At the end of the day, Frank Travis drove back to his place in Queens. It was a narrow home with red-brick steps up to the front door and a clapboard finish on the ground floor. Whenever he pulled onto the driveway and switched off the engine, he could see the echoes of the family that had once lived here. It had been four years since Mark had got a job on the west coast, two and a half since Gaby had gone to college, and many more since Naomi had told Travis she didn’t want to be with him anymore, yet the reminders of them all remained.
Inside, the kitchen felt the same as it always did: in all the time he’d been living here, he’d barely changed a thing, not only because the cabinets and countertops were fine but because there were memories in all of it. A scratch next to the sink where, as a teenager, Mark hadn’t used a cutting board. A hollow impression in the drywall where the kids had been fighting. Tiny pen marks, all the way up the door frame, where Travis had measured their heights every year until, suddenly, they were adults and gone. One of the many reasons Naomi had given for leaving – other than a two-year affair – was Travis’s total lack of interest in maintaining the house. But the truth was, Travis wasn’t disinterested in home improvement, or incapable, it had just never seemed important. At the end of every shift, he was beat, mentally and physically, his head filled with images he’d have given anything not to carry, so the idea of pouring the same energy into hanging a blind just didn’t compute. In all his years as a cop, he’d never been able to forget what he saw on the job. So when he got home, all he ever cared about was hugging his kids.
Upstairs, he showered and changed, and then – as the snow started to fall again outside – he grabbed his cell and sent messages to Mark and Gaby. Mark was working in LA, doing something with video games that Travis didn’t understand; Gaby was in her final year at Northwestern studying drama.
Once the texts were sent, he went to his voicemail and finally listened to the message Naomi had left him earlier. ‘It’s me,’ she said, the sing-song quality of her South Carolina accent deliberately subdued. ‘You still owe me the money for Gaby’s last semester. I cut you some slack because I know you’re struggling financially –’ she pitched those last five words as exactly what they were: a putdown ‘– but my patience only stretches so far, Frank. You owe me that money. Don’t force me to give Nat Stramer a call.’
Nat Stramer was her lawyer.
She was part of the reason Travis was still a detective, even into his fifty-ninth year: he’d originally retired at forty-five, after twenty-four years on the force, and had taken his pension while working a second career in security. But then the security firm had gone bankrupt and Naomi filed for divorce. A year after that, thanks to the efforts of Nat Stramer, Travis was ordered to pay his ex-wife one-half of the amount that his pension fund had accrued during the time they were married, and that was why he’d returned to the NYPD – just not in Homicide this time, in Missing Persons.
His cellphone buzzed, a message from Gaby popping up.
Hey Dad. All good here. You wanna chat? x
He dialled her straight back. ‘Hey, kiddo,’ he said, when she answered. ‘I don’t want to stop you if you’re in the middle of something,’ but the second he said it, he thought, Please don’t be in the middle of something. He wanted to talk to her. He missed both of his kids desperately.
‘No, it’s cool, Dad. What you up to?’
‘Oh, not much,’ he said, relieved. ‘Just chilling out at home. I can’t wait to see you over Christmas.’
‘Me too. Are you by yourself tonight?’
‘No, I’ve got some friends coming over later,’ he lied, because he knew if he told her he was alone again, she’d worry, and he didn’t need her mind on anything but the last months of her degree.
Even so, Gaby said, ‘I worry about you in that house by yourself. Why don’t you let me set you up on a dating site? You’d be a great catch.’
‘That’s sweet, honey.’
‘I mean it. I just want you to be happy.’
Seven words that stopped him dead.
He swallowed, suddenly overwhelmed by her comment, the kindness in it. He thought of all the times he’d sat on the porch in the backyard and watched Gaby and her brother play, and the moments in their teens, even as they’d argued with him, even as they’d stormed off after a fight, when Travis would think, I don’t want them to get any older. I don’t want them to leave. My kids and my work, they’re all I have. It’s all I am.
Maybe it’s all I’ll ever be.
The woman stared at the television without really taking in what was on. In her hands she played with a photograph, moving it between her fingers.
‘You want some more wine?’
Axel’s voice pulled her out of her thoughts.
‘No,’ she replied, still moving the photograph in her fingers. She could see Axel looking more closely at her now, at the picture she was holding. ‘I’m good,’ she said. ‘You go on to bed if you like.’
Axel nodded, but didn’t move.
‘Are you sure you’re okay?’ he asked her. She looked at him properly this time, and he must have seen the answer, because as soon as he did, he was nodding again. ‘I’ll see you in the morning, then.’
She watched him go, watched him look back at her from the bottom of the stairs, worry in his face, and then he ascended into the darkness. She listened to him moving around above her, floorboards creaking, and then her attention returned to the photograph she was holding.
Taken on the front steps of a house in south Brooklyn, maybe ten years ago, it was a snapshot of a family.
A father.
His two sons.
And his daughter.