I was a successful professional. I made good money, lived in a nice condo in a cool neighborhood. I may not have been Ryan Gosling, but I had a full head of hair, a strong chin, a decent bod that I worked hard to keep from puffing out in the wrong places. I worked on my inner life, too; I practiced mindfulness meditations daily and yoga twice a week. With all the work I was doing to be a better me, why was I only able to attract women who were batshit crazy?
As the firstborn son of a late-blooming businessman, I never had much growing up. Whereas my （ten years younger） little brother got to go to sleepaway camp, Disneyland, Hawaii for his tenth birthday, my ten-year-old self was lucky to score a nosebleed seat to a Dodgers game. I had no sour grapes about being the kid who was born before Mom and Dad had money; it’s just how it was. But even though I wasn’t mad that I never got to play club baseball or go on ski trips to Aspen, maybe subconsciously I felt less than Charlie, Winnie, and my brother and sisters because I never got what they’d gotten. My childhood had groomed me to think I didn’t deserve the best of anything. Like attracts like. Losers attract losers. If I wasn’t a fuckup, why did I keep falling under the spell of fucked-up women?
“Nathan, are you OK?”
I didn’t want to tell them . . . didn’t want them to know what I really was. Until I knew for sure myself.
“Sorry, yes. I’m just trying to figure out how someone . . . why someone . . . I mean, who would do that?” I stammered.
I flashed back to that horrible morning when the message came in. I had never met Silvia Hernandez. I didn’t know if she was young or old, joyful or morose, had a lisp, a stutter, or any other distinguishing vocal characteristics. I detected an accent but had no idea if it was supposed to sound Mexican, Central American, Puerto Rican, or right off the boat from Spain. She was a complete unknown entity to me. Which of course was why I was chosen.
“You said you never actually spoke with her,” Charlie reconfirmed.
“That’s right,” I said, recalling how I’d stared out my window right after hearing （not） Silvia’s shocking “news.” Cars were whizzing down the busy street beneath my third-floor condo; people were going to work, kids were going to school. I’d felt a rush of anger: A woman just died! Would it kill you to stop for a few fucking minutes!
“She left a message, and I left her one back,” I said.
“But she never called you again after that?” Charlie asked.
“No. We texted.”
“Can we see the texts?”
I opened the text chain.
“Her first text after my message was ‘Sorry, not getting service here,’” I said. I hadn’t questioned the validity of her assertion, then or now; it was true, the cell service on Louisa’s street was spotty. If she wasn’t on her Wi-Fi, it’s totally possible that she couldn’t make a call.
“Then what?” Winnie asked.
“Then I texted that I could be there in an hour,” I said. “It was rush hour traffic,” I added, so they wouldn’t think I was blowing it off.
“And then?”
I looked down at my phone. “Then she texted, ‘I called the funeral home, they are already on their way. Should I have them wait for you?’” I had rationalized that it was perfectly logical that Silvia would know which funeral home to call—she was her nurse, after all, and saw her more regularly than Winnie, Charlie, and me put together. Plus I was too grateful to question Silvia’s eagerness to take care of everything. I had never seen a dead body and was perfectly happy not to break my streak.
“And you said not to wait for you?”
“She responded like two seconds later, ‘They are here. OK to take her now?’”
“And you said yes.”
“It didn’t make sense for them to have to wait for me—it’s not like there was anything I could do to help the situation.” I tried not to sound defensive, but I could feel my face getting hot.
“No, of course,” Winnie assured me. “Go on.”
“Then she wrote, ‘She passed in the library, in her favorite chair.’”
I remembered how I’d gotten a chill, just as I had one now, as I pictured Louisa cozying into that chair with a book and a cup of tea, for the last time. I remembered thinking it was a relatively dignified way to go, and that Louisa would be happy about that.
“Her last text was, ‘I am very sorry for your loss, Mr. Nathan, I loved her, too,’” I read.