Sheet Music I get on the subway, decide to head home. As I squeeze onto the corner bench, I pull out the blue folder. I start scanning the documents. There’s a copy of my father’s will inside, the deed for Windbreak, the full-page obituary that ran about my father in the New York Times. All the documents that, because there was no funeral, I haven’t had to deal with yet. My father had wanted to be cremated, his ashes strewn across Windbreak, down into the ocean below. My uncle Joe was in charge of making that happen. I pull out the obituary (the one document I’ve read before), focusing on the photograph of my father. He is standing with his arms crossed, on top of a lush hill, the San Ysidro mountains behind him. The caption beneath the photograph reads: Liam Samuel Noone, founder of Noone Properties & Resorts, photographed at his flagship hotel, The Ranch. An asterisk next to my father’s name explains that Noone is pronounced like noon (the time of day) and not pronounced like no one. Though I know my father liked that people got the pronunciation wrong sometimes. No one Properties, he would joke, could not be a more perfect place for someone to es cape. I zero in on the photograph. My father looks strong, intense, and virile against the mountains cape backdrop. I’m not surprised that this is the photograph the newspaper used. For one thing, The Ranch was the first property my father built after taking over at Hayes. And this photograph leans into the mythical quality of how my father’s rags-to-riches rise is often described: Liam Noone—Brooklyn born, the only child of Irish and Russian immigrants, his father a plumber and his mother, his father’s bookke eper. He was the first person in his family to go to college, let alone to attend Yale University, where he graduated first in his class, earning his MBA at Columbia, where he finished in the top three. He took a job out of business school as director of operations at Hayes Hotels, a family-run hotel chain, which had five properties along the eastern seaboard. An odd choice, one might think, to sign on to such a small operation. An odd choice to acc ept a position that was far less lucrative than entry level at any of the big consulting firms or fancy investment banks courting top students to join their ranks. But when Walter Hayes died, he left the company to my father (“the most exacting young executive he’d worked with in forty-eight years”), and my father went on to turn the small hotel chain into the most sought- after luxury boutique hotel and resort empire in North America, with thirty five-star properties, eighteen more under development. A billion-dollar empire. He turned himself into an extremely wealthy man in the process. A mostly anonymous wealthy man who never wanted to be the face of the brand, letting his properties speak for themselves. Each of the properties had its own special story—its own mythical creation that made people long to stay there. Bucket-list properties that, Liam Noone worked tirelessly to ensure, always overdelivered. I turn to the final paragraph, which focuses on his personal life, highlighting that my father was survived by his children: a daughter from his first marriage, two sons from his second. There is no mention of his wives (or that they are now all ex-wives), which would be how my father wanted it. My father was married three times, but he never really got divorced. Even after he and my mother ended their marriage, he was a regular fixture in our home. He worked hard to maintain a good relationship with me and insisted it should disrupt my life as little as possible. It wasn’t just about me, though. My father wanted to disrupt his life—all of his lives—as little as possible too: the one with my mother and me that he was trying to
preserve; his life with his new family; and, then, the even newer family. It was as if he could only figure out a way for his worlds to never intersect; then he could get to pretend he was solely living inside each of them. I wasn’t mad at him for this when I was growing up, especially because I had a great childhood with my mother in Croton-on-Hudson. I loved our farmhouse and my friends at school—and the history of our small, sweet town, including the pride everyone took in the downtown “dummy light,” the oldest traffic light in America. And I didn’t have any desire to spend my time shuttling to my father’s New York City penthouse and a st epmother who didn’t have any interest in my being there. But even though I loved my father de eply, there is a limit to how much time you can spend with someone who compartmentalizes his life like that. We had our Friday nights together—and if I had a school play, or an art show, he rarely missed it. But he spent much of the rest of the time with the other families and in the other worlds he occupied. Worlds he also needed to tend to, worlds that I knew almost nothing about. This is one of the reasons why I’m stunned at how hard a time I’m having on the other side of his death. I’m not surprised that it’s painful, of course, but it’s staggering how de eply whipped I feel by the loss of him. It doesn’t help that my father and I had been somewhat estranged since my mother’s death last year. After losing her, I started pulling away from him. Maybe part of that was that she died so suddenly—a shocking bicycle accident during her usual evening ride home. A trucker who failed to turn on his headlights. And, like that, I was without her. My most important person. My mother used to say that what you did first thing in the morning was what was most significant to you. While I was growing up, the first thing we did every morning was spend time together. Real time, uninterrupted time. We’d get up with the sun still rising and take a walk into town, head to the bakery when it opened for fresh bread and hot chocolate, sit by the river and talk. We k ept up our morning ritual even after I left home for college—my phone ringing every morning at 8:00 a. m., wherever we both were in the world, so we could talk on my way to class, and then on my way to work, so we could have a coffee together, if a virtual one. So she could provide me with her daily reminder that nothing mattered to her more than I did. How can I explain the way her loss has broken me open? I’ve spent the last fourteen months looking at my phone at 8:00 a. m. every morning, willing it to ring again. In the aftermath, I’ve felt a twisted, long overdue loyalty to her—especially when it came to my father. I couldn’t seem to help it, even knowing my mother never harbored any anger toward him herself. My own anger may not seem to make a lot of sense, then. Part of it was that he tried to take on a more daily role in my life (something he’d never had), which only exasperated my feeling that the wrong person was doing it. The other part was a strange side effect of my grief—the unmitigated grief I felt since losing my mother. It had suddenly felt wrong to allow my father to occupy any emotional terrain in her absence. So I left the space empty, digging into that parental void on my own. Hurtling myself toward a simple, impossible mission: I could ke ep her as close as when she was alive. Now that my father is gone too, I can’t deny that I was on the wrong mission. The distance I k ept from him didn’t bring her back any more than it softened the pain of losing him now. Where does that leave me, though? What good is knowing that you were wrong when there is no one left to hear you say that you’re sorry? The subway lurches forward, then stops completely, the lights going out. An irritated murmur fills the car, but I feel relieved that, as my eyes fill with tears, no one else can see.
When I get off the subway, it’s started to snow. I live so far out in Brooklyn that my subway stop is aboveground, snowflakes starting to stick to my coat— to my skin—as soon as I st ep outside. I love everything about my neighborhood, even how long it takes to get here. It’s an area of Flatbush called Ditmas Park. It is historic Brooklyn—more small town than major city—with quiet streets, dogwood trees, old Victorian houses. A professor of mine in architecture school lived in one of those houses and rented me a room on a sliding scale. When her husband ended up taking a job in Northern California and she moved out west to join him, she let me lease the whole house until I could put together enough money to buy it from her. My house is a mint-green Victorian, complete with its original staircase and stained-glass windows, its parquet floors. Pocket doors. Boxed vegetable gardens in the backyard. I feel a surge of relief as my block of Marlborough Road comes into view, the respite of my home in striking distance. But tonight, instead of heading that way, I follow the Christmas lights on Cortelyou Road into the heart of Ditmas Park’s restaurants and bars—and my favorite local restaurant, Sheet Music, the name (and the small wooden sign hanging above the door) a relic from when it was a guitar shop. Now its chef serves wood-fired pizza and elevated farm-to-table comfort food in a space I designed with him. The two of us reimagined the main room together, working to incorporate contemporary details—plaster walls, a stainless-steel canopy over a central dining counter, vintage chairs—while maintaining its former life as a music store, highlighting the tin ceilings and the baby grand piano, brown and lush, in the restaurant’s far corner. The restaurant was (and is) a passion project of mine. This makes more sense when you know the chef is also my fiancé, Jack. I take the side gate and walk around back to the service entrance, peeking into the dining room as I walk past. It’s bustling and full, music se eping out through the windows, the lights low and inviting. It’s Friday night, which—at least in our little corner of the world—is the busiest night of the week: first dates (and last dates), after-work cocktails, parents wanting a New York City night cap before disappearing into their family weekends. I pull open the back door and st ep into the steamy kitchen, laying eyes on Jack at his station. He is wearing his chef whites and a San Francisco Giants baseball cap, his handsome face (my favorite face) sweaty and focused. I breathe easier just at the sight of him, my heartbeat picking up. It’s the same weird combination of elation and calmness that comes over me whenever I see him at the end of a long day, taking in his skin and his hands and that face. Even now. Even still. Jack is a year and change into being my fiancé, but he started off as my boyfriend more than twenty-five years ago; though, admittedly, boyfriend is overstating what we were to each other. He sat in front of me in eighth grade woodshop. I don’t remember actively clocking that he was cute, even though he was really cute: tall and lanky with curly hair and dark eyes. What I remember about him, though, was how he carried himself. Even if I didn’t know how to name it, I could feel how comfortable he was in his own skin. He was sure of himself in a way that most eighth grade boys weren’t. In a way that, I’d come to learn, a lot of grown men weren’t. He made it clear in how he spoke. His voice was gentle and kind and fleshy, like he belonged on the radio as opposed to sitting on a wooden bench in last period. Like he was only going to speak if he was certain that what he was saying was true.
It made me like being around him. It made me want to be around him more. I think this is why (though I’m not sure we really ever know why) I did something completely out of character for my eighth grade self. I tapped him on the shoulder and asked him if he wanted to come get some ice cream with me after class. Does that count as asking someone on a date? It was certainly the closest I’d ever come in my thirteen years on the planet. Jack, to his credit, didn’t make it the least bit weird, even though that was the first time in his thirteen years anyone had asked. Sure... he said, as though his cheeks weren’t turning red. I like ice cream. That afternoon, we biked to the A&P and ate our cookies and cream waffle cones by the river. It was one of a handful of outings before his family moved out west to Mill Valley, a small town just north of San Francisco. We didn’t see each other again until we were adults. I was on a first date at a much-discussed restaurant near Madison Square Park with a patent lawyer who also happened to be one of the restaurant’s investors. After our meal, he tried to impress me by taking me into the kitchen to meet the chef. Jack was the chef. “Hey, Nora,” he said, as if it had been twenty minutes since we last laid eyes on each other, as opposed to more than twenty years. The next day he found me online and sent a short message. Nice seeing you again. Let me know if you want to get some ice cream. Now, I stand back and watch Jack work. He drizzles some Saba oil onto the crust of his signature pie, which he makes with this incredible strawberry sofrito sauce: a savory mix of garden-grown strawberries and San Marzano tomatoes, balsamic vinegar, onions, and pine nuts. He marinates the sauce for hours until it comes out tasting like the juiciest, richest, tangiest tomato sauce you’ve ever had. It put Sheet Music on the foodie map less than two years after the restaurant’s soft opening, the pizza topping several notable food critics’ lists of must-try dishes. Jack sends the strawberry pizza out for service. Then he looks up and spies me standing there and breaks into a smile. The smile that he reserves for just me: intimate and carnal and focused. How do I explain it? It always makes me feel like he can’t believe I’m his, two and a half years in, twenty-five years in. In the same way I can’t believe he’s mine. I walk over, and he kisses me hello, his warm hand cupping the back of my neck, his breath against my lips. Steadying me. The way only he steadies me. “I didn’t know you were coming in,” he says. I close my eyes as I sink into his skin, take him in. “You okay?” he asks. “Maybe.” He laughs. “Maybe isn’t great.” “Sam Noone came to see me today.” He pulls back and looks at me, confused. “Your brother?” he says. “What did he want?” “Just to catch up, get a coffee... You know, tell me that he thinks someone may have killed our father.” “What?” I nod. “Come with me,” he says. He gently steers me toward his office, motioning to his chef de cuisine, Kayla, that he’ll be back. I lock eyes with her as we pass and try to give her an apologetic smile. The last thing she needs is me interrupting their dinner service. She turns back to her work, not even feigning a smile. She has been annoyed with me since Jack’s good friend from culinary school, Becker, asked him to come and run her restaurant—a two-star Michelin restaurant in Northern California—while she is on maternity leave. It is a position that, if he’d taken it, would have left Kayla in charge of Sheet Music while he was gone. Even though I encouraged Jack to go, Kayla blames me that he decided against it. I think of how absent I’ve been lately. And I wonder if she isn’t wrong. Jack and I fall into lockst ep as we walk into his small office. He closes the door behind us and turns to face me.
“What did he say exactly?” “He’s convinced someone pushed him over the edge...” He looks at me like that’s insane. It’s probably not all that differently from how I was looking at Sam a couple of hours ago. I wait for it to make me feel better—to climb into the comfort of this all being a far-fetched idea. “Is there any reason to believe that?” he asks. “Not really,” I say. “I mean, even if there are some threads I could pull at, my first instinct is that Sam has another agenda here. That this is a money play for him in some way. Or a power grab. Or I don’t know.” “So why do you look like that?” I shake my head. “I just also ke ep coming back to something else.” “Which is?” “Why did he choose to tell me?” Jack takes this in. And I can see that he knows the answer as well as I do. My brother may not know me well, but he knows me well enough to know that I’d have a hard time just letting this go. Maybe I’ve always been like that to a certain degree, but the technical aspect of my job necessitates an intense focus on such sexy details as safety and energy performance and egress. And now I’m unable to ignore it—whether I’m at work or not. I can’t shake a lingering suspicion when something feels off. “He wants me to go with him tomorrow,” I say. “Where?” “To Windbreak.” “Seriously?” “He wants us to take a look around. See if his concerns punch through.” “To California?” he says. His tone mirrors how I’m feeling: this is all a little extreme, for me to fly across the country on a hunch. To fly across the country on someone else’s hunch, someone who I barely know, whose motives are still unclear. “I know it’s insane...” He pauses, considers. “I didn’t say that.” Then he looks at me, that look he gives me when he’s waiting for me to catch up to what he already knows I need to do. The only other person in my life who was able to do that, to know what I needed almost before I did, was my mother. With her it felt like safety —to be seen and understood like that. With Jack, it has always felt that way too. At least it used to. But since losing my father, my connection to Jack (its tenderness, its d epth) has felt like something else. Something closer to a threat. “I’ll go with you,” he says. “If you need to do this, I’ll come.” “I wouldn’t ask you to do that.” I see something pop in Jack’s eyes, the sting of it, the surprise. “Well, you don’t have to ask,” he says. I look down, not saying anything. What is there to say? I know he senses what I haven’t wanted to talk with him about: since my father died, I have k ept Jack at a distance. I have k ept almost everyone at a distance. Closeness, especially closeness to Jack, stings too much. Like my most visceral reminder of what I’ve lost. Of what I stand to lose. Even if Jack gets it, the distance is like its own kind of injury—to him and to me—especially considering that historically and effortlessly, Jack has been the person I most want to reach for. So far, he has refused to punish me for it. He has tried to give me ample room to do what I’m doing. To grieve. He takes my hand and kisses my palm, soft and quick. The safety of his touch, of him, rises up to comfort me, in spite of myself. “I’ll be home later,” he says. “Get some rest.” Then he is opening the office door and heading back to work and away from me. I call out after him. “Jack,” I say. “Wait.” He is just outside the office door. He must hear me. I know he hears me. But he doesn’t turn back, probably because he already knows that if he does, I have nothing else to say. At midnight, I can’t sle ep. Jack is still at the restaurant. I get out of bed and head downstairs to my small home office, roll open the window, the cold flow of air moving me all the way to wide-awake. I take a seat at my drawing table, ready to get to work. I have a proposal due for a project in West Chelsea —a children’s bookstore that two retired book editors are opening near the Highline.
I’m hoping the quiet of the house will help me focus, but I spot the blue folder on the edge of the table and I’m back in my conversation with Sam. I’m circling back through it—trying to make it click into place—when my phone starts buzzing. I look down to see a familiar name splash across my screen, a text coming in from ELLIOT. Can you talk? I push the phone across my table, try to push away the guilt that comes with it. I tell myself Elliot could just be reaching out about Austin. I tell myself it could even be Austin texting me himself—even though I know Austin is not texting, not after midnight. Austin Abrams: eight-year-old piano prodigy, world-class brownie baker, one of my favorite people on the planet. Elliot’s son. Elliot and I started dating four years ago, shortly after he s eparated from Austin’s mother. He moved into the same West Village apartment building as my father. Elliot hadn’t yet gotten Austin a piano for the new apartment, so Austin would do his practice sessions on the old upright in the apartment building lobby after he got home from school, after Elliot got home from the hospital. My father heard him playing one evening and invited Austin and Elliot to use the Steinway grand piano in his apartment instead. They acc epted his offer, happily. And one night, when I went to meet my father for an early dinner, Elliot answered the door. Six-foot-six Elliot in his hoodie and wire-rim glasses, sweet Austin walking up to the door right behind him, the four-foot- four version of his father. Sporting a matching hoodie and glasses. It was easy between us from the jump—easy, if not too intense. I was inundated at my new firm and Elliot was focused on handling his medical practice (he’s a pediatric cardiologist) while navigating his new co- parenting role. I’d joke that we were half dating, half ships passing in the night. That joke hit a nerve, though. One reason he was getting divorced was that his wife felt Elliot was never able to leave the hospital at the hospital. She’d tell me that I was always twenty-five percent absent, he said. I didn’t feel that from him, but it’s possible I was too busy to notice. I was actually so focused on my own work that I decided we should take a st ep back. Not long after that, Austin’s mother decided she wanted another chance to make the marriage work, and I was quick to extricate myself entirely. I wanted nothing to do with ke eping their family apart. Austin wanted me in his life still—a decision that Elliot and I were happy to support—but I stayed in their lives in the gentlest of ways. I’d take Austin for an occasional hot chocolate after school on the days when Elliot was staying at the hospital late; and I’d try to attend his piano recitals, occasionally with my father. I was careful to ke ep the lines clean, even before I started dating Jack. And I was even more careful after Austin’s mother and Elliot s eparated for good. It wasn’t hard to ke ep them clean. That is, until my father died. And Elliot started reaching out. His presence in my life again feels like a balm. Is it just that he knew my father well? That he and my father adored each other? Is there an innocent comfort in that? It doesn’t feel so innocent at 12:08 a. m. It doesn’t feel so innocent when, these days, it feels easier to talk to him than it does to talk to Jack. That’s probably because Jack is the opposite of twenty-five percent absent. He is wholly there. Talking to Jack is too much like looking in the mirror. He sees everything about me. Since losing my father, I see the reflection of it in Jack’s face: the weight behind my eyes, in my skin. I’m a grown woman, but I’m also someone’s child, looking for the parents to whom she didn’t get to say goodbye.
I pick the phone back up. My fingers hover over Elliot’s name, debating whether to r eply. Whether to answer his request to talk. It’s just a phone call. We’re just talking. I r epeat that part to myself, like an anthem. And, still, what kind of anthem do you tell yourself in a whisper? My phone starts buzzing before I hit r eply. An incoming call, the ID coming up UNKNOWN NUMBER. I nearly drop the phone. My first thought is that it’s Elliot calling from the hospital landline. But my second thought fires in before I can stop it. Someone else is hurt. Since the loss of my parents, whenever an unknown call comes up on the caller ID, especially late at night, I’m sure it’s going to be someone else I love in the type of trouble I can’t save them from. I click acc ept. “Did you decide?” Sam’s voice jolts me. “What the hell, Sam? Why are you calling so late?” “Same reason you’re picking up, probably,” he says. “Can’t sle ep.” I close my eyes, irritated, trying to slow my heartbeat. I force myself to take a few de ep breaths, to find my center. “You scared the crap out of me.” He ignores this. “Did you look through the documents yet?” “Some of them.” “And?” I reach for the blue folder and open it back up. The obituary, the will, the rest of it. I flip to the Windbreak deed, pull it out. My father’s signature stares back at me, stamped and dated, from more than three decades ago. The first home my father ever bought for himself. His favorite place in the world. “Hello?” Sam says. I hear the creak of my porch door opening, Jack pushing past the screen, keying our front lock, home safely. I don’t call out to Jack to let him know I’m downstairs, to let him know I’m still awake. I don’t say anything to Sam for a moment, either. I rub my eyes, a wave of exhaustion coming over me. Grief is exhausting. No one talks about that. Or, at least, no one told me. No one told me just how exhausting it feels to carry it around with you. And it uses the same muscle as love. Because with real love you have to show up and give. You have to show up and be given to. And it’s not so much that I’ve forgotten how. It’s that it’s all added up to be so heavy. “What are you thinking?” Sam says. I shake my head as though he can see me. And I start to say it will be a wild goose chase, that this seems like nothing to me. I want to believe it’s nothing. But I feel a rush of something else. Maybe it’s just guilt that I pulled away from my father. Maybe it’s the need to be somewhere other than where I am. But it might be something else—something closer to instinct, a de ep-felt instinct, that my brother may not be entirely wrong. Did it take him showing up at the brownstone to see it? Maybe. Or maybe his showing up at the brownstone has finally encouraged me to say it out loud. “I’m thinking Dad has taken quite a few night walks around Windbreak to screw one up now,” I say. “So... you’ll come with me?” I’m silent. We are both silent, for what feels like a long time. Then he breaks it, sounding not at all like himself. “Nora...” he says. Like a prayer. “Please.” This is when I agree.