I (45M) lost my daughter Becca three years ago. She was nineteen. Car accident on I-78, February, black ice. She was a junior at Rutgers and she had a shift at a restaurant the next morning and a paper due on Monday and a whole life that just – stopped. My wife Donna and I have been in grief counseling since. We have a younger son, Marcus, who is seventeen and watching his dad fall apart has cost him things I can’t measure.
I want to be clear that I know I am not okay. My therapist, a woman named Dr. Pratt, has said directly that I am still in acute grief and that I need to stop looking for Becca in other people’s faces. She told me that three weeks ago. I am telling you this because it matters to what happened.
I was at a Starbucks on Route 9 yesterday morning, just waiting for a coffee before work. Nothing special about the day. And a girl walked in.
She had Becca’s exact hair. Not similar – EXACT. The dark red, the way it sat on her shoulders, the way she tucked one side behind her ear. She had Becca’s height and Becca’s way of standing slightly turned, like she was always halfway ready to leave.
My whole body stopped.
I know it wasn’t her. I am not having a breakdown. I know my daughter is dead and I have held that truth in my chest every day for three years. But I could not move.
The girl ordered something and sat down by the window and I just stood there with my coffee going cold and I could not stop looking at her. When she got up to leave I followed her out.
I called out, “Excuse me,” and she turned around. Up close she didn’t look that much like Becca. Different nose, different eyes. She was maybe twenty-two and she had earbuds in and she looked scared, because a middle-aged man she’d never seen had followed her into the parking lot.
I said, “I’m sorry, I just – you look like someone I lost.”
She said, “Okay,” and took a step back.
I said, “My daughter. She died. You have her hair.”
She looked at me the way you look at someone you’re trying to figure out how dangerous they are.
“I’m really sorry,” she said. “But I don’t – I need to go.”
And she went. Got in her car and drove away. And I stood there in that parking lot until someone I didn’t know asked me if I was alright.
Donna says I scared that girl. She says what I did was “understandable but not okay” and that I need to call Dr. Pratt today, not next week. My brother-in-law Glen thinks I need to be in an inpatient program. My friends are split – some say any parent would have done the same thing, others say I crossed a line the second I walked out that door after her.
I don’t know what I think. I’ve been sitting in my car in our driveway for an hour because I don’t want to go inside and I don’t want to look at Becca’s photo on the wall and I don’t want to call Dr. Pratt and hear what I already know she’s going to say.
I picked up my phone to call her. And there was already a voicemail. From a number I didn’t recognize. And the first three words, before the voice even said anything else, made my hands start shaking.
—
The Voicemail
“Hi. I’m sorry.”
That was it. Three words and then a pause long enough that I thought it was a wrong number, a pocket dial, somebody’s kid grabbing a phone.
Then: “I was the girl from the coffee shop this morning. The one with the red hair. I got your number off the lost and found board at the Starbucks – you left your card there, I think, when you paid? It was just sitting on the counter and I took it. I don’t know why. I’m sorry if that’s weird.”
I was still in the car. The engine was off and the windows had started fogging from the inside because it was cold and I’d been sitting there long enough that my own breath was doing it. I pressed the phone against my ear hard enough that it hurt.
“I just – I wanted to say I’m sorry about your daughter. I have a dad. And I could see that you were – I could see you weren’t trying to be scary. I want you to know that. I wasn’t scared of you, I was just – I didn’t know what to do. I’m really sorry for your loss. Okay. Bye.”
The message ended.
I sat there for another ten minutes. Maybe fifteen. I didn’t play it again. I didn’t need to.
What I Did Next
I didn’t call Dr. Pratt.
I know. I know.
I went inside instead. Donna was in the kitchen with Marcus, who was home from school because he had a half day, and she looked at my face and immediately sent him upstairs with some excuse about laundry. That’s something Donna has gotten very good at in three years: reading my face and moving Marcus out of the room before whatever is on my face gets into his.
I sat down at the kitchen table and I played her the voicemail.
She listened with her arms crossed and her eyes closed. That’s how Donna listens to hard things. Eyes closed, arms crossed, chin slightly down. I have known this woman for twenty-three years and I have watched her listen to a doctor tell us our daughter was gone with her eyes closed and her arms crossed and her chin down.
When it finished she didn’t say anything for a while.
Then she said, “What’s her name?”
“She didn’t say.”
Donna nodded. She unfolded her arms and put both hands flat on the table and looked at them. Her wedding ring caught the light from the window.
“You’re going to call her back,” she said. It wasn’t a question.
“I don’t know.”
“You are,” she said. “But call Dr. Pratt first.”
What Dr. Pratt Said
I called her. I got her voicemail, left a message, and she called back in forty minutes, which is fast for her. I told her everything. The coffee shop, the girl, the parking lot, the voicemail.
She was quiet for a moment.
“How did it feel,” she said, “when you heard it?”
I had to think about that. Which felt strange, because it seemed like it should be obvious.
“Like something I didn’t expect,” I said. “Like – I was ready for it to be nothing. I was ready to go inside and feel like an idiot and feel like a man who scared a young woman in a parking lot, which is what I did. I was ready to just add it to the pile.”
“The pile,” she said.
“Of things I’ve done wrong since Becca died.”
Dr. Pratt has this thing she does where she doesn’t immediately respond to something you’ve said. She just lets it sit there. I’ve been in her office for three years and I still haven’t gotten used to it.
“And instead,” she said.
“Instead it felt like – I don’t know. Like being handed something. I don’t know what.”
“Do you want to call her back?”
“Yes,” I said. “But I don’t know if I should.”
“Those are different questions,” Dr. Pratt said. “You already know the answer to the first one.”
The Call
Her name was Kayla.
Kayla Donahue, twenty-three, she told me this in the first thirty seconds like she was handing me her ID so I’d know she was real. She was a grad student. Environmental science. She’d been at that Starbucks because she had a study group at nine and she was early, which she said she always was, which she said drove her friends crazy.
I told her my name. I told her Becca’s name. I don’t know why – it just came out.
“Becca,” she said. “That’s a good name.”
“Yeah,” I said. “It suited her.”
There was a silence that should have been awkward and wasn’t, quite.
“Can I ask what she was like?” Kayla said.
Nobody asks me that anymore. In the beginning people asked constantly and then after some point they stopped, the way people do, because they think you’ve run out of things to say or because they’re afraid of making it worse. But I haven’t run out. I will never run out.
So I told her.
I told her about Becca’s thing for terrible reality TV that she watched completely without irony. I told her about the way Becca used to call me on her commute to her campus job and talk for exactly as long as the walk took, never a second longer, and then hang up mid-sentence sometimes because she’d arrived. I told her about the summer Becca decided to learn to make bread and made seventeen bad loaves before she got one right, and then acted like it had been easy the whole time.
Kayla laughed at the bread thing.
It was a small laugh, careful, like she wasn’t sure she was allowed. But it was real.
“She sounds like she was a lot,” Kayla said.
“Yeah,” I said. “She was a lot.”
What I Didn’t Expect
We talked for forty-five minutes.
I don’t know how. I don’t know what the other thirty-five minutes were, after Becca. We talked about Kayla’s research, something about watershed contamination in the Pine Barrens, and I told her I grew up near Toms River and she said she knew Toms River and we talked about that for a while. Normal things. Ordinary things. The kind of things I haven’t talked about with a stranger in three years because I stopped being a person who made small talk. I became a person who lost his daughter. That’s the whole identity. There isn’t room for watershed contamination.
At some point I realized I was standing in the backyard. I’d walked outside without noticing. It was cold, probably forty degrees, and I didn’t have a jacket, and I didn’t care.
Before she hung up, Kayla said, “I’m glad I called.”
“Me too,” I said.
“I almost didn’t,” she said. “I sat in my car in the Starbucks parking lot for like twenty minutes arguing with myself about it.”
“What made you do it?”
She thought for a second.
“My dad,” she said. “I kept thinking about my dad. If something happened to me. If he saw someone who looked like me.”
I didn’t say anything.
“I’d want someone to call,” she said.
The Driveway
I went back inside. Marcus was in the kitchen now, eating cereal at two in the afternoon the way seventeen-year-olds do, and he looked up at me when I came in through the back door.
“You okay?” he said.
He asks me this a lot. He has been asking me this since he was fourteen years old and he shouldn’t have to. That’s one of the things I carry.
“Yeah,” I said. “I think so.”
He looked at me for another second, this kid who has his sister’s nose and his mother’s eyes and some third thing that’s just his, and then he went back to his cereal.
Donna was at the counter. She turned around and looked at me and I said, “Her name is Kayla.”
Donna’s face did something I don’t have a word for.
“She’s a grad student,” I said. “Environmental science. She studies the Pine Barrens.”
Donna put down the dish towel she was holding.
“Is she okay?” Donna said. “Did we – did you scare her badly?”
“No,” I said. “She’s okay. She’s good.”
Donna nodded. She picked the dish towel back up. She turned back to the counter.
And then, quietly, not making a thing of it, she said: “Becca would’ve thought that was wild.”
She would have. She absolutely would have. She’d have wanted every detail, she’d have asked what Kayla was studying, she’d have had an opinion about the Pine Barrens that she’d have delivered with complete confidence despite knowing nothing about watershed contamination.
I stood in my kitchen and I thought about my daughter.
Not the last version of her. Not the version on I-78 in February. The bread version. The mid-sentence hang-up version. The terrible reality TV version.
I stood there and I thought about her, and it didn’t feel like drowning.
—
Becca’s photo is still on the wall. I looked at it when I came in. I looked right at it.
—
If this one got you, pass it on to someone who needs it.
For another story about an unexpected encounter with a stranger, read about I Lied to Get a Stranger Removed from a Waiting Room. Then I Saw Her Name., or check out My Stepdaughter Texted Me Something I Wasn’t Supposed to See for a different kind of family drama, and for a similar experience, see My Wife Came Downstairs With a Folder and I Didn’t Know What Was In It.
