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
About 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.
Dead bodies could be survivors. Sara understood that. They were survivors if they escaped their pain. If they were liberated. If they occupied a consciousness swiped clean of appalling memory.
There were lots of things Sara hated about the media, but at the top of the list was their reliance on gaudy alliteration. It was insulting, dismissive. The local press had done it to Rodney right after his accident, naming him Balloon Boy. Such wounding insolence. It was vicious, the calloused practice of shredding someone’s identity to a commodity, to a caricature. And the unsurvivor was the latest victim of this assault, the article referring to her as Jumper Julie.
If the media gave Sara a nickname it would be Slutty Sara, or Skank Sara, or Sex Tape Sara. They’d call her these things without any care of the malice tucked into these syllables, venom folded between consonants and vowels.
Sara lost track of time in the tub, or she knew that time passed and didn’t care. She never expected to spend four days bathing, but honestly, the tub was the safest haven she’d found since her fiasco posted online. It was warm and nobody was talking and Hank wasn’t yelling and decimating her heart and Felix couldn’t kick her car and Moses couldn’t suspend her from work and Nat didn’t know where to find her to post another video, and on the other side of this locked door was sweet Rodney, her only friend left. She expected to spend half an hour in the tub, but being immersed in that womb proved impossible to slide out of — why leave such quiet and warm comfort?
She only exited for quick trips. To eat takeout that Rodney had ordered, Chinese, Thai, pizza. To sleep in spurts, toss and turn, think too much, retreat back to another bath, slipping into solace.
And four days later, they’re still in this god-awful motel room. This is a capricious way to dole out her emergency money, but she can’t find the verve to try. She feels bad for Rodney, trapped out there. She wouldn’t be surprised if he took off on her — she certainly wouldn’t blame him. But every time she briefly emerges from the bathroom, there he is, watching TV, using his own phone to scroll around the globe. He always greets her with a serving of food, something to drink.
“Eat,” he says.
“Okay.” But she barely does.
“Be. Nice. To. Sa. Ra,” he says, hoisting a plate of pad thai at her.
It takes him almost twenty seconds to choke it out, but what Sara hadn’t realized until right this second is that who cares how long it takes him to talk. It’s the warmth behind his words that she craves.
“All right.” She takes it, smiles at him, but sets it down somewhere in the room before crawling into another bath.
She can’t believe they’re calling her Jumper Julie. She hops from page to page, trying to learn more about her, details that will help Sara get a sense of who this woman actually is, but not much has been released about her. Details are sparse to guard her identity.
Sure, she gets her privacy protected, thinks Sara, while my white ass shakes online.
Sara should be feeling better. That’s her mantra in the tub. You’ve gotten away, she tries to tell herself. Traurig and all its drama are in the rearview. Rally, Sara. Feel good.
What would really make her feel good is if Sara can pick up the phone and talk to Jumper Julie. Not for any guidance, just empathy. Empathy that spans all across the sky like storm clouds.
Cumulonimbus empathy.
Instead, she’ll have to settle for another bath — the one that started as Jake tweeted back to Paul — and it’s time to do it.
This is the time.
Sara points herself at a certain URL.
She opens the page and watches it load.
There is a still image, Sara on her hands and knees, Nat behind her, a banner above them that says SKANK OF THE WEEK.
And a link that says CLICK HERE FOR ALL THE ACTION!
It might sound like masochism, this impulse to watch what’s ruined her, but Sara remembers some of her mom’s advice. This was when Sara was seven or eight years old and she couldn’t stop singing the song “Frère Jacques.” It had been in her head for weeks and every time there was a lapse in conversation, that’s when Sara started singing. It was in her head when she fell asleep and when she woke up, in her head while she ate and played.