“I think I bungled this,” Tim said. “Let’s forget we had this conversation, and I’m going to get the ring from your dad, and then I’ll propose for real. A night out, the tasting menu at Per Se, a speech about how much you mean to me, a diamond hidden in your dessert. Okay?”
Nina laughed and nodded. “Okay,” she said.
Tim smiled. He looked so relieved that Nina rose up on her tiptoes to kiss him.
23
Tim and Nina had made plans with his friends from work that night, but Nina felt too drained to put up a good front.
“Would it be okay with you if I skipped?” she asked Tim. “I just . . . I can’t.”
He squeezed her shoulder. “Do you want me to skip, too?” he asked, concern on his face.
She shook her head. “No, it’s fine. You go. Have my share of fun, too.”
Tim laughed. “Are you sure?” he asked. “I can stay with you.”
“It’s okay,” she told him. “I don’t want you to miss out because of me.”
Tim looked at her for a moment, as if he were trying to make sure she was telling him the truth. He must’ve decided she was, because he said, “All right. I’ll talk to you tomorrow.”
And then he kissed her and headed downtown.
The ride home to Tribeca seemed like too much for Nina, so she decided to sleep on Central Park West that night.
She straightened up the kitchen and then took out her phone to call Leslie, to try to make sense of the on-hold marriage proposal. But then she put her phone down. She didn’t know what she would say. Didn’t know her own feelings enough to explain them to anyone else. She contemplated calling Pris to make plans to go out later this week and celebrate Rafael’s win, but she didn’t do that either. Instead she sat on the couch with Carlos. She wanted to escape her own life a little, so she picked up her dad’s copy of the New Yorker and was flipping through it while Carlos read something on a Kindle. After losing her place in an article for the third time, Nina put the magazine down and asked him if he wanted a drink.
Carlos asked for a beer, and she poured herself another glass of scotch. Not the Macallan, though. She felt like she’d need to ask her dad’s permission for that. And then she realized, like a punch to the gut, that once he was gone, whatever was left in the bottle would be hers. She wouldn’t have to ask anyone’s permission to drink it. She closed her eyes for a moment. Paper clips. Staples. Floor tiles.
When she opened her eyes, Carlos was looking at her.
“You’re in the middle of it now,” he said, putting his beer down on the table. “I know it doesn’t seem like your life will ever be okay again, but it will. I promise.”
Nina swirled the scotch in her glass and watched the little cyclone she created rage and then dissipate. Were the answers there? In the shimmering amber?
“I know,” Nina said, not believing it.
Then the two of them sat in companionable silence, Carlos reading again, and Nina lost in her own thoughts, until she decided to turn in for the night.
“He’s usually better in the mornings,” Carlos said, as she got up from the couch.
Nina nodded and headed down the hallway to her childhood bedroom, still decorated, so many years later, with the same pale-yellow chevron wallpaper Caro had chosen when Nina was eight. The same queen-sized four-poster bed she’d picked out when she turned ten. There was a picture on her dresser of her and Tim from about that time, too, both of them hanging upside down on a bar at the Dinosaur Playground in Riverside Park, their smiles looking like frowns, her father just inside the frame focused on the two kids, as if he was ready to spring into action the moment he saw either of them wobble. He wasn’t around to take her to the Dinosaur Playground often, but when he was, she was the center of his world.
Nina looked at the picture. She thought about all of the moments in her life she’d shared with Tim. The big ones, the small ones. No matter how great something was or how awful, having Tim there made it better. It always had.
She should marry Tim.
24
Later that night, Nina woke up at three A.M. in a panic. In her dream, she was playing hide-and-seek with her father. She was two and thirty-two at the same time, and she was running around the apartment and couldn’t find him anywhere: under the table, behind the curtain, in the bathtub. She started shouting for him to come out, panicked the way she was when she was nine and they went to the Union Square Holiday Market to buy presents for the people who worked in his office. It was the first Christmas after her mother died—the holiday itself would mark one year exactly without her mom—and Nina hadn’t wanted anything to do with it.
“I’ll get you hot chocolate with whipped cream,” he’d said. “An apple cider donut. Both of them. Anything else you want.”
“How about both of those and a candy cane that’s bigger than my arm?” she’d asked. Her friend Melinda had brought one to school and everyone thought it was the coolest.
“Deal,” he said. And so they went, bundled up against the cold, Nina’s scarf tucked tightly around her neck.
They were in a booth filled with finger puppets, and Nina got distracted by the one that looked like a giraffe and lost track of her father. Or maybe he’d lost track of her, one tiny head that had gotten swallowed up in a crowd of much taller ones.
When she realized he wasn’t standing next to her, Nina’s heart started racing. “Dad!” she’d yelled. “Dad!”
Ever since her mom had died, she didn’t like it when she didn’t know where her father was. He had even given her a copy of his meeting schedule to take with her to school, so she could always find him if she needed to. Checking it was the only way she could quell the panic that overtook her when she least expected it. At recess, in the middle of art class, in the car ride home from school with their au pair. But now? Now he had disappeared and nothing on the schedule would help her.
“Dad!” she’d shouted again, not sure what to do. “Find me!”
Just as she yelled that, her father pushed through the crowd. He lifted her up, and, even though nine was way too old for your father to pick you up like you were a baby, Nina felt so grateful to be in his arms.
“I’m so sorry,” he said, when he put her back down. “I’m so, so sorry. I didn’t realize you’d stopped walking.”
“I didn’t realize you’d kept walking,” Nina said, blinking hard, so that the tears she felt forming in her eyes wouldn’t get any farther than her eyelashes.
“It was my fault,” he said, noticing her tears. “You didn’t do anything wrong.” Then he held her hand, and her tears stopped, and the two of them continued walking through the Holiday Market. They said thank you to the people who wished them a Merry Christmas and kept shopping until they’d bought something for everyone on her father’s list.
Years later, when Nina thought about that day, she understood the blame he’d internalized when they’d become separated. He was a single father, and her well-being rested completely on his shoulders. Even with other people around helping him take care of her, he was still her only living parent.
* * *
• • •
When Nina was startled awake by her dream, her T-shirt and pajama pants were damp with sweat. Her heart raced just like it had that day she got lost by the finger puppets so many years ago. She’d heard about people who dreamed that a loved one had died and awoke to find it true. What about dreams where you couldn’t find the person you loved? Did those mean anything? Nina reached for her glasses and started walking down the hall in the dark to check on her father. But the distance seemed too far. Soon she was running, her panic growing with each step.
When she got to her father’s bedroom, she knew something was wrong. The panic snapped from synapse to synapse, filling her brain, her body. Her father wasn’t breathing. His chest wasn’t rising. It wasn’t falling. He was still. So still.
> “Dad!” she yelled, the way she had at the Holiday Market. “Dad!”
She ran to his bed, tears already falling. “Dad, no. No. You can’t.” Her hands were on his cheeks, then pushing on his chest, trying to get his heart to start again. “No! What if I need you to find me?”
But she knew. She knew, like she knew every contour of his face, that he’d never be able to find her again.
25
After Carlos wrote down a time of death that Nina knew might have been off by minutes or hours, she wasn’t sure what to do. All she could think about was an article she’d once read about a doctor from Massachusetts who did an experiment in which he tried to figure out definitively if human beings had souls. He put a dying man on a table and measured his weight constantly in the hours before he died. At the moment of death, the man lost three quarters of an ounce. The doctor posited that the three quarters of an ounce was his soul departing his body.
Tim had sent her the article when they were in college. Comforting? he’d written as the subject of the e-mail. Nina had done a bit more research and discovered that the doctor, who had conducted the experiment in 1911, had never been able to replicate it exactly. She’d figured, at the time, that there was probably another explanation for the three quarters of an ounce.
But now, sitting in the room with her father who was no longer breathing, she wondered. Was there such a thing as a soul? Was his soul floating out of his body right now? Was it in the room? In the air? Was she breathing in the essence of her father’s life at that very moment?
“I’m supposed to call the hospice center,” Carlos said to her. “But no one has to come for him until you’re ready. You tell me how long you want and that’s when I’ll tell them to come.”
Nina looked at Carlos, her mind blank. What was the correct answer to that question? How long was appropriate? Nina looked over at her father. He was the one she would have asked.
She had the urge to brush his hair before anyone else saw him. Maybe give him a haircut. She’d never given anyone a haircut before. Not even herself. Most kids at some point took scissors to their hair, but she never had. Did you need special scissors to cut hair?
Carlos was looking at her, waiting for her to say something.
“I’m sorry,” Nina said; her mind felt like it was in disarray, like someone had rifled through its compartments and left everything in the wrong place. “What did you ask?”
“Do you want to call someone?” Carlos asked. “It might be good for you to have someone else here with you now.”
Nina nodded. But she didn’t do anything. She didn’t go back to her room to get her phone. The thought of explaining why she was calling, of saying the words out loud, paralyzed her.
“Your boyfriend maybe?” Carlos asked.
Nina nodded again.
“You should go get your phone,” he added. “And call him.”
This time Nina left the room. She dialed Tim as she walked back to her father’s room. But his phone went right to voice mail. She hung up and switched to text. My dad is—she couldn’t bring herself to drop her thumb on top of the d—gone, she finished, the phone blurring in front of her, her nose running. She wanted to add that she needed him. That she was alone. She’d never felt this alone in her life. That her mother’s ring didn’t matter. The romance didn’t either. Or Per Se. They should get married right now.
But she said nothing. He said nothing.
Her phone was silent. Where the hell was he?
“He’s not there,” Nina told Carlos, trying to swallow back her tears but failing, panic fluttering against her ribs.
“Okay,” Carlos said. “Here’s what we’ll do. I’m going to leave the room and make some phone calls. You can stay here with your father if you want, or you can go to your bedroom or sit on the couch or take a walk or call a good friend, whatever feels right. And I’ll tell them we need a few hours.”
Nina nodded. She took a deep breath. Carlos left the room. And Nina walked over to her father. She smoothed his hair into the left part that he preferred. She buttoned the top button of his pajamas that had come loose, exposing the sparse white hair on his chest. Tears filling her eyes, she leaned over and kissed the gray stubble on his cheek.
“You have no idea how much I’m going to miss you,” she said quietly. And then she cried harder knowing he’d never know she’d said that.
26
Nina sat with her father, holding his hand, which seemed to feel colder and colder as time passed—though she wasn’t sure if that was actually happening or was just what her brain expected to happen. A line from Laberinto de la soledad, which she had studied in college and read many times since, kept running through her mind: La soledad es el hecho más profundo de la condición humana. El hombre es el único ser que sabe que está solo. It felt like it was on repeat, first in Spanish, and then in English, over and over: Solitude is the profoundest fact of the human condition. Man is the only being who knows he is alone. She just felt so alone.
After a while, she looked at the clock. 3:40 A.M. She knew Leslie kept her ringer off at night but dialed her anyway, just in case she happened to be awake. She wasn’t. Nina hung up before she could hear Leslie’s voice telling her to leave a message. She should call TJ, she realized, since he knew what was supposed to happen next—what her dad wanted to be buried in, who was supposed to get the Gregory Corporation’s press release, what it was supposed to say, which picture should be attached.
Nina looked at the clock again. She could give TJ a few more hours. Let him at least get a good night’s sleep before he had to deal with the death of his best friend for the past fifty years.
She pulled out her phone and instead sent an e-mail to Rafael and Jane with a subject line that said My Dad. The body text said: Nothing’s public yet, but I won’t be at work today. Hopefully she’d be able to finish out the campaign, get Rafael to election day. It was only seven weeks away. Maybe she could do that and take over her dad’s role at the Gregory Corporation at the same time. Would it be that hard to juggle them both? She’d counted on more time. But she shouldn’t have. She was smarter than that.
As she was trying to figure everything out, her phone rang. Rafael O’Connor-Ruiz calling, it said on the screen. She had never spoken to Rafael on the phone before. He had seen her e-mail and called her. The fact that he cared enough to do that made Nina’s throat feel full.
“Hi,” she said, trying to disguise her tears.
“Nina, Nina,” he said.
“It’s me,” she said, wiping her nose with the bottom of her T-shirt.
“I don’t sleep . . . I never sleep these days, but most people do, so I just wanted to make sure . . . is someone there with you?”
“Carlos,” she answered. “My father’s nurse. He’s calling the hospice and I think the mortuary to come get—” But she couldn’t finish the sentence. She tried, but it was impossible.
“Do you want me to come over? If you need someone, I can.”
Nina thought about how nice it would be to have him there, to have someone she could lean on, someone whose opinions she could ask. But regardless of whatever connection they had, he was her boss, nothing more.
“That’s such a nice offer,” she said, “but you don’t have to come.” She paused for a moment, afraid this meant she’d have to hang up, afraid she’d be alone again. “Maybe we could stay on the phone, though.”
“Whatever you want, Palabrecita,” he said. “I know how awful it is to lose a parent. Do you want me to talk? Do you want to?”
Nina sat down at the table where she and Tim had eaten dinner. She couldn’t bring herself to leave her father’s body alone. She remembered the night she and Leslie drove from Connecticut to eastern Massachusetts when Leslie’s mother had died. They’d joined Leslie’s father and her three sisters as they sat in the funeral home, staying with Leslie’s mother’s body
. It was a Jewish custom called shemira that Nina hadn’t known about before. Leslie hadn’t either—her family hadn’t been particularly religious while she was growing up, but while her mother was sick, her parents read everything they could about Jewish customs surrounding death and dying. And Leslie’s mom decided that she wanted her family to observe shemira, to sit with her from the time she died until the time she was buried the next day, keeping watch, not abandoning her before she was brought to her new home at the cemetery. There was something initially horrifying about sitting and talking near Leslie’s mother’s dead body—Nina had never seen her own mother after she’d died—but then somehow it became comforting. It had normalized death in a way.
“Have you ever spent the night in a funeral home?” Nina asked Rafael.
“Can’t say I have,” Rafael said. “Have you?”
“Mm-hm,” Nina said. “When my college roommate Leslie’s mom died. It’s a Jewish tradition or maybe more a practice—not one that most people follow.”
“How does it work?” Rafael asked. Nina imagined him relaxed against the pillows in his bed.
“Leslie’s dad said you’re really supposed to pray and read scripture, but we didn’t. Instead we talked about Leslie’s mom. Leslie and her dad and sisters told stories. I told one, too, about how grateful I was for her when Leslie and I moved in together our freshman year. My dad, unsurprisingly, didn’t want to leave. And Leslie’s mom took charge, shepherding him out of the room, convincing him to take her to Mory’s so Leslie and I would have a chance to get to know each other and the people on our floor. It takes a strong personality to boss my father around, and I’d been amazed that she was able to do it after knowing him for only a few hours.”
Nina leaned back in the chair she’d sat down in. It had been Tim’s earlier that night. Forever ago, that was how it felt.
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