Deb and I text sometimes. She sent me a picture of a bird last week. I don’t know if it was intentional. I chose to find it intentional.
My father is still gone. This is still the fact around which everything else organizes itself. The estate, the amendment, Vanessa’s choices, my choices, the administration, the accounting — these were all events that happened in the space that his death had opened. The events mattered and they were real, but they were nested inside the larger thing, which was that he died and I’m figuring out what to do with a world he isn’t in.
I still think about the text message. *The paperwork is done. You’ll see when the time comes.*
I keep it on my phone. I scroll past it sometimes when I’m looking for something else. It’s eleven days before his death and he’s texting me to say he’s made something right, the way he was able to make things right — in writing, through channels, officially.
He didn’t know how much he was trusting Mara Chen’s filing system. He didn’t know what would happen on a Tuesday night in October. He just knew he’d done the thing he set out to do, and he wanted me to know it was done.
Hi, Dad. I saw it.
It was there.
## The First Phone Call with Vanessa After the Hotel
She called me Wednesday morning, before I’d contacted Patricia Rourke or emailed Mara Chen. I was in the hotel breakfast area with a cup of coffee and an untouched plate of eggs, watching the news on a screen mounted too high on the wall.