The Last Thing He Told Me

“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.