Chapter iii
iii
ONCE I GOT HOME, I MADE MY SELF A QUICK PB&J for dinner and then headed upstairs to my bedroom closet, pushed my long dresses aside, and retrieved your boxes, which had been waiting there patiently for me. When the kids are around, I never touch your things. But sometimes, when they’re away, when things feel extra hard, when I’m especially lonely, I open up that first box and take out your old Columbia sweatshirt. When I put it on, I give myself permission to live inside our memories for a moment, an hour, an evening. It’s getting harder to remember some of the details, but there are certain memories I don’t think I’ll ever forget. Like the day we made Samuel.
I close my eyes and build the hotel room around us, picture the blond curls of your hair, feel the smoothness of your skin, and when I touch myself, I imagine it’s you. You, stroking me so lightly, so gently. You, sliding inside, feeling how much I want you. You, moving against me until I orgasm.
I don’t do it often, but when I do, I remember joy— until it’s over and the ache of loneliness returns.
I was thinking the other day, while reading Madame Bovary , about how in French orgasms are called la petite mort—the little death. Could it be that that’s what it feels like after death? Do you live in a world filled with that intense beauty, that mind-blowing sensation? Is there a world of even more potent pleasure that awaits us, bright and beautiful? I can’t get this question out of my mind, and I wish you could answer it for me. What comes next? Or is there nothing at all?
That night, I pulled all three of your boxes out of my closet. I knew the first box contained the physical items of yours I’d kept—your Columbia sweatshirt, of course, the baseball cap you had on the day we met, your unfinished copy of All the Light We Cannot See , an old photograph of you and your mom you’d had framed and displayed in your Jerusalem apartment, another one of you and me at Faces & Names, the scarf I knitted you however many Christmases ago.
I put your sweatshirt on over the wool sweater I’d worn to work and rolled up the sleeves that were far too long on me. Then, with the post of one of my earrings, I pierced the cheap packing tape I’d used to bind up your things. Inside the second box was your laptop—silly of me to save it, I know, but I thought perhaps one day there might be something on it I’d need and wouldn’t be able to access otherwise. Your phone was there, too. Your camera. I thought I might give that to Samuel when he was old enough.
With your sweatshirt engulfing my body, surrounded by the things you left behind, looking at the photograph of you and your mother both smiling Samuel’s smile, I thought about the secret that Darren and I had kept all these years. The secret that I knew we would have to share at some point. I wanted our son to know about you, about your intelligence, your talent, your eye for beauty and your determination to find it everywhere. But I hadn’t told him anything. I hadn’t even told him he was yours.
The last box I opened was the one I was looking for: the prints of the photographs you’d had filed in a drawer in your apartment, packed neatly into envelopes by date and location, a flash drive in each one with the original files. I dumped the box upside down to get all the envelopes out and started looking at labels—it pulled at my heart to see your handwriting. When my friend Julia’s dad died a few years ago, she got his handwriting tattooed on her wrist, copied from the bottom of the last note he sent her. Now her wrist says Love, Dad . Staring at those envelopes I wondered if there was something you’d written I could get tattooed on my wrist, an external symbol of how much you are part of me.
I started putting the envelopes in chronological order, and then a small piece of paper fell from the stack. It was torn off the back of an envelope, not the manila kind you’d kept your prints in, but a light blue mailing envelope. It looked like a return address. In beautiful cursive handwriting it said: Via Conte Verde, 68 #5A, 00185 Roma, Italia . Underneath the address, you’d doodled the face of a boy with dark curly hair and wide, dark eyes.
A tumble of questions ran through my brain: When were you in Rome and what were you doing there? Who was writing to you? Who was that boy? And why did you keep this address?
I pulled out my phone and texted Eric Weiss.
Found all Gabe’s flash drives. I’ll have the images to you by Monday.
Great , he wrote back. Thank you .
My thumbs hovered over the keyboard and then I typed: Did you send Gabe to Rome often?
The three dots started then stopped then started then stopped again. I stared at my phone until a paragraph appeared: I’m sure we must have at some point , he wrote. Though I don’t remember it as an ongoing thing. Gabe did work on a powerful story of the Syrian refugees coming through Lampedusa not long before he died. He got a World Press photo award for one of the images he took there. He may have flown in and out of Rome to get to Lampedusa.
Thanks , I typed back, pulling the paper out of my pocket and looking again at the beautiful handwriting, the drawing of the boy. Just curious .
Was it destiny that made me find that address? I still wonder. Was it you? It’s that old question of mine: Fate or free will? How are our lives designed? I’m still wondering, Gabe. And I probably always will be.
Because that address, it led to so much.