Anxious People(99)

“Would you like coffee?” Jack asks.

“Now? It’s a bit late,” his dad yawns.

“Let’s stop and get coffee,” Jack insists.

“What for?”

“I thought we could pick my car up from the station and go for a drive.”

“Where to?”

Jack makes his answer sound obvious.

“To see my sister.”

At that, Jim’s eyes lose their focus on his son and slide off toward the road.

“What? Now?”

“Yes.”

“Why… why now?”

“It’ll soon be her birthday. It’ll soon be your birthday. There are only eleven months to go before Christmas. Does it make any damn difference why? I just thought she might like to come home.”

Jim has to stay focused on the road, the white line running along the middle of it, to keep his voice under control.

“That’s at least a twenty-four-hour drive, though?”

Jack rolls his eyes.

“What the hell, Dad? I said we’d stop for coffee!”



* * *




So that’s what they do. They drive all night and all the following day. Knock on her door. Maybe she’ll go home with them, maybe she won’t. Maybe she’s ready to find a better way down, maybe she now knows the difference between how it feels to fly and how it feels to fall, maybe she doesn’t. That sort of thing’s impossible to control, just like love. Because perhaps it’s true what they say, that up to a certain age a child loves you unconditionally and uncontrollably for one simple reason: you’re theirs. Your parents and siblings can love you for the rest of your life, too, for precisely the same reason.

The truth. There isn’t any. All we’ve managed to find out about the boundaries of the universe is that it hasn’t got any, and all we know about God is that we don’t know anything. So the only thing a mom who was a priest demanded of her family was simple: that we do our best. We plant an apple tree today, even if we know the world is going to be destroyed tomorrow.



* * *




We save those we can.





73


Spring arrives. It always finds us, in the end. The wind sweeps winter away, the trees rustle and birds start making a fuss, and nature suddenly crashes through with a deafening roar where the snow has swallowed every echo for months.

Jack gets out of an elevator, bewildered and curious. He’s clutching a letter in his hand. It landed on his doormat one morning, without a stamp. Inside was a note with this address on it, as well as the floor of the building and office number. Beneath that was a photograph of the bridge and another envelope, sealed, with another name written on it.

Zara saw Jack at the police station and recognized him, in spite of the years that had passed. And because she’s been living those same moments over and over again since then, she realized that he’s been doing the same.



* * *




Jack finds the right office, knocks on the door. Ten years have passed since a man jumped, almost exactly the same amount of time since a young woman didn’t. She opens the door without knowing who he is, but his heart turns to confetti the moment he sees her, because he hasn’t forgotten. He hasn’t seen her since she was standing on the railing of the bridge, but he would still have recognized her, even in darkness.

“I… I…,” Jack stammers.

“Hello? Are you looking for someone?” Nadia wonders, friendly but bemused.

He has to reach out for the doorframe, and her fingertips brush his. They don’t yet know how they’re capable of affecting each other. He hands her the large envelope, with his name written untidily on the front, and inside it are the photograph of the bridge and the address of her office. Beneath those are the smaller envelope with For Nadia written on the outside. Inside is a small note, on which Zara had written, in considerably neater handwriting, nine simple words.



* * *




You saved yourself. He just happened to be there.



* * *




When Nadia loses her balance, just for a moment, Jack catches hold of her arm. Their eyes dance around each other. She clings tightly, tightly, tightly to those nine words, but barely manages to formulate any of her own: “It was you… on the bridge, when I… was that you?”

He nods mutely. She fumbles for more words.

“I don’t know what to… just give me a moment. I need to… I need to compose myself.”

She walks to her desk and sinks onto the chair. She’s spent ten years wondering who he was, and now she has no idea what to say. Where to start. Jack walks cautiously into the office after her, sees the photograph on the bookcase, the one Zara always adjusted when she was there. It’s a picture of Nadia and a group of children, at a big summer camp six months before. Nadia and the children are laughing and joking, and they’re all wearing matching T-shirts bearing the name of the charitable organization that funded the camp. It collects money to work with children like the ones in the picture, all of whom have lost a family member to suicide. It helps to know that you’re not alone when you’ve been left behind. You can’t carry the guilt and the shame and the unbearable silence on your own, and you shouldn’t have to, that’s why Nadia goes to the summer camp each year. To listen a lot, talk a little, and laugh as much as possible.