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.
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 be
ing 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.
SOME 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
IN THE YEAR FOLLOWING LILA’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 wo
rk 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.”
No One You Know Page 2
