No One You Know (3 page)

I sat at the kitchen table and waited, staring at the clock. At 5:43, the phone rang. It was my father. He was using the phone at the morgue, and the connection was poor. Muzak played in the background, the Beach Boys’ “Little Surfer Girl.” I strained to make out my father’s words, and made him repeat himself twice. “It was a positive ID.” Even when I was certain of the words themselves, it was a struggle to comprehend their meaning. “Her necklace is missing,” he added, more as a question than a statement, and I thought of the thin gold chain she always wore, with a tiny topaz stone suspended in a delicate gold pendant. The necklace had been a gift from me for her eighteenth birthday, purchased with three months’ worth of babysitting money. My father went on. “The coroner listed the cause of death as blunt trauma to the head.”

At that moment I didn’t stop to question the strange evenness of his voice, or the fact that he would deliver such horrifying news by phone while I was home alone. In hindsight I would realize he had been out of his mind with shock and grief; he could not be expected at that moment to make rational decisions. As I hung up the phone I was thinking about the car. If I had given it to Lila on Wednesday, as she requested, how might the chain of events have been altered? If I hadn’t been thinking of my dentist appointment, might Lila still be alive?

Once, in trying to explain to me the strange concept of imaginary numbers, Lila had quoted Leibniz, who called the imaginary number “an amphibian between being and non-being.” After my sister’s death, I sometimes felt as if I were trapped in such a state. All my life I had been Lila’s little sister. Then, without warning, I was an only child. My parents, to their credit, did their best to maintain our sense of family, to replicate the harmony we had shared before Lila’s death. In a world where “dysfunctional” was the common language of domesticity, we had considered ourselves lucky to be a happy family. But no matter how well-adjusted a family may be, no matter how hard its individual members try to move on, grief is not a thing that can simply be managed. The shape of our family had changed.

Almost immediately, I would come to see the world in terms of before and after. In my memories of before, there was a certain lightness of feeling, an intensity of color, the comfortable chaos of family life. After was a different story. After consisted of weight: the weight of guilt and that of grief. The shutters were closed, the house was quiet. At night, my mother kept to her garden, clawing at the dirt by the light of electric torches, tearing up weeds and planting bulbs. Past midnight I would hear her come in through the back door, drop her trowel and gardening shears in the big metal bucket in the garage. There would be a few moments of silence, followed by the rush of water through pipes, the sound of the washing machine shuddering to life. Then her footsteps up the interior stairs from the garage to the main level of the house, and the rat-a-tat-tat of the shower in the porcelain tub. Meanwhile, my father sat in the Stickley chair in their bedroom, reading, a glass of water on the table beside him. It was not a comfortable chair; before, he had always read in the recliner in the living room, his hand curled around a wineglass, Bob Dylan or Johnny Cash playing softly on the stereo. After, there was no wine, no music.

S
OME YEARS AFTER LILA’S DEATH, AT A GARAGE SALE
on Collingwood, I reached into a cardboard box and pulled out an old hardback copy of Graham Greene’s
The End of the Affair.
The jacket had been torn and taped back together, and the pages were warped and swollen. A sticker on the cover declared
25 cents.
It was a warm Saturday morning in September, the whole weekend stretching before me. I had nowhere to go, and the sun felt good on my bare arms, so I turned to the first page. “A story has no beginning or end,” it began, “arbitrarily one chooses that moment of experience from which to look back or from which to look ahead.” It was Andrew Thorpe’s old motto, there in black and white.

I scanned the line with my eyes twice, three times, to make sure I had read it right. Then I placed a quarter on the table, tucked the book under my arm, and began walking. It had happened before, I imagined it would happen again: just when I thought I had managed to outdistance the past, to put Lila’s story behind me, some unexpected thing would surface, bringing it all back. It could happen anywhere, anytime: a glimpse of someone who looked like her, a mention in the news of some significant mathematical discovery, a snippet of a certain song on the radio, a review of one of Andrew Thorpe’s books.

It should not have surprised me that the man who had made a career out of Lila’s story would have appropriated the novelist’s words as his own. What disappointed me was my own gullibility, my willingness to believe a thing I had been told without examining it for flaws, never stopping to question the source.

Every story is an invention, subject to the whims of the author. For the audience on the other side of the page, the words march forward with a certain inevitability—as if the story could exist one way only, the way in which it is written. But there is never just one way to tell a story. Someone has chosen the beginning and end. Someone has chosen who will emerge as the hero or heroine, and who will play the villain. Each choice is made at the expense of an infinite number of variations. Who is to say which version of the story is true?

Three

I
N THE YEAR FOLLOWING
L
ILA’S DEATH,
Andrew Thorpe interviewed dozens of people, including the editor of the
Stanford Journal of Mathematics,
three of Lila’s professors, and several classmates. If there had been friends, Thorpe would have interviewed them, too, but Lila had always been more interested in numbers than in people. Even my parents confided in Thorpe on a couple of occasions—but that was before any of us knew that he was planning to write a book.

Before he talked to anyone else, Thorpe talked to me. During the first semester of my sophomore year at the University of San Francisco, he was my professor for Contemporary American Literature. Lila died in early December, as the semester was coming to an end. Three weeks after her funeral, having failed to turn in my final paper, I arranged to meet Thorpe in a café across the street from campus. I’d met him a few times in the fall to talk about a semester-long project I was doing on Richard Yates and
Revolutionary Road.
Each of our previous conversations had veered off course, lasting well beyond its allotted hour. I had found him to be easygoing and funny, well versed on a variety of subjects, and perfectly willing to admit that he was a fan of action movies, Tears for Fears, and canned ravioli. He was originally from Tuscaloosa, Alabama, and I could still hear a trace of an accent, which I found charming. Even though he was only thirty years old, technically an adjunct instead of a professor, he was one of the best teachers I’d ever had.

“No problem,” he said, when I asked for an incomplete. “Take as long as you need.” We were sitting on an old loveseat tucked into an alcove. He had insisted on buying me coffee and a sandwich, which I had barely touched.

“Not hungry?”

I picked up the sandwich, put it down again. “For the past three weeks people have been showing up at our house with all this amazing food, but it’s impossible to eat anything. The very idea of food seems absurd. We finally started pawning it off on the neighbors.”

“When my dad died a few years ago,” Thorpe said, “his friends in Tuscaloosa did the same thing. We had enough fried chicken and banana pudding to feed the Crimson Tide.”

He looked me in the eyes for a few moments before saying, “How are you holding up, Ellie?”

I fought off tears. What could I say? It was too soon after the event to process it in any coherent way. There was still an element of shock about the whole thing. I found myself telling Thorpe about something that had happened that morning: upon waking, I had pushed back the covers and hurried into the bathroom with the thought of getting in the shower before Lila, who never failed to use up most of the hot water. As I was turning on the faucet I remembered that Lila was not there, that she would not be taking a shower that day or any day. Her death was a realization I had faced dozens of times since it happened, but each time it was a fresh wound. I would wake in the middle of the night, and for a moment everything would be fine, until I remembered that she was gone, at which point I would lie there in my bed, unable to fathom how our family would go on without her.

“One of the strangest things about all of this is living alone in the house with my parents,” I said. We were sitting beside the heating vent, but I was shivering. “Before, there was balance: two of them, two of us. Now, I feel like a third wheel in my own home, more like a houseguest than a daughter. When my parents and I weren’t getting along, whenever I was in trouble, Lila was always a buffer between us. Now, we just sit there trying hopelessly to make conversation.” I wiped my eyes. “I don’t know why I’m telling you this.”

Thorpe’s expression conveyed concern, but not pity. “Tell me whatever you like,” he said. “Maybe it will help.”

The conversations Andrew Thorpe and I had in the weeks and months following my sister’s death were not, to my knowledge, interviews. I turned to him because he was there, and he was sympathetic, and I never felt that he was judging me or my family. It was difficult to talk about Lila’s death with my peers, who were careful to be somber in my presence, as if laughter might make light of my grief. It was impossible to talk to my parents, who had in a way shut down. It wasn’t as though they stopped functioning: they both got up and went to work in the morning, and in the evenings, as it had always been, we took turns making dinner. My father played golf every other Friday, and my mother continued to work in her garden, weeding and planting and watering at night after her long days at the law firm. The difference was not one of action, but rather of emotion. My parents had always been joyful people, but after Lila died, they rarely laughed. On the rare occasion when one of them smiled, it seemed forced. The silliness that had been a common feature of our house subsided. And the lingering romance of their marriage, which I had come to take for granted, faded entirely.

When they talked about Lila, it was almost always the result of the occasional and momentary mental relapse of believing her to still be alive. For example, one morning a few weeks after she died, when I was taking the car out for the day, my father said, “Be sure to fill up the tank for Lila.” Another time, when I was taking plates down from the cupboard to set the table, my mother said, “You need one more,” and reached into the cupboard for a fourth plate before realizing that my count had been right.

It was as though my parents had made a conscious decision to forget. In hindsight I would find it strange that we did not sit around talking about my sister, calling up our fondest memories of her. But at the time it seemed natural that we danced around the subject, as if removing Lila from our conversation might somehow excise the grief.

But with Thorpe, I held nothing back. I talked to him about things Lila and I had done together as children. I outlined her odd habits and neuroses: she always put her left shoe on first and took a few steps around the room, as if to test the floor, before putting on the other one. She formed relationships with certain numbers in the same way avid readers develop relationships with characters in books—one of her favorite numbers was 28.

“Why 28?” Thorpe asked.

“Because it’s one of those rare phenomena that falls under the category of ‘perfect numbers,’” I said. “Its divisors, 1, 2, 4, 7, and 14, add up to 28. It’s the sum of the first five primes. There are exactly 28 convex uniform honeycombs. Our universe is 28 billion light years from edge to edge. Twenty-eight is also a harmonic divisor number, a Keith number, and the ninth and last number in the Kubera-Kolam magic square.”

“Interesting,” Thorpe said.

Encouraged, I told him more. Despite being pretty, Lila couldn’t stand mirrors and would go out of her way to avoid them. There were no mirrors in her bedroom, and when my mother finally got her to start wearing lipstick her senior year of college, it would often be a bit off-kilter because she put it on blindly.

One thing that came up often in our conversations was the question of who had killed Lila. The fact was, I didn’t have a clue. To my knowledge, no one had disliked her. I couldn’t imagine her getting on anyone’s bad side. I told Thorpe what I did not tell my parents: that whoever did it, I hoped he had been a stranger. I couldn’t bear the thought of it having been someone she knew and trusted.

“What about the man she was seeing?” Thorpe asked once. “Could he have murdered her?”

I flinched. “Please don’t use that word.”
Murder
was the term favored by reporters, but I couldn’t bring myself to say it. It was too graphic. I was grateful for the official terminology,
homicide,
which was somehow softer around the edges. “Of course the police are very interested in him,” I said. “But no one knows who he is. The two of them were extremely discreet.”

He jotted something on a notepad, and I kept talking. With Thorpe, I felt free to say anything. He listened, nodded, asked questions. In hindsight, I should have been alarmed by the pen that was always at the ready, the way he would sometimes start scribbling into his notebook in the middle of a conversation, but every time I met with him, he was reading student essays or writing lecture notes, so I thought nothing of it.

The semester after Lila died, I enrolled in Thorpe’s survey of Eastern European literature. It was the only class I attended faithfully. Our private conversations always began with whatever we were reading in class that week—Milan Kundera’s
The Book of Laughter and Forgetting,
Václav Havel’s
Temptation,
Bohumil Hrabal’s
Too Loud a Solitude
—and ended with Lila. I began to suspect that my friends found me morose and difficult to tolerate; though I understood that grief makes for unpleasant company, I couldn’t get my mind off what had happened to my sister. Thorpe was the one person who never seemed to tire of the subject. It occurred to me more than once that he might have a romantic interest in me. Why else, I wondered, would he continue to indulge me?

Most often we met at the café, but sometimes I stayed after class. The classroom had large, rounded windows, through which I could see the mouth of the bay and the Golden Gate Bridge. The sight of the bridge rising up through the fog, so aloof and yet so familiar, was comforting. Lila and I had walked across the bridge together many times, it was something we had done twice a year for as long as I could remember—on her birthday, and on the first day of fall. Talking about her in that setting, with this man whom I’d come to consider a friend, felt natural.

After the spring semester ended, we continued to get together. We’d meet in Dolores Park, which was close to his apartment, or at Creighton’s Bakery in Glen Park. A couple of times we saw a movie at the Roxie.

It wasn’t until June, six months after our talks began, that Thorpe told me he was writing a book. We were having lunch at Pancho Villa. We sat by the window, and while we dug into our burritos, Thorpe kept up a running commentary on the passersby. He had a story for each of them: the ratty-looking woman pushing the five-hundred-dollar stroller had stolen it from an unsuspecting yuppie mom; the attractive couple, hand in hand, was in town on a bogus business trip, both cheating on their spouses. It was a habit of Thorpe’s, creating backgrounds and motivations for complete strangers. I always suspected their actual lives were far less interesting than the stories he built for them.

At one point Thorpe sipped his orange soda and said, “Actually, I have some interesting news.”

“Really? What?”

“I’m writing a book.”

“That’s wonderful,” I said, and meant it.

Thorpe had confessed to me early on that his secret desire was to be a writer. While in graduate school he had attempted to publish a number of short stories, but after a string of rejections he gave up. I knew there was a partially written novel in a drawer somewhere—“Half the English department has one of those,” he’d said to me once, dismissing years of his own work with a wave of his hand.

“A novel?” I asked.

“No, this is nonfiction.”

“About what?”

He bit his lip, fiddled with his silverware, and after a long pause finally said, “It’s about Lila.”

At first, I was certain I’d heard him wrong. “What?”

“A celebration of her life and an investigation of her death.”

It sounded rehearsed, as if he had said it before. But the very notion that he would write a book about Lila was so outlandish, I thought for a moment he was joking.

“That’s not funny,” I said. “Why would you say something like that?”

“It’s a fascinating story. I think people would want to read about it.”

I pushed my plate away. “You can’t be serious.” I kept waiting for him to tell me he was kidding, but he didn’t. A man passed by with several dogs on leashes and Thorpe tried, stupidly, to lighten the mood with a joke. “This one gave up a lucrative career in medicine to pursue his dream of being a dog walker.”

“Lila isn’t a story,” I said, so loudly the couple at the next table turned to stare. “She’s my sister.”

Thorpe glanced apologetically at the couple and spoke quietly. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said it that way. It’s just that, listening to you talk about Lila these last few months, I’ve realized there’s so much about this case that hasn’t been brought to light. The police are strapped for resources. To them, solving the crime is just a job, an unwelcome distraction. Maybe I can bring a fresh pair of eyes to the case.”

“What stone could you possibly overturn that they haven’t already looked under?”

“Look, somebody knows something. At the very least, maybe I can figure out who Lila was seeing.”

“If you want to play private eye, go ahead, but please don’t put it in a book. Lila would hate that.”

I could tell that, as I spoke, Thorpe was already planning his response. “She was an exceptional person, enormously gifted,” he said. “The book is a tribute to her.”

I felt my face getting hot. “But you didn’t even know her.”

“I feel as though I did. If it weren’t for you, she would have been nothing more to me than an item in the news. But you made her real to me. You made her matter.”