Eight weeks before he pulled the trigger, my father called with instructions. “Hey Neine,” he said. “I want you to know my last wishes, just in case.”

“What do you mean?”

“When I die, I want to be cremated,” he said. “And I want you to scatter my ashes at Diamond Island.”

There was a long pause.  

“Do you understand me, Neine?”

I understood. Diamond Island was the southernmost island at the lake where we summered when I was a child. “Okay, Daddy,” I said, hardening into myself. 

“I know you’ll take care of it.” His voice dropped when he said this as if it were definitive, as if the deed were already done. Even at the end, my father was giving orders. He had always controlled everything, and now he was leaving me in charge of his legacy. I knew what to do—up to a point. I prepared a speech to deliver at his funeral, but when I entered the vestibule of the church, I learned that he had commissioned his remains to be separated into three parcels: the first for my stepmother Darlene to scatter at Cape May, the second for his sister to inter at the family plot, and the third for me to take to the lake. He conducted himself by the rules of war: divide and conquer, even in death.  

It was as if time stopped, and I was suspended in a vial of honey and grief. I stayed with my mother in the suburbs for three weeks after the funeral, and the days formed a radiant tunnel. It was the most magnificent spring I had ever seen. Outside the world was a maze of azaleas, hydrangeas, and incipient roses. Inside, my father’s urn—a green cloisonné pot decorated with golden flowers—sat on the mantle, flanked by pink orchids. Mom went to work, and I kept locking myself in my childhood bedroom to cry. 

There was a suitcase of adolescent notebooks from the back of the closet, and I spent long days reading through the old journals, skimming through years of dark, circular ruminations as if searching for clues. The pages were rife with rhyme, assonance, and splintered imagery, but they yielded few facts and very little useful information. Nothing was dated, and the pages were full of ciphers. I recalled that even as a girl, I wrote in code. I didn’t want anyone to discover the secrets I was keeping; I didn’t want to know them myself. Now here I was: a grown woman in a state of arrested development, playing at girl detective, going through old letters, examining family photographs, searching for—I wasn’t sure what. I copied out the most poignant lines from the diaries to later work into poems, but I didn’t find the truth I was seeking. 

I did, however, find a hollow book among my father’s things. I examined it closely: a curious, subversive object, the kind of thing you’d see in an old movie. From a certain angle, the book looked almost real—with its gold-edged spine and brown leather binding—but when you placed it on the table, the front cover opened up like a jewelry box. The interior was lined in camel-colored crushed velvet and contained a few trinkets: dice, cufflinks, a tie clip, and a broken keychain wrought with little silver boats. 

It still smelled like him.

As if driven by an invisible force, I took the hollow book to my room and transferred into it all the fine jewelry my father had given me: the diamond earrings, white-gold bracelet, sterling silver fountain pen, and black pearls. I put the jewels into the box that looked like book, and I put the book on a shelf. I took a step back and examined it from afar. It was almost convincing, and at the same time, it was an obvious forgery. 

Time slid away. The days passed into weeks, and soon my boyfriend Burkan was on his way for a visit. He would be my date for the wedding of a childhood friend, and then we would drive to Providence to spend the summer together. 

“Are you sure you want to do this?” My mother asked as I laid out my clothes and packed my bags. She disapproved of Burkan. 

“Yes,” I said with irritation. “I’m sure.”

“You know you can stay here for the summer.”

“Mom, I’m teaching at Brown this summer.”

“As your mother,” she said solemnly, “All I want is for you to be happy.”

I wasn’t above cruelty. “Are you sure you don’t want to be alone?” 

In the wedding photos, Burkan and I look happy, standing next to each other. I’m wearing a beautiful silk dress, and he is clean-shaven, attentive, and smoldering. We held hands and danced through the night, but beneath the surface, things were already tense. 

The next morning, when Burkan and I ate breakfast with Mom, she was tearful, fretful. As Burkan loaded my bags into the trunk, she slowly started preparing sandwiches for us to eat on the road. She was bereaved and stalling, asking question after question. Do you have enough water? It might get chilly at night. Do you need a jacket? Can you show me your route on the map?

It was hours before I maneuvered the car down the driveway. 

“Thank God you’re getting out of there, CG,” Burkan said.  

I stopped the car, pulled over at the end of the block, and glared at him.

“What do you mean?”

“You shouldn’t be here. It’s not healthy,” he said. “I’m glad that you’re spending the summer with me.” 

I was angry, defiant. “Maybe this is exactly where I should be.” I shoved the car into gear, and we drove away together for a summer of love.

On the drive to Providence, we vacillated between humor and tension. We pulled off the highway in New Haven to wander through a street carnival at Long Wharf. We were remembering what it was like to be together, and as we floated above the crowd in the basket of a Ferris wheel, I almost forgot about the news, the pending indictments, my father’s ashes on the mantle. We arrived in Providence just as the sun was setting. Burkan showed me up the cramped, winding staircase to his attic apartment, and at the top landing, he stripped me naked and wrestled me into the bedroom. 

I woke up the next morning in his dim little room, but Burkan wasn’t beside me. The apartment was long and narrow with sloped ceilings and uneven floors. None of the corners were square, and when I looked into the kitchen, I had the impression that the whole house was rocking like a boat. I found Burkan in the sitting room. He was sleeping on a twin mattress on the floor under the skylight. The dawn glimmered on his eyelashes, and his chest was bare. I lay down next to him, curled into his beautiful skin. He put his arm around me, but there wasn’t quite enough room for me there, so eventually, I got up and turned on the shower. 

Soon Burkan was off to the lab, where he studied the formation of nanoparticles on samples of orthopedic tissue. A creature of habit and disciplined vanity, Burkan had a simplicity about him that I admired—and could not relate to. He believed, deep down, that life was good. He was a physical being, and as long as he was well-fed and well-clothed, and well-fucked, he was happy. He was not an intellectual, but he was disciplined and determined. Science and engineering did not come naturally to him—as storytelling and poetic description came to me—but he worked at it. He put in his hours and earned his place.

He accepted his limitations, and he believed in me. 

“You are a very smart girl, CG,” he said. “A quality girl.”

“You should write stories for children. You would be great at it,” he said. 

“Maybe I’ll put a child inside you tonight,” he said.

Burkan did have one great gift. He was a natural lover. He emanated sexual energy; women were drawn to him; and he seemed to derive great pleasure from his uncanny ability to draw out of me orgasm after orgasm, working me up to an edge where I was feverish and subservient, my eyes glazed with desire.

I was always more of a dreamer than a physical being. I was distracted, abstract—and I loved Burkan’s presence and how he knew how to draw me back into my body. We knew each other by our animal natures, and it was good. 

He told me I was beautiful, and I believed him—because he said it as if he perceived something beyond my field of vision. 

I remember lying together on the twin bed in a pool of sun, looking up through the skylight, with our legs stretched up to the sloping ceiling. 

“I love your feet, CG,” he said breathlessly.

“I love your feet, too” I said, burrowing into his chest.

“I have never loved a woman’s feet before.” His voice was tender, and I knew he was telling the truth. Burkan loved me. I loved him to a point, and then I pulled back. I gave myself and withheld myself in the same breath, with every gesture. It was like I was pulling him in with one hand and pushing him away with the other. He knew, of course, about my father’s crimes, but he did not understand what it meant to me. I shared the news stories as they were published—or at least provided him with a redacted version of events as they unfolded. He listened and respected how I told the truth, but he didn’t know what I knew. I was withholding something—from him and from myself. We were lying next to each other, but we were not in the same place.

Every morning, I woke up before dawn with my heart in my throat. I opened my laptop and scanned the headlines. When there was no news, I went to the living room and curled up next to Burkan. When there was news, I read it alone and with horror in the pale light of dawn, examining each new article with breathless dread.