With a Little Luck: A Novel (33 page)

In times of crisis, people turn to safe harbors, and having pretty much exhausted mine, I’m driven to do something wild. Something I haven’t done in more than four years.

Go see my brother.

Yes, my older brother, Peter Lambert, is what you might call estranged, but I don’t think of him that way, not in the classical sense. It’s sadder and simpler than a dark divide, in our case. I don’t call him. He doesn’t call me. Our parents—the one thing we have in common—don’t connect us. Peter’s thirteen years older (mind you, I was no mistake, my mom always assured me—just a late blessing), so maybe it’s the age difference, maybe it’s because to start over now would be too uncomfortable, maybe we associate each other with
exhausting times. Whatever it is, we simply avoid each other. Except now, when a little distance might help my sanity.

I take Moose to the kennel—which is more dog spa than kennel, if we’re being honest, but I feel too guilty if I don’t put him in a comfortable setting—and fly to Chicago three days after Peter invites me. He was overjoyed to hear from me, which would under normal circumstances send me into a spiral of second-guessing but right now just feels like the most welcome thing on earth.

Knowing only that he’s a trader with a small but growing finance firm of his own, I’m not sure what to expect. I never understood that world, so in my brain and with my family background, I just carried around the popular shorthand: high-stakes gambling.

On a warm day I wander tentatively along the Chicago River, looking for his building. After a few false starts and contradictory directions from fellow travelers, I find the place. His office is high in a glass fortress that gleams in the sun. It’s auspicious. As depressed as I am, you could almost say I’m feeling fortunate.

“Berry!” he says, arms outstretched, as he strides up to greet me in the lobby. I can see my father’s lean face on him but my mother’s big dark eyes. His thick hair is longer than I might have assumed, and it seems oddly out of place framing his clean-shaven face and topping the tall, suited figure of a man in obvious control.

“Carolyn, this is my sister, Berry.”

The receptionist smiles.

“Pleased to meet you,” she says. “I’d tell you I’ve heard all about you—but he never even mentioned that he had a sister.”

“Carolyn is one of our more annoying employees, as you’ll discover,” Peter says. “Actually, there are many annoying people here, but she has an awful habit of saying what’s on her mind and being honest. It’s amazing we’ve found any use for her at all.”

“And Peter is a great man. You’re lucky to have him as a brother.”

“On second thought, we’re doubling your salary,” he says. The phone rings, ending what I’m certain would have gone on all afternoon. The place is already making me a little happier.

“Come with me. We’ll do a walking lunch.”

Peter takes me to the kitchen—which is far nicer than mine, with its stainless-steel everything and mounds of fresh fruit and snacks on tables along the walls. He opens the refrigerator and says, “Banana-strawberry or kiwi-mango?”

“Uh, well, um, banana—no, kiwi.”

“I should have pegged you for a berry.” He hands me a fruit smoothie. Then he shoots into the hallway as though sucked out of a plane at altitude.

We move down a long open corridor, behind employees intent on their flashing screens. And it’s a sea of screens. An ocean. The perfect calling for anyone with serious ADD.

“G-man, how goes the battle?” Peter asks a very young man with auburn hair and freckles who looks a little like Howdy Doody.

“Not good,” says Howdy, not looking up from the garden wall of monitors arrayed in front of him but waving at them dismissively. “All day I’m short where I should be long and long where I should be short.”

“Keep at it,” my brother says, slapping him smartly on the shoulder. “But not too long, or you’re fired.” G-man looks straight ahead without smiling. I’m not even positive it was a joke.

“And am I to understand that all this madness is making you rich?”

“Rich and poor. Depends on which day you ask,” he replied. “No, we’re doing okay. You can’t get tied up in the ebb and flow. You’ll go nuts.”

“I’ve been here about thirty minutes and I feel I’m already nuts.”

Peter guides me into his office. “You started nuts, Berry,” he says,
pointing three fingers at me. “That’s different. Seriously, growing up like we did, what we went through, you’re bound to be a little cautious. I happen to think you’ve taken it up a notch, at least from what I hear, but it’s a free country. They can’t arrest you for being nuts.”

“They certainly can,” I shoot back. I had that one on good authority. The timing is off sometimes, but they catch up with nuts every day and take them out of circulation.

“Not our kind of nuts.”

“From what I hear.”
Our kind of nuts
. The implication that he has a dossier on me is a little unsettling. “Peter, respectfully, how the hell do you know anything about me? And what do you know?”

“Only what Mom tells me.”

“You talk to Mom?”

“Not enough. But, yeah, a few times a year. It’s hard.”

He pauses, and for the first time, the charging bull is a little nonplussed.

“What do you talk about?” I ask.

“Things. Her. The dimwit.” He winds his finger round and round in a circle, then points. “But a lot of times, we talk about you. Because she’s concerned, all the time. She wants happiness for you.”

“I’m happy. Usually. Sometimes. It’s been a tough few weeks.”

“She told me some things that I could have guessed.”

“Guessed what? What did she tell you?”

He cocks his head to one side like a bird does when it’s sizing you up. “I want to show you something.”

He crosses the floor of the sparse but fairly large office to a filing cabinet. With effort, he dislodges the lowest drawer and hoists it onto a round table.

“Okay, what do you want first? Let’s do key chains.”

From a plastic quart container, he pours out a mound of key chains that would be the envy of any valet.

“NASA. Notre Dame. Seattle Space Needle. Waffle World. Yellowstone Park.”

“Quite a collection,” I say.

“Not a collection,” he corrects. “Protection.”

Then he pulls out a plastic container of coins and shakes it.

“I won’t pour these out. Too much of a mess.”

“What is it?”

“Every coin I ever found. Every one lucky. Time was I’d nearly kill myself retrieving them. I was hit by a train once going after a penny.”

“Oh, God,” I say, thinking that was really a lucky penny.

“It was a kiddie train at the mall,” he says. “I was fine, but the conductor had security escort me out.”

Peter takes out four more containers, each brimming with odds and ends that I recognize all too well by type and kind. Rabbits’ feet, shiny charms, amulets—the stuff of our superstitions—my dream treasure chest. I’m fascinated.

“What’s this one?” I ask, peering into a box of sticks.

“Lucky sticks,” he says. Believe it or not, that’s one I’ve never contemplated. Secretly, I’m wondering how much he’ll take for the whole lot. But he slams the drawer back into place. “What did you see?”

“Well,” I say, wondering what he wants me to say, because I suddenly want a closer relationship with this person and fear I might blow it if I answer honestly, “I think you’re being careful. I know. I’m careful, too.”

“Careful,” he says. “Let me ask you: Did you ever fall and hurt yourself?”

“Maybe when I was little,” I reply, without any clue where he’s going with this. “But not for a long time.”

“Well, you should. I wish you would.”

“Thanks, Pete. And I hope your hair falls out.”

“Berry, all that trash I just showed you was an obsession. It took me years to figure out it didn’t matter. I used to rub a lucky alligator I had in my pocket before I’d make a trade, and I couldn’t buy or sell anything that had the letters
X
and
T
next to each other in the symbol, and if anyone walked behind me while I was executing the trade, I knew it was going to be a loser, so I stole some velvet ropes from a nightclub and made people walk around the long way.”

“But it worked. Look at you now.”

“Actually, one day my boss tripped over the ropes and chipped a tooth on my cubicle wall, and I got fired.”

“Oh. But see, he walked behind you. You were right.”

Peter walks to the window. The sky is pure blue, and against the backdrop, he looks like a comic-book superhero standing tall, fists clenched.

“I was a wreck. I couldn’t function. Finally I started swimming long distances. I did it in the ocean. I’d go right to the edge of the current and come back. I did extreme helicopter skiing. I rock-climbed without ropes. I walked right up to the prettiest woman I’d ever seen and told her I didn’t like her dress, but it didn’t matter, because she still made it look beautiful.”

“And?”

“And she half smiled at me, turned back to her friends, and I never saw her again.”

The story would have been better if he’d married her, but I was still enjoying the ride. And at least it meant he wasn’t bullshitting me. Which right now I could not abide.

“Berry, we’re both equal and opposite reactions to the same force. You run from risk. I run to it, make love to it, and stick by it even when I learn it’s found somebody else and has cleaned out all my bank accounts.”

Peter’s phone chirps, and he presses a few buttons.

“Oh, shit. Oh, well,” he says, then looks back at me and resumes his cheery tone. “We’re two extremes, you and me. Neither is probably appropriate all the time, but I’m thinking my side of it is more fun. Anyway, you don’t have to be like me. Maybe just a little more like me.”

He waves me over to stand beside him in front of an enormous computer monitor. “Here,” he says, pointing to a chart that rises and falls, falls some more, and then rises again. “I’m about to place a bet on this stock. Our software is giving me a few scenarios, and I honestly don’t know which way I think it’s going. So you look at this list of eight trades, and you pick one.”

“Pick one?”

“Just one. Tell me which one you think will work best.”

“How am I supposed to know?”

“That’s just it. You don’t know. You can’t know. According to our trading software—which is very sophisticated, by the way—they have approximately the same probability of success.”

“How do you know which one to choose?”

“You don’t. That would destroy the whole system. But do it quickly, because in about five more seconds, everything changes, and the deal probably goes away.”

“Oh, God, oh … then … number five.”

“Five it is,” he says, and he clicks a line on the screen, then punches a button before tapping his chin and spinning back to face me.

“So now we wait,” I say, still looking at the screen.

“It won’t take long,” he replies.

“For what?”

“For us to know which way the wind blows, and whether we do a Dorothy and get swept away to Oz.”

“And that number, that 547, that’s the five hundred forty-seven dollars. So what’s the worst—”

“Those are in thousands.”

“But it says five—whoa. You mean five hundred thousand?”

“Yeppity.”

Yeppity. I don’t even know what that means. In this moment, I’m too much in shock to understand whether this is more of my brother’s argot and a positive or somehow a negative that I’m just not getting. It can’t be five hundred thousand. Even a novice, non-investor type like me recognizes that the prospect of losing five hundred thousand dollars is completely and utterly terrifying.

“But you have some sort of protection, right? You didn’t gamble the whole amount?”

“Correct,” he says. “We are hedged up to our ass—armpits, sorry. So let’s see.”

Under the sleek, soft caramel of his desk hutch, between stacks of paper and reports piled neatly if innumerably around him, smaller screens flash like a checkerboard of heart monitors. And in my imagination, we are watching heart monitors. Six, eight, maybe sixteen patients all lying there, counting on him and his people to keep them from dropping into cardiac arrest at any moment. Maybe all at the same moment.

My brother bites his upper lip and exhales. He taps his mouse with his middle finger, waiting for something.

Waiting. Waiting.

“All right,” he says, clicking the mouse emphatically and then
turning to me with a smile that opens into a laugh. “See? That wasn’t so hard. You did fantastic!”

“We won?” I look at the screens, but I can’t even tell which one he’s been working on, let alone what happened. “I mean, it’s over? It worked?”

“Well, it always works, in a sense. We lost sixty thousand dollars.”

The deed to my condo passes before my eyes. I’ve ruined my brother. Let’s see, my charm collection, value two hundred fifty dollars or so (the amethyst monkey paw alone cost me two hundred dollars). And my car must have some equity; I’ve been paying off the damn thing for something like five years. Maybe my Cabbage Patch collection? I think that’s still in Mom’s attic.

I choke back tears. “My God, Peter, I’m so sorry.”

He stands swiftly, takes my hands in his. “No, no, no, no. Berry, it’s fine. Don’t worry about it. By the time I walk out on the floor, we’ll have made it back. Or lost ten times as much. It’s the work we do. You take your best shot, consider every option, try to increase your odds, mix a million bits of news with … I don’t know, instinct, experience, feeling, not luck, but not always a perfect, foolproof plan. If every plan were foolproof, we’d have fewer fools in charge of everything.”

My heart feels like it’s returned to its proper place in my chest. I sigh, smile up at him, and see something I hadn’t before: a scar on his forehead, slightly curved, arcing away from his left eye.

“Peter, this is going to sound a little out of bounds, but … what happened to your forehead there?”

“The scar?” He touches it and looks to the side. “I hit a tree skiing. Never did find out why they let that tree get on skis.”

“How many times have you told that one?”

“Few hundred.”