he wanted to do tomorrow, let alone for the rest of his life, and Napoleon told him that was fine, there was plenty of time to settle on a career, and these days no one had just one career anyway (he absolutely told him it was fine; he’d double-checked his memory about a thousand times), and then they played table tennis in honor of the tennis—best of three, Napoleon won two—and then they watched a movie, The Royal Tenenbaums. They both loved the movie. They laughed a lot. They stayed up too late watching the movie. That’s why Napoleon was tired the next morning. That’s why he hit the snooze button on his phone.
It was a split-second decision he would regret until the day he died.
Napoleon knew everything about that day because he’d examined his memories over and over, like a homicide detective combing through the evidence. Over and over he saw it: his hand reaching for the phone, his thumb on the snooze button. Over and over he saw the other life, where he made a different decision, the right decision, the decision he normally made, where he didn’t hit snooze, where he turned off the alarm and got out of bed.
“Grasp the bird’s tail,” said Yao.
It was Heather who found Zach.
The sound of his wife’s scream that morning was like no sound he’d ever heard before.
His memory of running up the stairs: it seemed like it took a lifetime, like running through mud, like something from a dream.
Zach had used his new belt to make the noose.
It was a brown leather belt from R.M. Williams that Heather had bought him for Christmas, only a few weeks earlier. It cost ninety-nine dollars, which was ridiculous. “Expensive belt,” Napoleon had said to Heather when she showed it to him. He remembered fishing the receipt from the plastic bag, raising his eyebrows. She shrugged. Zach had admired it once. She overspent every Christmas.
You broke your mother, mate.
The kid did not leave a note or a text. He did not choose to explain his actions.
“Carry the tiger over the mountain,” said Yao, who was a young man, maybe only ten years older than Zach. Zach could have worked somewhere like this. He could have grown his hair long. He would have looked good with one of those beards they all had these days. He could have lived a fantastic life. So many opportunities. He had the brains, the looks, the facial hair. He was good with his hands. He could have done a trade! He could have done law or medicine or architecture. He could have traveled. He could have done drugs. Why didn’t he just do drugs? How wonderful to have a son who made bad choices but not irreversible bad choices; a kid who did drugs, who dealt drugs even, who got arrested, who went off the rails. Napoleon could have got him back on the rails.
Zach never even owned his own car. Why would you choose to die before you knew the pleasure, the spectacular pleasure, of owning your own car?
Apparently, that young bloke in front of him drove a Lamborghini.
Zach had chosen to turn his back on this beautiful world of whipbirds and Lamborghinis, long-legged girls and hamburgers with the lot. He chose to take a gift from his mother and use it as a murder weapon.
That was a bad choice, son. It was the wrong thing to do. It was a really bad choice.
He heard a sound and realized it was him. Zoe turned to look at him. He tried to smile at her reassuringly. I’m fine, Zoe, just yelling at your brother. His eyes blurred.
“Needle at the bottom of the sea,” said Yao.
My boy. My boy. My boy.
He was not broken. He would never stop grieving for Zach, but he had made a decision in the week after the funeral. He must not break. It was his job to heal, to be there for his wife and his daughter, to get through this. So he studied the literature, he bought books online and read every word, he downloaded podcasts, he Googled the research. He attended the Tuesday night Survivors of Suicide group as faithfully as his mother once went to Sunday mass, and now he ran the group. (Heather and Zoe thought he talked too much, but that was only in social situations. On Tuesday nights he hardly spoke a word; he listened and he listened on his foldout chair and did not flinch while a