Her days were stultifying and long. The nights were longer. After she went home to New York, Lizzie took a week off from the new firm (she still thought of it that way, even though she had been there close to a year). Her senior partner didn’t encourage her, but he didn’t argue either. Those first days were a disaster. She picked fights—with the sweet Croatian owner of her dry cleaners when her cardigan wasn’t ready, with a taxi driver for deciding to take Broadway downtown in the midafternoon. Small kindnesses could be her undoing. Her college boyfriend sent her a short e-mail saying how sorry he was, and there she was, weeping over her laptop. One evening after she came back from the bodega with beer, the nighttime doorman said, “Nice guy, your dad. I remember him helping you move in.” And it was true, she remembered with a faint smile, Joseph had been there—directing the movers, saying to her, “You could have lived in a place with an elevator; why didn’t you like that apartment on Ninety-Sixth Street?” The doorman said: “I’m sorry. My mom died five years ago and I still don’t believe it.”
She thanked him tearfully, hurried up the stairs. She didn’t believe it either. Nothing made sense to her. Not lying on the couch watching reruns of Freaks & Geeks, not meeting a law school friend for lunch, not talking to Sarah or Claudia on the phone or pounding on the treadmill or downing cup after cup of coffee. The feel of the raw winter air against her face—that was the only thing that felt close to right.
One night, she was on her couch wearing a thin V-neck of her father’s, leggings, and a pair of his wool socks, eating pad thai from Saigon Grill and watching Double Indemnity. She loved the movie, had seen it numerous times: she loved Barbara Stanwyck, who managed to be both steamy and coolly intelligent, and she loved poor hapless Fred MacMurray, who was no match for Stanwyck. Lizzie appreciated the ratatat dialogue and seeing Los Angeles as a city of noir, where nothing was as it seemed. But tonight, watching MacMurray race through the downtown L.A. streets, drive up to Stanwyck’s house high in the Hollywood Hills, not the same hill where she’d grown up but not unlike it either, those spindly palm trees looking even more surreal and strange in black and white—she felt unnerved, seeing the city she knew so well, a city that wouldn’t be the same for her ever again. Los Angeles was achingly far away.
Had her father ever seen the film? She switched the TV off. She called Sarah, but it went to voice mail, and she hung up before leaving a message.
Lizzie grabbed her coat, hat, and scarf from the hook, stuffed her keys, phone, and some bills into her pockets. Outside it was cold. The streetlamps threw out pools of anemic yellowish light. The moon was nowhere to be found. She began walking down Broadway, her gloveless hands clenched in her coat pockets, head down. She made her way past a pair of teenage girls wearing long thick sweaters, maneuvered around a stoic dog walker who held the leashes to four yelping, straining creatures. She passed newsstands and the little French bistro where her father and Sarah had taken her to celebrate the end of her first year of law school and the Starbucks that had been a Love’s Pharmacy that had been—she had seen pictures—a butcher’s shop. And the pet supply shop that had been a video store where Claudia flirted with the teenage clerk, and she and Ben fought about which movies to rent.
She didn’t know where she was going until she saw it. There was little inviting about the boxy Cuban diner, its fluorescent lights, but Lizzie went inside.
The waitress ushered her to a booth toward the back, but Lizzie shook her head. “Can I sit here?” She motioned toward a table by the door.
The waitress shrugged. “You’ll feel the wind every time the door opens.”
“That’s fine,” Lizzie said resolutely, and she slid in.
She had last sat at this table with her father. It had only been a few months ago, a quick weekend trip in October for the wedding of someone Lizzie barely knew, the son of a medical school classmate of Joseph’s. The skeletal trees along Broadway she stared at now had been full and resplendent. He had ordered the bistec, a charred sirloin loaded with garlic and onions, and ate it with gusto, grousing about going to a wedding solo and asking her about dating. (“Are you using OkCupid? I love it; I’ve met lots of—” “Dad, please. Can we talk about something else?” “But OkCupid was started by Harvard students!”) Now she ordered bistec, her second dinner of the night. When it arrived she ate and she ate. She scraped her plate clean, thinking of her father all the while. She never felt full.
As she was paying, feeling wobbly from all that food, she remembered her father telling her about a cousin of her grandfather’s who had gotten off the boat from Poland, thinking he was in New York and only later realizing it was Havana. Joseph had called her after Castro had transferred power to his brother. “We should make plans to go to Cuba; it won’t be long before Fidel is gone.” She heard the tenor of his voice—it sounded so clear and distinct in her head—and something inside her cracked open. She attempted to zip up her jacket with trembling hands.
“You okay?” the cashier asked.
“I’m fine,” Lizzie insisted as she pushed open the door. The brutal cold was a comfort as it hit her hot face, stung her lips, her skin.
The next morning she was up at sunrise, and for the first time in a week her mind felt sharp. She was at her office by seven thirty. An hour later, Marc, her senior partner, strode in.
“What are you doing here?” Marc said. “You look—” He paused. “You do not look good. Go home.”
“Please,” she said. “I need to be here. Please.”
By the following week, she hit upon a viable angle for the Clarke appeal. Marc thought it was a solid approach, and even Clarke, who wanted to know every last detail in his weekly calls from prison in Otisville, chortled and said, “This might actually work.” Lizzie should have been happy. But it felt beside the point.
Then Ben called, nearly three weeks after Joseph died. “I’m so sorry. I just heard,” he said. It was so good to hear his voice, so specifically good, that Lizzie started talking—she told him about the blind curve on Mulholland and the SUV that Joseph never saw coming. (“It wasn’t his fault,” Lizzie said, “it wasn’t anyone’s fault.”) She told him about the funeral and how she feared she didn’t do her father justice with her eulogy, and then, she said, there was the woman who came to the burial in flip-flops. “Who goes to a cemetery in flip-flops?” she said.
He cleared his throat, didn’t answer.
“You know, that was a rhetorical question,” she said, feeling self-conscious, and tried to laugh.
“I’m just so sorry,” he said. “I wish had known—”
“I should have called and told you.”