No One You Know (2 page)

Two

A
STORY HAS NO BEGINNING OR END,” MY
sophomore English professor used to say. “Arbitrarily one chooses that moment of experience from which to look back or from which to look ahead.” It was a motto that Andrew Thorpe managed to work into every session of class, no matter what book we were discussing. One could almost anticipate the moment he was going to say it, as the statement was always preceded by a lengthy pause, a lifting of his eyebrows, a quick in-take of breath.

I would choose a Wednesday in December 1989. Again and again, poring over the details, I would choose that day, and it would become the touchstone from which all other events unfurled, the moment by which I judged the two parts of my life: the years with Lila, and those without her.

On that morning I was in the kitchen, listening to Jimmy Cliff on the radio and waiting for the coffee to brew. Our parents had already left for work. Lila came downstairs, dressed in a ruffled black blouse, green corduroy skirt, and Converse high-tops. Her eyes were red, and I was startled to realize she’d been crying. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d seen Lila cry.

“What’s wrong?”

“Nothing. It’s just been a stressful week.” She gave a little wave of her hand as if to dismiss the whole thing outright. She was wearing a ring I’d never seen before, a delicate gold band with a small black stone.

“Dance with me,” I said, attempting to cheer her up. I grabbed her hand and tried to twirl her around, but she pulled away.

The coffeemaker beeped. I turned down the radio and poured her a cup. “Is this about him?” I asked.

“About who?”

“It is, isn’t it? Come on. Talk to me.”

She was looking out the kitchen window, at a small limb that had fallen onto our deck the previous week during a rainstorm. Only later, as I replayed the events of those days, would it seem strange that none of us had bothered to remove the fallen limb from the deck.

“How long has that been there?” Lila asked.

“A while.”

“We should take care of it.”

“We should.”

But neither of us made a move toward the kitchen door.

“Tell me his name,” I said finally. “I know guys on the basketball team. I’ll have his face rearranged.” I was only half joking.

Lila didn’t respond; it was as if she hadn’t heard me at all. I had learned long before not to be offended by her silences. Once, when I accused her of ignoring me, she had explained, “It’s like I’m wandering through a house, and I happen to step into another room, and the door shuts behind me. I get involved in what’s going on in that room, and everything else sort of vanishes.”

I reached across the counter and touched her hand to summon her back. “Nice ring. Is it opal?”

She slid her hand into her pocket. “It’s just a trinket.”

“Where did you get it?”

She shrugged. “I don’t remember.”

Lila never bought jewelry for herself. The ring must have been a gift from
him,
whoever he was. The very thought of a romantic entanglement was new to Lila. She hadn’t had more than half a dozen dates in high school and college combined. Throughout those years, my mother was fond of saying that boys didn’t know how to appreciate a girl of such exceptional intelligence, but I suspected my mother had it all wrong. Boys were interested in Lila; she simply had no use for them. During my freshman year of high school, when Lila was a senior, I’d seen the way guys looked at her. I was the one they talked to, the one they invited to parties and asked on dates, the fun and freewheeling sister who could be counted on to organize group outings and play elaborate pranks on the teachers, but Lila was far from invisible. With her long dark hair, her general aloofness, her weird sense of humor, her passion for math, she was, I imagined, intimidating to boys in a way I would never be. When she walked down the hallway, alone and deep in thought, clad in the eccentric clothes she made on my mom’s old Singer sewing machine, she must have seemed completely inapproachable. Although boys didn’t talk to her, it was clear to me that they
saw
her. I was well-liked, but Lila had mystery.

Even after she had graduated from UC Berkeley and started the Ph.D. program in pure mathematics at Stanford, Lila was perfectly content living in her old bedroom, eating dinner with the family most nights, watching rented movies with Mom and Dad on weekends while I was out with my friends. Lately, though, she had begun going out several evenings each week, coming home after midnight with a smile on her face. When I tried to get her to tell me who she was with, she would say, “Just a friend.”

Our mother, like me, was thrilled at the prospect of Lila dating. “I don’t want her to go through life lonely,” she had said more than once, although I suspected that Lila wasn’t entirely capable of feeling loneliness in the way most people did. There was so much going on inside her head, she never craved the company of friends. Although we could pass hours talking quietly in the dark, I knew that she was just as content to be alone, pencil in hand, working through some complicated math problem. I thought that, for other girls, having a sister was like standing in front of a milky pane of glass in which your own past and personality were reflected back to you with interesting variations. But aside from our physical resemblance, Lila and I were so different that, had we not been born into the same family, I doubted we would have been friends.

Lila finished her coffee, took an apple from a bowl on the counter, grabbed her backpack, and said, “Tell Mom I’ll be home late tonight.”

“How late?”

“Late.”

“Whoever he is,” I said, “don’t go too easy on him. You can’t let him think he’s running the show.”

I saw the beginning of a smile on her face. “Is that a rule?”

“A cardinal rule.”

I followed her to the foyer and took her black peacoat down from the peg beside the stairwell. As I was helping her into it, she said, an afterthought, “Any chance I could have the car today?” We’d been sharing a blue Toyota ever since I got my license three years earlier. It was Lila who wrote out our schedule every month, and on that month, she’d given me Wednesdays.

“I would, but I get off work at the library at four and I have a dentist’s appointment across town at four-thirty. I’d never make it on the bus.”

“It’s not important,” she said.

Before she walked out the door, I gave her our traditional half salute. For two seconds, maybe three, I heard the familiar sounds of the outside world infiltrating our quiet house—a car passing, a kid riding a skateboard down the steep sidewalk, a snatch of music from an open window across the street. Then the front door clicked softly behind her, and she was gone. In the months to follow, when I recalled that moment, I would suspect that the clicking sound I’d heard wasn’t the door, but something in my own mind, some barely audible psychic signal. I would tell myself that if only I had listened, if only I had paid attention, I could have somehow changed the story.

That night, I passed Lila’s message on to our parents, and we all went to bed as usual. The next morning, when I came downstairs, my mother stood at the kitchen counter eating cereal and perusing a legal brief, while my father sat at the table with his newspaper and buttered toast. “Go wake your sister, Ellie,” my mother said. “I can’t believe she’s not up. She has a nine-o’clock class.”

I went upstairs and knocked on her door, but she didn’t answer. I opened the door and saw that her bed was undisturbed, the white pillow shams and coverlet pristine. The small bathroom we shared was attached to my room, and Lila always listened to KLIV while getting ready in the morning. There was no way she could have showered and dressed without my hearing her.

I went downstairs. My mother was rinsing her cereal bowl in the sink. “She’s not here,” I said. “It looks like she didn’t come home last night.”

My mother turned to face me, her hands still wet. “What?”

My father looked up from his paper, startled. “She didn’t call?”

“Did she tell you where she was going last night?” my mother asked.

“No. She was upset yesterday morning, but she wouldn’t say why.”

“This person she’s been seeing,” my mother said to me. “Do you know who he is?”

“She won’t tell me anything.”

I went up to her room and retrieved her schedule from the bulletin board above her desk. We called the office of the
Stanford Journal of Mathematics,
where she worked part-time. She hadn’t been at her five-o’clock meeting the night before. “Weird,” the editor said. “It’s the first meeting she’s missed in two years.” Next, we called a guy named Steve who led a seven p.m. study group Lila was in; she had also missed the study group.

At that point, my father called the police and filed a missing person report. An officer came to our house and asked for a photograph of Lila, which he slid into a plastic sleeve. After he left, we went into the living room and waited for the phone to ring. That was Thursday. For two days there was no trace of her. It was as if my sister had walked to the Greyhound station, bought a ticket to Somewhere Else, and vanished.

On Saturday of that week Lila’s backpack was found in a Dumpster in Healdsburg. It still contained her wallet, her house keys, and her books. The only thing missing was a perfect-bound notebook, about an inch thick, with a blue plaid cover. I knew the notebook would have been in her backpack when she left home because she never went anywhere without it. It wasn’t a journal in the traditional sense. Instead of words, it contained numbers, page after page of formulae. For me, trying to read one of her calculations was akin to saying an ordinary word as fast as possible a dozen times in a row; the numbers and letters, taken separately, each looked familiar, but grouped together so densely they seemed mysterious, like some alien code that only a savant could crack. While I immersed myself in indie music and Eastern European novels, Lila filled her time with equations and algorithms, long sequences of letters and numerals stretching across and down the graph-paper pages.

“What’s all this?” I had asked her once, sitting on her bed and flipping through the notebook. I read aloud from a dog-eared page. “Every even integer greater than two can be expressed as the sum of two primes.”

She was trying on a new dress. My mother was always buying Lila fashionable clothes, trying to spiff up her quirky, homemade wardrobe. Out of kindness Lila would try them on, model them for our parents, and make some positive comment before hanging the clothes up in her closet, where they would remain untouched until I co-opted them for myself.

“Only one of the most famous math problems of all time, Goldbach’s conjecture,” Lila said. “Mathematicians have been trying to prove it since 1742.”

“Let me guess. My brilliant sister is going to be the one to solve it.”

“You don’t solve a conjecture, you prove it.”

“What’s the difference?”

“Math 101,” she said, cramming her feet into the pumps our mother had purchased to go with the dress. “A conjecture is a mathematical statement that appears
likely
to be true, but hasn’t been formally
proven
to be true. Once there’s proof, it becomes a theorem. While it’s a conjecture, you can use it to try to construct other mathematical proofs, but anything you come up with using a conjecture is only a conjecture. Get it?” Lila turned her back to me so I could zip her up.

“Thanks for being the family genius,” I said. “Takes the pressure off me.”

Lila kicked off the shoes and plopped down on the bed. “When I do prove it, I can only take credit for being half a genius. I have a partner. It’s a pact—we’re going to solve it together, even if it takes us the next thirty years.”

“A partner, huh? Who is it?”

“Just this guy I know.”

“If it’s going to take thirty years, you might as well marry him.”

“His wife might object.”

“Does she know that her husband is mathematically betrothed to you?”

Lila adjusted a bra strap and tugged at the neck of the dress. “She’s an artist. I doubt she’s ever even heard of Goldbach’s conjecture.”

When the news of the backpack reached us, we went to Mass. Even my father, whose only concession to religion my entire life had been to step through the wide church doors once a year on Easter Sunday, agreed to go. Together, we lit a candle for Lila. While my mother prayed aloud, I prayed, too, something I hadn’t done since I was a child. I didn’t exactly believe, but if there was a chance God was listening, I wanted to do everything right.

On Monday, two days after Lila’s backpack was found, a hiker in Armstrong Woods, near the Russian River town of Guerneville, left the trail and stumbled over a body partially covered by leaves. There was no hiking gear, no identification. It was four o’clock in the afternoon when my parents left for Guerneville, about seventy-five miles north of the city. I stood before the large front windows of our house and watched their dark gray Volvo pull out of the garage below. Thursday had been trash day, and in the chaos following Lila’s disappearance none of us had thought to retrieve the cans. The car stopped in the driveway, and my father got out and rolled the empty bins into the garage. Then he climbed in the car again, and I heard the hum of the garage door closing. Through the windshield I could see my parents, but only from the shoulders down. My mother’s navy skirt rose just above her knees. Her purse rested in her lap. In the space between the two front seats, she and my father held hands. As the car slowly backed into the street, I felt a sense of panic.