All This Life

But there’s no answer because he’s pouncing. His arm swings back, cocks for a punch, coming forward and hitting Deb right in the face. She falls down, out cold.

“We have to keep the world uncremated,” Wes says, throwing Kathleen against the wall.

20

“People sit in this every day,” Sara says. “Can you imagine?”

This isn’t the Golden Gate; it’s the Bay Bridge. They’re waiting in line at a toll plaza, trying to get into San Francisco. The traffic is bumper to bumper, even though it isn’t rush hour. It’s late morning. It’s the day after they spent all night together, naked in bed. Nothing sexual, but something did happen: Sara feels better. Rodney did that, and she’s not going to forget it. This is the calmest she’s felt since Nat posted their video.

They got a late jump this morning because of his injured foot. Something’s either broken or sprained badly in there. Rodney isn’t telling her much about it. He’s written his mom’s old address down on a piece of paper, and every time Sara suggests they go to the ER for an x-ray, he waves the address around.

After holding him hostage in the motel room for four days, she can’t badger him about the doctor. It’s his foot. All she can do is get him to San Francisco to see if they can find her, though Sara knows this won’t work. Life isn’t this easy. You don’t follow an old address and voilà, your dream comes true. His mom won’t be baking cookies in the kitchen. If anything, she’ll be slurping cocktails, if she’s still

up to her old tricks. But she guesses the only thing that matters is that Rodney gets to see her for himself. Sara would do the same thing, if she had the ability. She would hunt her parents down. She would do anything to be reunited.

That thought makes her hands twitch a bit, so to find some distraction before things escalate, she says to Rodney, “What’s that?”

They’ve rolled through the toll plaza and are driving onto the bridge. Over on the walkway, they see a bunch of people, around twenty of them, holding up signs toward all the cars, like picketers, except the only thing on their signs is a picture of a teenage boy, with #GOHOMEJAKE printed on the bottom.

“Must be a missing kid,” Sara says, answering her own question. She knows Hank would never do that. He’d never stand on a street in Traurig with #GOHOMESARA. He doesn’t care if she ever comes back.

Her hands start humming.

“Let’s program your mom’s address into Google Maps,” she says, hoping a task gets Hank out of her mind.

Rodney nods. He steers the slowly moving car, while Sara works the pedals, plugs the address into her burner.

NOAH911 FINDS HIMSELF on a BART train, taking it downtown so he can transfer to a bus, get over to the Golden Gate. The tracks glide him underground, and there are two other people on the almost-empty car. He is glued to his tablet and must be producing a horrible digital stench that keeps everyone away from him. He repulses people by posting on Tracey’s Facebook page. It must have an odor. Putrid pixels that make his friends recoil, close that tab, close their traps.

“Do you remember the green puttering Pinto, how it could barely make it up a hill?” he posts on her wall. “What about the time we helped Dad toss shingles off the roof and you were so little they tied you to the chimney keeping you far away from falling over the edge?”

No one likes or comments on or shares these tributes. Noah911 knows people see these things commute down their news feeds, but they’re too busy posting pictures of cats or clever memes, too busy tagging themselves.

Noah911 knows he’s being ignored. He’s talking to his dead sister and at the same time talking to a bunch of other people — his 713 friends — and no one wants to hear him.

No one says a single word. It’s been four minutes, and Internet time is its own demented metric system: Four minutes converts to over one month.

So he likes his own status.

The train stops between stations. It hums in the dark tunnel. For some reason he loses his connection. Who knows what’s over his head right now that forces him offline. But it’s not only him, the other two people in his car looking irked and panicked at their phones, wondering what went wrong, where the world went. The woman kills this time of disconnection by snapping selfies, capturing herself from a variety of angles. The other guy shakes his phone by his ear, like it’s a busted light bulb, hearing that filament fly around inside.

At least without a connection, Noah911 can’t compulsively check his Facebook page, counting the minutes he’s being ignored. He leans his head against the train’s tinted window.

All he knows is that it’s his fault Tracey’s dead. His dad is right. Noah911 has his share of the ashes, but he has all the blame, and soon he will help Tracey rest in peace.