“Where are you going?”
“To rent a car,” said Emily.
“But what will you …? How will you …?”
“Please stop crying,” Emily begged her sister. “I have insurance. It’s just a car. It doesn’t matter. I’ll buy a new one.” And Jess recalled that her sister was worth more than $100 million. Emily never acted spoiled or materialistic—not in the ways you would expect, but at times like these the money showed.
“Who are you calling?” Jess asked.
“Laura.”
“On Saturday morning?”
“Hi, Laura. How are you? Really?” She smiled. “Listen, could you call the police and also Commerce Insurance about my car? We think it was stolen last night in Berkeley. I know!”
“I need an assistant,” Jess said after Emily got off the phone.
“Why?” said Emily. “You have me.”
Do I? Jess thought. Emily could give her money, but Jess’s asking would have meant explaining how she’d donated her stock to Save the Trees. Emily could give advice as well about school, and Leon, and life in general, but none of the advice was what she wanted to hear.
She felt like an item on Emily’s to-do list: (1) fly to Banff with Jonathan; (2) establish Veritech Foundation to promote math education in underserved communities; (3) ask Jess what she’s doing with her life.
More like a fabulous old aunt than a sister, Emily began to pick up Jess every couple of weeks and take her to brunch at Greens, where she plied Jess with French toast, and Jess abstained and ordered blueberries with nothing on them. Then they would walk along the Presidio walls, with the wind whipping their hair, and they would gaze out at the ocean, and Emily would ask earnestly, “Are you sure you really want to be with Leon?”
Or Jess would sleep over at Emily’s condo, and they would drive together to the White Lotus in San Jose for vegan Southeast Asian food. Coconut soup, summer rolls with peanut sauce, mock squid lo mein, mushroom hot pot, and no-dairy flan for dessert. And Emily would say, “Are you sure you want to be in grad school if you’ve taken so many Incompletes?”
She had met Leon one day when she came to visit Jess at the Tree House, and her response had been about what Jess expected. “Totally inappropriate! What is he—forty? Who is he? Do you even know?” And she had taken the extraordinary step of assuming Jess’s share of the rent at her old apartment on Durant, simply because she could not bear the thought of Jess living in the Tree House.
“It’s a waste of money, keeping that empty room for me,” Jess told Emily.
“You need a home away from him,” her sister said. “You need somewhere to go.”
Jess had begun to dread these conversations. Generally, Emily’s Outings, as Jess began calling them, coincided with weekends Jonathan had canceled a visit, and Jess was not above pointing this out. “You only want to see me when you can’t see him,” she complained on the phone one January night.
“That’s not fair,” Emily said.
“You mean that’s not nice of me to say.”
“That too.”
Undaunted, Emily asked, “Do you want to go to the city on Sunday?”
“I have to work.” Jess sat cross-legged on the floor with her Logic text in front of her. George needed extra hours. Classes were beginning on Wednesday, and she still had Incompletes in Hegel, and Logic, and last year’s Incomplete in Philosophy of Language. She was in danger of losing her meager fellowship.
“We could go to Muir Woods.”
Jess hesitated. “I would,” she said, “but all you want to do is lecture me.”
“I don’t.”
“Right, you don’t want to, but you think you have to,” Jess said.
“We could drive the new car.”
Jess felt a pang of guilt about the old one.
“I’d like to go,” said Emily.
“Don’t tell me you’ve never been to Muir Woods before,” said Jess.
“Never with you.”
“You have to promise you won’t have an agenda.”
“No agenda,” said Emily.
“And no hectoring!”
“How is hectoring different from lecturing?”
“It’s louder.”
Jess carried a volume of Robert Frost when Emily picked her up.
“What’s that for?” Emily drove her new Audi along the coast, and the ocean rose and dipped in the sun.
“To read. To meditate!” Jess said blithely, and she thought, To avoid hectoring if necessary.
“Okay,” Emily said, bemused and, sensing Jess’s unsaid reason, a little hurt.
“The woods are lovely, dark, and deep,” Jess intoned as they took the path down from the parking lot. She had imagined finding a spot to read and meditate, leaving Emily to walk alone for half an hour, but the trees were so tall, and the light filtering down so green that she forgot her stratagem, and her troubles as well. The saplings here were three hundred years old, their bark still purple, their branches supple, foliage feathery in the gloaming. They rose up together with their ancestors, millennia-old redwoods outlasting storms, regenerating after lightning, sending forth new spires from blasted crowns. What did Hegel matter when it came to old-growth? Who cared about world-historical individuals? Not the salamanders or the moss. Not the redwoods, which were prehistoric. Potentially posthistoric too.
Jess closed her eyes to inhale the forest with its scents of earth and pine. “Couldn’t the Veritech Foundation be for forests?” Jess asked.
“No.”
“Why not?”
“Because our mission is math education.”
“But without trees there would be no math,” Jess said. “Let alone math education. Without trees we’d suffocate—literally and figuratively.”
“How do you suffocate figuratively?”
“You box yourself into received ideas, so you can’t breathe. You can’t even see where you are and you just … die from lack of perspective. Did you know that tribal peoples aren’t even nearsighted? Nearsightedness is a result of reading and staring at computer screens.”
Emily took off her glasses and gazed up at the blurry canopy. When she slipped her glasses on again, she much preferred the finer view. She saw the fertile detail all around her, the spores speckling the underside of ferns, the pinecones extending from every branch, pine needles drifting down and carpeting the mossy ground. Fecund, furrowed, teeming with new life—even the fallen trees blossomed forth with lichen and rich moss and ferns. Every rock and stump turned moist and rich, every broken place gave birth. Each crevice a fresh opening, each plant a possibility, putting forth its little hook or eye.
“You see?” said Jess. “And this place is tame. Up north you feel like an ant looking up at a blade of grass.”
“I’m not sure I’d want to feel like an ant.”
“Why not? Don’t you like to feel small sometimes?”
“No,” Emily said honestly.
“I do. I like it. I prefer feeling insignificant,” said Jess.
“I don’t believe that.”
“I didn’t say worthless, I said insignificant, as in the grand scheme of things.”
“But why?”
“Because humans have such a complex. We’re so self-involved. You have to get out to a place like this to remember how small humanity really is.”
And Jess was right. Numbers didn’t matter here. Money didn’t count, and all the words and glances, the quick exchanges that built or tore down reputations had no meaning in this place. The air was moist. Fallen leaves, spreading branches, and crisscrossing roots wicked water, so that the trees seemed to drink the misty air.
Jess said, “All your worries fade away, because …”
Emily finished her thought. “The trees put everything in perspective.”
“Right. It’s like your soul achieves its focal distance.”
The word soul startled Emily from her reverie. She turned on Jess. “You’re dropping out of school, aren’t you?”