it again before I can say, “My…father?”
He narrows his eyes at me. Then his face transforms into a look of horror.
“Christopher, what are you telling me about my father?”
Now it’s his turn to pale. He backs out of the office, muttering something about “can’t believe it.”
I cut out of work an hour early, waiting till I’m in my black car to give myself over to my feelings. I pull up a picture of a linen hanky I found once on Reddit when I googled “Arnoldi family.” Someone uploaded it, claiming to be a housekeeper of the deceased elder Arnoldi. I stare at the “A” on it, and stare and stare some more, as the car drives me to my father’s place. But I don’t need to look hard. I’ve seen this “A” my entire life. Because there’s a handkerchief that looks identical to this one framed atop my father’s desk.
I shut my eyes and think of Isa—how her eyes look just like mine. I noticed it in high school, how she wore the same eyeshadow palette I did…because we had the same color eyes. Brown like autumn, almost amber. Then I’d started noting her eyebrows, and how their curve looked so much like my own. It seemed crazy, because Isa was so beautiful. But I thought about it, and I thought about my father calling me cara, and I remember for a time I really thought my dad was “in the mafia.” That’s why I’d been snooping in the Columbus Building that night that I encountered Luca.
My heart flutters at the base of my throat as I ride the elevator to my father’s floor and march to his door, knocking hard.
It takes him a while to open for me. When he does, I can see from his face that he’s been forewarned.
“Daddy, I need to come in.”
He hangs his head. “I know.”
10
Elise
As it turns out, it’s not something I can talk about. With anybody. It’s…hard to explain. So I decide not to try.
What I do is pack my bags on Thursday night, so after work on Friday, I can head for Saranac Lake. It’s a long drive—between five and six hours, depending. I’m not sure what possessed my parents to buy seven acres with a house and two fishing cabins so far from Manhattan. But nobody asked me. No one asked me about a lot of things.
I’m rolling over the George Washington Bridge by six p.m., firing up one of my favorite fury albums, Jagged Little Pill, as I fly up the Northway. I’m breathing a little easier when I stop to get some matcha tea just outside Albany.
The last two and a half hours of the drive tend to be soothing, reminding me of childhood since I almost never come upstate except to relax at the cabin. The little cabin on the south side of the property is all we own now.
When I was young, my parents had the house, a simple, whitewashed two-story, retrofitted for Becca’s gear. That year after she died, we sold the white house at Saranac and our residence in lower Manhattan. My parents moved into a smaller place, closer to Wall Street. For years, I didn’t even know we still had one of the cabins; for that reason, Saranac is not a place that I associate with fresh grief.
Finally, the summer after my sophomore year of college, I was having migraines, and Dad mentioned it. Each cabin sits on about two acres, and each one has access to Lake Flower. I decided to spend a few weeks. The second week there, Dani and Ree joined me, bringing this ridiculous grocery store bakery cake that was probably intended to feed an entire football team. We stuffed our faces sitting in the Adirondack chairs in the warm grass beside the water, holding fishing poles sometimes and other times just watching them bob.
Fireflies danced all through the woods. One morning, from the screened porch on the front, we saw a deer eating a mushroom. I remember Dani drove the two of us to the hardware store, bought some tools, and fixed the porch swing sitting in a dusty corner of the attic. And there we stayed together for the next two weeks.
In many ways, we were coming back to one another. Ree had been at NYU and Dani at Bard College. The prior year, Dani and I had had a falling out at a bar. I was drunk, and she said she was sorry that she hadn’t