Too Many Notebooks

“Is there anything you want me to get for you?” Raj asks me, as I pull up the handle of his carry-on and give him a kiss.

“Some new perfume, I’m almost out. I’ll send you a picture of it.” He is hesitant to go, I can feel it.

“Well, if you think of anything else, let me know,” he says.

“Everything is going to be okay. Don’t worry.” I tell him again.

“I know. I’ll miss you. A lot.” He kisses me on my forehead and opens the door.

“Walk me to the elevator?”

We head down the hallway of our apartment building together.

“Oh, I know what I’m going to get for myself!” he says. “A Moleskin! I need a new one for this project.”

“Not another notebook. You have way too many!” I chide him. He knows what I think of his notebook habit.

“Oh sweetie, you can never have too many notebooks.” He gives me one last hug and kiss, then steps into the elevator.

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The baby and I are at the bookstore. He’s sleeping in his stroller, and I’m trying to decide between a best seller and the staff pick when I see the rack of notebooks. I can’t help it. As much as I tease him, I love to get them too. I know he will use them, eventually. He’s always carrying them to meetings, jotting down ideas. When Jakey is old enough, I know Raj will crack them open for him to scribble in. ‘Start ‘em young!’ He’ll probably say. I smile to myself and choose a simple black Moleskin. Not too small, not too big, with a band to keep it closed. I turn to read the jacket of the staff pick one more time when my phone buzzes. It’s Leila.

“Hey there!” I say.

“Oh, hi, good, you answered. Where are you?”

“Bookstore, but I’m about ready to checkout. What’s up?”

“Oh, I’m in the neighborhood and thought I’d stop by. I need to hold that baby of yours!”

Her voice sounds tense, but I assume she is battling the commuter rush.

“Great! I’ll be home in 10 minutes, I’ll meet you there!” I hang up, leave both books, and take the notebook up to the counter. You can never have too many.

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As soon as I see her, I can tell something’s wrong. Her face is strained in a way I only see when we’re driving across the bridge into New Jersey.

“Oh, is Jakey sleeping?” she asks.

“Yeah, but he’ll probably wake up soon. Is everything okay?” I question.

There is a knock at the door. “Hmmm…” I say, puzzled.

“Oh, it’s Mo,” Leila says. “Let me get it, you probably need to take care of Jake.”

I push Jake’s stroller into the bedroom, switch on the fan, and back out as quietly as I can. When I turn to go into the living room, I can hear them.

“Oh, god, no. Oh, no.”

“What happened?” I startle them with my question.

Mo turns away from me, and I see that Leila’s eyes and cheeks are damp.

“What is it?" I ask, looking for any sort of clue to this unexpected visit.

Then Mo looks at me.

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He saw it on the news. The plane that Raj was on took off and five minutes later, crashed into Long Island. As soon as he heard it was en route to Geneva, he knew it was Raj’s plane. He called Leila. Leila called me. And when she realized I had no idea what was going on, she made a quick plan to tell me in person, or at least be with me when I found out. They were right. My legs slip out from under me. Mo catches me and lowers me onto the sofa. Leila scurries into the kitchen for a glass of water.

“How can you be sure?” I ask Mo.

“It was his flight number. He sent me his flight info before he left. He said he wanted me to have it just in case.”

“In case of what?” I demand.

“I don’t know. You know him. He’s always looking out for you. And . . . well . . . maybe he knew….” Mo turns and stares out the window.

“Knew what? That he would crash?"

“You know he has unbelievable intuition.”

I know. I know this all too well. I suddenly realize his hesitation at the door, his hesitation before he boarded the airplane, was not him feeling bad about leaving. It was him knowing that he wasn’t coming back.

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“They’re starting to board,” he tells me, two hours after he has left our apartment. “I don’t know about this….”

“We’ll be fine, babe. Mo and Leila are nearby. I’m going to see them this weekend. I have Sasha coming tomorrow for a few hours so I can go out.”

“It’s just . . .” he starts but doesn’t finish.

Jakey wakes up.

“Can I see him?” Raj asks.

I get Jake out of his crib. His dark curly hair is tousled and his cheeks are creased from sleeping on his chubby fists.

“Oye, meh po-po,” Raj says in his native Trinidadian.

Jakey gives a little smile.

“Did you see that?” he asks. “I love you, beta. Be good to your mama, you hear me? Oh, they called my section. I gotta go. I’ll text you when we’re ready to take off. And Gen? I love you. I love you and Jake more than anything else on this planet.”

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It takes four hours for the airline to call us. When they finally do, I put my phone on speaker. I can’t listen to it alone. I need Leila and Mo to help me remember what they tell me. He did board. When – and if – they recover his body, I will need to supply something so they can do a DNA match.

“Like what?” I ask.

Hair, a tooth, fingerprints. If nothing else, you can bring in something he has worn. They can get something off of that. Suddenly I wonder if this is all I have left of him – the bits and pieces in our apartment. Which, in actuality, means nothing.

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The next week is a blur. I’m traveling through time and space in a strange, lofty way. Sometimes I feel like I’m hovering and watching things unfold. Sometimes I’m stuck in the middle of a debilitating storm, frozen with fear. Leila and Mo stay with me the entire week. I forget to ask them about work. I forget to ask about anything that is not related to Raj.

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“We set up a GoFundMe,” Mo tells me one day. Something about it makes it stand out from the haziness of the week.

“For who?” I ask him, genuinely puzzled.

“For you, Genevieve, it’s for you and Jakey.”

“What for?” I shoot back.

“Well, for whatever you need. Rent for the next few months. A cushion for the next few years. If you want to take a trip, you have something to draw from. He would want that for you.”

I sense that Mo feels the need to take care of me and the baby.

“We’ll be okay, Mo, you don’t need to do it.” I try to give him a way out.

“We already did, there’s $10,000 in there. Leila and I will need to go back to work. You’ll probably want Sasha to come more than a few hours a week.”

I start to realize that I am going to be alone. I crumble into Mo and cry.

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“If you give me your bank info, I can get the money transferred into your account,” Leila tells me.

She has been staying with me for three weeks now. She goes to work in the morning, comes back in the afternoon, then Mo comes over for dinner. They try to get me to go out, but I can’t. Everything reminds me of him. Everything is an unexpected trigger. I hand her my phone, tell her my username and password, and she sets up a transfer for the GoFundMe money.

“Okay, it will be in your account tomorrow. It’s $20,000. Can you believe it? We were hoping for $10,000, but people just kept on giving. People from every stage of his life: high school, college, grad school, his work overseas, his colleagues here. It’s amazing. And have you seen the tributes people have written, Gen?”

“Yes, but I can’t remember them all…it’s all a blur.”

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“You’re going where?” Leila asks me. She’s more shocked than I anticipated.

“Trinidad. Raj wanted some of his ashes taken there. Plus, I need to get out of here. Jakey and I need to be with his family. I need the sun. Everything here reminds me . . .” I trail off and Leila wraps me in a hug.

“Of course. Of course, you do. That’s what the money is for. Whatever you need to do to survive. Whatever you need to do, do it.”

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We stay with Raj’s aunt and uncle, the ones who raised him. Two weeks after we arrive, I can feel them start to rise out of their own grave of grief. I tell the landlord back in New York that I won’t renew my lease. Leila and Mo offer to arrange for movers to pack up the apartment and put everything in a storage unit. I calculate that after the airline tickets, paying the movers and storage fee, and general living expenses here, I can stay in Trinidad for one year and still have $11,000 leftover from the GoFundMe donations. Raj’s aunt and uncle aren’t taking much from me, but at least I can give them something for room and board. I decide that I will do a few extra things for them: upgrade the A/C and replace the roof. Maybe we can all go on a trip somewhere.

I go to the beach and it is the balm that I need. Each morning, I leave Jake with Raj’s aunt and uncle and walk the half-mile to the wooden planks that lead to the ocean. I am usually gone for two hours, sometimes three.

Right before we left for the airport, I decided to pay the fee and checked an extra suitcase, which I filled with all of Raj's notebooks. I have no regrets. When I come to the ocean, I bring one of his notebooks, read a few pages, and try to remember every detail of our life together. Today I sit on my towel and crack open the new black Moleskin notebook I bought for Raj at the bookstore the day he died. I turn to the first page; my pen hovers.

I look out across the ocean and my mind races forward and back again like I’m searching through a movie. Except the movie is our life and the focus is on the notebooks, every single notebook he has ever owned: from the most recent row of colorful Moleskins to the first notebooks he used in college. I picture the hand-bound notebooks made of elephant dung from South Africa, Lokta paper from Nepal, and mango paper from Thailand. I skim the spiral 6x9 notebooks when he traveled to remote places early in his career, the yellow legal pads he used when we were in graduate school. Now that he is gone, I want to read every word he has written.

But I realize that I need to write my own words now. I am going to start with this empty notebook in my lap. If I record all of our memories, I reason, I can’t possibly forget him. I will ask Leila and Mo to bring me more when they come to visit. I sigh as I realize that Raj is right, perhaps you can never have too many notebooks. I suppose I will find out.