I asked, "Did you know my dad?" He leaned back in his chair and said, "I'm not sure. Who was your dad?" "Thomas Schell." He thought for a minute. I hated how he had to think. "No," he said. "I don't know any Schells." "Knew." "Excuse me?" "He's dead, so you couldn't know him now." "I'm sorry to hear that." "You must have known him, though." "No. I'm sure I didn't." "But you must have."

I told him, "I found a little envelope that had your name on it, and I thought maybe it was your wife, who I know is now your ex-wife, but she said she didn't know what it was, and your name is William, and I wasn't anywhere near the W's yet—" "My wife?" "I went and talked to her." "Talked to her where?" "The narrowest townhouse in New York." "How was she?" "What do you mean?" "How did she seem?" "Sad." "Sad how?" "Just sad." "What was she doing?" "Nothing, really. She was trying to give me food, even though I told her I wasn't hungry. Someone was in the other room while we talked." "A man?" "Yeah." "You saw him?" "He passed by the door, but mostly he was yelling from another room." "He was yelling?" "Extremely loud." "What was he yelling?" "I couldn't hear the words." "Did he sound intimidating?" "I don't know what that means." "Was he scary?" "What about my dad?" "When was this?" "Eight months ago." "Eight months ago?" "Seven months and twenty-eight days." He smiled. "Why are you smiling?" He put his face in his hands, like he was going to cry, but he didn't. He looked up and said, "That man was me."

"You?" "Eight months ago. Yeah. I thought you were talking about the other day." "But he didn't have a beard." "He grew a beard." "And he didn't wear glasses." He took off his glasses and said, "He changed." I started thinking about the pixels in the image of the falling body, and how the closer you looked, the less you could see. "Why were you yelling?" "Long story." "I have a long time," I said, because anything that could bring me closer to Dad was something I wanted to know

about, even if it would hurt me. "It's a long, long story." "Please." He closed a notebook that was open on his desk and said, "It's too long a story."

I said, "Don't you think it's so weird that we were in the apartment together eight months ago and now we're in this office together?"

He nodded.

"It's weird," I said. "We were incredibly close."

He said, "So what's so special about the envelope?" "Nothing, exactly. It's what was in the envelope." "Which was?" "Which was this." I pulled the string around my neck, and made it so the key to our apartment was on my back and Dad's key rested on the pouch of my overalls, over Mr. Black's biography, over the Band-Aid, over my heart. "Can I see that?" he asked. I took it off of my neck and handed it to him. He examined it and asked, "Did it say something on the envelope?" "It said 'Black.'" He looked up at me. "Did you find it in a blue vase?" "Jose!"

He said, "I can't believe it." "You can't believe what?" "This is truly the most amazing thing that's ever happened to me." "What is?" "I've spent two years trying to find this key." "But I've spent eight months trying to find the lock." "Then we've been looking for each other." I was finally able to ask the most important question of my life. "What does it open?"

"It opens a safe-deposit box." "Well, what's it got to do with my dad?" "Your dad?" "The whole point of the key is that I found it in my dad's closet, and since he's dead, I couldn't ask him what it meant, so I had to find out for myself." "You found it in his closet?" "Yes." "In a tall blue vase?" I nodded. "With a label on the bottom?" "I don't know. I didn't see a label. I don't remember." If I'd been alone, I would have given myself the biggest bruise of my life. I would have turned myself into one big bruise.

"My father passed away about two years ago," he said. "He went in for a checkup and the doctor told him he had two months to live. He died two months later." I didn't want to hear about death. It was all anyone talked about, even when no one was actually talking about it. "I needed to figure out what to do with all of his things. Books, furniture, clothes." "Didn't you want to keep them?" "I didn't want any of it." I thought that was weird, because Dad's things were all I wanted. "So to make a long story short—" "You don't have to make a long story short." "I had an estate sale. I shouldn't have been there. I should have hired someone to take care of it. Or I should have given it all away. Instead I was in the position of telling people that the prices for his belongings weren't negotiable. His wedding suit wasn't negotiable. His sunglasses weren't negotiable. It was one of the worst days of my life. Maybe the worst."

"Are you OK?" "I'm fine. It's been a bad couple of years. My father and I weren't exactly close." "Do you need a hug?" "I'll be OK." "Why not?" "Why not what?" "Why weren't you and your dad exactly close?" He said, "Too long a story." "Can you please tell me about my dad now?"

"My father wrote letters when he found out about the cancer. He wasn't much of a letter writer before. I don't know if he ever wrote. But he spent his last two months writing obsessively. Whenever he was awake." I asked why, but what I really wanted to know was why I started writing letters after Dad died. "He was trying to say his goodbyes. He wrote to people he barely knew. If he hadn't already been sick, his letters would have been his sickness. I had a business meeting the other day, and in the middle of our conversation the man asked if I was related to Edmund Black. I told him yes, he was my father. He said, 'I went to high school with your dad. He wrote me the most amazing letter before he died. Ten pages. I only barely knew him. We hadn't talked in fifty years. It was the most amazing letter I'd ever read.' I asked him if I could see it. He said, 'I don't think it was meant to be shared.' I told him it would mean a lot to me. He said, 'He mentions you in it.' I told him I understood.

"I looked through my father's Rolodex—" "What's that?" "Phone book. I called every name. His cousins, his business partners, people I'd never heard of. He'd written to everyone. Every single person. Some let me see their letters. Others didn't."

"What were they like?"

"The shortest was a single sentence. The longest was a couple dozen pages. Some of them were almost like little plays. Others were just questions to the person he was writing to." "What kinds of questions?" "'Did you know I was in love with you that summer in Norfolk?' 'Will they be taxed for possessions I leave, like the piano?' 'How do light bulbs work?'" "I could have explained that to him." "'Does anyone actually die in his sleep?'