BACK HOME in Connecticut, I stared at my computer, poring over the image on the screen. My eyes burned from lack of sleep and four hours in front of the monitor.
After a long plane ride, an endless wait at the baggage carousel, and a traffic-filled slog up the highway, Rayna and I had arrived home in Niantic early in the afternoon Eastern time, but well into the evening Paris time. Exhausted, Rayna and I hugged each other good-bye and split off into our separate houses to crash.
Except I couldn’t. I had a sixteen-gig compact flash card filled with trip pictures screaming for my attention.
I loaded them onto my hard drive and started sorting. It would take me ages to really do justice to every shot I’d snapped over the three-week trip, so I let my instincts winnow them down. I allowed myself the briefest scan of each image, saving the ones that grabbed me to a special file. Again and again I went through the process, giving myself a little more time on each picture with every round, pulling aside the ones my eyes couldn’t stop drifting to, the ones that struck me in a place of pure instinct and emotion.
It took hours, but eventually I narrowed them down to twenty pictures, spanning all portions of our trip: Trafalgar Square at night; a snarling gargoyle leaping off a column at Prague’s St. Vitus’s Cathedral; Rayna with her back to the Trevi Fountain, following tradition by tossing a coin with her right hand over her left shoulder.
But my eyes kept going back to a picture of the fire at Pierre’s apartment building. I clicked it so it took up the whole screen. It was a shot of two firefighters on the ground. The smoke had grown thick by this point, and both wore oxygen tanks on their backs and cone-shaped masks that obscured their entire faces. Their thick black suits, yellow gloves, and yellow helmets covered them entirely, yet their emotion was crystal clear. They leaned back in perfect synch, holding the thick green hose between them, shooting water up at the flames, the very angle of their bodies and faces signaling grit, determination, and hope.
The image was gripping and kinetic, yet as I ran my eyes over it again and again I wasn’t drawn to the firefighters, but to the fire truck far behind them.
I enlarged the picture, zoomed in on the truck. There was an indentation along its side panel, the place where the hoses connected and the water valves turned on and off. The image was shadowed by something, but it was still too small and I couldn’t see it clearly.
I enlarged the picture again, centering that one spot on the side panel. Now I understood; the shadow was from a man. He looked young, in his early twenties maybe, though it was hard to make out his features, since he wasn’t looking at the lens. He faced sideways, one hand gripping the ladder embedded in the panel wall. His head was downcast, and every muscle in his body seemed to coil with clenched tension.
Could he be a firefighter? He was built like one, but he wasn’t in uniform. He wore a black leather jacket over jeans and a gray T-shirt. And though he had the facial scruff of someone who’d been on the job all night, he wasn’t engaged with the fire at all. He seemed wrapped in his own thoughts. His mane of dark, tousled hair, chiseled cheekbones, and thick eyebrows were stunning, but some inward pain twisted his eyes and mouth away from beauty and toward something more difficult and profound.
I couldn’t take my eyes off him.
I wondered what was going on in his head. Had the fire started in his apartment? I imagined him on the scene as the engines arrived, screaming at the flames as if sheer will could stop them. Or perhaps he was still inside when the firefighters came, raging against the growing inferno, coughing from the smoke as he defiantly pounded out licks of flame with blankets wet from his sink. I could see him struggling against the firefighters as they pulled him out of his apartment. I could imagine-The sound of the doorbell brought me back to reality.
“Piri?” I called, then remembered our housekeeper wasn’t here today. I’d given her the day off so I could decompress on my own. Reluctantly I left my computer and went down to the front door. No one was there, but a large bouquet of irises, with blooms in all the colors of the rainbow, had been left on the stoop. They were beautiful. I carried them inside and placed them on the kitchen table, then opened the card.
Welcome home! Sorry I couldn’t be there. I love you and I’ll see you next week when I get back from Israel. Love, Mom.
That was it. Despite her choice of blooms, she didn’t mention Dad at all. She hadn’t since the day after he was buried: in a casket with no body, under a headstone that would never mark his final resting place. She had told me flat out that she couldn’t handle speaking about him, so we wouldn’t. Period. It was hard at first, but after she won her Senate seat and became a prominent member of the Foreign Relations Committee, constantly traveling around the world, we had so little time together that I didn’t want to ruin it with anything that would upset her. So I hold my tongue and keep our conversations light. It keeps a chasm between us, but since there’s no way for me to bridge it without breaking her, I let it go.
But she had sent irises, my dad’s favorite flower. I touched the charm around my neck and felt happy and empty at the same time. I wanted to call my mom and tell her I understood what she couldn’t say. I wanted to pour out my heart about my nightmares and how broken I still felt inside, but I knew she’d find an excuse to get off the phone the minute I started.
I couldn’t find comfort with Mom … but maybe I could with Dad. It wasn’t ideal, but it always seemed to help a little. I plucked one of the irises from the vase and walked upstairs to Dad’s office.
Most people would think Grant Raymond, as the most renowned heart surgeon in the world, would take pride in keeping things clean. Pristine, perhaps. Even sterile.
Those people would be wrong. My dad wasn’t sloppy or dirty, but he liked his surroundings to reflect his thinking: multibranched, creative, and divergent. In the operating room he needed absolute order; everywhere else he thrived on absolute chaos. operating room he needed absolute order; everywhere else he thrived on absolute chaos.
Another quirk of Dad’s was that although he could remember an infinite number of intricate surgical maneuvers and enough random details and trivia to run any Jeopardy! champion under the table, he found it patently impossible to remember basic things like phone numbers, appointments, or what in the world he had actually walked into the room to do. To mitigate this flaw, he wrote everything down, usually on whatever was handiest. This left his office looking like the heavens had opened and rained leaves of paper for forty days and forty nights. Popping up from this churning ocean were models of the human heart, reference books, and notebooks full of inspired scrawls.
Illustrious hospitals and medical journals from all over the world had begged to send experts to sift through everything, just in case Dad had left notes that might lead to major leaps forward in cardio health. Mom paid no attention to these requests, but someone had to deal with them. That left me. I saw the experts’ argument. I even knew logically that they were right—the world deserved to benefit from Dad’s knowledge. If something in his office could save or improve a single life, Dad would want that information available. But strangers going through this room seemed like the ultimate degradation. Like an autopsy. I knew it made no sense, but it was how I felt.
Maybe in a few years I’d change my mind. Or maybe never.
I picked my way to Dad’s desk and sat down in his chair. Mimicking his favorite pose, I leaned all the way back, surveyed the glorious chaos, and waited for that feeling of his presence to settle in like it always did.
But it didn’t.
Something was wrong.
Something in the room was different.
I couldn’t place it exactly, but I could feel it. Things had been moved, or altered somehow. Placed back afterward, maybe, so it wouldn’t be so obvious, but there was an ineffable change in the room. I felt the edge of panic hit—this office was the closest thing I had to my dad. Changing anything in here changed him, or what was left of him for me.
Was it Piri? Had she tried to clean in here? Impossible. Piri revered Dad. Despite her overwhelming belief in the cleanliness/godliness connection, she would defend to the death his right to make any choice … even one she found personally heartbreaking. The few times Dad had left the door open and Piri saw inside, she held her breath and crossed herself for protection, but she walked right by.
But if it wasn’t Piri, then who? Who else had access to the house while I was away? Mom? She would never step inside here. Ben had keys. He loved my dad. He might have come inside to see him, like I do, but he would never move anything. He wouldn’t do that to me. Same with Rayna’s family.
Could it be someone without keys? Someone who’d broken in while I was gone? Someone who waited for Piri to leave at the end of the day, then slipped inside and snooped through my dad’s things, opening drawers, moving things, changing them around …
“Stop!” I said it out loud. I was being ridiculous and jumping to conclusions. I’d done that a lot this past year. “Extreme Thinking,” my therapist called it. Not uncommon in people who have been through an unexpected tragedy. When it happened, I was supposed to step back and look at things as rationally as possible.
So, rationally then … what specifically was different in here? I didn’t know. Maybe nothing … except I still felt the cold sense that something was wrong.
I rose, shaking my head. This was crazy. I had to let it go. Yet even as I left the office, I couldn’t help staring and trying to pinpoint what had changed.…
Then a low voice murmured in my ear. “Clea.”
I screamed and shot an immediate hammer punch to the side.
“Whoa!” cried Ben. He reeled back to avoid my fist and tripped over the rug, tumbling to the ground and spilling a fresh mug of coffee over his gray shawl-neck sweater.
“OH!” he gasped. “Hot. Very, very hot. Oh, not good.”
“Ben! Oh my God, wait—” I darted into the bathroom and grabbed a hand towel, then raced back to him, knelt down, and sopped the spilled coffee from his chest.
“I’m so sorry. I didn’t know you were there! You didn’t say anything!”
“I yelled from downstairs … I thought you’d heard me.”
A strange smell tickled my nose, and I bent closer to Ben, just inches from his face. “What’s that smell?” I asked.
“Cardamom clove coffee,” he said, gesturing to the now empty mug on the floor beside us. “I thought you might like it.”
“I like the smell. Maybe you should wear it as a cologne.”
“Could work,” he agreed. “You could give a testimonial that it makes women crazy.”
“Not crazy—nimble. Ten years of Krav Maga gives you catlike reflexes. If you’d been an intruder …”
The idea brought back all my questions and I quickly got up and led Ben to my dad’s office. “Do you see anything different in there?”
Ben looked, then shook his head. “It looks the same to me. Did you change anything?”
“No! I wouldn’t!” I retorted. “Someone did, though, I think. It feels different in there. Tampered with.”
Ben nodded, hands in his pockets—his thoughtful mode. “Okay,” he said, “what is it that feels different? Has anything moved? Is something missing?”