1
Jacqueline
I drive for a long time. The roads aren't particularly full and the steady flow of traffic is relaxing. I grip onto the steering wheel lightly and let my thoughts take me away. There are sizable intersections, and when the light turns red, I sit and wait for the massive flow of traffic to pass.
The weather has been turning gray recently. It is September, after all. The shift from the summer is starting, and after all the heat, it’s very much welcome. I can tell everyone is just eager for their fall weather, their coats, their pumpkin spice lattes, and the orange and yellow foliage.
There's a brief, two-week period where you can walk on the crisp fall leaves and they make that crunching sound underneath your feet, making you feel like everything's going to be okay. A new season is a new start, a new beginning to fix all the mistakes from the summer.
I drive nowhere in particular. Everyone else seems to be focused, eager to get home, perhaps to work, to take their kids to soccer practice or perhaps pick them up. But I find myself on this road for no other reason than the fact that I'm trying to buy some time and I don't know where else to go or what else to do.
I came home from Seattle last night. It was an uneventful flight, and I'm meeting with Sergeant Mallory in an hour to go over anything and everything that he found. I knew that I had to get home as soon as he’d called, even though he had insisted that there was no reason for me to change my plans and he could show me everything over the phone. Still, I knew I had to come home. There's no way that I could be three thousand miles away from home with this kind of big news being out there.
As my thoughts drift to Michael, I tell myself out loud to stop. I turn up Bruce Springsteen on the radio and I force myself to think of something other than my brother. I'm going to have plenty of time to worry about Michael, to consider all the angles of where he might be and why it wasn't his body in his car. For now, I just need to give myself some peace.
My mom is a nervous wreck, and when she becomes like that, the energy of the house completely shifts. The world becomes consumed by her thoughts and there's no room for anything else in there. I told her that I was going to Starbucks and didn't offer to get her anything, but I think she knows the truth. I think she knows that I'm just getting away from her. I'm just going on a drive in order to clear my head before I go to the police station.
I sit at another light, a red arrow pointing left, cars whooshing past mine, the sound of them deafening to my ears. The speed limit here is forty-five miles an hour, but many go sixty if they can. When the light flicks to green, I turn and realize then that the road is a lot more manicured here than it was before and I have entered a community.
The difference between the streets of rich people and the streets of the poor are night and day. They're about water fountains and flowers, along with exquisite shrubs, and bushes, and tall trees lining the walls.
I make a turn near the next intersection in the road right before the gate.
I have not come in contact with a lot of wealthy people. Growing up, everyone was pretty much just like me. But when I went to college, my dorm was full of them. I don't want to stereotype, but the main difference that I saw was just how different their attitude toward life is. The kids that I went to school with in Dartmouth, not all of them were spoiled necessarily, but many just had no clue what life could really be like. I couldn't afford the meal plan, so I bought everything myself and cooked it in my room. But of course, microwaves weren't allowed and there was only one on the floor, and hot plates weren't allowed inside either. My quality of nutrition was less than adequate during those years, but that was the least of my problems.
There were other details as well, ones that only occasionally come to me. Now, looking back, I wonder how much I missed out on not eating in the formal dining rooms. That's where everyone networked. That's where everyone made friends. I met Allison in class, but it was really over food that you made those real college connections, right? And parties. Of course, there were plenty of parties.
I don't know why my college years, which were actually quite a little bit in the past, suddenly come into my mind, except that there were a few times when Michael visited me and we had a really good time. I showed him the campus. We hung out with Allison and my other friends. And I remember us sitting on the lawn in front of the library and talking about making it.
Mom encouraged us to go to the best schools that we could find, and the ironic part was that it was the Ivy Leagues that actually offered us the most when it came to financial aid. Not just loans, but actual deep discounts on the tuition in the way of grants and scholarships. My time at college would have ended up costing me a lot less than if I had gone to a state school.
I remember that day, sitting with Michael on the lawn and him telling me about the internship that he’d gotten to Goldman Sachs and how excited he was for this new chapter in his life.
"Don't tell anyone, but I actually want to start a hedge fund," he says, with a twinkle in his eye. "I know that's probably dreaming too big, but hey, when you come from nothing, why not dream for everything?"
"There's no such thing as dreaming too big," I say, parroting our mom's words. "You go after whatever you want and you don't limit the scope of what's possible."
Michael went into finance because it appealed to him in a number of ways. He was analytical, but also competitive and a bit cutthroat. He never cheated, but he loved playing the game. He has been investing in stocks since he was a kid, playing the stock market as he called it.
At first, he just pretended that he invested one-hundred dollars into this company or that one and watched what happened. It was an extension of a project that they did in math class, and once he tried it, he was completely hooked.
Michael worked for Goldman Sachs for two summers, and then he got his first full-time position there upon graduation. That's the not so poorly hidden secret of getting high-powered jobs post-college. You have to put in full-time internship work during your summers in order to stand a chance of getting the opportunity for an interview.
I get into the left lane and realize that I’ve made a mistake. Luckily, there's no one two lanes to the right of me, so I change and follow the roundabout around the corner. I've never been one to drive without much purpose before. In fact, I mainly only get into cars to go somewhere, but this has been an interesting experience. There are a few speed bumps on a couple of the streets that force me to slow down, which I guess is the whole point, but I don't mind. I'm not going in a hurry and I'm not headed anywhere in particular.
I make a few right turns kind of by accident and then find myself in the main downtown area of a town that I've never been to. The roads are all crooked and convoluted and I drive around for a while before I find my way out. By that point, my head clears a little bit and the immediate thoughts of Michael disappear.
When I look at the time, I realize that I'm running late. I only have ten minutes to get to the police station.
2
Jacqueline
This always happens. It's always like this, isn't it? You have a lot of time to spare before you have to be somewhere until you waste it. You get lost, you do whatever you can to kill some time and then you realize almost too late, you've wasted too much.