Slowly, Sophie stopped moving.
“I’ve always liked that idea. That there’s a partner out there for every particle. Something mystical and strange, or someone…” Isabel remembered the weight of Ronald’s hands on her shoulders. She fell silent when she heard Sophie’s breaths heavy with sleep. She gazed at her daughter. Sophie’s hair spiraled around her head like galaxy arms around a central eye. She hoped Sophie felt how completely she was loved, even when there was no one around to say it. She kissed Sophie’s forehead before she disappeared.
CHAPTER 3
Jake halted in the lobby before the glass door: a homeless man was poking his forearm with a needle. Out of the doorman’s line of sight, he jabbed the syringe in and out, stabbing for a vein. His cargo pants billowed. Wind blew his long sleeve onto his chest like an X-ray tracing his bones. His hair was just as dark as Jake’s—Jake recognized his dad.
Rather, a version of him. But unmistakable.
Thinner, wrinkled, frustrated.
Still, Dad.
Jake stood immobile in shiny brown loafers, a two-button blazer, and a navy tie with red stripes, his uniform for the first day of eighth grade. The key chain on his backpack—a stainless-steel tag printed with TRINITY, his school’s name—swung in smaller and smaller arcs until it hung still. He had not seen his dad, Tom Kristopher, in five years. Now, here they were, close enough to have a conversation. Behind him, grown-ups in Barbour jackets and oxford shirts speed-walked to work, obeying the unspoken norm to ignore the homeless on New York City streets. Dad dropped the needle and wandered out of view.
Jake was too shocked to move.
His heartbeat pumped his throat.
“You okay?” Lucas, the doorman, asked.
The last time Jake had seen his father was in their old apartment in Harlem, leaving to disappear for the weekend like he always did after payday. Jake had reimagined that moment so many times—feeling the delicate memory for all of its details—that he was no longer sure what the exact circumstances had been. Jake had handled the image of his dad’s broad back receding in the doorframe too much to trust it anymore.
Since then, Jake’s mom, Janice, had married again, this time to George Hershaw III. Something about George—never “Dad”—always felt off. He was so much older. She didn’t act in love with him. When the three of them strolled around Tribeca—from Hermès to Gucci, “treating” Mom, as George put it—and George leaned in to kiss her, she usually offered just her cheek. When George reached for her hand, she sometimes held her own instead. She ordered a kale salad without dressing when he was around, but split a large pizza and garlic knots with Jake when George was away on business.
Mom was beautiful—lustrous hair, dense eyebrows, a natural tan—and that seemed to be what George liked best about her. All of his nicknames came from her looks: Dollie, Dimples, Caramel. She’d always been thin, but when she’d started dating George, her body had changed. Her biceps rounded. Her thighs hardened. She grew squares of abs.
Her courtship with George was fast and glitzy, and had ended last summer in a Montauk wedding that he’d paid for from save-the-date to sparkler send-off. Janice, thirty-two, took George, fifty-two, with no children of his own, to be her lawfully wedded husband. Jake didn’t eat much that night. He didn’t even taste the four-tiered, three-layer wedding cake that stacked lemon sponge on raspberry sponge on red velvet foundation. His mom tried to dance with him, and Jake made an effort, but the band George had flown in from Atlanta was too loud; the tent at Gurney’s Montauk Resort was packed full of strangers; and George had been pawing his mom in ways that turned his stomach. Big hairy hands all over a white wedding dress felt wrong.
“Jake, you okay?” Lucas pressed.
“I’m fine. See you later, Lucas.”
The sidewalks were crowded.
Needle abandoned.
Mom did love Dad, though. They had grown up together in a Catholic town on Long Island, dated in secret starting in fifth grade, and made the seismically unpopular choice to have him when they were nineteen. Instead of going to college, when Mom was seven months pregnant, they’d left for jobs in New York City without anyone’s blessing. The way they explained it to Jake: they chose each other over everyone else. “When you find out who your family is, that’s all that matters,” Dad said once while looking at Mom.
Their first apartment was decked out with CVS-printed photos of them: snapshots from their city hall wedding in four-by-four layouts, each box a kiss from a different angle, their ear-to-ear joy brighter than the glossy photo finish; and then, pictures from a road trip through Maine, the two of them kissing under lighthouses by rocky coastlines, infant Jake strapped to Mom’s chest; and then, the three of them cheers-ing red-and-yellow-streaked hot dogs at a Mets game. Their home in Harlem was a shrine to their family, lacking every luxury except love.
Dad’s first job had been in sales at Booyah Sports, talking up hiking gear to those with wanderlust. Mom had waitressed at an Italian restaurant on the Upper East Side. They were happy. It shone through Mom’s face when Dad came home at night. They liked to kiss new parts of each other, so Dad would always plant one on Mom in an amusingly bizarre place—under her chin, behind her ear—and she’d return the strangeness by kissing his wrists or Adam’s apple.
The recession took their jobs without warning. Gifts at home became necessities: shampoo and conditioner on birthdays. Joy gave way to focus. Mom and Dad started to bicker, tension rising slow as water coming to a boil, mostly around “asking for help.” Mom got hired first at the Glen Oaks Club, where she waited on serene members in tennis whites. That alone was not enough. They moved to a smaller apartment but kept all their photos, even though the frames crowded the kitchen counter and foggy glass shelf over the bathroom sink.
Mom took a second job at a dry cleaner. Meanwhile, Dad wouldn’t take a job paying less than he used to make. When his application for vice president of business development at Home Depot was rejected—a job that required a college degree—Mom yelled so precisely, Jake learned how searingly articulate someone could be with tears streaming down her face. She broke three picture frames that night by slamming them against the floor. Dad stared at the glass shards from his seat on their slanted sofa and calmly agreed to change.
He accepted a job in construction: a graveyard shift in Manhattan four nights a week. On his nights off, he started to go out drinking with “the boys” on his shift. Months passed. Dad stayed out later, sometimes not coming home until Jake was leaving for school. The two of them would pass each other in the stairwell between walls of chipping gray paint. Dad started to disappear the day after he got paid; then for entire weekends; and then for five whole years.
Until today.
* * *
After school, Jake stepped off the subway a few stops early on Fourteenth Street instead of going all the way home to Tribeca. Misty rain wet his face. Each breath nipped melting clouds. He wandered over dark sidewalk into Mah-Ze-Dahr, where he ordered a slice of carrot cake. Everything else—cheesecake with black graham cracker crust, sugar-dusted brioche doughnuts, cream-filled choux pastries—had been pillaged, but the carrot cake needed love. He took George’s Chase Sapphire card out of his wallet and swiped it limply.
Jake ate his slice with a plastic fork on a skinny counter lined with outlets. On his phone, he read a New York Times article about an opioid crisis in the United States and studied a list of slang names for drugs—Apple Jacks? Black Pearl? Junk?—on AddictionCenter.com that did not elucidate much. Jake had never done drugs. He hung in his nook, unseen, until the windows were bruisy and he felt compelled to leave. Mom would worry soon.
As he walked home, he searched everyone sitting on the sidewalk for his own eyes, his own hair, his own genes. The air was rainy. His lips felt cold. A cardboard bed lay flat in front of Starbucks, ominously missing its occupant. George didn’t like Starbucks. He refused to pay for any coffee there, saying it wasn’t a coffee bar, it was a chain of publi
c restrooms. Jake’s blood thumped louder the closer he got to home, but he didn’t pass anyone he knew. When he stepped back through the lobby’s glass door—no needle—he figured Dad had moved on. There was no way Dad knew where they lived, anyway.
“Good evening, Jake,” Ed, a night doorman, said.
“Sir.”
Elevator.
Ninth floor.
Jake turned his key. The long hallway peeked into their bright kitchen, where Mom sat on a stool, her arms crossed over her chest.
“Love you,” George said.
“Thank you,” Janice said icily.
“Say you love me.”
“I love you.” Her voice was flat.
“Look at me and say it.”
“Hello?” Jake announced himself. The fact that Mom and George were at odds didn’t surprise him. George loved her “moods,” as he called them, writing off whatever reasonable qualms she had with him as irrational, emotional swings.
Mom stood up. She wore black yoga leggings and a clingy sweatshirt that hugged her sculpted waist. Her hair shone in a sleek line from her high ponytail to her mid-back. Jake set his damp backpack in the hallway and hung his rain jacket on the coat rack, which looked like a tree skeleton leafed with Barbour, Moncler, and Patagonia fleeces. He slipped his New Balance sneakers off heel by heel and walked across the white shag rug into the kitchen. George was leaning against the counter and eating dime-size gluten-free chocolate chip cookies straight from the bag. His belly rounded his white-and-blue-striped polo.
“Where were you?” Mom asked.
“Around.”
She looked concerned.
“Chasing tail?” George asked.
“George, please.”
Mom blushed. He chuckled devilishly.
“Do you want tea?” she asked.
Jake nodded. He was too stuffed to want anything more inside him, but he rarely told her no. On the stool she left vacant, he slumped and stared at the sink where Mom was filling a cherry-red Le Creuset kettle. She set it on the stove and swept blue fire under its seat. George had given Mom carte blanche to remodel anything she didn’t like about the apartment when they moved in, but nothing had needed an upgrade. Their modern three-bedroom in the heart of Tribeca, with floor-to-ceiling views of the Hudson River, was like their wedding had been—lacking only one immaterial thing. George tossed another handful of cookies into his mouth.
“I’m spent,” he announced as he left the room.
Alone with Jake, Mom sealed the bag with a plastic butterfly clip and returned it to the cabinet over the stove. Every step delineated her quads.
“You gonna tell me where you really were?” she asked quietly.
“I saw Dad.”
She froze.
“Outside. This morning. He was jabbing himself.” Jake mirrored the stabbing motion he’d seen his father make toward his forearm. “By our building.”
She gripped the sink with both hands.
“We didn’t talk,” Jake said. “He left.”
“For where?”
“I don’t know.”
Mom leaned forward; under the chandelier, her face looked worn. Bags shaded a second strip of eyeliner under her eyes. Up close, her pain was stronger than her mask.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
“It’s not your fault.”
The teakettle’s scream startled Mom into filling two steaming mugs. She dropped a chamomile bag into each one and sat beside him. Neither spoke. Jake reached for her hand. As his fingers curled around hers, he wished he could hold her pain for her, too.
* * *
George lost his job at the mutual fund when Jake started high school. There was no talk of his getting a new one. The prospect of working so hard again so soon did not excite him. Instead, he entertained ideas such as investing his savings in a tennis-related startup; fundraising for a new designer surfboard company that would hold board meetings in Hawaii; or moving to Argentina and retiring. If George did move, of course they’d follow. He was their patriarch and owner. If he wanted to move to the Andes and ranch, then all three of their lives would be uprooted. It suddenly didn’t matter that they lived in a spacious Tribeca apartment filled with modern art. Jake felt alarmingly dependent on an unreliable man.
Jake got his own part-time job helping rich kids with their homework. He was charming enough to earn good cash tips from their moms and saved everything he could. Despite his new gig, Jake had never spent less. He stopped taking taxis. When he needed to buy food, he got it from CVS, where, in the refrigerated area, they sold yogurts for twenty cents cheaper per container than Duane Reade. Jake had always gotten good grades, but now he scored the best in his class. He wanted to work at Lionel Padington’s firm on Wall Street, which paid the highest salaries and only hired Ivy League grads with 4.0s. He was focused on going to Yale, which he perceived as the less stuck-up Harvard. He read SAT prep books as if they were maps showing the path out of jail.
* * *
Jake’s junior fall, he opened the door to find their hallway full of suitcases. The black Tumi bags were stuffed like popped popcorn, corners unzipped and bursting with Mom’s cashmere. Mom’s shoes filled three paper bags on the floor. The fourth had a Yale sweatshirt on top, which she’d bought on their college tour the prior week.
Jake had just returned from Essen, a no-frills restaurant catering to office types. Jake ate dinner there a few nights a week. He liked their prices—a heaping to-go Styrofoam container of vegetables and hard-boiled eggs for less than $10—and the fact he could work there uninterrupted. He read alone next to his food in the upstairs area filled with dinky tables and steel chairs. It teemed with business casual sorts on efficient breaks, a crowd that resonated with his sense of purpose. The only drawback was that the upstairs had no windows, offering no clue as to passing time. It was later now than he’d wanted to get home, 10 p.m. on Friday.
“You went in there because you wanted to find something!”
George’s voice was distorted by shouting.
Jake froze, still in khakis and a school tie.
“Don’t… blame… me,” Mom said.
The spaces between her words were wet.
“No man’s clean! Not fucking one.”
Jake walked in slow motion. He passed an overturned stool in the kitchen. He waited outside their door, sour-stomached.
“You’re disgusting,” Mom snapped.
“You wanted to catch me.”
Jake imagined what might have happened. The door swung open to reveal Mom’s red stare. She pulled Jake in for a hug that he was too shocked to reciprocate. Her eyes bled tears onto his oxford. George looked sweatier than usual in a country club polo.
“What the fuck’re you looking at?” George demanded.
Mom swung around.
“We’re leaving,” she announced.
“You’ll be back.”
Mom led Jake into his own room.
“Can you pack?” she managed.
“What’s going on?”
Mom shut the door and sat on his bed, her forehead on her wrists.
“I didn’t think it’d get to me. Didn’t know it’d be this bad.” She shook her head slowly, clearly at an internal slideshow. “This isn’t the right place for you to be…” She looked at Jake through glassy eyes. “I’m so sorry.”
“Mom, it’s okay.”
“His phone… So many.”
She covered her eyes.
“I’m so sorry,” she said.
They hugged.
“I’ll help you pack.”
“Where will we go?” he asked.
Mom was in no state to help. He pulled his own Tumi from under the bed and began filling it: pressed khakis in beige and navy, a blazer, a foot-tall stack of workout shirts, running shorts, boxers, and handfuls of white athletic socks with check marks on the ankle. He didn’t know what to bring. He grabbed blindly.
“A hotel. I booked a room for tonight.” She shook her head. “I
just kept thinking, what if you’d been here when he brought one of them home? I’m so sorry.” She covered her eyes. “I’ll work again. I have my own savings. An account we never merged.”
“Me too.”
Jake had already invested his tutoring money in the most reliable companies he could find. He wasn’t betting on risky new technologies. He only trusted businesses with proven strategies. The power of time—the greatest multiplier of all—would yield the most enormous gains. All he had to do was wait for his sum to grow. So far, he had $19,012.
“We’re going to be fine,” she said.
“I know.”
“We’re going to be fine.”
* * *
A week later, they moved to Harlem. Their new apartment was the same size as their old one ten blocks south, both skirting seven hundred square feet; the former tenant had left his sofa for free, and they each had their own skinny bedroom. They shared a bathroom, but it was more than Jake had expected. After all, Mom had signed an iron-clad prenup with George. None of his credit cards had worked since they left. $17,021. Jake had withdrawn money to help while Mom waited to hear back from the country clubs where she was interviewing.
For dinner their first night at home, Mom bought KFC. Over the cooling food, they talked about the future. That was a happier place. Early applications to Yale were due in one year. Meanwhile, Mom ate exactly half of their shared green beans side and half of the mac and cheese from the $5 Fill-Up menu, which came with chicken nuggets mixed in like meaty pasta croutons. Her smile looked strenuous. $17,021.
* * *
Jake headed home with his $12 Old Navy scarf over his nose and mouth, $10 beanie pulled down to his eyebrows, exposing just his stare to the cold. Snow flurries wet dark air, lit a little in the yellow shadows of Harlem’s street lamps. He was imagining what Mom might have made for dinner. They ate together every Monday, the one night of the week she got home first. Her chicken stir-fry was his favorite, chili a close second. Food and the future were his two mental Band-Aids, good for mending painful moments.
The Love Proof Page 4