The Last Thing He Told Me

After all, this is what I thought I knew. Twenty-eight months ago a man walked into my workshop in New York City wearing a sports jacket and Converse sneakers. On the way to the theater that night, he took me to dinner at a small tapas restaurant on Tenth Avenue, and he started to tell me the story of his life. It began in Newton, Massachusetts, and included four years at Newton High followed by four years at Princeton University, a move to Seattle, Washington, with his college sweetheart, and then a move to Sausalito, California, with his daughter. There were three jobs and two degrees and one wife before me, who he’d lost in a car accident. It was a car accident he could barely talk about more than a decade later, his face cloudy and dark. Then there was his daughter. The highlight of his story—the highlight of his life—his headstrong, inimitable daughter. He moved with her to a small town in Northern California because she’d pointed to it on a map. And said, let’s try there. And that was something he could give her.

This is what his daughter thought she knew. She’d spent the majority of her life in Sausalito, California, in a floating home with a father who never missed a soccer game or a school play. There were Sunday night dinners at restaurants of her choosing, and a weekly trip to the movies. There were lots of jaunts to San Francisco museums, plenty of neighborhood potlucks, and the annual barbecue. She didn’t remember their life before Sausalito, except in vague snapshots: a birthday party with a great magician; a trip to the circus where she cried at the clown; a wedding somewhere in Austin, Texas. Bailey filled in the blanks with what her father told her. Why wouldn’t she? That’s how you fill in the blanks—with stories and memories from the people who love you.

If they lie to you, like he did, who are you then? Who is he? The person you thought you knew, your favorite person, starts to disappear, a mirage, unless you convince yourself the parts that matter are still true. The love was true. His love is true. Because, if it isn’t, the other option is that it was all a lie, and what are you supposed to do with that? What are you supposed to do with any of this? How do you put the pieces together so he doesn’t disappear completely?

So his daughter doesn’t feel like she is going to disappear completely too?

* * *

Bailey wakes up, shortly after midnight.

She rubs her eyes. Then she looks over to find me sitting in the crappy hotel desk chair, watching her.

“Did I fall asleep?” she says.

“You did.”

“What time is it?” she says.

“Late. You should go back to bed.”

She sits up. “It’s kind of hard with you staring at me,” she says.

“Bailey, did you ever visit your father’s childhood home in Boston?” I say. “Did he ever take you to see his house?”

She looks at me confused. “Like where he grew up?”

I nod.

“No. He never took me to Boston. He barely went back there himself.”

“And you never met your grandparents?” I say. “You never spent any time with them?”

“They died before I was born,” she says. “You know that. What’s going on?”

Who is going to fill in this blank for her? This kind of hole? I don’t know where to start.

“Are you hungry?” I say. “You must be hungry. You barely touched your dinner. And I’m famished.”

“Why? You ate both our dinners all on your own.”

r /> “Get dressed, okay?” I say. “Would you get dressed?”

She looks at the fluorescent hotel radio-clock. “It’s midnight,” she says.

I put a sweater on and toss her sweatshirt to her. She looks down at it, splayed across her legs, her Converse sneakers peeking out beneath the hood.

She pulls the sweatshirt over her head, pushing the hood all the way down until her purple hair is sticking out.

“Can I at least get a beer?” she says.

“Absolutely not.”

“I have a fake ID that says otherwise,” she says.

“Please get dressed,” I say.

* * *