London Gray

The primer on the walls smelled of fresh beginnings, but the torn envelope in my hands weighed of a lifetime of regrets. A notebook trembled from the uncontrolled nerves in my hands. The back of my throat was coated with unfinished cuts of diamonds, and as I tried to swallow, 30 years of disconnect got in the way.

“What is that?” Scott asked as he walked into our living room, holding a roll of painter’s tape.

“This just got delivered,” my voice fought against a tide of tears.

Scott picked up on the sorrow in my heart the moment he saw it overtake my eyes. He sat beside me and took the notebook in his hands. A single paper sat on my lap, a letter that explained how half of my world was gone. Scott peered over at it as it rested on my knees, hesitant to touch it as if it were made of fire.

“It’s from an estate lawyer.” I explained, as if I had all the answers. “My father passed away.”

Even though Scott never met him, a gasp of breath escaped his lungs. At the end of the day, knowing me ultimately meant knowing my father. Before he could wish upon me his condolences and regrets, I thrusted a check into his hands, it was where the real fire burned.

Scott’s eyes lit up like a jumbled string of Christmas lights, but retreated when he realized his reaction wasn’t anything I needed. “$10,000?”

“$10,000.” I repeated in disbelief.

The primer on the walls dried and for hours, I sat there. Scott painted the room around me in a color called London Gray. I moved the plastic covering off the couch, just enough for my aching heart to find a place to settle, and I sat there. My father, a man who I knew barely anything about, had passed away. My father, the man who helped bring me into the world but never guided me through it, left this world behind. I sat on the couch until the sun fell down and the moon rose up. I willed the tears to stop from falling but there was only so much I could do against an undeniable gravity that weighed me down.

I only have two clear memories of my father. I was four years old when he told me how he fell in love with my mother. A chief petty officer in the United States Navy, he excavated a piece of his heart when he spotted my mother along the coastline of Subic Bay in the Philippines, where the rustle of the banana leaves made her voice settle in the breeze. It was then, when he told me to see the world, because I would never know what was waiting for me on the other side of it.

The other memory was when I was five years old. I found him standing behind a closet door, his charismatically upturned smile the prize I got for finding him. In our games of hide and seek, he never picked the most creative spots to hide but rather almost stood out in plain sight, if only I were cunning enough to find him. He picked me up in his arms, it was the only time I ever felt weightless.

And then he was gone.

He walked out the door without giving me one last kiss on my forehead. He left his side of the closet intact and didn’t take any furniture. I thought he left with nothing, but as he walked down the stairs, he stole the naivete of my childhood. He took irreplaceable years from my adolescence as the warmth of his palm opened the front door. He escaped with a pocket full of love from his only child as he disappeared from my life.

It wasn’t until later in adulthood that I learned my father became a spy for the CIA. That when he walked out of our house for the last time in New York, he walked into a life of espionage at Camp Peary in Virginia. There were clandestine affairs and covert operations that I would never be privy to. For years he watched me from afar, but never came close enough to give me one more kiss on the forehead. He was a mountain of secrets in which I would never reach the summit.

The only other time I ever heard from my father, was on that summer afternoon, through his estate lawyer. Henry Palmer, dead at the age of 61. 56 of those years were without me.

I picked up the notebook and read the pages again. It was written in my father’s handwriting. Even though he was only in my life for the first five years of it, I remembered his penmanship. The ink still pressed down into the page with urgency the way it once did, the angle of his letters always seemed like they were in a rush to get somewhere.

The notebook was blank, except for the first three pages. The first page housed a list of places to see. Morocco and Spain, Jamaica, and the Philippines. San Diego and Honolulu, Hong Kong, and Sydney. A single address sat on the second page, the location meant nothing to me. And the third page had one sentence on it, one of the only things I remember him saying to me.

“Go see the world.”

And that is exactly what I had to do. A week after I received the news of my father’s passing, I booked a trip to California. Scott and I walked along the coast of Pacific Beach, the high tide of the ocean rushed up against our ankles and the San Diego sand cushioned our bare feet. We ate California burritos at the edge of Sunset Cliffs, where twilight flirted with the edge of the horizon.

The following month, we took a weeklong trip to Barcelona, where the Mediterranean Sea tasted of salt and oysters, where the days stretched into late nights at restaurants and nightclubs. I wrote in my father’s little notebook as we sat on a bench at Park Guell, admiring the mosaic designs and architecture, wondering if seeing the world meant stepping into someone else’s shoes, or if it meant stepping my own shoes into someone else’s world.

I slowly checked off places on the list. I ate at hawker stalls at the night markets of Hong Kong and danced in the middle of a tango club in Buenos Aires. I surfed on a private strip of sand on Australia’s Gold Coast and sat in a quiet stillness underneath the rustle of banana leaves in the Philippines, where my mother’s voice settled in the breeze.

I tried to find my father in every place I visited. I searched for his charisma in between the neon lights of Miami’s Ocean Drive, I looked for his thin wired glasses in a sea of faces along the colorful coast of Cinque Terre. His perfectly rounded eyes were nowhere to be found, the warmth of his hugs was gone. I took planes and trains, I took buses and taxis, and I circled the Earth as if each trip would bring me closer to a man I never knew. I tried to find him in places as if he were hiding in plain sight, sometimes forgetting that he had already left this world behind.

But the one place I avoided was the only place he ever needed me to see. As I sat on our living room couch a couple of years later, with the little black notebook full of memories from the world I had seen, I turned to the second page. I read the London address he left behind. Nothing in me wanted to fly to Heathrow Airport, but everything in me knew I had to.

And like we had done dozens of times before, Scott and I packed our bags and swallowed the jet lag as we touched down in London. I walked through the roads of London with a cloudy fog around my head. I stood in front of Buckingham Palace and Big Ben for obligatory photos and drank my way through pints of beer and Pimms cups without ever tasting the country on my tongue. The notebook burned a hole in my bag wherever I took it, the single address the last part of my father’s requests still left untouched.

On our third day in London, Scott woke me up with a fresh cup of coffee and a shared understanding of what we needed to do. He didn’t suggest we go see any of the sites and gave up on the idea of seeing Arsenal play at the stadium. Instead, he read the address into memorization and tucked the little black notebook in my bag. He took my hand and led me out of our hotel room.

It was on that third day in London where over thirty years of my own life abruptly proved itself to be untrue. Amid London’s fog, I finally gained clarity. I learned that up was down, that wrongful doings couldn’t always be replaced with rightful wishes. If his whole life had been a lie, it made sense that his death was too. Underneath a sky of London gray, I finally learned the truth.

Scott led us to the address in the notebook. The Islington flat sat above an Egyptian kebab shop, an unassuming façade for a life’s worth of secrets kept in the dark. With the same trembling hands that once held onto the letter of my father’s death, I rang the bell and waited for what had always been hiding in plain sight.

The door opened, and there with his charismatic upturned smile, was my father.