Laura Dave: The Last Thing He Told Me

Her skin is reddening, her eyes fierce and firm. And I see it—her decision forming, her need cementing, into something no one can take from her.

Grady keeps talking but she is done trying to hear him. She is looking at me when she says the thing I thought she would say—the thing I thought she would come to all along. The reason I went to Nicholas, the reason I did what I did. She says it to me alone. She has given up on the rest of it. With time, I’m going to have to build that back. I’m going to have to do whatever I can to help her build that back.

“I just want to go home,” she says.

I look at Grady, as if to say, you heard her . Then I wait for the thing he has no choice but to do.

To let us go.

Two Years and Four Months Ago

“Show me how to do it,” he said.

We turned on the lights in my workshop. We had just left the theater, after our non-date, and Owen asked if he could come back to the workshop with me. No funny business, he said. He just wanted to learn how to use a lathe. He just wanted to learn how I do what I do.

He looked around and rubbed his hands together. “So… where do we start?” he said.

“Gotta pick a piece of wood,” I said. “It all starts with picking a good piece of wood. If that’s no good, you have nowhere good to go.”

“How do you woodturners pick?” he said.

“ We woodturners go about it in different ways,” I said. “My grandfather worked with maple primarily. He loved the coloring, loved how the grains would turn themselves out. But I use a variety of woods. Oak, pine, maple.”

“What’s your favorite kind of wood to work with?” he asked.

“I don’t play favorites,” I said.

“Oh, good to know.”

I shook my head, biting back a smile. “If you’re going to make fun of me…” I said.

He put his hands up in surrender. “I’m not making fun of you,” he said. “I’m fascinated.”

“Okay, well then, without sounding corny, I think different pieces of wood appeal to you for different reasons,” I said.

He moved over to my work area, bent down so he was eye to eye with my largest lathe.

“Is that my first lesson?”

“No, the first lesson is that to pick an interesting piece of wood to work with, you need to understand that good wood is defined by one thing,” I said. “My grandfather used to say that. And I think that is definitely true.”

He rubbed his hand along the piece of the pine I was working with. It was a distressed pine—dark in color, rich for a pine.

“What defines this guy?” he said.

I placed my hand over a spot in the middle, blanched to almost a blond, totally washed out.

“I think this part, right here, I think it could turn out interesting,” I said.

He put his hand there too, not touching my hand, not trying—only trying to understand what I was showing him.

“I like that, I like that philosophy, is what I mean…” he says. “I kind of think you could probably say the same thing about people. At the end of the day, one thing defines them.”

“What defines you?” I said.

“What defines you?” he said.

I smiled. “I asked you first.”

He smiled back at me. He smiled, that smile.

“Okay, fine,” he said. Then he didn’t hesitate, not for a second. “There is nothing I wouldn’t do for my daughter.”

Sometimes You Can Go Home Again

We sit on the tarmac, waiting for the plane to take off. Bailey stares out the window. She looks exhausted—her eyes dark and puffy, her skin a splotchy red. She looks exhausted and she looks scared.

I haven’t told her everything yet. But she understands enough. She understands enough that I’m not surprised she is scared. I’d be surprised if she weren’t.

“They’ll come visit,” I say. “Nicholas and Charlie. They can bring your cousins if you want. I think that would be a nice thing. I think your cousins really want to meet you.”

“They won’t stay with us or anything?” she says.

“No. Nothing like that. We’ll have a meal or two together. Start there.”

“And you’ll be there?”

“For all of it,” I say.

She nods, taking this in.

“Do I have to decide about my cousins right now?” she says.

“You don’t have to decide about anything right now.”

She doesn’t say anything else. She understands—as well as she is allowing herself to integrate it—that her father isn’t coming home. But she doesn’t want to talk about it, not yet. She doesn’t want to navigate with me what things will look like without him, what they’ll feel like. That too doesn’t need to happen right now.

I take a deep breath in and try not to think about all the things that do have to happen—if not right now, then soon. The steps we’ll have to take, one after another, to move through our lives now. Jules and Max will pick us up at the airport, our refrigerator stocked with food for today, dinner waiting on the table. But those things will have to keep happening, day in and day out, until they start to feel normal again.

And there are things I can’t avoid happening, like the fallout coming several weeks from now (or several months from now), when Bailey is on her way to something like recovery, and I’ll have my first still moment to think about myself. To think about what I’ve lost, what I’ll never have back. To think only of myself. And of Owen. Of what I’ve lost—what I’m still losing—without him.

When the world gets quiet again, it will take everything I am not to allow the grief of his loss to level me.

The strangest thing will stop it from leveling me. I’ll have an answer to the question that I’m only now starting to consider: If I had known, would I be here? If Owen told me, out of the gate, that he had this past, if he had warned me about what I would be walking into, would I have chosen him anyway? Would I have chosen to end up where I am now? It will remind me briefly of that moment of grace my grandfather provided shortly after my mother’s departure when I realized I belonged exactly where I was. And I’ll feel the answer move through me, like a blinding heat. Yes. Without hesitation. Even if Owen had told me, even if I had known every last bit. Yes, I would choose this. It will keep me going.

“What is taking so long?” Bailey says. “Why aren’t we taking off yet?”

“I don’t know. I think the flight attendant said something about a backup on the runway,” I say.

She nods and wraps her arms around herself, cold and unhappy, her T-shirt unable to compete against the frosty airplane air. Her arms covered with goose bumps. Again.

Except this time I’m prepared. Two years ago—two days ago—I wasn’t. But now, apparently, is a different story. I reach into my bag and pull out Bailey’s favorite wool hoodie. I slipped the hoodie into my carry-on bag to have it ready for this moment.

I know, for the first time, how to give her what she needs.

It isn’t everything, of course. It isn’t even close. But she takes her sweater, putting it on, warming her elbows with her palms.

“Thanks,” she says.

“Sure,” I say.

The plane jerks forward a few feet, and then back. Then, slowly, it starts easing down the runway.

“There we go,” Bailey says. “Finally.”

She sits back in her seat, relieved to be on the way. She closes her eyes and puts her elbow on our shared armrest.

Her elbow is there, the plane is picking up speed. I put my elbow there too, and I feel her do it, I feel us both do it. We move a little closer to each other as opposed to doing the opposite.

It feels like what it is.

A start.

Five Years Later. Or Eight. Or Ten.

I’m at the Pacific Design Center in Los Angeles, participating in a First Look exhibition, with twenty-one other artisans and producers. I’m debuting a new collection of white oak pieces (mostly furniture, a few bowls and larger pieces) in the showroom they’ve provided.