Frankie kept one sympathy card on her desk from the death of her father. She’d filed away all of the others weeks ago. It wasn’t even a card from a close friend, because Frankie didn’t have many people that she considered friends. The woman who sent it was a colleague from a nonprofit board. Frankie kept the card because it was a reminder of how wrong people could be.
Inside, the woman had written
My father was the greatest hero in my life. I know what you’re going through.
If only that were true. People assumed that when you lost a parent, you felt nothing but pure grief. They didn’t account for complex relationships. And the relationship between Marvin Stein and his daughters was nothing if not complex.
She kept a photo of her father on her desk. When she picked it up, she could hear his cold voice in her head, passionless and demanding. The photo showed him in his physics lab at UC Berkeley, in his white lab coat. Like her, he was tall and thin. He had wiry gray hair and a neat mustache. He didn’t smile, and his eyes were impatient. Her father never liked to bother with emotional frills like photographs. When Frankie took the picture with her phone, he’d said, “Get on with it, get on with it.”
Her mother had died of cancer when Frankie was five, just a year after her sister, Pam, was born. Since then, their family had been just the three of them. Marvin Stein, physicist, was not meant to be a single father. He dealt with numbers, theories, and formulas, not children. And definitely not girls.
It was hard enough when they were young, but it got worse during high school and college. Their father demanded perfection. Anything but straight As and top test scores was a failure. Because he was a success himself, he pushed his daughters to do more and achieve more. Nothing was ever good enough. Frankie responded by setting crazy expectations for herself that might win his praise. Pam responded by defying him altogether and throwing her failures in his face.
And now he was gone. More than three months later, he still haunted her.
“Are you thinking about Marvin again?” Jason asked.
Her husband stood in the doorway of her office. He was dressed in running clothes, and his hands were on his hips. Sweat glowed on his narrow face.
“Yes, I keep thinking about that last camping trip,” she said, toying with the photograph of her father with her fingertips.
“Dwelling on it won’t change what happened,” Jason told her.
“Oh, I know.”
Jason sat in the comfortable chair in front of her desk. He worked in the headquarters of a large pharmaceutical company a few blocks away on Post Street, but he often went running through the city midway through the afternoon and showed up at her office while she was on a break between appointments. Her own office was located on the top floor of a ten-story building on the east side of Union Square, looking out on the palm trees of the park.
“It’s also not going to change what a son of a bitch Marvin was,” Jason added.
Frankie’s lips bent into a sad smile. “I know that, too.”
“So how do you feel?” He asked it in a clinical way. They were both scientists. Sometimes it was hard to remember they were husband and wife, too. She expected him to take out a yellow pad and start taking notes while they talked.
“I feel off,” she said.
“Can you be more specific?”
“Not really. Something’s not right with me, Jason, but I don’t know what it is.”
“I think it’s called grief.”
He was right, but that didn’t make her feel better. Another husband might have come out of his chair and hugged her, but that wasn’t Jason, and that wasn’t the kind of relationship they had. They weren’t touchy-feely.
She’d met him seven years ago at a conference in Barcelona. He was British. They were both in their early thirties. She’d noticed when she met him that he was handsome, although their interactions were purely professional in the beginning. He had an athletic build and close-cropped black hair. His dark eyes missed nothing, and he had an expressive mouth that could shift from humor to disdain with a twitch of his lips. His face was full of sharp angles, and so was his personality. She liked that. She hated men who tried to woo her.
They’d stayed in touch after the conference because they both specialized in memory. He worked on the neurological side, focused on brain chemistry. She worked on the therapeutic side. Nine months later, he took a research position with a pharmaceutical company in San Francisco, and their meetings evolved slowly from professional to personal. A year after that, they married, to the amusement of her sister, Pam, who’d assumed that Frankie would never leave her clinical office long enough to meet a man.
She’d found a husband who was a carbon copy of herself. Smart. Demanding. Unemotional. Or maybe — she occasionally whispered to herself — she’d done what so many other women did and married her father.
“After he died, you told me you felt some closure with him,” Jason reminded her.
“I know. I still do.”
“Do you remember why?”
Frankie did. The camping trip snapped like a photograph into her mind. It was something that she, Pam, and their father had done annually since they were children. On New Year’s Eve, they would travel to a state park around Northern California and spend two nights there. They’d stayed as close as Angel Island in the bay and traveled as far afield as Redwood National Park north of Eureka. It was a family tradition, but their father had a way of turning the outings into intellectual exercises. He selected a discussion theme. He assigned reading and quizzed them like a professor. The topics had ranged over the years from politics to science to economics. Minimum-wage policy. Extraplanetary life. Addiction. Alaskan glaciers.
This year’s topic had been a strange departure. It was risk. Which turned out to be a tragically ironic subject in the wake of what happened to him.
“He was different with me that last evening,” Frankie said. “Maybe it’s because it was just the two of us this year. He relaxed. We talked about Mom. Before we went to sleep, he told me he was proud of me. I’d been waiting my whole life to hear something like that from him.”
“So you got what you wanted,” Jason said.
Frankie stared out her office window. She could see the crowds in Union Square ten stories below her. “Yes, he could have told me he loved me, and it wouldn’t have meant as much as him being proud of me.”
He heard her hesitation. “So what’s wrong?”
“I don’t know. I just — I don’t know.”
“It hasn’t even been four months, Frankie. That’s not long when you lose a parent. Don’t rush yourself.”
“You’re right.” Frankie shook her head and added, “Pam missed out.”
“If she’d been there, it wouldn’t have been the same,” Jason reminded her. “Marvin treated her differently.”
“I know.”
“Maybe you got the closure you needed because it was just the two of you,” he pointed out.
“I’ve thought about that, but it makes me feel guilty.”
“You had no way of knowing what was going to happen.”
“No.”
On New Year’s Day, her father had awakened early, at sunrise, which was typical. He made coffee and took a hike along the bluff trails of Point Reyes. He told Frankie to stay behind, which was a surprise. Normally, he made her and Pam get up and join him on his early walks. It didn’t matter how late they’d been up the night before. He hiked north of Arch Rock where the cliffs dropped sharply to the rocks and beach. It had rained overnight. The earth of the headlands was soft and yielding.
Hours later, when he still hadn’t returned, Frankie alerted the rangers. They found Marvin Stein’s body at the base of the cliff.
Jason checked his watch. “I have to get back to work. Are you and Pam going to Zingari tonight?”
“Probably. Do you want us to wait for you for dinner?”
“No, I might be late.”
“Okay.”
Her husband got up, and his sharp eyes examined her face. “Are you still feeling off?”
“Yes, I don’t know exactly what it is.” She stared out the window again, and without looking at Jason, she said, “Do you think that he—?”
Jason waited, but Frankie didn’t go on. He answered her question without her asking it, because she couldn’t form the words.
“No, I don’t think that Marvin killed himself,” Jason said. “He’s not the kind of man who would take his own life. It was an accident. The cliffs are dangerous. He fell.”