More Than Words

by Jill Santopolo

  Nina’s mouth quirked into a small smile. She’d dragged Tim with her to the Central Park carousel more times than she could count. But she shook her head. “I don’t really want to be cheered up,” she said. “I just . . . can you stand in the darkness with me?” She’d been reliving the car ride with Rafael over and over in her mind these past weeks, trying to figure out why it had made her feel better. And that was what it had been: He’d stood with her in the darkness and made it feel safe. It was what she’d needed then. It was what she needed now, too.

  “Remember when we went skiing in Park City?” Tim said, as they kept walking, bikers and joggers zipping by them.

  Nina nodded. She knew what he was going to say. She’d been eleven and terrified.

  “We couldn’t see more than a few feet in front of us.”

  Nina nodded again. She’d panicked. He’d panicked.

  “Even though we were scared and didn’t know what was going to come next, we went slowly, and stayed together, and we got down the run.”

  Nina looked at him.

  “We’ll get down the mountain, Nina,” he said. “But there’s no use worrying about how. Your dad is still okay. We’ll deal with things as they come. For now, for old times’ sake, how about we see if a ride on the carousel will make you smile? Will you try? For me?”

  She let out a long breath. “For you,” she said.

  He steered her toward the center of the park, into the bright sunshine.

  “I just want you to be happy,” Tim said. Then he bent over and kissed her. And she tried to forget everything, to lose herself in his kiss like she had four months before, the first time she’d felt his lips against hers, but she couldn’t do it.

  6

  In high school, all of Nina’s Brearley friends wanted to know what was going on when Tim took her to the Interschool Prom when she was a sophomore and he was a senior. And then two years later, they were sure something was going on when he came back from Stanford for the weekend and she took him. But nothing was happening then. At least not on Nina’s end. Tim was the person she always counted on, leaned on, looked up to. But he wasn’t the person she daydreamed about kissing.

  Pris had asked what was going on between them again when Tim visited Nina in college, traveling across the country to spend the weekend with her in New Haven. But Nina had thought of him as a friend then, too. He was the one she called when she was feeling homesick, the one who cheered her up. But he wasn’t the person whose name she doodled in her Spanish notebook, who made her feel tongue-tied when she ran into him in the dining hall.

  And then back in January, Tim had stood with his hand around Nina’s waist as her father told the press that his cancer was back, that he’d eventually be stepping down as chairman of the board. As her father said those words, Tim held Nina up, held her close.

  “Who will be taking over as chairman?” a reporter asked.

  “I’ll keep my position as long as I’m able,” he replied. “And then my daughter will take over for me, the way I did for my father. This is still a family company.”

  Nina took a deep breath. It was real. It was going to happen. Before business school she’d made a deal with her dad: She would work in politics until he needed her to take the helm of the corporation. She’d figured she’d be ready by then. She’d be able to continue the family legacy after she’d solidified her own. But she hadn’t even gotten ten years. Not only was she going to lose her father, she was going to lose the life she’d imagined for herself. The future she’d expected would be hers.

  “You okay?” Tim whispered in her ear at the press conference.

  If it were anybody other than Tim, she would’ve said yes. “No,” she answered, truthfully.

  This wasn’t just a company, it wasn’t just a hotel—it was her family, it was her father, her grandfather, it was everything they ever gave up, every compromise they ever made, every risk they ever took to solidify their place in New York society. And now it would all rest on Nina. She wasn’t ready.

  “Then let’s go,” Tim said. He pulled his phone out of his pocket, acting as if it were vibrating. He held it to his ear and furrowed his eyebrows. Then he tapped her shoulder and, still pretending someone was on the other line, motioned for her to come with him.

  They ducked into an empty conference room.

  “Well, that was shit,” he said.

  “It was worse than that,” Nina responded. “It was like a thousand people watching while you take a shit.”

  Tim raised his eyebrows, surprised to hear her swear. “Well, then it’s a good thing we got you out of there.”

  Nina couldn’t help it. She laughed, glad Tim was with her. Glad he’d orchestrated their escape.

  “My dad said we’re going to your dad’s for dinner tonight.” He went to the counter and made them each a cup of espresso.

  “Yeah,” Nina answered. “He said he wants to be surrounded by the people he cares most about.”

  Tim sat down and put Nina’s cup in front of her. “Well, you don’t have to twist my arm. Are you cooking?”

  “With Irena,” Nina said. “Between the two of us, we’re making all my dad’s favorites.”

  “So Kobe steak?” Tim tipped back in the chair, lifting the front two legs off the ground. He looked so relaxed, Nina thought, so comfortable. He’d always been that way. So comfortable in his skin. She admired it, wondered, sometimes, what it would be like to feel that way, too, not to watch her words, control her emotions, evaluate her actions the way she knew her father expected. She wondered what she’d be like if she hadn’t been raised that way—so disciplined, so aware.

  “Mm-hm,” Nina answered Tim. “And a lemon meringue pie, and string beans with almonds, and honey corn bread.”

  “Delicious,” Tim answered back, tipping the chair forward again. “Can’t wait.”

  * * *

  • • •

  When Nina left after dinner that night, Tim did too, and they got a drink at Weather Up, the cocktail lounge right near her apartment, and then another. And went to sit by the river. And soon they were talking about life and love and the future, their breath making puffs of smoke in the cold night air. And then Nina was crying, and Tim was holding her, and maybe it was the alcohol, or maybe it was just the time it was meant to happen, but Tim kissed her, and Nina relaxed against him, and he tasted like the past and the present and the future all at once.

  By the time Priscilla called to ask what those photos from the press conference meant, Nina and Tim were finally dating. “You two were meant for each other,” she’d said. And maybe it was true.

  7

  Since Joseph Gregory relapsed, Caro called Nina more.

  “Hi, darling,” she said, late Sunday afternoon, the weekend after the brunch. “I’m down at the Seaport hotel checking on a few catering concerns.”

  “Is everything okay?” Nina answered. She’d been reading a new speech out loud in her living room, dropping her voice to see how the words would sound in Rafael’s register.

  “It’s all fine,” Caro said. “But since I’m down your way, how about a walk along the river?”

  Nina was one of the few people in Caro’s life who didn’t mind taking long walks with her. Caro built them into her schedule, but TJ thought it was an inefficient use of time.

  Nina put down the speech she’d been reading. “Sure,” she said, glad for the break. “I’ll see you soon.”

  The two women planned to meet in the lobby of The Gregory by the Sea. Just after her grandfather died, when Nina was two years old, her dad had opened the second hotel by the seaport and named the rooftop bar Nina’s Nest. You could see all of New York Harbor from there. It was one of Nina’s favorite views of the city.

  * * *

  • • •

  When Nina got to the hotel, she said hello to the staff and then waited in front of the
framed spread of her parents from People magazine hanging next to the elevator bank. In one of the photos they were both laughing, her mom’s dark brown hair loose and sweeping across her face. Nina wondered if that was how her mom had looked when she caught her father’s eye in Barcelona. He’d been enjoying paella and a glass of wine on the beach, just as Nina’s mother was finishing her doctoral thesis on the depiction of the female body in Spanish literature. He’d always said that she’d been so beautiful reading on the beach—serene, ethereal—that he’d had to invite her to join him.

  The media loved the story: New York’s most eligible bachelor falling in love with an unknown woman from Colorado while on vacation. Their wedding was held in the ballroom on the thirty-second floor of The Gregory on the Park and was covered in the New York Times, the New York Post, Newsday, New York Magazine, and the Daily News. Shorter pieces even made it into the national magazines. The pieces were scattered throughout the two hotels in frames. Nina had once drawn a map detailing where they each hung, her parents’ love story made into her very own treasure hunt.

  She remembered the first time she’d ever seen the People magazine spread. She’d been five years old, and the piece had been published as part of the coverage on the opening of the rooftop bar at The Gregory on the Park. Her dad had named the bar Los Tortolitos, Spanish for the lovebirds, something her parents had been called in the Spanish press, and jokingly adopted for themselves. Nina had needed her mom to read the article’s title to her. “Los Tortolitos: A Love Story for the Pages,” she’d said, when Nina brought her the magazine, “and then underneath it says, ‘Don’t you wish your man looked at you the way Joseph Gregory looks at Phoebe?’”

  “I do, Mommy!” Nina told her.

  Her mother laughed and picked Nina up. “When you’re older, you’ll find someone who loves you like that, but not for a long time.” Nina wondered if that was how Tim looked at her now.

  * * *

  • • •

  “Nina, darling,” Caro said, crossing the lobby and shaking Nina out of her reverie. She was wearing white tailored pants, a boat-neck sweater, and a pair of flats. There was a silk scarf around her neck. She was dressed down, since it was a Sunday, but dressed down for her was dressed up for most people.

  “My parents looked so happy together,” Nina said to Caro as they started walking along the water, her mind still on the magazine spread.

  “They balanced each other out well,” Caro said.

  Boats were pulling into New York Harbor, and Caro paused to watch one drop anchor.

  It was funny. When Nina was dating other men, she talked to Caro about them. Asked questions, wanted her opinion—not necessarily on the men themselves, but on what to say, on how she felt, on how to navigate both their emotions and her father’s. But now that she was dating Caro’s son, she didn’t feel like she could talk about it with her. At least not directly.

  “What do you think is the most important thing, the one thing that makes your relationship with Uncle TJ work so well?” Nina asked.

  A foghorn sounded in the distance, and Caro turned. “Honesty,” she said. “I’ve always told TJ that we can handle anything that comes our way as long as we’re honest with each other. Then we can be partners. A team. Face the world with a unified front. I know I can trust him, always.”

  Nina nodded. She wondered if Tim felt that way about her. That he could trust her with everything. He definitely used to. He shared his triumphs, his dating disasters, even his most secret failures, like the mistake he’d made at work the previous year that cost his company an investor. He’d barely been able to give voice to it. She knew she told him everything—all about her jobs, her boyfriends, her embarrassments and fears. And then she realized with a start that she hadn’t told him about her conversation with Rafael in the car before the fund-raiser.

  She wanted to ask Caro if she thought that was a problem, but instead she said, “When you and Uncle TJ started dating, did it feel . . . exciting? Did it . . . make your heart race when he touched your shoulder?”

  Caro laughed. “Watching him walk down the street made my heart race,” she said. “I’m glad you and Tim have that, too.”

  “Right,” Nina said. Caro tilted her head slightly, as if she needed to see Nina’s expression from another angle.

  “You two are happy?” she asked.

  “We are,” Nina said, as both women moved away from the pier and started walking down the path. “Now, what was going on today with the caterers?”

  Nina wished she could confide more in Caro, but right now that seemed impossible. And Nina wished, for probably the millionth time in her life, that her mother were still alive. But that was impossible, too.

  8

  When Nina got back to Tribeca and put her key in the elevator that led to her loft, she dialed Leslie. She needed a dose of her best friend: Just hearing Leslie’s voice made Nina feel stronger, more able to handle what was being thrown her way.

  “Les!” she said, when her friend picked up the FaceTime call. “Where are you?”

  “Cole’s soccer game,” Leslie said, flipping the phone around so Nina could see the field. “Why do we make four-year-olds play soccer? Half of them can’t even kick the ball when it’s two inches in front of them.”

  Nina squinted and saw Cole, his dark curly hair flopping as he ran. “Well, he looks like he’s having fun at least,” she said.

  “He basically just runs back and forth from one side of the field to the other,” Leslie told her. “And we pay for this. He could run in the backyard for free.”

  Nina laughed. “Do you need to get back to the game?”

  “Not at all.” Nina saw Leslie standing up, telling Vijay she’d be right back, and walking down a set of bleachers. “I’m glad you gave me an excuse to get up,” she said as soon as she was in the privacy of a little grove of trees. “Those benches could use some cushions. How’s everything going? Campaign? Your dad? Tim?”

  “It’s all going . . .” Nina stood at the floor-to-ceiling window in her living room and looked past her phone, out at the cobblestoned Tribeca streets below her. “I just got back from a walk with Caro. I miss my mom, Les.”

  “Oh, Neen,” Leslie said, sitting down on the grass, leaning against the trunk of a tree. “It sneaks up on you, doesn’t it.” Leslie’s mom had died when she and Nina were in college, and other than Rafael’s surprise moment of empathy, she was one of the only people Nina felt could truly stand with her in the darkness.

  “She died almost twenty-five years ago,” Nina said, wishing she were there, next to her friend, her back against a neighboring tree. “I used to think at some point I’d stop missing her. But I don’t think I ever will.”

  Nina remembered going with her mom to Columbia University when she was very young, sitting in a small office filled with books, her mother’s students asking Nina how old she was, what her favorite color was. And her mother urging her to answer “en español” after she’d answered in English.

  “She’s got your cheekbones,” other professors would say.

  Or: “She’s got your freckles.”

  It was true—those were the two features that Nina and her mother shared. Otherwise, Nina looked like her dad. Her hair was light brown, the way his used to be, and silky. Her eyes were dark blue, like his, too, and the two of them had matching dimples and up-turned noses. Whenever people saw them together for the first time, their eyes would shift back and forth, as if matching feature for feature, checking to see where they diverged.

  Nina sometimes wondered if she’d look more like her mom if she wore her hair shorter. But her hair was so much lighter . . . There must’ve been someone in her mom’s family who had light hair, too, though Nina didn’t know who. She didn’t have albums from her mom’s childhood the way she did from her dad’s, his great-aunts and -uncles and distant cousins, most of them still living in England a
nd Wales, making appearances at various parties throughout the years.

  “Yeah, I don’t think you’ll stop,” Leslie said, pulling Nina back to the moment. “But maybe that’s a good thing. If you miss her, it means you remember her. It means she’s still here.”

  “I guess,” Nina said. “But does that make it any easier?”

  Leslie paused for a beat. “I didn’t say it was easy.” Nina saw her friend stand up suddenly.

  “Oh, no way! My son just scored a goal. Yeah, Cole! Way to go, buddy!”

  Nina smiled. She heard all of the parents cheering in the background. “You should go. Tell him I say congratulations.”

  “I will,” Leslie said. “And I’ll call you later. I love you, Nina. Miss you.”

  “You too,” Nina answered.

  Nina grabbed her bag and decided to take herself out for frozen yogurt with rainbow sprinkles—something she used to do with her mom. Maybe this was an afternoon for remembering.

  9

  The next week, it started to feel like summer. June was here. It was warm enough that women were outside in sleeveless dresses for the first time since last September. The sun was shining, the sky was deep blue, and there was just enough of a breeze to make the day feel alive. Nina usually made do with the coffee that Jane brewed at campaign headquarters but decided to stop for an iced coffee on the way to work.

  She paused at the crosswalk while cars drove by in front of her and lifted her face to the sun, closing her eyes for a moment to listen to the horns and the car engines and the chatter that gave New York City its vibrant energy.

  Campaign days were getting longer, and she knew the caffeine would help carry her through—at least for the next few hours. Lost in her thoughts, she walked smack into the person who was coming out of the coffee shop. They both paused, stunned for a moment by the collision, and then Nina looked up. It was Rafael.