Start Reading #2
As I sat, grappling with loss and with this strange information, the nurse put a hand on my shoulder and offered me a piece of paper, a checklist of all the things that should happen next.
I picked a funeral director at random. A few hours later two men came to take his body away. It wasn’t him, just the husk of him. Still, I wept. Ugly, stupid, uncontrollable, with a passion I didn’t have for him in life. The end of something—of life, of hope, of other possibilities.
Very efficient, this business of death. They know what to do with a body, I’ll tell you that. The paperwork, however, is staggering. But they guide you through with a kind of practiced patience, these people accustomed to managing family members in shock, ushering them through the many steps.
I am a good student. I learned the lingo, the procedures, what must be filled out and processed, emailed or sent via FedEx. I ordered copies of his death certificate. Then I was told to wait. The medical examiner had to sign off on cause of death.
That’s when I remembered the woman who had answered my father’s phone.
“Was there anyone else here with him?” I asked the hospice nurse, Patty, flush and full figured, with a dimple and an appealing head of curly dark hair.
“There was,” she said. “A redhead. Younger.” She delivered it like gossip because it actually was.
“Oh?”
“She said she was a friend. She wasn’t here long.”
“Huh.” I don’t remember my father having an actual friend. Certainly not a girlfriend. He was a loner mostly. That was his thing. Hell is other people, and all that. “Where’s my dad’s phone?”
Patty and I went through the bag containing the few items he had come in with—his clothes, his wallet, his keys, the same watch he’d worn every day, all my life.
“Strange,” she said, when it was clear that the phone was nowhere in the room. “I don’t see it anywhere. Are you sure he had one? I don’t remember him talking to anyone.”
Another niggle of suspicion. “I’m sure it will turn up.”
My thoughts tumbled.
Who is the redhead? Where is my father’s phone?
What is actually happening here?
But there were no answers in the hospice room, and the walls were starting to close in on me. Finally, I left with his things and returned to his house. The place where I grew up but hadn’t visited in years—decades, actually.
Once back at the house, I called my mother.
“I’m sorry, dear,” she said, as if I’d told her about some mildly disappointing turn of events. “How are you?”
My mom left my dad long ago. Moved to California with her new boyfriend, soon husband. She’d moved on from my father, as I had. You can only try for so long, right?
“When’s the last time you talked to him?” I asked.
“Oh,” she said, sighing. “Years ago. Right after Amelia was born, I think. I called to tell him I hoped he’d be a better grandfather than he was a father.”
“You did?”
“It wasn’t a pleasant conversation.”
“No,” I said. “It wouldn’t have been.”
“That man,” she said after a few silent moments where I could hear the television news in the background of the call. “He was a locked box. I tried for years to force open the lid.”
Maybe there was nothing there. Maybe if she had succeeded, she’d have found only more silence.
She didn’t ask how he died, and I didn’t mention the possible poisoning, or the redhead, or the missing phone, and it was all crashing about in my head with other things I knew about him.
I wasn’t sure what to do with any of it.
“I’m sorry, honey,” she said, more feeling in her voice now. “I know it’s hard.”
When we hung up, a terrible aloneness threatened to swallow me.
His house—mine, now, I guess, along with everything else, part of a big inheritance according to the will I found in his locked filing cabinet, the key in his desk drawer.
The house is isolated, sitting on acres of property in the Adirondacks.
My memories of my life in this place are somehow vivid and distant at the same time—my parents fighting over some mundane thing that made no sense to me, the bus that used to pick me up at the bottom of the long drive to take me to school, watching MTV and getting high with my friends in the basement.
My childhood was decent, normal. But my parents’ unhappiness with each other was like a black sock in the white wash, coloring everything gray.
They stayed together until I went to college.
As soon as I was settled into the dorm, my mother left.
Apparently, she’d been having an affair for years.
My childhood fell apart behind me, and I had no choice but to look ahead to what came next.
A wealthy new stepfather, aptly named Richie—a nice enough guy absolutely nothing like my dad—and a new house with a room for me in California.
I came back to my father’s house only sporadically after that, an awkward weekend here and there.
Now, outside the kitchen window, as I make myself a peanut butter sandwich, tall trees sway, whisper in the stiff wind. The sky is still a moody gray, but no snow has fallen. This place—it’s familiar and unfamiliar at the same time. A place where a different version of me lived her early life.
There’s a grandfather clock in the living room, and its ticking (relentless) and its chimes (startling in spite of their predictability) are the only sounds in this house.
As I eat, suddenly I find myself puzzling over the clock. I know it must be wound to keep operating, and my father has been in the hospital dying. So has someone come here to wind it?
The question piques my curiosity.
The redhead? His friend?
Which makes me think about his missing phone.
I slip his laptop from its black leather case and boot it up.
I have learned through trial and error on his desktop upstairs, and in accessing some of his accounts, that his password for almost everything is my name and my birthday, or some combination of them with numbers and “special characters”—which I guess is touching in a way.
In my work as an investigator, I’ve discovered that most people—even people like my father, who should know better—use something familiar and easy to remember.
Once you’ve figured out one of their passwords, you probably can figure out most of them.
So after just one wrong entry, I enter a combination he frequently uses, where the e in my name is replaced with a 3 and !
@# is added at the end. The computer comes to life.
There aren’t any photographs of us anywhere else in the house, so I’m surprised to find that his desktop background is a picture of Amelia as a toddler and me holding her, an image I must have sent him.
That was when I was in my “still trying” phase.
I stare at it a moment, marvel at how small she was, how young I look.
Did he still see us that way? When do we stop trying? When do we give up on each other?
Moving on from sentimentality, I click on his Find My app and select “Devices.”
And there is a blinking blue dot that represents his phone some miles away.
I click on the location, and it comes up on the map. I zoom in on the roads and recognize the area from my misspent youth.
Away from the town center, there are large swaths of private property, some held by families for generations.
On them you’ll find trailers or abandoned old structures like barns and farmhouses.
When I was a kid, this area, these properties, were where we went to party, or to buy weed.
Later, I understood from my father that a spate of meth labs had sprung up around there.
Apparently, our town, like many small rural communities, had quite the drug problem.
I stare at the blinking blue dot representing his phone. I enter the address from Maps into Google Earth, but as far as I can see, there is no structure near the phone’s position. There’s nothing but woods.
I dial his number from my phone and imagine it ringing on a forest floor somewhere. Then I feel a little shock, a wash of sadness at the sound of his voice: “Leave a message.”
I hang up and do another ugly cry at the kitchen table, with the wind chimes on the porch outside, silent before, going absolutely wild now. I calm myself, finish my sandwich, staring at the pulsing blue dot.
Think.
Given my profession, I know a thing or two about cell phones and how they can be tracked. First: The phone must be charged to be giving off a signal. What’s it doing out there in the woods? How is it still charged? How did it get there? My father. All mystery, even in death.
I’ll admit here to a little flash of anger.
I think if I knew I was dying, that death was a growing dot on the horizon, I would write Amelia a letter.
I would tell her all the things I’d already told her and maybe some things I hadn’t so that she had a physical thing she could hold, a place where my words of love and adoration, respect and awe lived.
My handwriting on paper. But there’s nothing like that from him. Only more silence. Only more questions.
After I finish my sandwich, I spend a while looking through every drawer in my father’s house for anything like that.
But all I find are sticky notes with random names, numbers, words—wrench, recycling, croissants.
Then I look about for some sign of the redhead. An extra toothbrush maybe, some lacy underwear in a drawer next to his old-man tube socks, a lipstick beside his razor. But there’s no sign of her.
I call the phone again. No answer.
Then I hunt through the cabinets for anything poisonous—like what?
I don’t know. But there’s very little in his cupboards.
Dishwashing soap under the sink, some sponges, spray cleaner.
A few mismatched dishes, coffee mugs. There are some smelly take-out containers in the fridge. Chinese. Some overripe apples.
Poison? Accidental? Suicide? Murder?