For weeks after the attack, I held on to the irrational hope that the notebooks had survived, as if paper stood a better chance against a fireball than flesh. I could comprehend (barely) that my father was gone, but not his work. My father scribbling in the notebooks was my single strongest memory of him, more than any accolade or opening. He was always working, thinking, creating at the breakfast table, at the park where I played, late into the evening when I’d come home from a night out. His notebooks were everything. How could they not have survived?
My hope gave way to hysteria. Any day now, we’ll get a call from authorities to tell us they’ve found the trunk, I thought. Before Thanksgiving 2001, when I finally had the guts to get on a plane, I flew back to Boston, thinking I could track down the trunk. Maybe he shipped it? Yes, I convinced myself, he’d shipped the notebooks, and the trunk was simply lost, like so many things in the chaos after 9/11. I was sure the trunk was out there, still in existence. Maybe he took it to FedEx or UPS before he got on the plane and sent the trunk home all on its own, instead of checking it onto the flight. A college friend picked me up, and we drove around to shipping sites and post offices from Boston to Maine, like amateur private investigators asking desperate questions about whether they remembered a man with a booming voice and salt-and-pepper hair shipping a trunk on September 10. Nobody did, of course.
I even tracked down a few of the people that had been on retreat with my father before he boarded the plane, a collection of artists, writers, and musicians who supported one another through sobriety for years, but none of them remembered seeing the trunk of notebooks at any time during their weekend in the Berkshires. But they all sobbed and told me how much my father had meant to them over the years as they kept the demons at bay. “A rock,” one Pulitzer Prize–winning playwright said to me, as he choked back tears. “An absolute rock.”
Only then, on the nearly empty flight home, as airports were ghost towns that fall, did I finally accept that the notebooks and my father were gone. I came back to Pasadena, found a grief counselor, and threw myself into the WAM project, the last Light/Break that would ever be created, taking up where my mother had left off, as she was too devastated to care if the commission ever got finished. Working with my father’s assistants off the plans that the museum had on hand, and by memory from the discussions I’d heard over the summer, we completed Light/Break #47 for the museum’s garden. I met Casey the night the exhibition opened.
I’d never told my mother about the notebook chase. She thought I was at a friend’s wedding, a nonsensical excuse she never questioned. No point in mentioning it now, either. The memory only stood to remind me how much time I felt I’d lost. Gathering up the letters, I told her, “Let’s put them all in a box. I’ll take care of it. I’ll have some free time now, you know, because I have no husband and no future.”
“Yes, that does free up the hours,” she agreed. Before last night, I would have felt terrible about saying such a thing, but now we could both smile. My mother poured me some more coffee and said, “You know, I was thinking, you should just go someplace. Take a few years off, go back to school. Do you think you could cash in on that fellowship you won? You should go to Paris! You haven’t been back since college, you lost all of that. Go. To. Paris!”
“That’s what Polly said, too. I’ll think about it. I need to get a lot of things in order.”
“Stop! Don’t think. Go! Take that time you never got when you were twenty-one. You got cheated. Your twenties should have been much more fun. Make your thirties what your twenties should have been! Throw some caution to the wind! Let life come to you.” I know my mother viewed her wild twenties as some sort of sacred rite of passage that everyone deserved. Now that I’d solved her Letter Guilt, she seemed determined to repay the favor.
But I knew time didn’t work like that. You don’t get a do-over on loss. “I will get there. I promise. But in my own time.” Besides, even driving to Ojai had felt like a journey of a thousand miles. How could I pack up and start over somewhere? “But, the house . . .”
“Please, it’s a house. And, technically, it’s my house; I should be the one worrying about the HVAC system, not you. I can take care of it for a few years, and then we can decide what to do with the real estate and the paintings and everything.” I knew she meant the memories, too. We’d both delayed so many decisions in favor of emotional expediency. “I wouldn’t mind moving back to Pasadena. I miss . . .” She hesitated. “Life.”
I was happy to hear her say that, thinking about how my father described her need to see and be seen as combustible. “Let me think about it. Truly. I feel like I need to get through the next six days before Casey gets back from Tokyo. If I’m still standing and can still show my face in public by next Monday, then maybe I will go someplace.”
My mother’s expression turned very dark. “Casey’s lack of courage will come back to haunt him. He’ll pay more for this more than you.”
“What do you mean?”
“Nobody admires a liar. What he did to you is all about him. Put the truth out there, and then disappear for a little bit. His reputation will be far more damaged than yours.” My mother’s mind was working on the kind of strategic level I hadn’t seen in years. “I had an idea this morning on my hike. You remember my friend Candy?”
“Of course.” Candy McLean was a former Rose Queen, disgraced soon after her star turn down Colorado Boulevard by a few tasteful, but half-nude photos in the “Women of the Ivy Leagues” edition of Playboy, the kind of photos that high school girls now routinely post on social media without the blink of an eye. But in the late eighties, the photos led to a social purgatory for Candy in Pasadena. She rebuilt her reputation as an on-air TV anchor in LA, donating her emcee skills to every charity event in town as penance. Unfortunately for Candy, she lost her last bit of collagen at exactly the same moment that HDTV came into being. It could have been a career-ending coincidence, but Candy was smart, and she saw the future: online gossip. She left TV and became a society reporter and web entrepreneur.
Her website, CandysDish.com, had started as a Pasadena society page but quickly gained traction by including favorable puff pieces on the Hollywood elite, both those in front of the cameras and the bigwigs behind the scenes, like agents, studio executives, and producer types. My story, at the intersection of society, the arts, and personal tragedy, was exactly the sort of reportage at which Candy excelled. “She’s the perfect person to put this story out there in the public for you. She’ll be discreet behind the scenes and kind in print. And now, this week, before Casey gets home and has any chance to speak to the media.”
I had a hard time envisioning Casey speaking to the media, given his role in the situation. Then again, he did seem confident in his convictions, like he was doing the right thing, and, thanks to my support and name, he had more of a career to protect than I did. But I had no idea where to begin. “I’m not sure I can sit in front of someone and say, ‘I’ve invited you here today to talk about my crap husband and his other family I didn’t know about until last week.’ I’m not ready.”
“Of course not. But this conversation won’t be about that, it will be about something bigger,” my mother said. She had clearly been doing a lot of thinking. “I’m getting all kinds of interview requests for the tenth anniversary. Are you?”