so I'd see her around that first year. I actually met her a bunch of times and she never remembered me, which probably got my attention…"

He doesn't say the rest. That when he walked into a room, most people remembered him. And here was someone who couldn't have cared less.

"Anyway, one night, my friend and I were drinking in the living room, it wasn't even late, like eight thirty or something, and Grace came out of her bedroom and told us to take our party somewhere else. She was really calm about it, but she meant business. And I was done. I mean totally smitten. Weird reason to be smitten, maybe. But it didn't matter. She wasn't interested and she made it clear she wasn't interested, and so we became friends. Until she moved back to New York to take care of her folks, and we lost touch…"

He clears his throat.

"But then when I ended up in New York, we reconnected. She was different. Like a grown-up. Or maybe that's not a good categorization. She was always pretty grown up. But she was more settled in her skin. She was working with your father by then, and she was happy. She loved her job or working with him, or both. And we started spending time together. And I knew, she never lied, she told me that her relationship with your father was… complicated. I don't know if I took that as a challenge? I hope not. But I don't know." He pauses. "I just loved her. And I guess I believed that I was better for her than he was. How could I not be better? I was offering her all of me. But the audacity of me, to think that you can apply that kind of logic to love. That logic has anything to do with it."

I watch him.

"I guess what I'm saying is that I don't blame Grace. It's unfair to blame her. I walked into it with open eyes. I knew. I just thought that eventually it would add up to more. My loyalty to her. And at times it felt like it did. Once we were committed to each other, she changed the parameters of their relationship. At least for a time, I believe she did. But that didn't change how they were together. The way she looked at him. So I don't know… what does it mean to be faithful if you love someone else anyway? Loyalty doesn't trump love, not in the end."

I feel that in my gut. In my soul. The pain he had to work through that he ended up on the wrong side of that equation. On the wrong side of someone else's love story.

"What happened that night, Paul?" Sam asks.

"In her will, Grace had asked… She had asked that her ashes be scattered at Windbreak. I had been putting it off." He takes a deep breath. "We were separated at the end. When she had the heart attack, that complicated it for a little while. But it's fair to say that we'd been separated for the better part of the last few years. We were still friends. Good friends. In the end, we ended up back at the beginning…" He considers. "But it made grieving, and how to even think about grieving, even more complicated. All of which is to say it took me a long time to finally get out to Windbreak. To finally honor that wish."

He looks up at me.

"Grief does crazy things," he says. "That's not by any means an excuse."

"It's just a fact," I say.

He nods. "It's just a fact."

"How did you get in?" Sam asks.

We both turn to him, standing by the window ledge, as if remembering he is there. His eyes flush, wet.

"The stairs from the beach. Grace had taken me in that way once, a long time ago. She also had the code written down. It was with her instructions in the will…" He pauses. "Your father wasn't supposed to be there. That's why I picked then to go. He was supposed to be at an event for Inez. I knew that because I received an invitation from her as well. I confirmed your father would be attending. If you check with his office, you will see that I made that call."

I nod, knowing that is true. Inez had said as much. Our father had made a last-minute decision to bow out. He decided to get on a flight to be at his favorite place instead.

"I had just finished scattering her ashes when he must have seen me. When he came up behind me. He startled me. And we got into it. Not because I was there, exactly. He wasn't surprised that I was there, not when I explained why. But he seemed… so broken. It made me mad. I was just so mad. When we were younger, I was mad at him for not choosing her. I never understood why he didn't give everything up to be with her. Maybe she didn't see it that way, but it felt to me, it always felt to me, like he never chose her. Just her. No one else. And fuck him for that… except standing there with him, I realized I'd been wrong."

"About which part?" I say.

He shrugs. "He was loyal to her," he says. "He belonged to her as much as she belonged to him."

He looks away. And I start to picture the scene. A rainy night. A man taking those steps two at a time up to the last place he wanted to be. Still, there he was. Because he wanted to honor his wife's last wish. He wanted to scatter her ashes where he knew she wanted them to be. Despite himself. Because he knew what he never wanted to let himself know. What he always knew. He knew where she belonged.

"We argued a bit," Paul says. "I don't even remember what was said exactly. He was angry to just see me there like that. I was mad because he wasn't supposed to be there. That I couldn't even have this without him, in the background. My whole life, this guy in the background… But I turned away and started to leave. I just wanted to get out of there. And then your father… he called out after me. I think he was trying to apologize or make it peaceful. He said how much Grace cared about me. Like I needed him to say it. Except, apparently, I did. Because it leveled me. It absolutely leveled me. So I walked back toward him."

He shakes his head, lets out a disbelieving laugh. Sam moving away from the window. Sam moving closer to us, to me. As if he knows we need to be together. We need to be together to take in this part.

"I keep going over it, what I heard him say then. He was talking real softly because he wasn't exactly talking to me. But he needed someone to know. And she wasn't there to hear it anymore. He said, I can't figure out how to be without her. And it was worse than anything else. The pain. The pointlessness of it all… And I just… it tipped me over, you know? In my mind, this whole time, he was to blame. And it was somehow worse that I couldn't blame him anymore, either. And I pushed him. Yeah, I did push him. But I didn't mean to push him over the edge. I didn't mean to kill him. I didn't mean…"

Paul wipes at his face, tears sliding down his cheeks. He tries to stop them, the tears he doesn't feel he deserves to shed. But he can't. He is crying so hard that he can't even talk anymore.

Sam moves away from him, from both of us, holding his knuckles so tight that they're turning white. His eyes fill with tears too, as much as I see him trying to fight it, angry tears that are starting to spill down his face.

I turn back to Paul. And I can start to see the rest of it without anyone saying it—without Paul saying it. The shock of it. My father there one minute, gone the next. Paul's heart racing. No one there to hear it.

The aftermath. My father disappearing in the night sky. What just happened? How did that happen? What had he just done? The world moving into a weird slow-motion, and also going faster than it ever had before: Paul taking the steps down to the beach, two at a time, calling 911. Getting to my father, to the body , just as the couple did. The couple and their loud barking dog. They're also on the phone with 911. The EMT holding her hand over my father's pulse, shaking her head. She is shaking her head at her husband.

Paul is running before he even knows he's running. Before he can think about the rest of it. Get out of there. He has a pregnant daughter, Grace's pregnant daughter. He's about to have his first grandbaby. There's nothing he can do now even if he stays. The EMT is holding her hand on his chest still, her husband is talking to 911. We have no pulse. We have a broken skull, a broken brain. There's nothing left to do for him. There's nothing, at all, to do. But, for his daughter, his granddaughter—for Grace's daughter and granddaughter—he can get away from there.

He looks up at me, needing me to hear this part. "I'll do whatever you want now. We can go to the police together. Not that you should have to bear that burden. But just tell me and I'll do it…"

What can I tell him? Probably not what he wants to hear: that I can feel how heavy the word burden sounds coming from his mouth, the weight of it surrounding him, visible in his skin and on his hair and in his smell. What he has lost, what he never quite had.

That I understand, looking at him, the grief we carry, that small hollow circle. We can love someone and they love someone else. We can spend a lifetime trying to understand them, without accepting they weren't really ours to understand. We can look someone straight in the eye and never bear witness to the most private part of them—the part they saved just for themselves.

But, oh to know it now, to know the part that my father saved for himself. To know what made him move and turn and breathe.

She loved you, Dad. Didn't she? That was her life. And, despite all the noise, all the beautiful and necessary noise, loving her was yours.

So I do what you would do if you were here. What you would do for her.

I reach out slowly. I take his hand.