He can see the comment. He can see, “I feel sad for whoever posted this.”
And Paul bursts into tears. He crumbles under the mass of his own ignorance. Having a kid is the ultimate risk. It creates such a limited perspective. A tube of love. And your vision can be so obscured that you do not understand the dangers on the periphery. You want nothing else but to adore and train and watch them prosper, but the world will have its way with them. Protection is a wicked illusion.
Paul cannot keep Jake safe, even if he spends the rest of his days guarding the boy’s room. He has to let him out. He has to teach his son to fend for himself, and that’s the great paradox of being a parent: He doesn’t want to teach him everything, wants to hold back just enough that Jake needs him. Paul wants to always be needed by his boy, but that greedy motive might prevent Jake from having access to all the tools needed to survive.
Even if you do give them every tool, it’s like indoor rock climbing, Paul’s main source of exercise. You can have everything you need, make it to the top, but what if you’re scaling the wrong wall? Paul himself had all the tools, supportive parents that stayed together, a Stanford education, a trough of options, and yet he still found an existence that perpetually disappoints him.
That’s what he’ll try and focus on, making sure Jake mounts the right wall.
If Paul’s parents were here they’d say, Pay attention. They’d say, It will be the hardest thing you ever accept but you can’t protect him. Teach him to scale the right wall and hope for the best.
The final thing Paul does before going downstairs is close his son’s computer. He unplugs it and carries it away.
6
Before it became that morning, it was any other, yesterday rehydrated. Noah sat at his desk in his office on Montgomery Street, in San Francisco’s financial district. It was a ghost town at 3 AM and Noah had been alone in his walk into the office. There was a street sweeper going by, newspapers being disseminated to various boxes and stands, sidewalks hosed down before the swarm, the explosion when the rest of the working stiffs showed up, pounding the pavement, flooding various cafés for caffeine and carbs.
Like clockwork, Noah arrived at this ungodly hour, putting everyone else in his firm to shame with his hawkish commitment to the details. This was what you have to do to be the best, and Noah was committed to storming the highest echelon. He’d been the best Ugly Duckling his first-grade class had ever seen, a lacrosse midfielder who would take your head off, and he was on his way to being the best futures trader at the firm.
There was something about futures that made sense to Noah. He had an instinct for both short- and long-term commodity trading. He approached the whole thing like an athlete, with the simple philosophy that it took diligent hard work every day. He never rested on one single laurel, but saw every futures contract that paid out — that he won—an opportunity to learn from and be even better for the next. There was no celebrating, no grandstanding, no days off. If you weren’t pushing yourself to improve, then you were getting worse.
A lot of traders used futures to hedge their bets, reducing the overall risk of their clients’ portfolios. But what made Noah so good at it was that he never approached futures in this condescending way. They were the closest thing to an actual competition in the market. Futures contracts either paid out or busted. Win or lose. Period. Noah flourished on the risk.
He cracked open a protein shake and peeked at the clock, 3:48. He could hear his sister, Tracey, ragging him about his early approach to his job: “You’re the oldest thirty-five-year-old in the world,” she’d say. “You’re still pretty young! Go out and have fun!”
“I’m thirty-four, Trace.”
“You’re focusing on the wrong thing,” she’d say, ten years his junior. “Why not enjoy yourself?”
“Did it ever occur to you that I might actually like working?”
“If you could see what I see,” she said, shaking her head. Here was his sister with that knowing smile of hers, exposing crooked bottom teeth. She had eyes the color of cucumber peel and she loved to rag her brother. He loved it, too. This was a shtick they’d been perfecting for years, his over-concern, her under-concern. They balanced each other out.
Noah was always the greedy go-getter, a hardwired Type A pit bull. Tracey was flighty, wonderfully flighty — it was one of the things her older brother loved about her so much, all the whimsy she saw in the world, all the life, all the hope. How she could actually enjoy where she was without ruining it with superimpositions about the future.
Noah’s therapist once told him that the difference between depression and anxiety was which way you were looking: to your past or to your future. People who were depressed fixated on the past, while their anxious counterpoints couldn’t stop worrying about what was coming next week, next month, next year. A future that might not ever happen.
Noah was staunchly restless, fearful, the future this supernova waiting to blow. He’d always lived that way. And he always won. Captain of the lacrosse team, valedictorian, at the top of his MBA class. Life wasn’t a game, per se, but if there were gods out there keeping score, Noah was winning.
Tracey was neither depressed nor anxious. She was there, floating from moment to moment, a leaf on a river.
“You’re my Forrest Gump,” Noah joked.
“You laugh, but Forrest had a ton of Buddhist wisdom.”
“I think he was retarded, Trace.”
When he left her that morning, she was asleep on their couch. Noah halved a pink grapefruit and spread hummus on a piece of toast, leaving them on the coffee table in front of her with a note that said, Make sure my sister eats this, okay?
He kissed her on the forehead and remembers so clearly thinking that she looked happy. She was flat on her back, drooling a little. The blanket was spilling onto the floor and so he fixed it, covering her up.
The expression on her face was pure — that was the word he always thought of when he saw her sleep. Pure. He leaned down and kissed her forehead, smelled the lilac from her shampoo.
The sun wasn’t even thinking about coming up yet, and in the darkness of the room he paused to watch her breathe. This was a tradition that dated back to her being born; Noah was astounded by her tiny body in her crib. It was hard for him to tell if she was breathing back then or not, and he’d get scared, tell his mom about it. The two of them would sneak back into Tracey’s room together, and their mother would put Noah’s hand lightly on the baby’s back, so he could feel her move with every swell from her lungs.
Noah could see her clearly breathing on the couch. Her nose whistled with every breath.
They’d moved to San Francisco together thirteen months ago. He was taking a new job, a huge promotion, and was excited to relocate to such a beautiful city, a nice pardon from their childhood in the Deep South. It had never occurred to Noah that Tracey would want to move with him. It didn’t seem possible that anybody made such a huge life decision on a whim.
“Really?” he said. “You’ll leave?”
“Why not?”
“If it was anyone else, I’d have serious questions. What will you do?”
“I’ll figure it out.”
“How much does that pay?”
“It’s pro bono.”
“So I pay.”
“You pay the rent,” she said, “and I pay with elbow grease, taking care of you.”
They got an apartment in the Mission District, Noah immediately pouring himself into his new gig, excited to prove that he was the best hire they ever made. Tracey was living on the exact opposite schedule, staying up late, sleeping in, exploring. But she did keep her promise of taking care of their place. She didn’t seem to know how to do her own laundry, and yet she made sure their common rooms were spotless, the fridge stocked with food.