Van and I drove back to Colette’s the next morning. The three of us spent the day in the living room, reading and watching movies. It was beautiful outside, but the house contained us and our grief. After dinner, Van played Angry Birds on his phone and I sat beside him on his bed, leaning against the wall and turning the tie rack over in my hands. It occurred to me there could be something hidden inside it—maybe the tie rack was part of an elaborate mystery; maybe my father had been a secret agent, secretly. A secret secret agent. There might be a scroll of paper inside, or a microfilm. A message for me. What did a microfilm even look like? And why was it sometimes called microfiche? I started going down that rabbit hole as I hacked at the tie rack with a spare pen.
Van tapped my arm, took the tie rack away from me, and used his thumbnail to pry open the catch at the back. He held the halves together for a moment before separating them, and I drew in a breath. But inside was just a hollow, empty space. I felt something that seemed less like disappointment and more like heartbreak. I didn’t want to let it show, to seem like a crazy person who would search anywhere, everywhere, for an answer to a question about her father, the question of why I wasn’t important to him, a mystery that would be of no interest to anyone else on earth. Instead, I just shrugged, then closed the two halves back up again, like a surgeon who has taken a peek inside a patient and realized that nothing can be done.
Van tapped out a text message to me. Who were those two people at that house we stopped at? he wrote. They weren’t really your friends
When I didn’t answer right away, Van grasped my upper arm.
I texted back. They knew Dad. I thought he left them the baseball but I was wrong
Not for them?
No. Don’t tell your mom ok?
Colette appeared in the doorway. “There you are,” she said. She plopped down on Van’s other side, and he mashed his face into her collarbone. They entwined easily while I sat separately, the sole issue of my father’s failed first marriage.
“Your father had such nice hair.” Colette tucked Van’s hair behind his ears. “Short here and with a little length here.” I could hear the sadness stoppering her throat. With a cough, she cleared it away. “But he was so handsome. Those green eyes.”
From downstairs came the sound of a woman selling earrings on television, cutting shrill and clean in the summer dark. “These are real opals, folks!”
Colette signed a phrase that involved a toothbrushing motion. Van screwed up his face and crawled over her toward the bathroom. She leaned back against the wall and shut her eyes.
“I am so tired, Ellie,” she said. “I read somewhere that grief is like one of those devices that pull the sap out of a tree to make maple syrup. And your energy is the sap.”
“Where did you read that?”
She thought for a moment. “Maybe I made it up,” she said. “I can’t even remember anymore, that’s how tired I am. But it’s how I feel.”
When Van returned, he was holding scissors. He’d cut his bangs so short that what was left stood up in little blond nubs. “Colette.” I nudged her. “Look.”
“Oh!” Colette gasped. “Oh wow. Oh gosh. That’s okay!” she said. Her voice was bright, but as she signed to Van she sank slowly on the bed until she was curled up. Van’s smile dissolved.
I hugged him, my way of trying to tell him it was all right, and took the scissors downstairs, hiding them in one of the drawers of Dad’s desk underneath a bottle of screen cleaner and an empty tin of Altoids. In a little while I would drive back to D.C., fall asleep in my own bed, far away from here. Tomorrow I would go to work. I would try to write a story that cracked open and shimmered, illuminating some dark and unknown place. I would force myself to get on with my life. To matter to myself, if not to my dad. I wanted a weekend with Lucas. I wanted my career to skyrocket. I wanted to be out by the moon.
Colette and I sat cross-legged on the sofa, drinking wine. She was wearing an oversized T-shirt, my father’s flannel bathrobe, and, for some reason, purple lipstick. It was nine o’clock on Sunday night.
“I’ve got to get going. I have work tomorrow.” I put my glass down.
“Stay with us. It’s late already. You could drive home early in the morning?”
I rubbed my neck, considering. “Yeah. Okay.”
She removed the wine bottle from where it was resting in the crook of her arm to pour more. “I don’t usually drink like this. Everything is just so insane. That haircut.” She shook her head. “How does Van seem to you?”
“I’m not sure. I didn’t really know him well enough before…” I trailed off.
Colette gave me a weak smile.
“He’s smart,” I continued. “Really smart and nice. He’ll get through this.”
Colette didn’t look convinced. After all, what did being smart or nice have to do with managing grief? I thought of all of us with little holes drilled in us, our energy gushing out, rendering us empty and dumb. I was the intellectual one, the writer, confident that my father had expected me to take up his mantle. Colette was…wifty. My half-sisters, Sadie and Anna, were at the self-involved stage of teenagerhood. Van was a child. I would keep my father’s baseball, and through my reporting I would try to make his name resound.
But the baseball wasn’t mine; I had been given a novelty tie rack. I had a job because I’d flattered the male CEO; I had a lover because I was young and feisty. What did being smart and nice have to do with anything?
“Ellie, I have to ask you something.” Colette put her hand on top of mine. “Did you take Jim’s baseball?”
“Did Van tell you that?”
“No, I noticed it was gone. I have to get it to that guy, L. M. Taylor.”
Angry heat rose to my face. “How do you know it’s a guy?”
“Doesn’t L. M. Taylor sound like a man’s name? Why would your dad leave his baseball to some woman?”
Poor Colette, I thought. Of course he would have left his baseball to a woman. The surprise to me was that L. M. Taylor might be a man.
“I was just looking at the cutest photo of Jim in his baseball uniform in his old yearbook,” she said. “He was buff!”
“Did Dad ever mention knowing the poet Romley Cass?”
Colette looked at me and my stomach sank. Then she shook her head. “I don’t think so. But we have some of his books lying around.”
We were quiet for a minute, sipping from our glasses. Out the window, the garage light shone in a perfect circle on the grass. “I want to tell you what I learned today,” Colette said finally. “I talked to a shaman I found online through a friend. The shaman said your father can contact us through portals. I know it sounds crazy, but hear me out. This woman wrote a book about her experiences channeling the dead, called The Shaman Inside You, and in it she talks all about how spirits make contact through flickering lights and phones. Messages. I have to show this to you.” She reached into the pocket of Dad’s bathrobe and pulled out her cell phone. “Look.”
At first I didn’t understand what I was seeing. Then I realized it was a series of automated messages telling her to update her Facebook password. The messages had long strings of numbers in them, as though displaying errors in the computer code.
Colette’s eyes welled with tears. “It’s your father,” she said hoarsely.
“Dad wouldn’t contact us through Facebook.”
“He’s using what’s available to him.”
“He was an intellectual and an artist. He thought Facebook was stupid.”
She waved away my statement with her wineglass hand. “I want to figure out what he’s trying to tell me.”
“He’s dead,” I said. “He’s not trying to tell you anything.”
Colette stood up. When she drew the robe around her, her breasts rose and tightened. She was still a young woman, I thought; she could remarry. She could have another husband. But I would never have another father. Out of this new sense of victimhood, my anger dissipated. “Colette, wait. I’m sorry.”
She kissed my cheek on her way out. “Everyone is tired, not just me. Tomorrow I’ll order you a copy of that book. I’m going to see that shaman woman soon. Maybe you’ll come with me.”
On the couch downstairs, I tried to sleep. I thought about how teacups shattered but did not reassemble, eggs could be scrambled but not unscrambled. People died but did not undie. Entropy—the disorder in a system—always increased. I’d learned this in Mr. Vinokurov’s eleventh-grade physics class, which I had nearly failed for being unable to design a contraption out of wooden dowels and a stocking that could prevent a raw egg from cracking when dropped from the ceiling. I’d remembered the bit about entropy, though. It seemed so indulgent and perfect, the idea that the world created ever more disorder.
I heaved off the sheets and got up for a drink of water. The night-light in the bathroom was throwing dinosaur-shaped shadows over the sink. Colette had blotted on a stiff piece of paper towel that had missed the wastebasket—there were purple lips on the floor.
“Dad, I miss you,” I said, speaking in the direction of the night-light, but it didn’t flicker. “I loved you blindly. And now I have this insulting gift.”
I took his high school yearbook, The Castle Hill Moat, with me on my way back to the couch and lingered over the page with my father’s baseball team. I was sure I’d seen this years earlier, but now I started poring over all the names, searching for an L. M. Taylor. In the back row, far from my father, third from the left, there was a Larry Taylor, a shortstop. He wasn’t tall like my dad, but he was uncommonly handsome, with a strong jaw and long dark hair, typical of its time, and a sensitive-looking face. Could this Larry Taylor be the L. M. Taylor from the will? It was such a common-sounding name, but baseball was the common ingredient.
It was probably demented to search this way, but I did it anyway. I ran an image search under “Larry M. Taylor,” and dozens of men came up. Men at Ford dealerships, school superintendents, men who had died tragically in a fire. There was one, a manager at Metro Central Bank in Crosskeys, Maryland, whose face looked like the face of the shortstop in that long-ago photo. He was still beautiful—age hadn’t changed that. It was him. I slapped the laptop screen down as if I’d been burned.
In the swimming lavender darkness, from the lumpy sofa, my fingers felt for the zipper on my purse, found their way to the baseball. I tossed it into the air and waited for it to return and smack the skin of my living hand.
When I opened the laptop again, a few quick searches produced an email address. It was the middle of the night. I wrote:
To: L. M. Taylor
From: Eleanor Adler
Subject: bequest
Dear L. M. Taylor,
You don’t know me, but I’m the daughter of James Adler, the poet. I understand that you may have been friends with him when you were young. He died recently, and he left you something in his will, an object that was important to him. I see that you work in Crosskeys. I’m in D.C. Could I meet you for a cup of coffee? I’d love to give it to you in person.
Sincerely,
Eleanor
I pressed send and lay back on the pillow. Every so often the ceiling above my head buzzed; Colette had left her cell phone on the floor. I imagined the messages she was receiving, thinking they were from my father, the strings of numbers lighting up the bedroom where he once breathed and slept and read a biography of Bruce Springsteen and made love and blew his nose and whispered good night and listened to the thump of his own heart beating.