Neither Obie nor I had fathers growing up, and we were both angry because of this. Obie’s mum, Martha, knew how to deal with that anger better than my own mother, and for that reason, I spent a lot of time at their house. In my mind, Martha had remained unchanged from the day I met her as a boy, playing in the tōtara tree that sat outside their kitchen window.

           Seeing her at the funeral, I realized just how much she had aged. The death of her son had drained what little youth she’d clung to. She was no longer a mother, and with that went her vigor. Deep crow’s feet fanned out from her eyes and reminded me of an uprooted tree. When we hugged, I felt the bones beneath her arms and the shoulder blades beneath her back.

           The funeral was decidedly local, as Obie would have wanted. The town we grew up in is isolated and to all who drive through it, it is a cold and hard place to live. Most of its people are forestry workers or cray fisherman or gang members—the sort of people who look after their own and ignore the rest. To us who call it home, it is a paradise that gets into your bones and cannot be shaken.

           Almost everyone in the town knew Obie, and almost everyone turned out for the funeral. The men wore black suits and black dirty dog shades and carried cans of rum and coke, their tattoos spilling out from their collars or their cuffs. The women wore dresses, and as the night progressed, hoodies were pulled over the top. They smoked in large groups out the back of the town hall, corralling the children with husky yells. People got drunk and a bonfire was lit and cheers were made in Obie’s honor.

           No one knew why Obie had killed himself. For a while, it looked like we would never know what happened, and I came to accept that belief. Grief had made me tired, and I did nothing to counter it. I woke each morning with a sinkhole in my chest and let it drain me.

           In the months that followed the funeral, as winter set in, people stopped gathering in the local bars or down at the black pebbled beach where Obie would always come up in conversation. It was over that winter that he started fading from people’s minds. Despite my apathy, I felt a need to hold onto him and took to visiting Martha on the weekends. We never spoke about Obie, but my being there seemed to be enough to nurse the memories each of us held. Each time I visited, I brought her wild venison or pāua or duck and chopped firewood for her while she brewed a large pot of tea. I was fulfilling some imagined oath I had made to Obie that let me keep him alive and delay my grief. I guess that’s why I was so surprised when Martha broke our silently agreed arrangement and pulled me from my stupor.

           It was December, over six months since the funeral. At first, I wasn’t quite sure what she wanted and just nodded along while she rattled off things I knew nothing about. She was offering me something but what, I wasn’t sure.

           “And that’s why it has to be you, Luke,” she said. “Tell me you’ll do it? Please.” She was crying and reached for my hand and that’s when I realized what she was asking. She wanted me to find out what had happened to her son. 

* 

Few people born in our town stray far from it. Obie was one of the exceptions, and his name used to be whispered in the halls of the local high school like a myth—a model only the bravest dared aspire to. Now his name would be used as a warning. 

           I had just turned thirty-one when Obie was offered the job in the States. He was a waste management systems engineer, which might not sound glamorous, but Obie was good at his job and people pay good money not to smell shit. He once said his brain worked like an air traffic controller’s, but for sewage, which I always liked and told people. He wrote a thesis on something or other that impressed his industry and ended up being headhunted by an American firm. He joked that he’d made the big leagues funneling the black water of New York.

           Obie was to be part of a team doing a redesign of an entire borough’s sewage system. His stint in the States was meant to be a year or two—nothing more than a blip in our lifelong friendship. Like a migrating bird, he would find his way home and our friendship would be unchanged. I imagined us in a few years’ time, out on the water fishing together. Maybe he’d tell me a story from those years he lived in America, and I would smile as if I’d been there with him. That would be it— nothing more would come of it.

           I remember the feeling of dread after high school when we parted ways for the first time. He was going up to Victoria University in the Capital and I was going to Otago. We never said anything, but we both knew we’d end up back together in our home town after university— and we did. Neither of us had any desire to live elsewhere. I was working in forestry science and spent a bit of time away, but New Zealand is small, and I was never that far from home. Obie’s work was the same: He once got flown to Rarotonga by the government and spent a summer there, but he said it was just like New Zealand, only you were still allowed to drink-drive and the beer wasn’t as cold. It was that summer he was away when I started writing a lot. I’ve always written stories, but never with any real intent. Martha believes I’m a better writer than I am. When Obie and I were teenagers, she used to tell me that one day I would write something to define our country. She stopped saying that when I became a man and went into forestry, but I knew for some inexplicable motherly reason she still believed in my scribblings. I’ve had a few things published in a local newspaper, but nowhere I’m really proud of.

           That summer Obie was away in Rarotonga, time passed as it always had, except I began to measure it by the stories I wrote in the cab of a ute while whole forests were felled. I still measure time like that. Everyone does, in a way; they just don’t realize it. Stories represent periods in a life—not a date on a calendar or a forestry block where you worked. I can never remember the forests we cut down. A pine tree plantation is a single thing to me. A place loses its significance when it’s turned over to a uniform crop. More often than not, it loses its name, too. An ancient rainforest becomes Block 246.

           Obie never got sentimental about things, and we never talked about my writing. Though I was once in his ute and found a copy of the newspaper one of my stories had been published in. It was well-creased and stained with grease, so I knew he’d read it on a lunch break somewhere. That was enough for me. He was a good friend like that; we didn’t need to say everything out loud.

           When we were kids, we were completely inseparable. From the outside, it didn’t look like there was much to do in our town, especially in winter when the smoke from the chimneys settled over the place like a lid that kept everyone inside if they weren’t working the boats or the bush. Obie and I were always busy, though, and we used to brave the cold and trudge off into the hills whenever we could. When summer came, we’d spend whole days out on the water in his uncle’s tinny towing lures as we explored the coastline. It’s odd to think about that. Those memories seem to belong to someone else. The Obie there is not the Obie who killed himself. I guess that’s what Martha wanted from me: a story that she could sit down and read to learn the why. She wanted to be right there in New York with her son when he did it. She wanted to feel his desperation, to hear what went through his mind. She wanted to wallow in her grief. We all did.

*

There is an old man on the redeye flight from LA to New York who asks me if I’m heading home or away from home. 

           “Away from home,” I tell him, and I watch his face light up upon hearing my accent. He turns out to be a nice fella from a place called Bozeman, which is far from the sea. He and his wife had visited New Zealand in the early 2000s, and we talk a lot about his time there and also things like hunting and stargazing. I quickly realize his wife is dead and that he is lonely. 

           “I love airplanes,” he says after the drinks trolley has loosened both of us up. 

            “I find them very meditative, and you always meet interesting people on them. What are you doing in New York?”

           “My friend died there a few months ago. I’m going to sort out the odds and ends.”

           “God, that’s awful. I’m sorry, son. That’s a horrible job for anyone to undertake.”

           I nod politely and he eventually dozes off. I sit listening to him mumble and grind his teeth in his sleep. I can’t sleep and entertain myself with the notion that I’m his guardian angel, although I don’t know what I’m guarding him against. When we land at JFK, he wakes up and starts chatting again. We taxi on the tarmac for a while, and I look out at the gray morning light seeping into the plane.  

           “Things start to look ugly this deep into winter,” the man tells me. I don’t entirely agree with him but give him a wry smile all the same. The trees are skeletal, and their leaves sit in decaying piles the same color as a child’s paint pallet after they’ve mixed all the primary colors together.

           “Can you imagine dying here,” he says, leaning over the center armrest. “In this city?”

* 

Obie had been living in a place called Williamsburg, but I check into an Airbnb on Manhattan because when I looked at a map, I saw it was an island, which I liked. It turned out Williamsburg is on an island, too, but in the end, I am happy with my decision because Manhattan is “happening,” as the cab driver describes it. I have little intention of getting amongst the “happening,” but I feel I ought to at least try. At the Airbnb, I drop my bags then walk north to stop myself from falling asleep. The jetlag has frayed my nerves, but once I reach Central Park, I feel better. There is a cold wind coming from the north, which I find disorientating because I’m used to the cold wind coming from Antarctica in the south.

           I stop by a tall tree I don’t know the name of and place my hand on its bark. The wind feels different on my face somehow. I close my eyes and stick my tongue out to taste it, but all I get is sausage sizzle. Beyond a small pond is a hotdog stand. The guy running it is yelling to passers-by about deals and discounts. I make my way towards him and ask what he recommends. He says something in a thick accent that I don’t understand, so I just nod, and he disappears behind the rattle of a generator and a stack of soda cans. A moment later, he appears with a hotdog piled high with things I don’t recognize. 

           “What kind of sausage is this?”

           “Yes, sausage,” he replies. I sit down on a bench to eat it and watch all the New Yorkers walk their dogs. I’ve never seen animals like them before. Fluffy, rat-sized things that wear coats and socks.

           My mum never let me get a dog when I was a boy, but Obie’s uncle who lived out near a forest park owned a pack of pig dogs. The thing about pig dogs is you have to hunt with them at least once a fortnight or else you’re doing them a disservice. Even once a fortnight is a little cruel. It’s when the dogs get out of practice that they’ll do something stupid that’ll get them killed. Like hanging onto a boar’s ear for too long or going at the pig from the front.

           Anyway, Obie’s uncle’s wife used to get fed up with him hunting so often that she threatened to leave him. His uncle was real upset about this because he loved his wife and he loved hunting. Obie and I were only fifteen, but we came to the rescue and started running the pack of dogs on Saturdays after rugby. It turned out pig hunting was harder than rugby and pretty soon we were fitter than most All Blacks and eating a shitload of pork sausage. A lot of people faint the first time they see a pig getting stuck with a knife or a dog getting thrown five meters clean in the air by an angry boar. It’s the only way to hunt them, though, and it’s the same way dogs hunt in the wild. I don’t hunt with dogs anymore, not because I think it is cruel, but because I don’t have the same hunger as I did back then. Obie and I were obsessed. We lived for anything that took us into the bush or out to sea. It was our whole identity.  

           Once Obie got his driver’s license, we started pig hunting after school. I remember one summer afternoon we must have chased the dogs ten kilometers up a river valley until we finally found them with a monster boar. He was too big to roll and stick with a knife and neither of us hunted with a gun, so we had to pull the dogs off it and let it go. It was well dark by that point, and we didn’t have torches, so we just lit a fire and slept right there on the bush floor with the dogs lying next to us for heat. I remember falling asleep to all those smells: mug, blood, and manuka smoke from the fire. That night stands out in my head as one of the happiest I’ve ever been.  

*

There is a square window beside a small square desk at the Airbnb. I sit down with my laptop and try to at least figure out how I am going to write the story Martha wants. Already I can feel the impossibility of the task. Obie didn’t leave a note or a journal. I can never inhabit his mind and part of me has no desire to. I spend half an hour staring out the window, then shut my laptop and catch the subway over to his apartment in Brooklyn.

           It’s in an old pre-war building a couple of blocks from the waterfront. His landlord is a nice man dressed in black with an incredible fur hat. I ask him about it, and he tells me he’s Jewish. I’ve never met a Jewish person before and get all excited. He must be put out by it because he opens the door for me, shows me how to lock it, and then leaves. I feel guilty, but part of me is glad because now I can stand in this apartment alone.

           All of Obie’s possessions were emptied out, but for some reason, no one has taken over the lease. Obie didn’t do himself in here or anything like that. It’s just chance that it hasn’t been filled and I can stand here in this room. I don’t have a clue what I’m hoping to find, but it seems like something a detective might do, so I do it. All that comes of it is a strange feeling. I leave and walk down to a place on the riverfront that’s called a park but is more a concrete boardwalk. I sit down on a bench and take out Obie’s phone, which Martha gave me. The embassy sent it along with all his other things back to New Zealand, and now I have brought it back to New York. I scroll through his messages feeling horribly nosey. I’m about to stop and shut the phone off when I find a number saved as “O” he’d been texting for a couple of months. Texts like, Where are you? You still coming? Or, It was nice seeing you last night, let’s do it again. I try to go on his apps, but I need internet, so I find a quiet bar and ask about the wi-fi. When I go on his Tinder, I put a face to O. Her name is Oleda, and she is beautiful. Her bio reads as two emojis: one of the US flag, one of the Mexican flag. Below is a line that says, Walking via Dolorosa. I never went to church or any of that, so I have to google what it means. I can’t figure out if she is being morbid or ironic, if she herself feels persecuted, or if she means we all are, every one of us, walking the Dolorosa. 

*

Obie is an unusual name for a New Zealander; most of us are just called John. When we were kids, a lot of people had never heard a name like Obie before, and he used to get teased about it. Everyone liked Obie, so there wasn’t much to tease him about, except his name. Even so, people knew not to push it. If you did, you’d be sure to get a smack.

           Because I’d known Obie for as long as I can remember, I’d never thought of it as an unusual name. We must have been teenagers when I was ’round at his place for dinner one night and asked where the name had actually come from. I can’t remember what brought it to mind, but I remember feeling intense anticipation for the answer. 

           “His old man named him,” Martha said. Neither Obie nor I knew a whole lot about our dads, and we made one of our wordless pacts that said we didn’t care. In the absence of fathers, we both poured ourselves into doing what we imagined men did. It turned out, we were both good at it and enjoyed being men a lot. It wasn’t until I was older that I started to see how growing up without fathers had affected us. Obie particularly was extremely protective of any woman he dated. It once got him into trouble with the cops when he was in his early twenties. He never hit a woman or anything like that. Martha had taught Obie to be very respectful of women, but not so much men. Some out-of-towner hit on his girlfriend at a bar and Obie knocked out his two front teeth. We knew all the cops in our town, and all Obie had to do was pay for the guy’s dental bill, which was a few thousand. I paid for half of it because Obie used to be broke a lot back then, before he started getting steady work in the shit industry. Anyway, I guess we liked to prove we didn’t need dads, and our mums believed us because they wanted to. My mum mentioned the odd thing about my old man—like I knew he was a forestry worker and had died before I was born. Back then, lots of people died in forestry and there were a few kids in town with the same story as me. Martha didn’t talk about Obie’s father at all, though, and if he ever came up in talk around town, people always just said he was a nutter.

           We must have been seventeen or so when Obie met his dad. It was a weekend, and we were fucking around at his house trying to build a smoker when this red Holden Commodore pulls into the front yard. I knew the moment he stepped out that he was Obie’s dad. He must have been watching the house because Martha had just gone out to town. We all shook hands and then Obie and his dad went and sat in the garden and talked for an hour or so. Turned out, Obie’s dad was a bloke named Jack who had been in prison the last decade. I hung around because I didn’t trust the guy but also because I didn’t trust my best friend not to drive off with Jack in that Commodore. Obie ran on impulse sometimes, especially when he was angry.

           I felt bad for listening in, but I wanted to know what Obie felt. They talked about nothing in particular for a while. Jack spoke in almost a whisper, but I caught most of it. He said prison had changed him—that it had broken him. After he said that, Obie gained confidence and asked why he’d done those things that had ended him up in prison.

           “You do a lot of things when you’re young to prove yourself,” Jack said. “A young man can be a cruel beast. Truth is, no man wants to do those cruel things, though.”

           “Why does he do them then?” Obie asked. Jack gave a shrug and the conservation ended soon after that. We never saw Jack again. His body washed up on the beach a few days later. The coroner said he’d been drifting out at sea for days. Dehydration was what killed him in the end—a cruel thing to die from when you’re floating in water. Obie never did find out why Jack named him Obie, but like I said, Obie wasn’t sentimental about things. He always said names were just sounds our mouths can make. Nothing more. 

*

It was the first day of winter when Martha called me and told me about Obie, which meant it was the first day of summer here in New York. I still can’t understand why someone would kill themselves on the first day of summer. That was my first thought when Martha told me. Not of Obie, but of some trivial unspecific.

           I try to imagine this place in summer as I sit in a cab heading uptown. I paint leaves on the trees, dye the sky blue. As if in spite, it starts snowing, and I tell the driver to stop the taxi so I can walk the last few blocks to the address Oleda gave me on the phone. I like walking in the snow. It makes me feel connected to the city for the first time since arriving. New York is a brick-brown city when you make your way to the poorer parts. Oleda lives in what the cab driver called “the projects,” and I don’t know why they call it that, but it makes it sound much more exciting than it is. It evokes change and development when in fact the area feels decidedly still. I meet Oleda in a concrete square she calls a park because of the skeletal trees that sit imprisoned around the edges. There are old men smoking cigarettes under an oak tree and young men drinking and staining the gray concrete black with their piss over by a skip bin. I ask if she is hungry, and she nods, so we walk through the snow to Lexington Avenue and find a diner that is falling apart but warm. She orders French toast even though it’s late afternoon, and I order a quesadilla. 

           “I wanted to go to his funeral but . . .” She trails off. 

           “It’s a long way to travel,” I say. She nods.

           “How was it?”

           “Sad,” I answer. “There were a lot of people. Everyone liked Obie. Everyone got very drunk.” She smiles and gives a little laugh that incorporates a snort. She is wearing a green jacket with what I like to imagine is a coyote fur hood and little heart earrings.

           “I miss hearing that accent. Obie used to talk to my kids and tell them stories about your country until they fell asleep. I’d always listen in too.”

           “You have kids?”

           “Two boys; I had them when I was younger. Their father’s an asshole. Obie was nice to them.”

           “So you guys were serious?”

           “Serious enough for him to meet my kids. I mean, we trusted each other, you know. I knew that when I swiped right on his ass.” She laughs again and covers her mouth with the back of her hand. 

           “What stories did he tell?” I ask. 

           “I don’t know, stories about the sea. He used to describe the hills or the smell of certain things or the sounds of certain birds. Real nice things, you know, not so much stories. I think they made him sad, though—thinking about his home. Towards the end, he started talking about home a lot, not just to the kids but after they went to bed, to me. We’d lie in my room, and he’d just carry on telling me about the sea and the forests or the bush or whatever you call it. Talk’n’ bout birds and adventures into the mountains. I liked hearing those stories, but I’d have to start kissing him to get him to shut up.”

           “What was he like then? Did you see him the day he died?”

           “Well, no. We stopped seeing each other a few weeks before it happened.”

           “Why?”

           “He didn’t talk about his feelings much—I’m sure you know that. But I mean he just dropped off the face of the earth. Didn’t answer my calls or his front door. Nothing. And I was the one helping with his sickness.”

           “Sickness?”

           “Yeah, his stomach was no good. Could barely eat some days. I even made him go to the doctor a couple of times, but they found nothing wrong with him.” 

           “I didn’t know that. How long was he sick for?”

           “Hard to say; he hid it well. I mean he kept going to work the whole time.”

           “Did he like his work?”

           “He loved it. He was proud of what he did.”

           I scratch my stubble and thank the waiter as he puts our food down. “Did he seem . . . depressed?” I ask.

           “I don’t know, maybe.”

           “So, you don’t know what happened to him in those last couple of weeks?”

           She shrugs. “Like I said, he just vanished.”

           We eat in silence for a while, and when we leave the diner, the snow has hidden the gray concrete. 

           “I see why people love this city,” I say as walk back to her place. 

           “Yeah,” she replies, sounding unconvinced. “Obie used to say he only liked the city when it rained. You know, when nature crept its way back in. He had a point—the autumn leaves or the winter snow. That’s when the city is beautiful and when people say so. Most of them don’t realize it’s not the city that’s beautiful, though. It’s the leaves or the snow that is.”

           We come to the same concrete square where I met her. The smokers and drinkers have drifted off to find cover from the snow. We hug and she starts crying, so we stay hugging for a few minutes. When we part, I smile at her and leave without saying anything. I walk back to my Airbnb through the snow. I figure it’ll take me at least two hours, but I want my body to feel exhausted when I climb into bed. An aching body will remind me of home.         

*

The snow stopped overnight and has already turned brown on the busy streets. I catch the subway over to Brooklyn to meet with Obie’s old boss. She is a middle-aged woman who speaks with a thick New York accent that elongates all the vowels. She gives me a tour of the treatment plant out in Greenpoint and points out where Obie used to work. I sense she hates me being here and having to forge sympathy. Her tone is formal, and she keeps repeating her praise of Obie like a voicemail: He was a valued member of our team. 

           When the tour is over, I don’t even bother asking her questions. It’s clear she is struggling to remember who Obie was. On my way out, a man in overalls stops me. He has large thick glasses that turn his eyes into saucers, and I can’t stop staring. 

           “Yo, you Obie’s boy?” he asks, and we shake hands. “I heard you were coming through. Trey.”

           “Luke,” I reply, and I like him immediately. It’s the afternoon, and he tells me to wait a minute so he can finish his shift. I hang around outside until he appears and leads the way to a bar on the other side of Newtown Creek. It is an industrial part of New York and with the snow and the skyline out of view, it’s easy to forget we are in the city. The bar Trey chooses reminds me of home with its dust and worn furniture and worn clientele. We order a beer each, and they came out with two shots of whiskey, which I learn is a common deal here.

           “You from New York?” I ask awkwardly. 

           He nods. “Oh yeah. Born and bred. Only place I plan on dying, too,” he says with a laugh. We cheers, and Trey tells me how he and Obie used to sit in the same seats we sit in now and drink themselves to sleep. 

           “I’ve never known anyone who could drink like Obie,” he says, “and best of all he drank for all the right reasons. He drank because he was happy—to celebrate life, you know. Not to drown nothing or because he needed a drink.” Trey stops abruptly, and I can see he is holding something back. 

           “What happened to him?” I ask. 

           “I don’t know. He just . . .” Trey gestures at nothing in particular as he searches for the words. “I mean, he got sick, you know. He lost a lot of weight, and his energy went. He started doing weird shit. Like around lunchtime he’d walk over to the cemetery, rain or shine. Said he liked eating under the trees there. I was worried about him, so I invited him upstate one weekend to my buddy’s place who was having a party. It’s right in the Catskills—surrounded by forest. Real nice place. Anyway, he disappeared into the forest almost as soon as we arrived there. We had to call the police and everything. Luckily, we found him before anything bad happened.”

           “Where was he?”

           “A mile or so up this riverbed, under a huge tree. Sound asleep. It was freezing, too, and he had his fucking top off. I knew something was really wrong then, but then he got better after that trip, so I stopped worrying. And then he got bad again and then . . .”

           I nod knowingly as another round is set down on the table. We trade stories and drink until the bar wants to close. The streets are quiet when we stumble out into the cold. Trey says the trains aren’t running this late at night, so we walk the few miles to Jackson Heights where he lives. The cold stings my cheeks; it feels good against my whiskey-flushed skin. 

*

There is a little girl staring at me. It takes my mind a second to process her, but eventually I remember Trey mentioning his ten-year-old daughter at the bar. I must have been drunker than I thought because I am fully clothed on his couch and have no memory of lying down here.

           “Where’s your Dad?” I ask. She points to a bedroom door. I smile and ask if she knows how to use the coffee machine, which she says she does. I watch on as she boils water in a pot on the stove then adds coffee grinds straight to it. She pours the brew into a mug, and I wait for the grains to settle on the bottom. The coffee tastes good and I tell her so. Obie and I used to make coffee a similar way when we were out on the water with only a camp cooker. 

           On the long break between high school and university, we took this elaborate trip to Fiordland. His uncles tinny didn’t have enough fuel to get us there, so we kind of borrowed, kind of stole a trailer sailor from the yacht club and sailed there. We strapped our rifles, fishing rods, tents, and bags to the bow. It was summer, but Fiordland is south and more wild and isolated a place than most on Earth. Mountain peaks rise from the ocean, waterfalls fall 500 meters to valley floors. And there is no one there. Not a soul for miles. Obie and I sailed into one of the sounds and anchored the yacht offshore, away from the sand flies. During the days, we fished for groper, dove for crayfish, and wandered into the bush where the birds came in close because they had never seen humans before. We slept out on the tiny yacht under clouds of stars and cooked coffee on a camping stove in the centerboard-well at dawn. That’s how we passed our summers—living so close to the land we became part of it. Now I’m in Jackson Heights, drinking coffee made that same way, but it doesn’t quite taste the same. I suppose it never will. 

*

You can’t see the Atlantic Ocean from Battery Park. When you look at it on a map, you’d think you could, but the land overlaps in such a way that it hides the horizon. I sit down on a bench at the edge of a boardwalk before the sea. Gulls line the railing and eye me nervously. Gray clouds appear in patches just like the snow on the ground that melts and flows in tiny rivers over gray concrete to the sea. My hangover is mild, all things considered, but it shades my mood with a sentimentality. Maybe it’s just this city, though. I know Obie felt it—that bizarre tradition of solitude in one of the most densely populated places on earth.

            Obie and I never spoke on the phone all that much; our friendship depended on the tangible, like our movement together though the landscape. Our history was recorded in miles walked, mud beneath nails, and aching bones. On the phone, there was always an awkwardness between us. I remember he called a month or two before he died. He asked about the trips I’d made into the hills and the trout flies I’d used in the rivers.

            “What about you?” I asked. “Gotten out of the city?”

            “No,” he said. He fell silent.

            “Can you get to the beach easily?” I asked, trying to make conversation. “You thrown a line out yet?”

            “We inspected a terminal down in Queens the other day. There are sandflats in a place called Jamaica Bay, right by the airport. It’s full of trash, though, and you can’t see the real ocean.”

            “Well how far is the sea?”

            “Just over a tongue of land.”

            “Well, go check it out? Surly?”

*

I catch the ferry to Rockaway. I am the only one who sits up on the top deck. My face and hands turn numb as the Manhattan skyline shrinks. We pass under the Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge and the Atlantic Ocean opens up before the ferry. I get off in Rockaway on the Jamaica Bay side and walk across the thin tongue of land to the beach and the sea that stretches to the horizon. Not a soul is in sight. I stumble across the sand to the breaking waves and pull my shoes off to stand in the water. It is icy cold and wakes me up. I realize I’m not breathing right, that I’m gasping for air and my chest feels ready to burst. A noise comes from my throat, I bend over with my hands on my knees, trying to steady myself.

            It was raining when Obie swam out past the breaking waves. He washed up a few days later with the incoming tide. They called it a suicide and not a drowning because a surf camera had filmed the whole thing. It showed him wading into the water in his jeans and swimming out until he was a speck that disappeared amongst the movement of water. The police said hypothermia was what got him. There are worse ways to go. People say you start to feel warm towards the end. That you sort of just fall asleep as your body shuts down.  

*

The dial tone rings for a long time before Martha picks up. She tells me about the summer back home, and I tell her about New York and the people I’ve met. When the conversation runs out, we both sit quietly and wait to see who will really speak first.

           “I can’t write your story,” I eventually say.

           “Obie’s story,” she corrects me.

           “Obie’s story,” I echo.

           “I only wanted to give you closure, Luke. I could see it was eating you up. You’re the type of person who doesn’t give up on things—on Obie—no matter how much you convince yourself otherwise.”

           “Obie, he . . .”

           “It doesn’t matter.” There is another silence. I can hear a dog barking on her end of the line. The distant hum of cicadas. Summer. “You’ll never truly understand someone,” Martha says, “or why they do something, especially if you love them. You need to accept that. Don’t write the story. It was never important. Come home.”

*