Thanks for the Trouble

  I noticed one of my dad’s diaries had landed just on top of the cement divider. Zelda reached out with her foot and kicked it off. She looked at me and smiled. “We ought to get out of here. Otherwise, I think we’re going to be arrested for felony littering.”

  YOUR TURN

  I BACKED UP A FEW feet and took the off-ramp. I felt electrified, both from being so close to all those rushing cars, and from letting go of all that past at once. But my excitement was quickly overshadowed by anxiety, because I’d realized where we were going next, where we had to go next, and I wasn’t sure how Zelda would take it.

  “That was marvelous, Parker,” she said, leaning over and resting her head against my shoulder. “But I hope you didn’t only do that because of what I said, about your being arrested. I mean, I hope you did it for your own sake and not for mine.”

  I squeezed her hand, as if in agreement.

  “So, where to next?”

  I didn’t answer. She only began to understand when we crested the hill and the hospital came into view.

  “Wait. Why are we here?”

  I pulled to a stop in a loading zone and pointed toward the door. Your turn, I signed, forgetting she didn’t understand the language.

  “What?”

  I opened up my journal. Your turn, I wrote.

  “My turn?” She laughed condescendingly. “This isn’t a game, Parker. There are no ‘turns.’ ”

  Why not? I did what I had to do. Now you have to.

  “I don’t have to do anything!”

  She seemed a little ashamed of her own intensity, and when she spoke again, her voice was calmer. “Parker, I’m very proud of you for all the progress you’ve made, but my situation is entirely different from yours. Your father has been gone for years. My husband is still alive.”

  Not really. You said it yourself.

  “But . . .” She ran out of argument before she’d even begun to argue. “But I can’t.”

  I turned to two fresh pages in the Moleskine.

  Now, I wrote on one.

  Never, I wrote on the other.

  I held the journal up, and Zelda stared at it for a few seconds. “That’s a cliché,” she said.

  I shook the journal.

  “I know!” she shouted. Then, more quietly, “I know.” She closed her eyes and took a deep breath. “Stay here, all right? I have to do this alone.” She opened the door but turned back to look at me. “Thank you, Parker. For everything.”

  I watched her pass through the sliding doors of the hospital. The rain was still coming down, but the sun had emerged from behind the clouds out over the water. There’d probably be a rainbow.

  Suddenly something underneath me started shaking, and because I live in San Francisco (and because I was pretty keyed up in general at this point), I assumed it was an earthquake. I jumped out of the car, only to realize that the shaking was localized right around the area of my new, too-tight jeans: my phone was vibrating.

  You have to understand, no one ever calls me (for reasons that are probably pretty easy to work out), so I wasn’t used to the sensation. Still, I had a pretty good idea who it would be. My mom must have gotten home and noticed all the missing pictures, not to mention the missing car. I thought about ignoring her, but then I figured, fuck it. Today was a day for not ignoring things.

  “Hello?” she said. “You’re there, right? If you’re there, tap your finger against the speaker.” She didn’t sound angry yet, but that could very well be a temporary situation.

  Tap.

  “You have the car? Tap once for yes and twice for no.”

  Tap.

  “And you’re with Zelda?”

  Tap.

  “Okay. Good.” She gave a relieved sigh. “I just wanted to make sure it wasn’t stolen.”

  Tap tap.

  A long pause. I pulled the phone away from my ear to see if the call was still going.

  “You know the Shakespeare Garden, in the park?”

  Tap.

  “I spent the morning walking around the neighborhood, and I ended up there. I actually talked to Shakespeare a bit. I mean, not the real Shakespeare—I’m not completely cuckoo yet—but that statue of him. He has a very reassuring presence. Then I came home, and I saw what you’d done, and I decided to call. So here I am.” She sounded strange, like a kid almost, and I remembered something Zelda had told me once: No one ever really stops feeling young. “I’m sorry about yesterday, Parker. I shouldn’t have gotten so angry. I just . . . I felt like something was finally shifting these past few days. You went to that party, and you have a—well, whatever Zelda is to you—and you’re planning to go to college. And then you got into that fight at the movie theater, and it was like everything was going back to the way it’s been. And that was hard for me because . . . well . . . because I’ve been a pretty shitty parent.” No amount of tapping could serve as an adequate response to that, so I just waited. “I know that. I’m guilty of a little wallowing. I drink too much. And yes, sometimes I idealize your father. It’s hard not to. Not because he was so great all the time—which he wasn’t, by the way—but because that’s just what happens when people die. They sorta get the red carpet treatment, because they can’t disappoint you anymore. And you can’t be mad at a dead person, because being mad takes a lot of fuel, you know? And where are you gonna get that fuel now that they’re gone? So all you have left is all that love, even when you don’t want it anymore. Well, that and a bunch of photographs.” She paused. “Did you throw them away?”

  Tap.

  “I figured. I thought about doing it myself a million times before. I really did. But to take them all down, to really commit to that—it felt like killing him all over again. That’s the thing about letting someone go. It’s a kind of murder. Or more like a murder-suicide. You have to kill the person in your memory and then you have to kill the version of you that needed that person. It’s big, Parker. And I just haven’t been big enough to do it. Hey, are you okay?”

  Somewhere along the line, I’d started crying, and I guess my mom heard me sniffle.

  Tap.

  “We can talk about it more later, okay?”

  Tap.

  “You’re still in trouble for that fight, by the way. You don’t get a free pass just because I’m apologizing. I’m still your mom.”

  Tap.

  “Oh, and you can bring Zelda to dinner if you want. I’ll be nice.”

  Tap.

  “Okay. I’ll see you later.”

  I hung up. The sun was completely out now over the Bay, scattering spangles across the water, though it stubbornly kept on raining where I was. If I’d been able to speak, I would’ve told my mom that I agreed with everything she’d said, except for one thing: I don’t think that there’s such a thing as “letting go.” Like, I don’t know much about the brain, but I do know that everything sticks in there; we’ve yet to develop the Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind technology to delete the stuff we don’t want to have to think about anymore. And that means that everything you’ve ever seen and heard and felt, along with everyone you’ve ever loved (and hated, and wanted, and wanted to hate and hated to want) is locked in your brain until the day you die. So why would the heart be any different? I don’t think we should ever expect to let go. We just have to move on anyway.

  And that made me think about Zelda, and what she was about to do. The optimist inside me said maybe everything really had turned around for her in just a few days, the way it had for me. But I’m not really a very optimistic person.

  How long had she been gone? Only ten minutes, maybe fifteen. But I felt a cold bubble of dread forming in my stomach, because suddenly I knew she wasn’t coming back. I left the car double-parked and unlocked and ran toward the hospital. The homeless man in the Yale sweatshirt was still camped out by the hospital door, but I heard him cackling at the same time I saw the crumpled wad of bills in his hand.

  Nathaniel’s room was empty but for Nathaniel: the only guy in Sa
n Francisco who spoke less than I did. Beep. Beep.

  I went to the nurse’s desk on the seventh floor and reached across to steal a pad of Post-its.

  “Whatchoo doin’?” the nurse asked.

  Was a girl just in here? I wrote.

  “You mean the one with the weird hair?”

  I nodded.

  “Yeah. She spoke with Dr. Romaniello.”

  And then?

  “Beats me. She left.”

  My mom’s car already had a ticket on it, but it fluttered out from under the windshield wiper like some huge moth as I tore out of the spot. Zelda must’ve gone out a back entrance and called a car. It meant she had a head start on me, but not much of one. And luckily—and unluckily—I knew exactly where she was going.

  THE BRIDGE

  THE RAIN LET UP SOMEWHERE along the way to the Golden Gate Bridge. I’d always wondered about that threshold, between where it was raining and where it wasn’t. Somewhere, that line had to exist, didn’t it? You’d be standing in one place and getting rained on, then you’d step a couple inches to the side, and the rain would be gone. Even if it let up gradually, so gradually that you couldn’t even tell it was happening, there had to be one final step that took you out of the shadow of the clouds and into the sunlight.

  I drove across the city as fast as I could, rolling through stop signs and running through intersections after the light turned red. If a cop had spotted me, he probably would’ve had a chase on his hands, but I made it to the water unopposed. I ran through the wet grass of the park at the base of the bridge, past the cross-sectioned sample of the Golden Gate’s suspension cable and a few tourists giving peace signs for the camera.

  Up on the span, there didn’t look to be anyone else around, except for the occasional bicycle whizzing by, its rider as lean and arched as a greyhound. I started walking, hoping I wasn’t too late. Cars rumbled over the metal gratings. In the distance, rain clouds went on doing their usual wetwork, but the sun was bright and glary here.

  “They tried to build an antisuicide barrier, you know.” She’d been hidden, or maybe even hiding, behind one of the tall red stanchions at the center of the bridge. As I passed by, she began to speak. I might not have noticed her if she hadn’t. “This was back in the seventies. But they couldn’t make it happen. You know why? Because people thought it would be too ugly. It’s just not the Golden Gate Bridge if it’s all covered in safety nets and railings.” Zelda crossed the narrow cement sidewalk and leaned out over the edge, gazing down at the flecked blackness of the bay. “Now, you might think it really doesn’t matter one way or the other—if a person wants to kill herself, she’ll just find some other way to do it, right? Wrong. It turns out that most people make these decisions pretty lightly, on the spur of the moment, and if they can’t do it at the precise moment when the thought occurs, they often don’t do it at all.” She stepped up onto the lower bar of the railing. I went to stand next to her.

  That’s pretty fucked up, I wrote in my Moleskine.

  “Is it? I learned about all this more than three decades ago, and I still haven’t decided. On the one hand, yes, it sounds terrible to value some old bridge over a human life. But on the other hand, why should a human life be worth more than the beauty of this bridge? A lot of people died to build it, you know, and they died so that it would look like this. And it’s lasted a lot longer than your average person does. So maybe it is more important.”

  Maybe. Just don’t jump off it.

  “Speak to me, Parker. Speak a single word and I won’t.”

  That’s not fair.

  “It’s as fair as what you’re asking.” She went up on her tiptoes, and I noticed the delicately scalloped skin between her heel and ankle. She put her elbows on the railing. My whole body was tensed, ready to spring forward and pull her back if it came to that. “So how would you do it, if you had to?”

  Do what?

  “Off yourself.”

  I frowned. I haven’t thought about it.

  “Of course you have. Everyone has.”

  She was right, of course. I mimed throwing back a handful of pills.

  Zelda gave a measured nod. “Pharmaceuticals can be good. But difficult to keep them down. People always underestimate the lifesaving power of regurgitation.” Now she began to lean forward, folding all the way over the bar, so that she looked like a towel on a rack. “I told them to let Nathaniel go,” she said. “And you were right. It felt good. I mean, not good good, but, you know, good. And then I came here. I could’ve done it already, you know. But I decided to wait. I couldn’t leave you without a real goodbye.”

  You don’t have to leave at all, I wrote, in big scrawled letters. I changed everything about myself so you’d stay. What was the point of all that if you go?

  She must have heard me writing, but she stayed bent over the railing, so she couldn’t see what I’d written.

  “You’re the best thing that’s happened to me in a lifetime, Parker. Maybe two. I’m a very lucky girl.”

  I leaned way out over the water, so I could hold my journal in front of her face, and I felt my feet lift up off the sidewalk and my weight shift forward. In another couple of seconds, I would’ve gone over myself. But Zelda had sensed what was happening. She straightened up just in time to pull me back onto the path. I scrabbled for the railing and dropped the notebook in the process. It flipped end over end, splashing silently into the water: Now, Never, Now, Never.

  Then Zelda was hugging me so tightly it felt like the wind had been knocked out of me. She put her lips inside the whorl of my ear and whispered. “It’s been quite an adventure, hasn’t it?”

  She let me go. And I hummed as hard as I could, just as I’d been taught to do in Dr. Joondeph’s office, just as I’d done in that dream. I was aiming for I love you. What I got was: “Mm Mmm Mmm.”

  Zelda laughed. “Not a word, Parker Santé, but a fine finale. Look out!”

  She pointed behind me. I turned, expecting one of those crazy bicyclists to come whizzing by like a bullet train. But there was only the long empty pathway, still sparkling from the rain. When I turned back around, Zelda had risen to stand on the railing, one hand on the metal post beside her. None of the cars on the bridge so much as slowed down, but I swear time itself did. Her silver hair was whipping around in the wind as if each strand were alive, her sea-green eyes spilling rivers down her cheeks. I remembered the first time I saw her, sitting alone in the dining room of the Palace Hotel, tapping at her egg. Perfect sadness. Silver, not platinum. And every moment of our time together suddenly came back to me, in pointillist bursts of color: Elbows touching on a movie-theater armrest. The angels’ share. Genmaicha. Still life. Cherry Icee. A stolen scarf. Beep. Moleskine. Columbia University. The hydra. Skin and more skin. Crack. Flutter. And all of it bringing us here, to this frozen instant on the Golden Gate Bridge. She looked back at me, one last time, and the sadness I saw in her face was different from the sadness I’d seen that first day. Imperfect sadness maybe, which was another way of saying there was a little splinter of happiness in there too. I’d given her that at least.

  And then she jumped.

  AFTERWARD

  AND

  AFTERWORD

  GOODBYE, BANANA

  THE BANANA WAS GONE.

  It had been replaced with a painting of a couple wrapped up in a checkered quilt of gold and cream and black. My first thought was that the banana must have been stolen, but of course that was ridiculous. Who would steal a giant picture of a banana? Then again, who would buy it in the first place? The world was full of mysteries.

  “You looking for the banana?” Dr. Milton said. “I figured it was time for a change. Got some Klimt instead.”

  “What banana?” my mom asked.

  “Just something I used to have on the wall.”

  “Oh.” My mom laughed awkwardly. “I thought it was some kind of expression.”

  She was there as part of what I liked to call “the self-improvement supe
r package”: joint therapy, individual therapy (for both of us), AA for her, and speech therapy for me. It was weird, at first, seeing her in Dr. Milton’s office. For half a decade, this had been the place I came to say all the things I couldn’t say to her. But it was good in a way too. It was a change.

  We didn’t talk about anything specific—just whatever had been going on that week. There was a lot to talk about. I was finishing my applications, but I still wasn’t convinced I wanted to go to college just yet. Why not take a year or two off to bum around a bit? Zelda had told me I ought to travel more, and it seemed stupid to go straight from twelve years of education to four more, without even doing anything to celebrate in between. Unsurprisingly, my mom disagreed. She and I still didn’t agree on much of anything, when it came down to it. But it seemed to make her happy just to be talking about the future.

  The future—that dirty rat bastard of a concept. It kept on coming. One week gone by. Then another. Then another.

  “I don’t even understand why they call it Alcoholics Anonymous,” my mom said during one of our sessions. “It’s not anonymous at all! People are always saying their name. ‘I’m Marian, and I’m an alcoholic,’ and then everyone goes, ‘Hi, Marian!’ It’s about as un-anonymous as you can get.”

  You should make up a fake name, I signed.

  “What about Catwoman? Can I be Catwoman?”

  That would be weird.

  “What about Zelda? That wasn’t her real name, was it?”

  It was Griselda, actually.

  “Wow. Really? I’ve never known a Griselda. Fancy.”

  “Have you had any word from her?” Dr. Milton asked me.

  I shook my head. I’d told them she’d had to move away because her dad got a new job in Australia. If I’d told them the truth, I’d have ended up in therapy for the rest of my life. Or maybe a straitjacket.

  “What a shame,” my mom said. “I owe so much to that girl. I’d like to take her out for a nice dinner.”