All This Life

THE BOTTLE IS still in Sara’s hands. She lets it fall, skittering on the walkway. She swung it at his face for all the rest of them. All the others who have harmed her, who have harmed anyone, all the monsters who think it’s okay to prey on people. She falls close to the man holding Kathleen, nuzzling against them. She looks at his damaged and kind face. Her hands are buzzing again but in a different way.

KATHLEEN CAN’T DO anything. Except move on hands and knees. Back a few feet. Retreat from Wes. Get as far away from him as she can. Get away from the two people holding her. Finally, she is alone, lying in a heap, blinking her eyes like crazy.

“Kathleen,” a young woman says, one of the people who were down next to her. “It’s Sara. Sara Clancy.”

Kathleen keeps blinking.

“Kathleen,” Sara says.

“Sara?”

“Are you okay?”

“I don’t know. .” Kathleen’s words trail off, stop off, pausing. She can’t say anything else because it’s her son. Her son! Limping up to her. Panting. Sweaty. Her son, Rodney, and Sara with her on the bridge.

Rodney leans down.

“Mom,” he says.

JAKE DIDN’T FILM the fight. He was so close to the action. A few feet away. He could’ve posted this too, shepherded this disaster, but why, what’s the point, it doesn’t matter; he learned today that his followers are hoaxes. They are ghosts. They don’t care about him.

There are other ghosts, too. The brass band. He captured them here and ever since that morning he’s felt haunted, and he doesn’t want that burden.

“They’re in here,” Jake says to his dad, shaking his iPhone. He presses the button to get that boing-boing noise and asks Siri, “Should I keep doing this?”

“Jake, I’m not sure what to say,” Siri says.

It’s when Siri uses Jake’s name that he almost starts crying, but he’s not going to. Astronauts do not weep during moonwalks. And he’s not sure why when Siri says his name he feels comforted, and cared for, and when that lip-pursing therapist or his parents call his name he feels the opposite. He feels chastised, reprimanded, cornered. He feels violent.

Siri has reached out through that user interface and caressed his cheek and made him feel better, like doing this is possible, and Jake takes a step toward the railing and his dad says, “What are you doing?”

Both father and son are right at the bridge’s railing.

The father’s hand firmly bunches up Jake’s shirt, pulling him, like a bully. Jake tries to fight free and turns his body toward the edge and then Jake throws his iPhone, throws it as far as he can, arcing down to the ocean.

Why?

Because he has no choice. Because it’s become an urn full of digital ashes and it’s the only way he can get rid of the ghosts, scattering them where they died. It’s the only way he can separate them from himself.

IT’S BALLOON BOY and his mom and Sara, sitting on the walkway.

“Rodney?” Mom says.

“Mom,” he says again.

“What are you doing here?”

It’s hard to pick words to say, so Rodney smiles. It’s been many years, and yet Balloon Boy and his mom are united again. Thanks to Sara. She made sure their lives went on. Made sure that every now and again you end up where you’re supposed to.

“You,” Balloon Boy says to his mom.

“Me?”

“You,” he says, hugging her.