More Than Words

Tim was waiting for them in the lobby and took Nina’s hand, squeezing it softly while they stood in the elevator. “I love you,” he whispered, so only she could hear.

When they got to the top floor, TJ and Caro were already there. Tim and Leslie stopped to talk to his parents, but Nina crossed the room to stand by her father’s casket.

“Would you like anything to drink, Miss Gregory?” Marty, the bartender, asked her. “Scotch?” he asked. “Neat?”

Nina didn’t trust herself to speak, so she just nodded. It was really too early for scotch, but today was a day for exceptions.

As she drank, she looked out at the city, standing next to her father for what she knew would be the very last time. She wondered how many other people out there had lost their father this week. This year. This decade. There were 8.5 million people who lived in New York City. More than 1.6 million in Manhattan alone. Of those millions, how many of them had felt just like she did at one point in their lives? Bereft, afraid, unspeakably sad.

Rafael, she thought. Rafael lost his dad. Rafael once felt like she did.

And then, almost as if she’d summoned him, Nina felt a hand touch her elbow. She turned and Rafael was there, with Jane and Jorge and Mac and the whole rest of the office.

Nina hugged them all, taking an extra beat with Rafael, feeling his body against hers. She ended with Jane, who held on to her the longest. “I heard you’re not coming back,” she said, into Nina’s ear.

The two women separated. “I just . . . I don’t know which end is up, Jane,” Nina said. “Rafael needs someone whose brain is working properly right now. Mine isn’t. And I don’t know when it will again.”

“Well, you’re all he’s talked about since we got into work this morning. I told him we didn’t have to be the first ones here, but he insisted.” Jane left it there, but Nina could hear the question in her voice. Nina had no answer. She looked for Tim but couldn’t find him in the small crowd that had shown up since they’d arrived.

Nina turned back to Jane. “I’m glad you came early,” she said.

Nina talked to all of them, but the whole time she was aware of Rafael, aware of how he was looking at only her, sympathy in his eyes. After a while, the room started to fill up even more, and Jane announced that they had to get back to the office. They all hugged Nina again, and this time Rafael was last. “I told you I don’t sleep,” he said. “So if you ever need someone to talk to in the middle of the night, don’t hesitate to call. I’m not your boss anymore.”

Nina looked up at him. “We can be friends now,” she said.

“We can be whatever we want to be,” he answered before he turned to leave.

Nina could feel her cheeks turning pink and put her hands to her face to hide them. Though, of course, that brought more attention to her blush. Leslie walked over.

“That hottie who couldn’t take his eyes off you, that was your boss, right?” she asked.

Nina felt her blush deepen. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she said.

“You’re not fooling me with that act. That was Rafael O’Connor-Ruiz, wasn’t it?”

“Yes,” Nina confirmed. “That was him.”

Leslie looked at Nina with raised eyebrows. “And the two of you . . . ?”

“Nothing,” Nina said. “Honestly. I’d tell you. It’s nothing. I’m with Tim.”

“Is this something we need to talk about?” Leslie asked. “Do you want to talk about it?”

“I don’t know what I want,” Nina said. Then she paused. “I want my dad, is what I want.” And her bottom lip started trembling, as if it had a heart all its own.

Leslie pulled Nina to her. “I know,” she said. “But you’ve got me.”

Nina wiped her eyes and leaned her head against Leslie’s, grateful, at least, for that.

“Come with me to the bathroom. We’ve got to fix your eyeliner.”

Nina let Leslie lead her to the restroom, wondering how she’d get through the rest of the day without someone telling her what to do. Grief felt like it mixed up her brain and her heart, put them back in the wrong places. She wasn’t sure how she’d set that right ever again.

32

Leslie stayed that night, too, in the guest room that had the same bedding as the rooms in the Gregory hotels. When Nina was furnishing her apartment, her father went on a familiar tirade against guest rooms with uncomfortable bedding. Nina figured the easiest way to avoid an argument was to accept when he offered to outfit the whole room for her. So the sheets were Egyptian cotton. The blanket, merino wool. The pillows filled with goose feathers. All in shades of cream and gold.

The two women sat cross-legged on the bed, wearing pajama pants and T-shirts, looking almost the way they did fourteen years before, when they were trading essay outlines for Directed Studies, neither of them confident in her thoughts or the way she’d expressed them. But now Leslie dyed her hair to hide the handful of silver strands that kept appearing at her temples. And Nina rubbed cream around her eyes every night, trying to stop the progression of the crow’s feet she saw forming when she smiled. They’d aged, they’d grown; Leslie had gotten married, given birth to a son. But when they were together, they became their college selves, Leslie brash and bold and unstoppable, Nina perceptive and observant and quietly commanding. Leslie’s husband, Vijay, once said their personalities had rubbed off on each other over the years, tempering their extremes. But maybe they’d just gotten older.

“Are you thinking about tomorrow?” Leslie asked, when Nina had gone quiet.

“I’m thinking . . .” Nina said, “about kids. If I have kids, they won’t know my dad. My mom either.”

Leslie picked up one of the glasses of wine she’d poured for them. “Cole never met my mom,” she said. “But he still knows her.”

Nina lifted her wineglass and took a sip. She’d had more to drink today than she’d had in any twenty-four-hour period in her life. The low-grade buzz helped, though. It dulled everything and made her understand why people took Xanax. “I guess it’s the same with my grandparents,” Nina said, thinking more about it. “I know their stories—how the first painting my grandmother bought was a Lee Krasner. How my grandfather stole his teacher’s grade book in seventh grade to try to hide a B in history.”

“Exactly,” Leslie said. “We put my mom’s picture on Cole’s dresser. And he knows that his name starts with a C to honor her. Whenever we go swimming we talk about how she loved to swim so much that Jodi and I were convinced she was a mermaid when we were kids. I almost cried in the middle of a Target a few months ago when Cole saw a mermaid doll and asked if we could buy it because Grandma Cheryl probably would have liked it.”

Nina smiled at that. “He’s a sweet kid.”

“Thank goodness,” Leslie said. “Imagine if I gave birth to an asshole?”

“Not possible,” Nina told her.

“So what would you tell your future kids about your dad?” Leslie asked after another sip of wine. “What would you want them to know about him?”

Nina leaned back against one of the pillows, her head cradled by its softness. She thought about her imaginary children. In her mind now they always had Tim’s auburn hair, her mother’s freckles, and her father’s blue eyes. Maybe she would make sweet potato pie with them, using the recipe her dad liked. Maybe they’d start their own turkey collection. And their own traditions in his honor.

“Remember that year you came home for Thanksgiving with me?” Nina asked.

Leslie nodded. “Our junior year. After my mom died. I didn’t want to go back to Massachusetts.”

“Mm-hm,” Nina said.

“Your dad went all out for Thanksgiving that year.” Leslie shifted so she and Nina were both resting against pillows, facing the painting on the other side of the room. It was something Nina had bought at a gallery on a whim when she and Tim had gone to an opening a couple of months ago. It looked like a Kandinsky, but with more attitude.

“He went all out for Thanksgiving every year after my mom died.” Since Nina’s mom had died on Christmas Day, for years afterward, she and her father couldn’t look at trees or twinkling lights or listen to Christmas carols without falling apart. So Nina’s dad decided that their big family holiday would be Thanksgiving. He made it a full-day affair, with an early-morning party to watch the Thanksgiving Day Parade out their window, and breakfast, lunch, and dinner for anyone who stopped by at any point in the day. He decorated the apartment with turkeys—first with the ones Nina had cut out using her hand to shape the turkeys’ bodies in lower school and then later on with an absurd collection he’d pulled together from antiques shops. Once they’d heard about it, people started gifting him with turkeys; he eventually had so many that they took up an entire cabinet in the dining room.

“That first year,” Nina continued, “he wrote a note to everyone who’d helped us, telling them how grateful we were for them. It went over so well that he kept doing it—a note each Thanksgiving for everyone in his orbit, thanking them for whatever it was that the person gave him—friendship, advice, help, a clean apartment, a recommendation for a new wine to try. If I’m being honest, I think it became part of the persona he cultivated, where everyone thought he was their best friend. I like to think it meant something anyway, though. That the messages were heartfelt, even if they had another purpose.” She turned to Leslie. “Do I give him too much credit sometimes?”