Laura Dave: The Last Thing He Told Me

“I am,” I said.

“Count me in then,” he said. “I’m yours.”

I put my head on his shoulder. “Thank you,” I said. “Okay. Now you.”

“Favorite part of my day?” he said.

“Yes,” I said. “And don’t cop out and say right now.”

He laughed. “Shows how well you know me,” he said. “I wasn’t going to say right now.”

“Really?”

“Really,” he said.

“What were you going to say?”

“Sixty seconds ago,” he said. “It was cold outside the blanket.”

Follow the Money

Jules doesn’t leave until after 2 A.M.

She offers to stay over, and maybe I should have let her because I barely get any sleep.

I lay awake most of the night on the living room couch, unable to face my bedroom without Owen. I wrap myself up in an old blanket and wait out the dark, playing it over and over in my head—the last thing Jules said before she left.

We stood at the front door and she leaned in to give me a hug. “One thing,” she said. “Did you keep your own checking account?”

“Yes,” I said.

“That’s good,” she said. “That’s important.”

She smiled approvingly, so I didn’t add that I’d done so at Owen’s insistence. Owen was the one who wanted to keep some of our money separate for a reason he never fully explained. I assumed it had something to do with Bailey. But maybe I was wrong about that. Maybe it had to do with leaving what was mine untouched.

“I ask because they’re probably going to freeze all his assets,” Jules said. “That’s the first thing they’ll do while they’re trying to figure out where he went. What he knew. They always follow the money.”

Follow the money.

I feel a little bit queasy, even now, as I think about the duffel bag shoved under the kitchen sink, a bag full of money that Owen probably knows they can’t follow. I didn’t tell Jules about the duffel because I know what it looks like to any reasonable person. I know what it should look like to me too. It looks like Owen is guilty. Jules had already decided as much, and a mysterious bag of money would only convince her further. Why wouldn’t it? She loves Owen like a brother, but it isn’t about love. It’s about what points toward Owen’s involvement in this mess: that he’s running, that he acted suspiciously with Jules on the phone. Every single thing.

Except this. Except what I know.

Owen wouldn’t run because he is guilty. He wouldn’t leave to save himself. He wouldn’t leave to avoid prison or to avoid looking me in the eye and admitting what he’s done. He wouldn’t leave Bailey. He would never leave Bailey unless he absolutely had to. How can I be so sure of this? How can I trust myself to be sure of anything when I’m obviously biased in what I’m willing to see?

Partially it’s because I’ve spent my life needing to see. I’ve spent my life paying incredibly close attention. When my mother left for good, I didn’t see it coming. I missed it. I missed the finality of that departure. I shouldn’t have. There were so many hasty exits before that, so many nights she slipped out and left me with my grandfather without so much as a goodbye. There were so many times she didn’t come back for days, or weeks, only offering up an occasional phone call, an occasional check-in.

When she finally left for good, she didn’t say she wasn’t coming back. She sat down on the edge of my bed and brushed my hair off my face and said she had to go to Europe—that my father needed her with him. But she said she’d see me soon. I assumed that meant she’d be back soon—she was always coming and going. But I missed it. The language of it. “Seeing me soon” meant she was never coming back, not in a substantial way. It meant I’d spend an afternoon or an evening with her twice a year (never overnight).

It meant she was lost to me.

That’s the part that I missed: My mother didn’t care enough not to be lost to me.

That’s the part I’ve sworn to myself I would never miss again.

I don’t know if Owen is guilty. And I’m furious he left me to deal with this alone. But I know he cares. I know he loves me. And, more than that, I know he loves Bailey.

He would only leave for her. It has to be that. He left the way he did to try and save her. From something or someone.

It all comes down to Bailey.

The rest is just a story.

The sunlight streams through the undraped living room windows, soft and yellow, against the harbor.

I stare outside. I don’t turn on the television or flip open my laptop to check the newsfeed. I know the most important thing. Owen is still gone.

I head upstairs to shower and find Bailey’s door uncharacteristically open, Bailey sitting up in her bed.

“Hey there,” I say.

“Hi,” she says.

She pulls her knees to her chest. She looks so scared. She looks like she is trying hard to hide it.

“Can I come in for a sec?” I say.

“Sure,” she says. “I guess.”

I walk over and sit down on the edge of her bed—as if that is something I know how to do, as if that is something I’ve done before.

“Did you sleep at all?” I say.

“Not much,” she says.

The outline of her toes is visible through the sheets. She curls them tight together, like a fist. I start to reach for her foot, hold it, but then think better of it. I clasp my hands together and look around her room. Her bedside table is littered with theater books and plays. Her blue piggy bank rests on top of them—the piggy bank that Owen won for her at a school fair shortly after they moved to Sausalito. It’s a female piggy bank, complete with bright red cheeks and a bow on top.

“I just keep going over it in my head,” she says. “I mean… my father doesn’t make things complicated. At least not with me. So explain what he wrote in his note to me.”

“What do you mean?”

“ You know what matters about me … what’s that even mean?”

“I think he means that you know how much he loves you,” I say. “And that he’s a good man despite what people may be saying about him.”

“No, that’s not it,” she says. “He meant something else. I know him. I know he meant something.”

“Okay…” I take a deep breath. “Like what?”

But she is shaking her head. She is already onto something else.

“And what am I supposed to do with that money? All that money he left me?” she says. “That’s the kind of money that someone leaves you when they’re not coming back.”

That stops me. Cold. “Your father’s coming back,” I say.

Her face fills with doubt. “How do you know?”

I try to think of a comforting answer. Luckily it also feels like the truth. “Because you’re here.”

“So why isn’t he?” she says. “Why did he take off like he did?”

It feels like she isn’t actually looking for an answer. She is looking to fight when I give her an answer that she doesn’t want. It makes me furious with Owen for putting me in this position, regardless of the reason. I can tell myself that I’m sure of Owen’s intentions—that, wherever he is, he’s there because he is trying to protect Bailey. But I’m left sitting here, without him, anyway. Doesn’t that make me as ridiculous as my mother is? Doesn’t it make me the same as her? Both of us putting our faith in someone else above everything else—calling it love. What good is love, if this is where it leads you?

“Look,” I say. “We can talk about this more later, but you should probably get ready for school.”

“I should get ready for school?” she says. “Are you serious?”

She isn’t wrong. It’s a lousy thing to say. But how can I say what I want to say? That I’ve called her father dozens and dozens of times, that I don’t know where he is. And I certainly have no idea when he’s coming back to us.