Chapter 3 #2
“Neither do I, Luce. I thought it was pretty strange at the time. And then when he went out in that water, a couple days later—I mean, I don’t know. But here it is. Maybe it’ll make more sense when you open it.”
I look up. “You didn’t look inside?”
“Look inside?”
“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean—”
“Luce, you know I would sooner—I mean, you know me—” A flush overcomes his cheekbones. He urges the envelope toward me. “Anyway, here it is.”
His hand, holding the envelope, could span a dinner plate. He smells of outdoors, of green things. Of gardening. The ridges of his fingers are stained with dirt, though the dirt itself is scrubbed away.
I pull the envelope from his hand. It’s thin, not much inside. “Was there anything else?”
“Nope. That was it.”
Punkin’s lying on her back on the porch. Chief sits on her stomach, licking her face in long, patient strokes of his tongue. I call gently, “Hey, honey! Time to let Chief go home.”
Punkin buries her nose in the fur of Chief’s neck and cradles him. Then, with a grave face, she opens her arms. Chief leaps back to Ben and lifts his paws to Ben’s gigantic kneecaps.
“Hey, bro. What did I say? No jumping.”
Chief sets his paws back down on the porch floorboards and looks up imploringly.
“Atta boy.” Ben scoops him up. “Manners make the dog, like my mom always said.”
Chief settles himself within those spacious arms. An expression of drugged pleasure takes hold of his face.
“How is your mom these days?” I ask.
“She passed, actually. Last winter. Stroke.”
“Oh my God, I’m so sorry.”
“Yep. It was a shock. Like your dad, I guess.”
Punkin reaches up and strokes the dog’s fur. “Were Chief and Grandad good friends?” she asks.
“Were they,” he says. “You should’ve seen the way Chief ran up whenever he spotted your grandfather. Always had a treat for him. That’s the secret.”
Punkin looks at him, eyes round. “Really?”
“Every time.”
She turns to me. “I’m going inside to bake some dog treats, okay?”
At the word treats, Chief leaps from Ben’s arms and chases after Punkin into the house.
“What a sellout,” I say.
“Yeah, he’s pretty basic,” says Ben. He puts two fingers to his lips and whistles. A second later, Chief comes running back out, looking guilty. “Is she really going to bake her own dog treats?”
“Probably. She loves to bake. Looks up all these recipes online. Figured out fractions all by herself. You should try her madeleines.”
From the kitchen comes the noise of pans cascading from a cabinet.
“I’m okay!” calls Punkin.
“I guess I should see how that’s going,” I say.
Ben nods and starts to turn away, then checks himself. One hand on the post. “I really am sorry about your dad,” he says. “He was a cool guy. All that pirate stuff.”
“Yeah, he had his pet projects, for sure.”
“You might want to take a look at some of that stuff before you toss it out. He seemed to think he was really on to something.”
I manage a laugh. “Yeah, he always felt he was on to something. Like, This time it’s for real, honey! I can feel it!”
“No, I mean something was really going on with him. He was out at night with flashlights in the meadow there.”
“Par for the course, to be honest.”
Ben squints across the grass. “All right, then. I’ll leave you to it. Let me know if you need help with anything.”
“Sure. Yes. Of course.”
He looks down at Chief. “Saddle up, bro. Time to leave the girls in peace, all right?”
“Ben, wait.”
He stops, one foot poised over the step, and turns his face to me. The setting sun glints in his hair, in his beard.
Ben.
“Thanks.” My heart thuds. “For looking out for my dad. Being there. I appreciate it.”
“Luce, I’m just sorry it turned out this way. That’s all.”
“I know,” I say. “I know you are.”
Ben starts down the porch steps to the weedy gravel drive. Chief trots at his heels. Ben has a giant, swinging walk, like a mountain gorilla. The opposite of Arnaud. The familiarity of it sits in my gut, like an old injury that comes back to ache.
—
The first few days after the death of a loved one are not the worst part.
You are shocked to the point of disbelief.
Nothing seems real. You deal with the undertaker, the church, the family members, the police.
You compose the obituary. You pick out the coffin, the clothes, the flowers, the music, the speakers, the food.
You are so busy dealing with logistics, with the feelings of others, that you don’t really understand that somebody is dead.
What dead means. What death does to your life after everybody goes home and you are alone.
Arnaud did not leave a lot of stuff behind.
He did not participate in the zeitgeisty accumulation of cheap crap; he bought almost all his clothes from vintage stores, not because he was a hipster but because he said the materials were of better quality, the craftsmanship incomparably superior.
He wasn’t a Luddite, though. He mostly read books on his iPad; he paid his bills online.
When we had a little money, which was not often, he liked to spend it on experiences.
Eating out at a fine restaurant, drinking a bottle of exceptional wine.
A night away. A week backpacking in Vietnam.
Still, I had to go through everything he left behind.
Decide what to keep and what to give away and what to throw away.
In the beginning, I cried a lot. I lamented his T-shirts that smelled like him; I grieved the tweed jacket he wore when I told him I was pregnant and he hugged me so long and hard, against the corduroy lapels, that I knew everything would be okay.
The beautiful leather shoes I gave him last Christmas that he hardly ever wore because, he said, they were too immaculate to wear any old day around the poo-crusted streets of Paris.
Eventually, though, I learned to steel myself.
Punkin needed to be fed and dressed and taken to the nursery school we’d picked out for her the previous spring; I had to go back to work or we would starve.
I didn’t have time to sit around and get sentimental over every last nail clipper in the bathroom drawer, just because it contained traces of Arnaud’s DNA.
But then I started sorting through his file cabinet, his drawers, his papers.
And it’s funny how you can be in love with someone, think you know the bones of somebody, the map of his brain and heart, and yet here are these letters tucked into a large manila envelope labeled Danae and you realize there was a section of his brain and his heart you had no map to, that you didn’t know existed.
A girl he used to love. That pretty girl Danae with the long legs and stylish jacket who came to the funeral, who kissed both your cheeks and condoled with you in exquisite French: He used to love her. He used to fuck her.
And other things.
Did you know he once took a course in finance and then abandoned it after three months, but not soon enough to avoid incurring increasingly pressing demands for tuition that he finally paid a year later?
Did you know that he spent three weeks in hospital the year before you met, after a motor-scooter accident caused a bleed on his brain?
Did you know that he had been fired from his job two months earlier and never told you, even though he left the apartment every morning, Monday to Friday, just as if he were setting off to work?
No, you didn’t know any of these things.
Everybody has a secret life you know nothing of, chérie, said Maman, with her usual instinct for drama, when I came to her in tears. Every heart bears a hidden burden.
—
Now I stare at this envelope Ben Ressler gave me. This envelope from my father.
In the kitchen, the noise of banging metal has stopped. Punkin wanders into the entry hall. “I found a cookie pan. Did Grandad have any recipe books for dog treats?”
“I don’t think so, honey. I think we’re going to have to look that up on the internet.”
She peers at the envelope in my hands. “Are you going to open that?”
“Yep.” I slide my finger under the edge of the seal and rip it apart.
I don’t know what I expected. A note, I guess.
My father’s last words to me. Some sage piece of advice?
Remorse, maybe—for keeping me at a distance, for contributing exactly nothing to my upkeep or education over the years?
Some final confession of love? Some explanation for why he had chosen to die, now of all moments?
I stick my hand inside the envelope and pull out a small metal key.
“What’s that for?” Punkin asks.
I turn it over in my palm. It’s only an inch or so long. Too small for a house key. The base is round. When I hold it closer, I see the numbers 8238 etched into the brass.
“I have no idea,” I tell her.