Here I Am by Jonathan Safran Foer(33)

“You say ‘I know,’ and yet it’s night and we’re not talking to him.”

“I just walked in. I was going to have a glass of water and then go talk to him.”

“And the plan was to talk to him together.”

“Well, I can spare you from having to be bad cop.”

“Spare him from having a bad cop, you mean.”

“I’ll be both cops.”

“No, you’ll be a paramedic.”

“I don’t know what that means.”

“You’ll apologize for having to correct him in any way, and the two of you will end up laughing, and I’ll be left as the annoying, nitpicking mother again. You get your seven-minute wink, and I get a month of resentment.”

“None of what you just said is true.”

“Right.”

She scrubbed at the charred residue on a burnt pan.

“Max is asleep?” he asked, aiming his lips at hers and his eyes to the side.

“It’s ten thirty.”

“Sam’s in his room?”

“One drink for four hours?”

“Three and a half. Someone else showed up halfway through, and it just—”

“Yes, Sam is up in his emotional bomb shelter.”

“Playing Other Life?”

“Living it.”

They’d grown so afraid of not having the kids to fill the void. Sometimes Julia wondered if she let them stay up only to protect herself against the quiet, if she called Benjy onto her lap to be a human shield.

“How was Max’s night?”

“He’s depressed.”

“Depressed? No he’s not.”

“You’re right. He must just have mono.”

“He’s only eleven.”

“He’s only ten.”

“Depressed is a strong word.”

“It does a good job of describing a strong experience.”

“And Benjy?” Jacob asked while looking through a drawer.

“Missing something?”

“What?”

“You’re searching around.”

“I’ll go give Benjy a kiss.”

“You’ll wake him up.”

“I’ll be a ninja.”

“It took him an hour to fall asleep.”

“Literally an hour? Or it felt like an hour?”

“Literally sixty minutes thinking about death.”

“He’s an amazing kid.”

“Because he’s obsessed with dying?”

“Because he’s sensitive.”

Jacob looked through the mail while Julia filled the washer: Restoration Hardware’s monthly Yellow Pages of gray furniture, the ACLU’s weekly infringement of privacy, a never-to-be-opened financial appeal from Georgetown Day, a flyer from some broker with orthodontics broadcasting how much he just sold the neighbor’s house for, various paper confirmations of paperless utilities payments, a catalog from a children’s clothing manufacturer whose marketing algorithm wasn’t sophisticated enough to realize that toddlerhood is a temporary state.

Julia held up the phone.

Jacob held up his body, although everything inside fell—like one of those bottom-weighted inflatable clowns that keep coming back for more punches.

“Do you know whose this is?”

“It’s mine,” he said, taking it. “I got a new one.”

“When?”

“A few weeks ago.”

“Why?”

“Because…people get new phones.”

She put too much soap in the machine and closed it too firmly.

“There’s a password on it.”

“Yeah.”

“Your old phone didn’t have a password.”

“Yes it did.”

“No it didn’t.”

“How do you know?”

“Because why wouldn’t I?”

“I guess so.”

“Is there something you need to tell me?”

Jacob was busted for plagiarism in college. This was before computer programs that could search for it, so getting caught required flamboyant stealing, which his was. But he wasn’t caught; he accidentally confessed. He’d been called into his “American Epic” professor’s office, asked to take a seat, made to ferment in the halitosis while waiting for the professor to finish reading the last three pages of a book and then clumsily shuffle through papers on his desk in search of Jacob’s work.

“Mr. Bloch.”

Was that a statement? A confirmation that he had the right guy?

“Yes?”

“Mr. Bloch”—shaking the pages like a lulav—“where do these ideas come from?”

But before the professor was given a chance to say, “Because they’re sophisticated far beyond your years,” Jacob said, “Harold Bloom.”

Despite his failing grade, and despite the academic probation, he was grateful to have made the blunder—not because honesty was so important to him in this case, but because there was nothing he hated more than exposed guilt. It made a terrified child out of him, and he would do anything to relieve it.

“New phones ask for a password,” Jacob said. “I think they require one.”