Chapter 9 Alfred Hitchcock Lived in These Hills #2
She’s quiet. Because she knows what I’m not saying.
That the visitor was Owen. I don’t have to explain beyond that.
Jules understands, better than anyone, that there is only one reason I would shift everything I’ve been planning.
There is only one reason that I would choose a different path in the eleventh hour.
Because the eleventh hour could possibly take us back to Owen.
Could possibly take my kid back to her father.
“What do you need me to do?” she asks.
“I may need to come back here,” I say. “I need this window to stay open.”
“Of course. I’ll take care of that.” She pauses. “When?”
“A day or two. I just don’t know yet.”
I don’t answer her beyond that. I don’t need to. She’ll let her friend know I may be back. She’ll let her friend know no details beyond that, until and unless it becomes absolutely necessary.
“Keep me close, okay?” Jules says.
“Always,” I say.
Then we hang up.
I go upstairs to find Bailey in the primary bedroom.
The bed is enormous, and Bailey is already lying on a corner of it. Her sweats are on. Her hair is damp from the shower.
And her burner phone, the one I had waiting for her, is in her hands. I don’t have to double-check that she isn’t texting anyone. Not Shep or her friends or her boss. She doesn’t need me to tell her that she can’t do that. She knows what she can and can’t do.
“You okay?” I ask instead.
“Yeah, I think so,” she says. “The shower helped.”
She pulls her legs up so I can scooch onto the base of the bed. I lie down, perpendicular to her, holding her ankle.
“Good,” I say.
“Can we both sleep in here tonight?” she asks.
I offer her a smile, trying not to make a big deal about her asking me to stay close.
But it still catches me, fills my chest up.
Especially now that we live apart, these moments are fewer and further between—as they’re supposed to be.
But I treasure them when they come. I treasure the knowledge that, against the odds, it gets to be me.
I get to be the one that makes Bailey feel safe.
“Please!” I say. “I almost got lost on my way up here to find you.”
She gives me a laugh, it’s a small laugh, but her first all day. I feel it move through me. A little found joy.
“How about you?” she asks.
“How about me?”
“You doing all right?”
She is worried. I can hear it. She is worried about me.
“No no no,” I say. “No worrying about me. That’s not allowed, kid.”
She rolls her eyes, and I know she wants to point out that she’s not a kid anymore.
But she knows that would be useless. She knows that I’ll push back.
I’ll remind her that I was my grandfather’s kid until the day he died.
That I will resist all of her instincts to take care of me, just like he resisted all of my instincts to take care of him.
It’s the great blessing of my life—that I get to be the one to take care of her.
“I keep looking at my phone, expecting a million texts from my boss,” she says. “She must actually be losing her mind that she can’t reach me.”
“Sorry about that.”
“Don’t be,” she says. “Her not being able to reach me is the only upside of this whole fucking mess…”
I give her a smile.
“But I can’t stop thinking about how I had to work last Sunday until almost midnight, and so I missed Grandpa’s weekly call. I missed our last call. That just seems… I don’t know… so fucked-up.”
“Bails, there was no way for you to know.”
“No, I know.” She pauses. “But I’m having trouble figuring out when we last spoke before that.
I don’t know for sure. I mean, without my phone, there’s no way to really know.
But, whenever it was, he was telling me about this cartoon he saw in the New Yorker,” she says.
“Only Grandpa would actually like… try to explain a cartoon as opposed to texting the photo of it…”
I nod, not saying what I know to be true.
That the reason Nicholas didn’t just send a screenshot, but walked Bailey through it, was that he knew that Bailey loved New Yorker cartoons.
And talking about them was a way to keep Bailey on the phone—it was a way to get to hear her laugh. The way I knew he loved that laugh.
“It was a funny one. It’s the one where the father takes his kid out fishing. Did you see it?”
“No, I don’t think so,” I say.
“Okay, well, the kid catches this tiny fish and the father tells his kid to smear any witnesses that said the fish wasn’t big. I’m not explaining it great, but I’m telling you it was funny.”
“You’re taking on your grandfather’s role.”
“Exactly,” she says. “Anyway, Grandpa was laughing so hard. Which made me laugh so hard. And I don’t know, maybe it was the kid and dad fishing together, like Dad and I used to do, but…
I just thought Dad would love that cartoon too.
And so I told Grandpa that, you know? I said, Dad would love this.
It just came out before I thought about it. ”
“About what?”
She shakes her head, struggling to bite back her tears. “That Grandpa was probably mad that I’d bring up Dad to him.”
“He wasn’t mad.”
“Then why did he get off the phone so quickly?”
She looks away from me, the tears spilling out, no matter how she is trying to stop them.
All of it is catching up to her at once: her sadness that she is without Nicholas now, her incredible sadness that he isn’t here to hold her close to him and tell her that it’s okay between them. That, with their kind of love, it’s forever okay.
“Bailey,” I say. “Nicholas was never, not for a moment of his life, anything but totally in love with you. Don’t spend a second worrying about that.”
“I just don’t know why I had to bring him up.”
“Because your father is who you always want to bring up. Me too.” I shrug. “That’s love.”
“But why aren’t you mad?”
I look at her, confused. “At Nicholas?”
“At Dad,” she says. “I mean, I know we’ve talked about all of this. But how does it not catch up to you? Like, here we are again, and you just don’t seem mad that he…”
“Put us in this position?”
She nods.
I hold her eyes. Those beautiful eyes, bright with tears.
I want to tell her that getting mad isn’t going to get me anywhere that I want to be, but that’s not the whole truth.
The whole truth is closer to this: Being mad at someone is almost a luxury.
It means they are there to hear it. What I am, still, is figuring out if that’s a luxury we’re going to have.
What we are both doing now is figuring out if that is something we get to hope for.
I reach over, wipe away her tears.
“The thing is…” I say. “I know your father. And I’m guessing that being hard on him is a waste of time, considering how hard he is probably still being on himself.”
“So… you’re not mad?”
I think of Owen, in front of me twenty-four hours before. What was living there underneath my happiness at seeing him last night? What was living beneath my confusion as to what he was doing there? Was it anger?
No. It was more like something else. Something like hope that there would be a time where he’d be safely in front of me—and that would get to be the work between us again. What it means to forgive.
“No,” I said. “Not mad. Not just yet.”