TWO WEEKS LATER, Dad had a heart attack. When I got to the
hospital, he was in a bed in the emergency room, his eyes closed. Mom
and Lori were standing next to him. "It's just the machines keeping him
alive at his point," Mom said.
I knew Dad would have hated that, spending his final moments in a
hospital hooked up to machines. He'd have wanted to be out in the wild
somewhere. He always said that when he died, we should put him on a
mountaintop and let the buzzards and coyotes tear his body apart. I had
this crazy urge to scoop him up in my arms and charge through the doors
—to check out Rex Walls–style one last time.
Instead, I took his hand. It was warm and heavy. An hour later, they
turned the machines off. In the months that followed, I found myself
always wanting to be somewhere other than where I was. If I was at
work, I'd wish I were at home. If I was in the apartment, I couldn't wait
to get out of it. If a taxi I had hailed was stuck in traffic for over a
minute, I got out and walked. I felt best when I was on the move, going
someplace rather than being there. I took up ice-skating. I rose early in
the morning and made my way through the quiet, dawn-lit streets to the
rink, where I laced up my skates so tightly my feet throbbed. I welcomed
the numbing cold and even the jolt of my falls on the hard, wet ice. The
fast-paced, repetitive maneuvers distracted me, and sometimes I went
back at night to skate again, returning home only when it was late and I
was exhausted. It took me a while to realize that just being on the move
wasn't enough; that I needed to reconsider everything. A year after Dad
died, I left Eric. He was a good man, but not the right one for me. And
Park Avenue was not where I belonged. I took a small apartment on the
West Side. It had neither a doorman nor a fireplace, but there were large
windows that flooded the rooms with light, and parquet floors and a
small foyer, just like that first apartment Lori and I had found in the
Bronx. It felt right.