by Laura Dave
“I shouldn’t have gone anywhere,” she says. “I’m sorry. But I thought I heard a knock on the door, which completely freaked me out. And then my cell phone rang and I picked it up. And there was all this static. I kept saying hello and getting that static. And so I went into the hall to see if I could hear any better, and I don’t know…”
“You kept going?” I say.
She nods.
Grady shoots me a look, like I’m out of bounds to comfort her. Like I’m simply out of bounds. This is how he sees things now. His plan for Owen and Bailey is on one side of a line and I’m on the other. This is the only way he sees me now—as the main impetus toward his imagined solution.
“I thought it was my father on the phone. I don’t know why. Maybe it was the static, or the blocked number. I just felt it strongly that he was trying to reach me and so I thought I’d walk for a minute, see if he tried me again. And when he didn’t, I just… kept going. I didn’t think too much about it.”
I don’t ask her why she didn’t at least let me know before she left that she was okay. Maybe she didn’t trust that I would let her do what she needed to do. That was probably a part of it. But I knew the other part wasn’t about me, so I decide not to make it about me now. It’s never about someone else the moment you realize it is up to you to get yourself to a better place. It’s only about figuring out how to get there.
“I went back to the library,” she says. “I went back to campus. I had Professor Cookman’s roster with me and I just started going through the yearbook archive again. We ran out of there so fast after seeing the photograph of… Kate. And I just thought… I thought I needed to know. Before I left Austin.”
“And did you find him?”
She nods. “Ethan Young,” she says. “The last guy on that list…”
I don’t say anything, waiting for her to finish.
“And then he did call,” she says.
That stops me. “What are you talking about?” I say.
I almost faint. She spoke to Owen. She got to speak to Owen.
“You spoke to your father?” Grady says.
She looks up at him, offers a small nod.
“Can I talk to Hannah alone?” she asks.
He kneels down in front of her, not leaving the room. Which apparently is his way of saying no.
“Bailey,” he says, “you’ve got to tell me what Owen said. It will help me help him.”
She shakes her head, like she can’t believe she has to have this conversation in front of him. Like she has to have it, at all.
I motion for her to tell me, to tell us. “It’s okay,” I say.
She nods, keeps her eyes on me. Then she starts talking.
“I had just found this photograph of Dad, he looked heavy and his hair was so long, like shoulder length… like basically a mullet. And I just… I almost laughed, he looked so ridiculous. So different. But it was him,” she says. “It was definitely him. And I turned my phone on to call you, to tell you. And then I was getting an incoming call on Signal.”
Signal. Why does that sound familiar? It comes back to me: the three of us eating dumplings at the Ferry Building a few months back, Owen taking Bailey’s phone and telling her he was putting an app on it. An encryption app called Signal. He told her nothing on the internet ever goes away. He made some terrible joke about if she ever sends sexy messages (he actually said sexy), she should use the app. And she pretended to throw up her dumplings.
And then Owen got serious. He said if there were a phone call or a text she wanted to disappear, this was the app she should use. He said it twice so she took it in. I’ll keep it on there forever, if you never use the word sexy around me again, she said. Deal, he said.
Now, Bailey is talking fast. “When I said hello, he was already talking. He didn’t say where he was calling from. He didn’t ask if I was okay. He said he had twenty-two seconds. I remember that. Twenty-two. And then he said that he was sorry, sorrier than he could tell me, that he’d organized his life so he would never have to make this phone call.”
I eye her as she fights back tears again. She doesn’t look at Grady. She only looks at me.
“What did he say?” I ask gently.
I see it weigh on her. I see it weigh deeper than anything should weigh on such young shoulders.
“He said it’s going to be a long time before he can call again. He said…” She shakes her head.
“What, Bailey?” I say.
“He said… he can’t really come home.”
I watch her face as she tries to process that—this terrible, impossible thing. The terrible, impossible thing he never wanted to say to her. The terrible, impossible thing I’ve been suspecting myself. The terrible, impossible thing I’ve known.
He is gone. He isn’t coming back.
“Does he mean… ever?” she asks.
Before I even answer her, Bailey moans, quick and guttural, her voice catching against that knowledge. Against what she knows too.
I put my hand on her hand, her wrist, and hold her tight.
“I really don’t think that…” Grady jumps in. “I just… really don’t think you know that’s what he meant.”
I drill him with a look.
“And as upsetting as the phone call was,” he says, “what we need to be talking about right now is next steps.”
She keeps her eyes on me. “Next steps?” she says. “What does that mean?”
I hold her gaze so it’s just the two of us. I move in close so she’ll believe me when I tell her she is the one who gets to decide.
“Grady means where the two of us go now,” I say. “Whether we go home…”
“Or whether we help you create a new home,” Grady says. “Like I was talking to you about. I can find you and Hannah a good place to stay where you’ll get to start over fresh. And your father will join you when he thinks it’s safe to come back. Maybe he thinks that can’t happen tomorrow, maybe that’s what he was trying to say in the phone call, but—”
“Why not?” she interrupts him.
“Excuse me?”
She meets his eyes.
“Why not tomorrow?” she says. “Forget tomorrow. Why not today? If my father truly knows you’re the best option, then why isn’t he here with us now? Why’s he still running?”
Before he can stop himself, Grady lets out a small laugh, an angry laugh, as though I coached Bailey to ask that question—as though it isn’t the only question someone who knows and loves Owen would be asking. Owen avoided being fingerprinted. He avoided having his face plastered all over the news. He did what he needed to do to avoid outside forces blowing up Bailey’s life. Her true identity. So where is he? There’s nothing else to play out. There’s no other move to make. If he were going to be coming back, if he thought it was safe to start over together, he’d be here now. He’d be here beside us.
“Bailey, I don’t think I’m going to give you an answer right now that will satisfy you,” he says. “What I can do is tell you that you should let me help you anyway. That’s the best way to keep you safe. That’s the only way to keep you safe. You and Hannah.”
She looks down at her hand, my hand on top of it.
“So… that is what he meant then? My father?” she says. “He’s not coming back?”
She is asking me. She is asking me to confirm what she already knows. I don’t hesitate.
“No, I don’t think he can,” I say.
I see it in her eyes—her sadness moving into anger. It will move back again and from there into grief. A fierce, lonely, necessary circle as she starts to grapple with this. How do you begin to grapple with this? You just do. You surrender. You surrender to how you feel. To the unfairness. But not to despair. I won’t let her despair, if it’s the only thing I manage to do.
“Bailey…” Grady shakes his head. “We just don’t know that’s true. I know your father—”
She snaps her head up. “What did you say?”
“I said, I know your father—”
“No. I know my father,” she says.
Her skin is reddening, her eyes fierce and firm. And I see it—her decision forming, her need cementing, into something no one can take from her.
Grady keeps talking but she is done trying to hear him. She is looking at me when she says the thing I thought she would say—the thing I thought she would come to all along. The reason I went to Nicholas, the reason I did what I did. She says it to me alone. She has given up on the rest of it. With time, I’m going to have to build that back. I’m going to have to do whatever I can to help her build that back.
“I just want to go home,” she says.
I look at Grady, as if to say, you heard her. Then I wait for the thing he has no choice but to do.
To let us go.
Two Years and Four Months Ago
“Show me how to do it,” he said.
We turned on the lights in my workshop. We had just left the theater, after our non-date, and Owen asked if he could come back to the workshop with me. No funny business, he said. He just wanted to learn how to use a lathe. He just wanted to learn how I do what I do.
He looked around and rubbed his hands together. “So… where do we start?” he said.
“Gotta pick a piece of wood,” I said. “It all starts with picking a good piece of wood. If that’s no good, you have nowhere good to go.”
“How do you woodturners pick?” he said.
“We woodturners go about it in different ways,” I said. “My grandfather worked with maple primarily. He loved the coloring, loved how the grains would turn themselves out. But I use a variety of woods. Oak, pine, maple.”
“What’s your favorite kind of wood to work with?” he asked.
“I don’t play favorites,” I said.
“Oh, good to know.”
I shook my head, biting back a smile. “If you’re going to make fun of me…” I said.
He put his hands up in surrender. “I’m not making fun of you,” he said. “I’m fascinated.”
“Okay, well then, without sounding corny, I think different pieces of wood appeal to you for different reasons,” I said.
He moved over to my work area, bent down so he was eye to eye with my largest lathe.
“Is that my first lesson?”
“No, the first lesson is that to pick an interesting piece of wood to work with, you need to understand that good wood is defined by one thing,” I said. “My grandfather used to say that. And I think that is definitely true.”
He rubbed his hand along the piece of the pine I was working with. It was a distressed pine—dark in color, rich for a pine.
“What defines this guy?” he said.
I placed my hand over a spot in the middle, blanched to almost a blond, totally washed out.
“I think this part, right here, I think it could turn out interesting,” I said.
He put his hand there too, not touching my hand, not trying—only trying to understand what I was showing him.
“I like that, I like that philosophy, is what I mean…” he says. “I kind of think you could probably say the same thing about people. At the end of the day, one thing defines them.”
“What defines you?” I said.
“What defines you?” he said.
I smiled. “I asked you first.”
He smiled back at me. He smiled, that smile.
“Okay, fine,” he said. Then he didn’t hesitate, not for a second. “There is nothing I wouldn’t do for my daughter.”
Sometimes You Can Go Home Again
We sit on the tarmac, waiting for the plane to take off. Bailey stares out the window. She looks exhausted—her eyes dark and puffy, her skin a splotchy red. She looks exhausted and she looks scared.
I haven’t told her everything yet. But she understands enough. She understands enough that I’m not surprised she is scared. I’d be surprised if she weren’t.
“They’ll come visit,” I say. “Nicholas and Charlie. They can bring your cousins if you want. I think that would be a nice thing. I think your cousins really want to meet you.”
“They won’t stay with us or anything?” she says.
“No. Nothing like that. We’ll have a meal or two together. Start there.”
“And you’ll be there?”
“For all of it,” I say.
She nods, taking this in.
“Do I have to decide about my cousins right now?” she says.
“You don’t have to decide about anything right now.”
She doesn’t say anything else. She understands—as well as she is allowing herself to integrate it—that her father isn’t coming home. But she doesn’t want to talk about it, not yet. She doesn’t want to navigate with me what things will look like without him, what they’ll feel like. That too doesn’t need to happen right now.
I take a deep breath in and try not to think about all the things that do have to happen—if not right now, then soon. The steps we’ll have to take, one after another, to move through our lives now. Jules and Max will pick us up at the airport, our refrigerator stocked with food for today, dinner waiting on the table. But those things will have to keep happening, day in and day out, until they start to feel normal again.
And there are things I can’t avoid happening, like the fallout coming several weeks from now (or several months from now), when Bailey is on her way to something like recovery, and I’ll have my first still moment to think about myself. To think about what I’ve lost, what I’ll never have back. To think only of myself. And of Owen. Of what I’ve lost—what I’m still losing—without him.
When the world gets quiet again, it will take everything I am not to allow the grief of his loss to level me.
The strangest thing will stop it from leveling me. I’ll have an answer to the question that I’m only now starting to consider: If I had known, would I be here? If Owen told me, out of the gate, that he had this past, if he had warned me about what I would be walking into, would I have chosen him anyway? Would I have chosen to end up where I am now? It will remind me briefly of that moment of grace my grandfather provided shortly after my mother’s departure when I realized I belonged exactly where I was. And I’ll feel the answer move through me, like a blinding heat. Yes. Without hesitation. Even if Owen had told me, even if I had known every last bit. Yes, I would choose this. It will keep me going.
“What is taking so long?” Bailey says. “Why aren’t we taking off yet?”
“I don’t know. I think the flight attendant said something about a backup on the runway,” I say.
She nods and wraps her arms around herself, cold and unhappy, her T-shirt unable to compete against the frosty airplane air. Her arms covered with goose bumps. Again.
Except this time I’m prepared. Two years ago—two days ago—I wasn’t. But now, apparently, is a different story. I reach into my bag and pull out Bailey’s favorite wool hoodie. I slipped the hoodie into my carry-on bag to have it ready for this moment.
I know, for the first time, how to give her what she needs.
It isn’t everything, of course. It isn’t even close. But she takes her sweater, putting it on, warming her elbows with her palms.
“Thanks,” she says.
“Sure,” I say.
The plane jerks forward a few feet, and then back. Then, slowly, it starts easing down the runway.
“There we go,” Bailey says. “Finally.”
She sits back in her seat, relieved to be on the way. She closes her eyes and puts her elbow on our shared armrest.
Her elbow is there, the plane is picking up speed. I put my elbow there too, and I feel her do it, I feel us both do it. We move a little closer to each other as opposed to doing the opposite.
It feels like what it is.
A start.
Five Years Later. Or Eight. Or Ten.
I’m at the Pacific Design Center in Los Angeles, participating in a First Look exhibition, with twenty-one other artisans and producers. I’m debuting a n
ew collection of white oak pieces (mostly furniture, a few bowls and larger pieces) in the showroom they’ve provided.
These exhibitions are great for exposure to potential clients, but they are also like a reunion of sorts—and, like most reunions, somewhat of a grind. Several architects and colleagues stop by to say hello, catch up. I have done my best with the small talk, but I’m starting to feel tired. And, as the clock winds toward 6 P.M., I feel myself looking past people as opposed to at them.
Bailey is supposed to meet me for dinner, so I’m mostly on the lookout for her, excited to have the excuse to shut it all down for the day. She’s bringing a guy she recently started dating, a hedge funder named Shep (two points against him), but she swears I’ll like him. He’s not like that, she says.
I’m not sure if she is referring to him working in finance or having the name Shep. Either way, he seems like a reaction to her last boyfriend, who had a less irritating name (John) and was unemployed. So it is, dating in your twenties, and I’m grateful that these are the things she’s thinking about.
She lives in Los Angeles now. I live here too, not too far from the ocean—and not too far from her.
I sold the floating house as soon as Bailey graduated high school. I don’t harbor any illusions that this means I’ve avoided them keeping tabs on us—the shadowy figures waiting to pounce should Owen ever return. I’m sure they are still watching on the off chance he risks it and comes back to see us. I operate as if they are always watching, whether or not he does.
Sometimes I think I see them, in an airport lounge or outside a restaurant, but of course I don’t know who they are. I profile anyone who looks at me a second too long. It stops me from letting too many people get close to me, which isn’t a bad thing. I have who I need.
Minus one.
He walks into the showroom, casually, a backpack over his shoulders. His shaggy hair is buzz cut short and darker, and his nose is crooked, like it’s been broken. He wears a button-down shirt, rolled up, revealing a sleeve of tattoos, crawling out to his hand, to his fingers, like a spider.
This is when I clock his wedding ring, which he is still wearing. The ring I made for him. Its slim oak finish is perhaps unnoticeable to anyone else. I know it cold though. He couldn’t look less like himself. There is that too. But maybe this is what you do when you need to hide from people in plain sight. I wonder. Then I wonder if it isn’t him, after all.