All This Life (22 page)

Paul could tell this young cop all of these details, and many more, so many more, so stop making it sound like Paul didn't know anything about his boy.

“You heard me about the jeans, right?” Paul says.

“Yes. Does he have braces? Wear glasses?”

“Neither.”

“What color was his shirt?”

“I don't remember,” Paul says.

“Jacket?”

Paul continues to peer all around the parking lot, hoping to see his son flouncing back. He simply needed to wander off, get mad,
let his frustration out, something that would explain his departure, that he's not really running away. He's not trying to leave. He had been only temporarily carried away.

“Any other unique identifiers?” the cop asks.

“He usually has his ear buds in. Always playing music.”

The cop doesn't write this detail down.

“He literally always has them in, so please put that in the report.”

Sighing, the cop jots down a few words, then says, “I'm going up to the doctor's office. To get additional information about the boy's clothing.”

“I'll wait here in case he comes back,” Paul says.

“You should go home. Check and make sure he's not there. If you have keys, you should also look inside your ex-wife's residence. Be thorough. Closets. Under beds. The garage. Trunks of vehicles. Any place he can hide.”

“Who will wait here?”

The cop looks puzzled. “Why would he come back?”

The officer meant why would Jake return here, to this parking lot, but his vague and stabbing syntax—
Why would he come back?
—travels through the skin, the meat, the bone, wedging in Paul's body, a wound already infected with blame. That parental blame. The way seeing a chipped tooth day in, day out can call into question if you're even fit to be a parent. The way there are so many reminders that Paul isn't doing a very good job of it.

“He's coming back,” Paul says.

“I have all the information, and we'll be in touch,” the cop says. “We'll also reach out to the FBI, talk about opening a missing person file with them.”

“He might come back here to find me,” says Paul.

The cop turns and walks to the building's front door. “You're right; we'll be in touch.”

“That's it?”

“That's a lot,” says the cop. The door is open, and he's marching through. “Normally, in these circumstances, the child hides in a familiar place. Go home and be thorough with your search. We'll be in touch.”

The door slowly shuts and Paul is alone. He turns in another circle, screaming, “Jake! Jake!”

He texts his son again. This one says:
Let me know that you're okay, please.

He even calls him, though he knows there's no chance that Jake will answer. “It's me. Where did you go? I'm worried. Please. I'm at the therapist's still. I'm waiting for you. I can pick you up wherever you are. I'm not mad. Only concerned. I want to help. Please let me help. I will meet you anywhere. Please call. Or text. I love you. We love you, your mom and me. We are here. Please call.”

OF COURSE, JAKE
isn't in a closet or hiding behind the water heater or buried in a pile of laundry, but Paul does his due diligence anyway, inspecting his condo from top to bottom, both floors, and once that turns up nothing, he knows his son hides in the computer.

Paul hasn't gone to his ex's—the place he used to live, where his alimony and child-support payments still fund the mortgage—but he'll get there. He's not dismissing the cop's advice. It's just that since Paul knows where his son spends the majority of his time, why not look there first?

Of course, that's part of why he's not champing at the bit to go to his ex's, but the main deterrent is the barrenness. It's one thing to be in his own empty apartment, because that's how a newly divorced bachelor is supposed to live. There's supposed to be a dearth of any intimacy. The walls should be stark white. The cheap carpet should have a constellation of pizza crumbs, so many of them that walking barefoot is like reading Braille with your feet. There aren't any throw
pillows on the couch. There isn't a couch. The kitchen cupboards are packed with the slimmest essentials, olive oil and tinfoil. Paul hates all the vacant cupboards, but the idea of buying baking spices or casserole dishes seems devastating. The refrigerator is merely a brief cooling station for his pale ale, and there's a whole shelf dedicated to half-finished burritos. There isn't one vegetable on the premises.

Going over to his old house, to wander unaccompanied through all those memories, is too much. He'll do it. Of course, he'll do it. He'll make it over there soon, for Jake's sake.

Fact of the matter is that Paul doesn't want to search inside the computer for him, either, but that somehow seems easier, and if that's the wrong word here, it seems less bloated with the past, the prowling memories talking shit to him from inside the house's walls. The failure of the marriage haunting, rattling chains, slamming doors. At least looking for Jake online didn't have that ghastly baggage. Because he'd never done it before, and that now seems like another failure.

He had told his boy on his voicemail that Paul would meet him anywhere, and that claim will be challenged as Paul goes hunting for TheGreatJake. Paul has to let go of his disdain for social media. This is the only place he can find his son.

The site he hears Jake talk about the most is Twitter, and that's where the manhunt will commence. Paul opens the page and makes an account, choosing the humdrum username Paul_Gamache.

And he's in; he's a part of this; he's plugged in.

Of course, that doesn't mean he knows what the hell he's doing. Paul Googles various things on how to work the user interface, how to track down specific people, and it stuns him how easy it is to navigate, how effortless it is to find the single person you need to locate, and thirty seconds later he's found TheGreatJake.

He clicks follow.

He follows him.

He is following his son.

He thinks about all the historic reasons to follow your children. The time-tested ones, the traditional, the textbook: following kids for protection. For making sure predators are kept at bay. For ensuring a good life, all the advantages. For a balanced diet. High-fiber foods. Eight glasses of water a day. Shampoo and conditioning. To make sure they're never too hot or too cold. For sunscreen. For protective eyewear. For cleanliness. For cardiovascular exercise. To make sure they don't grow up too fast, see the world's forked tongue. Follow them so they shy away from greed, that god. Teach about the honor in a day's hard work. To build values. Grow optimism. Cultivate a social conscience. Stoke kindness in them. Shield them from the inevitable dullness and boredom that will grow on their bodies like fat once they're adults. Once they've settled into disappointing realities. Once they themselves are disappointments.

But before that, you protect them from themselves, which is the worst predator of all: the one they never see coming.

Follow children for the various kinds of support. Financial. Emotional. Psychological. Babying these kids way longer than is appropriate. Keeping them reliant on you for your own selfish means. Wanting them to seek out their own experiences but equally wanting them to need you forever. The ultimate Catch-22, because if you raise them right they strike out on their own, leaving you with curdling memories and their student loans.

For forced nurturing. Reminders about a proper night's rest. You follow and offer unsolicited advice about how to find the right friends and lovers. How to pick a partner. Paul loathes that part of being a parent—how it requires you to act as though you know so much, feigning wisdom, donning a pitiful costume of acumen that Paul knows is bullshit, but these sorts of hypocrisy are always and forever socially acceptable.

You follow them to bond. To communicate. To shuck their feelings from their hearts like oysters from shells.

Follow to offer crass and caustic editorials, spoiling any thoughts of a child's sovereignty with your intrusive monologues.

You follow your children because you love them and you know the world is contagious with depravity, and in one way or another, everyone gets infected.

Despite how adroitly we try to remain pure, it's impossible. It's only a chipped tooth but it's more. Everyone swims in the earth's dirty broth.

And yet parents do their best to shield children. They follow in every way they can, hoping for happiness and safety, even though those things don't really exist. They are artifices. Paul knows these things, and someday his son will possess this carnivorous knowledge, but let
someday
be decades from now. Let it only reveal the despair long after Paul is gone.

And what better way to accept the futility than to become Paul_ Gamache and enter the all-encompassing artifice—what better way to update these historic reasons to follow your kids, rooted in lessons learned in centuries barren of downloaded deities—what better way to follow them than to follow them.

Evolve into a binary detective.

Sleuth their profiles for clues that might tell you who they actually are, where they choose to reside.

No matter how much Paul hates this, it's the only way he can find his son.

His first tweet:
It's dad,
@TheGreatJake
. Where are you?

Because Paul only follows one user, he can see no other people's tweets, has no other posts coursing down his timeline. It's empty, hollow, lifeless; it's a socket waiting for a bulb. He needs TheGreatJake to show himself.

And he'll also need to check his ex's house. He knows this and isn't being negligent. He was never negligent. Toward the end of the marriage, back when Paul had no idea they were nearing the end, he'd take walks by himself every night after work. This was 6
or 7
PM
. The sun zipping down in the Marin sky. They lived in a circuitous web of residential streets, but if he kept following the forking roads to the left, he arrived at his destination: a yellow dead-end sign.

It never seemed poetic or metaphoric at the time. It was the marker he used on his walk to alert him to turn around, go back home, but with some space, if you spend your free time walking to the dead end, of course, your wife divorces you. Of course, your son leaves. Paul had been walking to the dead end for so many years that what if he actually reached it and didn't realize? What if he was living it?

Stop it. This isn't about me
, he thinks, though he's not sure that's true.

That's exactly why Jake left; if his mom were here, were around more, with her presence the boy would be better.

Paul decides to scroll through TheGreatJake's old tweets while he waits, and Paul was right to look for him here. From the time stamps, he knows that there have been three tweets since therapy.

I'd smash this whole fucking place.

I am on my own.

Running away from home. Where 2 go?

There it is. Spelled out. Running away.

Paul winces, feels a stab in his abdomen, his lungs folded up like origami, every breath a labor.

All this could be from the laxative, he hopes. This could be the beginning of things getting back to normal inside of him.

But he knows it's not. He knows it's the news—the tweeted confirmation—that Jake is trying to leave. To flee. To be free. To be absent. To be missing. He is doing this on purpose. He is engineering a life away from Paul.

About eight minutes later, Paul gets an answer to his tweet, his plea to know where his son is, TheGreatJake saying to him:
I'm here.

Where is here?
Paul tweets back.

I'm here,
@Paul_Gamache
.

14.

A
bout the time Jake answers Paul's tweet, Sara's adding more hot water to her bath. She does this with her big toe, moving the dial so the scalding reinforcements pour into the tub. First, her lower legs feel the temperature crank and the sensation slowly moves up her small body, the water working toward her head.

It's been four days since Sara's day zero. Her rebirth with a digital, conjoined twin. One without Hank, without a job, a home, a boyfriend. Those desired commodities ripped and replaced by a sex tape.

New Sara is four days old, and this newborn can't get out of the bath.

She and Rodney drove out of Traurig and made it into California, cruised down the mountain into the foothills, finally entering Sacramento. After five hours on the road, they needed a motel room. The room had two double beds. Pillows so scrawny that they were probably stuffed with creamed spinach. The carpet smelled like a campfire. Under a black light, the bedspread could make a porn star blush.

Right when they got into the room, Sara said, “I need a bath.”

She locked the door, crawled in the tub, scrolled on her phone, reading more about the brass band, the jumper who lived. The article called the woman a survivor, but Sara didn't buy that. She was the exact opposite. An unsurvivor. If she leaped from the bridge because she thought a better world awaited her, what a tragedy to be fished from the water, wake up restrained in a hospital. She didn't want this life in the first place, and now the consequences of her actions would make it even worse.