Laura Dave - The Last Thing He Told Me

But I think about the other Austin red flag. When I asked him to come with me to Austin for my woodturners symposium, he went dark for a minute. He didn’t balk at the suggestion, but he pivoted. He did pivot. So maybe it wasn’t just about Bailey. Maybe it had something to do with Austin itself. Something he didn’t want me to run into there. Something he had run from.

I reach for my phone and call Jake, a diehard football fan: college, the NFL, classic games on YouTube at eight in the morning.

“It’s late where I am,” he says, instead of hello.

“What can you tell me about the Austin football stadium?” I say.

“I can tell you it’s not called that,” he says.

“Do you know anything about their football team?”

“The Longhorns? What do you want to know?”

“Their colors?”

“Why?”

I wait.

He sighs. “Orange and white,” he says.

“You positive?”

“Yes, burnt orange and white. Uniforms, mascot. Goalposts. The end zone. The entire stadium. It’s midnight. It’s after midnight. I’m sleeping. Why are you asking?”

I can’t seem to tell him the truth, which sounds crazy. The U.S. marshal who showed up at our house is based out of there. Bailey remembers being there. Maybe. And Owen got weird about the idea of us going there, two different times. Two different times I can now recall.

I don’t want to tell him that Austin is all I have.

I think of my grandfather. If he were alive, and sitting here with me, I could tell him. He wouldn’t think I was crazy. He’d just sit there and help me go through it all until I figured out what I needed to do. That’s why he was good at his job—at helping me understand what my job was. The first lesson he ever taught me was that it wasn’t just about shaping a block of wood into what you wanted it to be. That it was also a peeling back, to seeing what was inside the wood, what the wood had been before. It was the first step to creating something beautiful. The first step to making something out of nothing.

If Owen were here, he would understand that too. I could tell him too. He would look at me and shrug. What do you have to lose ? He would look at me, and see it—what I’d already decided.

Protect her.

“Jake? I’ll call you back,” I say.

“Tomorrow!” he says. “Call me back tomorrow.”

I hang up, and I go back outside. I find Bailey where I left her, staring out at the bay, sipping on my glass of wine, like it belongs to her.

“What are you doing?” I say.

The glass is almost empty. It was full when I left it. Now it is almost empty. The wine covers her lips, the corners of her mouth stained red.

“Can you not?” she says. “I just had a little.”

“I don’t care about the wine.”

“So then why are you looking at me like that?” she says.

“You should go and pack a bag,” I say.

“Why?” she says.

“I was thinking about what you said, about the wedding. About Austin. And I think we should go,” I say.

“To Austin?”

I nod.

She looks at me, confused. “That’s crazy. How is going to Austin going to help anything?” she says.

I want to give her an honest answer. If I try to quote my grandfather and tell her this could be the peeling back, will she be able to hear that? I doubt it. And if I tell her what I’ve put together so far—a wobbly formulation at best—she will rebel and refuse to go.

So I tell her something that she can hear, something that is also the truth. Something that sounds like what her father would say.

“It’s better than sitting here,” I say.

“What about school?” she says. “I’m just going to miss school?”

“You said you weren’t going tomorrow anyway,” I say. “Didn’t you just finish saying that?”

“Yeah,” she says. “I guess.”

I’m already heading into the house. I’m already on the way.

“So pack.”

— Part 2 —

Each species of wood has its own distinctive patterns and colors, which are revealed when the bowl is turned.

—Philip Moulthrop

Keep Austin Weird

We get on a 6:55 A.M. flight out of San Jose.

It’s been forty-six hours since Owen left for work, forty-six hours since I’ve heard a word from him.

I give Bailey the window seat and take the aisle, passengers knocking into me as they make their way to the one bathroom in the back of the plane.

Bailey leans against the window as far away from me as she can get, her arms folded tightly against her chest. She is wearing a Fleetwood Mac tank top, no sweatshirt, goose bumps running up her arms.

I don’t know if she is cold or upset. Or both. We have never flown together before, so I didn’t think to remind her to put a sweatshirt in her carry-on. Not like she would have heeded my advice anyway.

Still, suddenly, this feels like Owen’s greatest crime. How did he not provide me with a point of reference before he disappeared? How did he not leave behind a set of rules on how to take care of her? The first rule: Tell her to pack a sweatshirt when she gets on a plane. Tell her to cover her arms.

Bailey keeps her eyes glued to the window, avoids eye contact. It’s just as well that she has no desire to talk. I start taking notes in my notebook instead. I work on making a game plan. We land at twelve thirty local time, which means it will probably be close to two before we make it to downtown Austin and check into the hotel.

I wish I knew the city better, but I’ve been to Austin only once before, during my senior year of college. It was Jules’s first professional assignment (she was paid to the tune of $85 and a hotel room) and she invited me to tag along. She was photographing the Austin Chronicle ’s Annual Hot Sauce Festival for a Boston food blog. We spent most of our time in Austin at that festival, burning our mouths off on a hundred different kinds of spiced ribs and fried potatoes and smoked veggies and jalapeño sauces. Jules took six hundred photographs.

It wasn’t until shortly before we were heading out of town that we wandered outside of the gardens in East Austin where the festival was being held. We found a hilltop that gave us the most incredible view of the downtown skyline. There were as many trees as skyscrapers, more clear sky than clouds. And the coziness of the lake somehow made Austin feel less like a city and more like a small town.

Jules and I decided then and there that we were going to move to Austin after graduation. It was far less expensive than New York, far easier than Los Angeles. We didn’t really consider it when the time came, but in that moment, that’s what it felt like, looking down over the city. It felt like looking at our future.

This certainly isn’t the future I’d imagined.

I close my eyes, trying to not let it subsume me, the questions that keep rolling through my head on a terrible loop, the questions I need answers to: Where is Owen? Why did he need to run? And what did I miss about him that he was too afraid to tell me himself?

That’s part of the reason I’m sitting on this plane. I have this fantasy that by leaving the house, it will trigger something in the universe that makes Owen come home home again and offer up the answers himself. Isn’t that how it’s supposed to work, the kettle boils once you stop watching? As soon as we land in Austin, there will be a message from Owen asking where we are, telling me that he is sitting in our empty kitchen waiting on us, as opposed to the other way around.

“What can I get you ladies?”

I look up to see the flight attendant standing by our aisle, her silver drink cart in front of her.

Bailey doesn’t turn her head from the window, her purple ponytail the only thing facing out.