I was blindsided. Not just by the announcement that Lili was taking off with her ex-fling, but by her comment about our future, too. Sure, I knew I had to get around to unpacking those boxes someday, but I hadn’t felt any urgency. And Lili had never complained about them before.
I felt that she was expecting a response from me, but I just didn’t have one. After she waited a couple of beats, she stood up to clear the table. “I packed before I left my apartment, and I have everything I need in my trunk. Do you think you could drive me to the airport in Philly tonight, and I could leave my car here?”
“Tonight?” My voice squeaked. “So soon?”
“It’s news,” she said. “Kind of requires immediate action.”
I stood up, too. I was determined to be adult about this, even if I didn’t want to be. “Sure. What time?”
“I’m booked on a red-eye to Rome at eleven. Tomorrow morning I’ll meet up with Van and we’ll fly into Tirana. He’ll have all the visas by then.”
“And if not? You guys will just hang out in Rome together?”
“I’ll be fine, and you don’t have to worry about me falling for Van again. All right?” She stepped over to me and kissed me. “I know this may seem like it’s coming out of the blue, but I’ve been thinking about our future together, and this trip with Van is just pushing everything forward.”
“I understand. And I appreciate what you’re saying.” Rochester tried to nose his way between us. “Even the dog agrees, I guess.”
“Good. We have time for one long walk before I go, if you both want to.”
“Rochester’s always ready for a walk.” I smiled at Lili. “And I’m always happy to spend time with you.”
As we strolled down Sarajevo Court in the golden light of early evening, I thought about Lili’s comment, that I needed to deal with my past. It was a complicated one, for sure, though I thought I’d been managing well enough.
Once upon a time, I was a computer executive, married to a beautiful, successful woman. We lived in Silicon Valley and we were trying to have a child. After Mary suffered two miscarriages, though, everything fell apart and I ended up in prison.
Since then, I had restarted my career, first as an adjunct professor at Eastern, then as an administrator. Rochester had become my surrogate child, and his love had helped me open my heart to Lili. What else did I have to do to deal with my past? Just unpack a few boxes?
We walked slowly past mature trees and townhouses with a vague Eastern European air, from the gabled roofs to the stone fronts, arches and fake bell towers on the end units. Lili would soon be in the part of the world where this architecture had originated, I thought, and I’d be back here. But we’d both have work to do.
Rochester pranced ahead of us, his golden plume of a tail held high and proud. Suddenly he stopped and lowered his head, pointing his snout forward.
I knew what that meant. “No squirrels!” I said, yanking on his leash just as he lunged forward.
The little rodent scampered up the trunk of an oak, and Rochester jumped up and placed his paws on the bark. An acorn dropped from above and hit him squarely on the snout. He yelped and backed down.
“That’ll teach you,” I said, laughing.
Lili reached up to brush away a curl. “Oh, crap,” she said. “I lost that barrette, the one that was loose. I knew I should have just put it away.”
“Rochester is ready to turn around and head for home,” I said. “We can look for it on the way.”
I leaned down to the shaggy dog. “You hear that, boy? Lili lost her barrette. You’re going to find it for us, right?”
He shook his head but I couldn’t tell if that was a yes or a no. All the way back we scanned the street and the lawns, looking for one of her yellow-and-brown butterflies, but with no success. “It’s all right,” Lili said. “I can rearrange the ones I have on my head. But I am bummed. I bought them from an artisan’s shop in a small town in Eritrea. I know I’m never going back there.”
“I’ll look again tomorrow morning,” I said. “While I’m thinking of you landing in Rome.”
When we got back to the house, I shifted her big backpack from her trunk to mine. It was surprisingly light, and I remarked on it. “Have to be able to get on the road quickly if the story moves,” she said.
Rochester scrambled into the back seat, and I drove Lili to the airport. She spent most of the trip on her smart phone, either pecking out emails or confirming details with a dozen different people, from the assignment editor at the Journal to a doctor’s office where she left a message to reschedule an appointment.
I stopped in the departure lane, and she kissed me goodbye, then walked off with her backpack and her camera bag without a backward glance. Rochester moved back up front as I inched my way out of the airport and then got back on the highway.
Her trip worried me. I didn’t trust Van, her ex-boyfriend, and I worried that if he uncovered some nefarious deeds connected with the fire on the cruise ship, he’d be putting himself and Lili in danger.
When we got home, I looked for information online about the incident Lili and Van were investigating. The Siren had been on a cruise from Venice to Athens, making stops in several picturesque towns along the Croatian coast. It broke down near a rocky, nearly unoccupied peninsula that stuck out into the Ionian Sea as if Albania was giving the finger to its neighbors. The Albanian Defense Force had taken control of the ship and directed it to dock in Durrës, a cruise port due west of the capital.
That was all I could find. The next morning I signed up for a free trial of the Journal’s web content, and searched for Van’s byline. He hadn’t posted anything yet; but then, he and Lili probably hadn’t even reached Albania by then.
After a quick breakfast Saturday morning, I stood in my living room and looked at Rochester. “What do you think, boy? Should I do some unpacking?”
He didn’t say anything, just walked over to the row of boxes and slumped to the floor. The box that had contained my dad’s suede jacket was still open, so I started there. Beneath it I found cards and letters I had sent home from overseas trips, a composite picture of my third-grade class, a set of Isaac Asimov’s Foundation trilogy. It was all so random, and that made it a process of discovery.
I used the Swiss Army Knife my father had given me for my sixteenth birthday to slice open the next box, where the newspaper packing was dated soon after my mother passed away. The careful way the box had been packed told me right away it had been done by my father.
As I sliced the tape around the first item, I wondered what he had thought was worth saving. I unfolded the paper to reveal a small pale green Lenox china bird, no gold details or other ornamentation. It was about three inches tall, with its face turned upward.
I remembered that bird. My father had bought it for my mother for their first anniversary, knowing how much she loved Lenox, which was manufactured in Trenton, New Jersey, right across the Delaware from Stewart’s Crossing and the city where both she and I had been born. I carried it to the china cabinet and set it in the front.
As I continued to unpack, I found more mementoes of my parents’ lives together. When they were first married, he worked as an engineering temp for different companies, a few months at a time. When he returned from each out-of-town assignment, he brought her an antique perfume bottle—crystal, porcelain, cloisonné, each one different.
It seemed like everything my father packed away was something connected to the two of them. None of the paperback romances she loved to read, or items she had bought for herself. It was almost as if he was preparing for me this record of a happy marriage, even as my own was falling apart.
After unpacking for a couple of hours, I felt like I was beginning to drown in my family’s past. To clear my head, I took Rochester for a long walk, out of River Bend and down toward the Delaware Canal, which ran behind downtown Stewart’s Crossing. In the summer the towpath beside the canal was lined with black-eyed Susans, the tiny pansies we called
Johnny Jump-Ups, and other wildflowers. It was a great place to let Rochester off his leash for a good run.
I sat down on the grassy bank of the canal. Rochester darted back and forth behind me for a minute, then took off down the canal. “Don’t go too far,” I called. Then I relaxed and stared up above at the puffy clouds floating across the light-blue sky.
I thought about my parents’ lives, and their marriage. They had always squabbled, but insisted that it was just their way of communicating. And the relics my father had saved testified to the love between them.
Rochester finally ran out of steam, and collapsed beside me. I stroked his head, and remembered that after my mother’s death, I’d worried about my dad, back home alone in Stewart’s Crossing. When he announced he was selling the house where I grew up to buy the townhouse in River Bend, I hoped that meant he was getting along. He mentioned occasional dinners out with various elderly women, trips to the race track with old friends. But I was too caught up in my own troubles to do much for him.
We walked back home soon after that, and I checked my laptop for newer reports on the Siren, but there was little to find. By my calculations Lili had already been in Rome for a few hours, and might have already left for Tirana, the Albanian capital—providing Van was able to secure the necessary visas. Why hadn’t Lili emailed me yet? Surely she’d been able to get Wi-Fi access somewhere?
My heart skipped a beat when my laptop pinged with the notice of an incoming email from Lili. She had sent a snapshot of an airplane and the note that she was boarding it for Albania.
Each time I took Rochester outside to walk, and saw Lili’s car parked beside mine, I thought of her, and what she had said before she left. Sunday morning, I fed and walked Rochester, then continued to unpack. By the time I’d finished the third box, though, I was once again overwhelmed with emotion. Each new item brought back memories of my parents and my childhood—a giant clamshell, souvenir of a Jersey shore vacation. My bar mitzvah certificate. A hand-carved figurine of a duck that had sat on my dad’s workbench. An old prayer book, all in Hebrew, that had been in my family for generations.
I don’t know when I started crying, or why. Was it the long-forgotten memories? Or was I finally reconciling myself to my father’s loss, especially as I hadn’t been able to attend his funeral? Rochester came over to where I sat on the tile floor of the living room and snuffled me, and I reached out to stroke his flank as he settled against me.
Once when I was a teenager, my father and I were watching a TV program about Jewish immigration, and a man mentioned that even though he had left his family behind in Europe, when his father died, he had said the Kaddish, the ritual prayer recited at funerals, grave sites and during memorials for the dead.
My father had turned to me then and said, “I expect you to say Kaddish for me.” I could still hear his voice in my head and remember staring at him in confusion. I was a teenager, and my parents seemed immortal then. I couldn’t imagine then the losses I would face in the future.
I picked up the prayer book and flipped it open, looking for the Kaddish prayer, scanning the Hebrew letters, looking for a familiar pattern. I can’t carry on a conversation in the language, but I did spend three years of weekday afternoons in Hebrew school and I could still make out the letters.
When I found it, for the first time I looked at the English translation. I had always thought the prayer was about loss, confusing it with the 23rd Psalm and its walk through the valley of the shadow of death. But instead, it was a paean to God’s glory, and the only hint of sorrow came in the last line: “He who creates peace in His celestial heights, may He create peace for us and for all Israel; and say, Amen.”
Wasn’t peace, after all, what mourners sought? A reconciliation to loss and a recognition that God, in his wisdom and greatness, was responsible for birth and death.
I began to recite the Hebrew, part from memory and part from deciphering the letters on the page, stroking Rochester’s side as I did. When I came to the end, I looked down at him and smiled, and said those last words to him in the language of my ancestors, a people who were very familiar with suffering and loss. “O-seh shalom bim raman, hu ya-aseh shalom aleinu v’al kol Yisroel, v’imru Amen.”
*
About noon, I heard a vehicle pull up in front of my house, and I walked to the front door. My friend Rick Stemper was standing by his truck, with his Australian shepherd Rascal in the back.
“I’m going to take Rascal for a run,” Rick said. “You guys want to come? Or are you doing something with Lili?”
Rochester pushed past me to the courtyard gate and began barking madly when he spotted his friend. Rascal returned the barks.
“I’ll be right out,” I called, over the cacophony. I locked up the house and let Rochester run down the driveway to Rick’s truck. Rick opened the tailgate and Rochester launched himself at Rascal, and the two of them began to romp.
“Lili left Friday night for Albania,” I said, as Rick closed the tailgate. “With her ex-boyfriend.”
He cocked his head to the side in a gesture that reminded me of Rochester. “Excuse me?”
We got into the truck and he began to drive. “This guy Van is an investigative reporter for the Wall Street Journal,” I said. “He was getting ready to head to Albania to report on that cruise ship fire and his photographer got sick. So he asked Lili.”
“Convenient for him, huh?”
“Yeah. I mean, I know he’s a jerk, and she thinks he’s a jerk. But he’s still this globe-trotting journalist who brings truth and justice to the world. And I’m just a guy.”
“A guy with a dog. Don’t discount Rochester’s power.”
“That’s comforting,” I said, as he turned onto River Road. “Have you heard anything about this ship thing, through, you know, like police channels?”
“The Stewart’s Crossing PD generally steers clear of international incidents,” he said. “You want to talk about the rash of burglaries in Crossing Estates, that, I’ve heard about. Cruise ships? Nothing.”
“Van has this cockamamie idea that there’s spy equipment on the ship.”
“Cockamamie? That one of those college professor words?” He laughed.
“I’m not a professor any more. At least not now. And cockamamie is a word my father used to use.”
He nodded. “Mine, too. Along with a bunch of others too colorful to repeat. Seriously, she’s in Albania?”
“As far as I know. I haven’t heard from her since she was boarding the plane in Rome.”
There were no other dogs at the park, which was a surprise for a Sunday afternoon. We opened the gate and then let Rochester and Rascal off leash to run around. Rick and I sat on a wrought-iron bench at one end of the park.
“So, Lili’s gone,” he said. “Bummer. I like her.”
“She’s coming back,” I protested. “As soon as this assignment is over. She’s the chair of her department, and she’ll have classes in the fall.”
Rick leaned back. “And she’s gone off with her ex.”
“She says they only had a brief fling once years ago.”
“Aren’t you worried they’ll have another?”
I realized that I wasn’t worried about Van and Lili fooling around. What really scared me was the idea that she’d come back from Albania—but not to me.
I looked up at the sky. A puffy cumulous cloud drifted above us. “Before she left, she told me I had to clean up the house. That while she was gone I should make room for her.”
“Meaning you have to get over your past,” Rick said. “I had to do that eventually, after Veronica moved out. I mean, I threw a lot of her shit away right off, but some stuff I just kept. I don’t know why. Then one day, a couple of years after the divorce was final, I just sort of looked up and said, ‘I don’t need this crap around.’ And I got rid of it.”
“None of the stuff in my house ever belonged to Mary,” I said. “It’s all the boxes my father left behind.”
�
��Your parents are part of your past,” Rick said. “And so’s that guy you were back in Silicon Valley, before you got caught clicking your mouse around to places it wasn’t supposed to be.”
Rick was right. My ill-fated attempt to take care of Mary by hacking her credit records, and then the year I spent as a guest of the California penal system, had changed me in large and small ways. I thought I’d been dealing with those changes, in learning to love Rochester, and then Lili, and coming to understand my compulsion to snoop around online. But maybe there was more work to be done.
I thought about the number of times my father had been creeping into my thoughts. We had always sparred with each other; I was too much of a wise ass, and my father believed it was his job to knock that sarcasm out of me before the world did it. He was an engineer, with a logical mind, and he couldn’t understand the intuitive leaps my brain made sometimes. He never understood how I made a living, working with information rather than mechanical drawings and scale models.
I loved him, of course, and I know that he loved me. I was sorry that I’d missed spending more time with him after my mom died, when I was in California and he was back in Pennsylvania. And I had never acknowledged before that I felt terrible about missing his funeral while I was incarcerated.
Rick and I sat on that park bench for a while, both of us lost in thought, until the dogs came romping back demanding to be played with.
By the time we got home that Sunday afternoon, it was time for dinner and a long walk around River Bend. After dinner I cleaned up as best I could—I hung a few pieces of my dad’s clothing in my closet, and put the rest into a suitcase to take to the thrift shop. The knickknacks found places in my china cabinet or on my bookshelves. I packed a couple of small boxes of stuff I wanted to save but didn’t know what to do with. I had one box of my dad’s left to unpack, but when I realized it was all paperwork I put it aside.
The Untreed Detectives Page 7