Come With Me

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Come With Me Page 1

by Helen Schulman




  Dedication

  To Sloan Harris,

  cherished reader, partner in crime

  Epigraph

  I’ll go anywhere to leave you but come with me.

  All the cities are like you anyway.

  —BRENDA SHAUGHNESSY, “DRIFT”

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Part One

  Part Two

  Part Three

  Author’s Note

  About the Author

  Also by Helen Schulman

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  I’M GAME,” SHE SAID. “I’M IN.”

  She pushed her sunglasses up onto the top of her head. The super-bendy photochromic lenses were constructed out of something called NXT, which had been invented by the army. Designed for battle, this pair was also great for trail running, deflecting slingshotting branches from scratching her eyes out, and mitigating the rapid-fire one-two shock of shadow and blazing sunshine during high-intensity sprints in the woods. Now she was using the sunnies as a headband; they pulled the escaping wet wisps of her ponytail off her forehead and behind her ears. Still, she rewrapped and twisted the whole sweaty, tangled, mess up into a bun so it was high off her neck, and sat the glasses on top again, too. A little plastic crown.

  “What do you want to know?” he said. He was tapping on his smartphone. His feet, in Adidas flip-flops, were tapping along with his fingers.

  “When I was your age, I wanted to eat the world,” she said. “Love, heartbreak, I wanted to feel it all.”

  He didn’t look up. Why should he? He wasn’t a feelings kind of guy. He was forever young, at least at that moment, so this was boring and he wasn’t listening anyway. She sounded like someone’s Aunt Sadie; she wouldn’t listen to herself. “Then for a long time, I didn’t want to feel any of it. But now I am at a point.”

  They were meeting on campus. Tresidder Union. She’d insisted. She didn’t want to have this conversation at the office. It was 11:00 a.m., on a Saturday, spring quarter, most of the coders probably had already stumbled their way out of the dining halls and onto their bikes and then off their bikes and into work. Sometimes some of them didn’t even bother returning to the dorms on Friday nights, they slept in the office on the couches, arm wrestling over the hammock, the beanbag chairs.

  She pulled her shorts down farther on her legs. The flesh of her thighs was sticking to the metal lattice of her seat and she could feel it puffing like Play-Doh through the grille. The morning was growing warm. Good thing she’d already finished her workout. They sat outside on the deck of the student union at a round white table with three red wiry chairs surrounding it, leaving one empty; now he was using it as a footrest. These oddly floral configurations dotted the cement terrace in a utilitarian, but somewhat attractive manner. Very Marimekko. Most of the seats were already occupied, the sun was bright and the air was dry. Kids on their computers, their iPhones. Profs on their computers, their iPhones. Some older guys, nerdy in bike helmets, with short-sleeved button-down shirts and even pocket protectors, were reading actual newspapers. At the base of the steps, a young Korean mother was sharing her muffin with her toddler twin girls. So cute, they each wore matching hickory striped overalls, and pigtails, although the one in the red T-shirt had one plait that went north and the other south, like a cockeyed weather vane.

  She remembered those days—there never was enough muffin to go around, there was never much left over for her. She was thinner then.

  They’d met at the Starbucks inside. “First Starbucks on any campus anywhere,” he’d bragged for the ninety thousandth time while they stood in line. As if she didn’t already know this, everyone who lived in the area knew this, she’d been living here far longer than he had. He ordered; she paid. He was drinking a Teavana Shaken Iced Passion TangoTM Tea Lemonade. She had a Clover-brewed coffee; those were invented by a bunch of caffeine-craving graduates. Product-design majors, she figured. Single-cup coffeemakers. They cost a zillion dollars. She had hers with milk. Her husband called that “Regular, no sugar,” which in some way was how she might describe herself. Regular, no sugar.

  When the Clover machines were introduced at the first campus Starbucks on any campus anywhere a few years earlier, well, you would have thought those boys actually found God.

  “What does the TM stand for?” she wondered out loud. “Transcendental Meditation?”

  “Trademark,” he said.

  “You said you had all this info on me,” she said.

  “I said, ‘the Cloud has all this info on you.’ But it doesn’t matter; it’s out there. We have it. It has it. Everyone has it. But I know how to use it.”

  “To find out,” she said.

  “To make money,” he said. “I need to know if you’ll care enough for your eyeballs to get sticky.”

  “So how do we begin?” she said. “You said, ‘infinite chances, infinite universes.’ How do you tease the important stuff out?”

  He nodded. For the first time that morning, he looked, well, serious. Less spectrumy and more engaged. Like he didn’t live on planet Pluto, but right there where she lived, like he lived somewhere on Earth beside her.

  “I’ll take care of the algorithms,” he said. “You take care of the questions.”

  She sighed. This was the easy part. She thought about it almost every day. She’d had a therapist once who said the best thing for her to do was to sweep the obsessive thoughts away. For the past twenty-three years, she had been sweeping.

  “What would have happened if she’d lived?”

  He looked at her Petite Vanilla Bean Scone. He’d already eaten his Ham & Cheese Savory Foldover. She guessed he was still hungry. She pushed her pastry toward him. He took a bite. Then, with food in his mouth, a chalky paste, he said, “That’s all?”

  “There are no other questions,” she said.

  There were crumbs on his chin and a whitish spume in the corners of his lips. As if he were foaming at the mouth! She swallowed the urge to pantomime dabbing her own mouth with a napkin or just reaching out and dabbing his. But she wasn’t his mother.

  “Oh, you’ll have more,” he said.

  Which was true. More questions were soon to follow.

  Part One

  IT WAS A COOL BLUE morning. Later, at dawn, which was coming too fast—Amy wasn’t ready yet to face the day—sunlight would layer the sky into swaths of paler blues, grays, pinks. But not now. Now the whole world, or at least her ludicrously perfect patch of it, was encased in a clear inky gel, an atmospheric snow globe, seemingly flawless. Amy had just been awakened by a tactile hallucination, sensing her phone vibrating minutes before the alarm actually was set to go off. She’d grabbed it from her nightstand, saving Dan that juddering hand-buzzery sound—a gag that came daily, like Uncle God’s worn-out prank. These days, her nights comprised marathon hours of lacy sleep, in and out of dreams so wild and disturbing, the interruption by her own inner alarm clock could be viewed less as a textbook case of conditioning—Pavlov’s wake-up call—and more accurately as an act of self-preservation.

  She moved Dan’s open laptop carefully off his belly, closed it, and set it down onto the cream-colored cut-pile carpeting on her side of the bed. Dan must have fallen asleep while updating his LinkedIn file. Back in the day, when he first started out in newspapers (ha-ha), he often conked out while writing on yellow legal pads, and Amy had had to pry the pens out of his hand. The attic still held several ink-stained coverlets documenting that period. Time capsules. So last century.

  Quietly, she slipped on a pair of running tights and exited their bedroom. If she tiptoed down the stairs and kept Squidward, their psychotic Vizsla, from
barking, if she put on the sneakers she’d left to air outside the back door, she could hit the ground running. She’d circle around the faculty ghetto, following the campus blue lights like bread crumbs, then up into the hills. She’d head for the Dish, an old radio telescope that probably sort of functioned, sitting close to the top of one of the highest local gradients. If she was in luck as she ran, she’d see the fog lift and the light of day do the lifting. On a clear morning, the view was all the way to San Francisco.

  Amy didn’t have time to do the whole seven-mile loop today. Thing One and Thing Two, as they referred to the little boys—they were idents—had to be hauled out of bed by six thirty if any of the stuff that needed to happen before they went to school was to occur: the corralling of homework, clothes, tooth brushing, deodorizing poor little Theo (Thing Two), who on top of the rest of his issues appeared to be showing signs of way-early puberty, while Miles, his exact replica, had not a solitary hair where it counted, nor a single one of Theo’s hurdles. Amy poked a nose in their room before shutting the door carefully: no signs of life in the trundle beds, same mop of carroty curls exploding like a burst of fireworks on each pillow—always a surprise. Both she and Dan had dark hair, although recently Dan’s was shot through with silver, as though he’d stuck his finger in a light socket and it had been electrified. (She supposed in a way, he had.) Then she moved down the hall to check on Jack.

  In her oldest boy’s room, Lily was the only one up, still lounging in bed, her loose blond ponytail fanned out seraphically against her flowered pillowcase, blue eyes so bright they startled, black mascara melting prettily beneath her lashes, daisy-eyed. Jack’s girlfriend. She and Amy waved to each other via Skype, Jack’s laptop permanently open on his desk, angled toward his bottom bunk. Lily lived in Texas now, although she was a constant presence in Amy’s household—she’d moved two years ago, two weeks after the kids began dating—and slept under a fluffy pink duvet, surrounded by stuffed animals, a photo of a calla lily framed above her bed. It was a Mapplethorpe; Jack had found the print online; he had it sent to Lily for her sixteenth birthday. Their whole relationship, it seemed, was conducted over devices, although apparently not all of it.

  Amy gently covered up her sleeping son’s bare chest with his quilt out of some weird sense of propriety, even though she knew Lily had seen it all before. They’d had sex. Cindy, Lily’s mother, had told Amy as much in an email after Lily had visited last summer. God knows what the kids did together over the Internet.

  Now Amy posed her phone’s clock in front of Jack’s webcam. It was two hours later in Texas and she didn’t want Lily to be late for school. For this, she was rewarded with a sweet smile.

  Downstairs, Squidward was sleeping in his crate in the kitchen. Amy dug his chow out in fistfuls so he wouldn’t hear the kibble hit the metallic bowl. Asleep, the animal was magnificent, a deep glossy auburn; as he doggy-snored, his muscled belly shimmered like sunset on a lake she’d never seen—maybe in Maine or Vermont? Gently she unbolted the crate and shoved the tin bowl inside. He opened a wild eye—he had two settings, it seemed, on and off—and then began to scarf down his breakfast. Quickly, she refilled his water bowl, set it down, and then unlocked her back door. Still blue outside. She could smell the eucalyptus. She pulled yesterday’s socks out of her sneakers, which were a little wet with dew, sat down on her back step, and put them on. In five, four, three, two, one, Squidward dashed out past her, jet-propelled and ready for his morning run. They paid a Stanford track star to take him out for an hour at midday. It was a delicate matter right now, keeping the kid on payroll: Dan was around; they needed to think about money. But the last thing she wanted was to further rock his confidence.

  She obediently fell into step behind Squidward, and they turned left, running toward the elementary school. She would escort the twins there later that morning. Empty, with its retro playground—slides and tire swings and little habit-trails—no one could guess the tortures that awaited poor Theo inside.

  Amy had a lone real friend at work, the CFO, Naresh; his wife, a venture capitalist, was one of their angel investors. Naresh and Nancy put their kids in the local Waldorf School, which was vehemently anti-tech; perhaps without the distraction of computers and video games Theo could learn to read there, too, though Naresh said even in the fifth grade the kids spent all day knitting and digging for worms in the dirt. Thirty-something grand a year to live like a sharecropper’s child in Appalachia. Dan would have a seizure.

  A half-mile in and Amy caught her stride, clearing away the cobwebs in her hips and knees as they became oiled by synovial fluid, and then the onset of that weird divine heat that spread across her sacrum like Tiger Balm. It was one of those subtle bodily shifts that signaled the difference from starting a run to running (the way falling in love that first time had transformed the impatience of waiting-for-life-to-begin into the exhilaration of actually living), her breath even and deep. Soon she would enter a different plane. No more monkey mind.

  Amy hadn’t started running with any seriousness until the twins were thrown out of preschool. (Theo had hit another kid in the head with a piece of iron pipe that was part of a construction “work.” “Iron pipe? In a classroom of two-year-olds?” Amy had asked. “What is this, West Side Story?” Apparently not. Montessori.) So during the premorning hours while Dan still slept, Amy had begun, like now, sometimes wearing a headlamp, to navigate the darkness, before the babies woke. While running she could pretend she was unencumbered again, working her way up the corporate ladder with discipline and drive, eager to get a head start at her desk, blowing through a bunch of calories now so she could go crazy later, on the free bar snacks at happy hour.

  Or if it had been a rough night—Theo was a somnambulist, one time he’d sleepwalked into Jack’s room, pulled down his pull-up, and peed on the older boy as he’d been innocently dreaming in his bed; and with all the caterwauling that ensued, Amy was surprised none of the neighbors had called the police—she’d take a postbreakfast run, pretending to be a smug little Earth Mother now while she ran, her hair in braids, wearing tie-dyed capris, pushing the twins around the Palo Alto high school track in a double-baby jogger, each munching beneficently on a rice cake smeared with cashew butter. If they napped after a couple of miles, she’d park the jogger by the football dugout and tackle the stadium steps while they slept, fantasizing about joining an ashram in India as she ran up up up into the sky. Midday Amy switched roles in her mind’s backstage: she might transform into a French au pair, outsourcing the boys to a children’s museum art class or the library story hour and ignore them, hanging out in the back of the room, listening to Youssoupha and Daft Punk on her iPhone. In the afternoons, more often than not, she’d turn into a mixologist when it was five o’clock absolutely anywhere, finding the time to fix herself a fancy cocktail, when there were days where there wasn’t even time to shower it seemed, but still she was able to muddle mint and slice cucumbers on a mandolin, blasting music, the Things safely eating Cheerios off the ground in the rubber room she’d constructed out of gym mats on the floors and the walls in the dining area.

  She’d confessed all this to Dan after she’d gone back to work, while taking a large frozen organic pizza out of the microwave, Jack’s postdinner snack, and Dan had said, his long arms snaking around her middle, his lips pressed against her neck: “If you’d only told me earlier, we could have brought the au pair with us into the bedroom.” He could be funny, Dan. But not that time.

  Running made everything better. It was a vacation from her life. What lengthy list of crap could she not think about for the next hour? It was what sex did—now only birthday and anniversary weekends away, or when the kids were at sleepovers at some other hapless mother’s house—filling her with liquid light. The skin on her arms prickled beneath the morning chill, and also the fascia on her right shin. The body was so fantastically surprising sometimes. Stretch a hamstring while lying on her back and feel the music shoot up and out of her spine and thro
ugh her cranium. Craziness. The furnace of her sacrum was working its hot magic now.

  Then she saw him. At the school.

  Fuck no, thought Amy.

  In shorts, Tevas, and a hoodie—such pretension, he’d have to lose the hoodie; a yesteryear cliché—he was sitting on a swing. Waiting for her.

  “Amy,” said Donny.

  Under the playground lights, he looked just like her old roommate from college, Lauren—except for the hairy legs—wiry and short, blond, a ferrety handsomeish face, which made sense because he was Lauren’s son. When he’d come to Stanford three years before, to be nice Amy had invited him over for a welcome brunch and to do laundry, although the machines in the dorm were newer than hers—Donny pointed this out—and Energy Star–qualified. Plus, he sent his out to a campus Fluff and Fold. Now he was her boss.

  “What are you doing up?” said Amy, jogging in place, uselessly, her heart rate already coming down. Usually Donny trailed in a good couple of hours after her at work. Donny was a sleep camel, often up all night, drinking Mountain Dew Kickstart and writing code, being smart, acting dumb—catching up sometimes with eighteen-hour naps on the weekends. Once in a while he stayed awake to actually do his schoolwork.

  “I stalked you via Find My Friends,” said Donny. “I thought I could use the exercise.”

  He stood and started pumping his knees, his feet slopping in the Tevas. Hard to tell if he was joking or not.

  Squidward was nowhere in sight.

  “The dog,” said Amy, weakly.

  “He’ll boomerang,” said Donny. “I think maybe I’m thirsty.” Apparently this was a self-revelation. “You could buy me some green juice or a Philtered Soul.”

  She looked at her phone. 5:23 a.m. Philz Coffee wasn’t open. Nothing was open.

  “Or we could have breakfast at home,” said Donny.

  The first three months of the start-up they’d worked out of Donny’s room in the “Entrepreneurs’ Dorm,” but that hadn’t lasted long. Thank God, really, because it smelled like a dorm room, and there was always pee on the toilet seat, just like in the twins’ bathroom at her house. (Except for Tuesdays. Tuesdays the suite lavatories were cleaned by Facilities, and Amy could actually sit down.) Since the Things were officially school-aged (another argument for public school—they couldn’t be expelled), Amy had gone back to work part-time. In the beginning, she had been commuting three days a week up to the City at her real part-time job, working in PR/crisis management, hoping for employment at Google, where she fantasized about dropping off the dry cleaning on campus, eating in a cafeteria, putting in endless hours, never seeing her family. But some dreams weren’t meant to be. So, when the start-up moved into an office, she’d stayed on the Peninsula to work full-time with them.

 

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