No One You Know

by Michelle Richmond

  “Then Tally came, and Will was amazing. She was colicky, spent the first six months of her life screaming up a storm, but her crying didn’t bother him one bit. When he was out working on the farm, she could scream for hours, and nothing Nancy did seemed to work. But when Will walked into the house, he’d wash up real quick and then go take Tally out of Nancy’s arms, and start blowing in her ear, making this weird, musical rumbling sound—he had such a voice, you should have heard it, I always thought he should have been the front man in his band—and her screams would turn to little cries, then peter out to a whimper, and within a minute or two she’d be completely quiet and happy. Honestly, I don’t know how we’d have gotten through those first few months without him.

  “At any rate, about a year after Tally was born, Will was running errands in Petaluma when he ran into some guy he used to know in the music business. He called from the guy’s recording studio to tell us he wouldn’t be home for dinner, and he didn’t come home that night or the next, and when he finally did show up a week later he was a complete wreck—unshaven, unshowered, with that familiar paranoid look in his eyes. He went to pick Tally up from her playpen and Nancy told him she didn’t want him anywhere near the baby. He denied falling off the wagon, but it was obvious. Nancy insisted that he go back to rehab, and I backed her up on it, but he refused. At one point in the argument he put his fist through the wall right there.”

  I looked where Frank was pointing. You could still see where the wall had been repaired and painted over.

  “That was when Nancy told him to pack his bags and get out,” Frank said. “I tried to persuade her to give him one more chance. I was worried that without us, he’d completely fall apart. I was afraid for his life. After all, he was my baby brother. I remembered when he was born. I remembered playing ball with him when we were kids, and helping him pick out his first guitar, bailing him out of jail the first time he got in trouble for driving under the influence. Nancy told me point-blank that it was him or her, and even though I loved my brother to death, I wasn’t about to lose Nancy or my baby over him. Will pleaded with me to let him stay, he promised he wouldn’t do it again, but I told him what I was really feeling at the time—that I’d given up on him. To this day I regret saying it, but at the time it was true.

  “Ultimately I had to pack his bags for him, because he refused to do it. I’m not sure how I finally got him out to his car, but I did, and I drove him to the city, paid for a couple of weeks at a hotel out by the beach, gave him a few hundred dollars to get by. We spent that night in the hotel room, talking things out. He was alternately contrite and angry, crying and yelling, but he promised me he’d stay out of trouble and find work, and that I’d see him again in three months’ time, clean and sober and gainfully employed. ‘Maybe I’ll even write some songs,’ he said. There was such hope in his voice, I wanted to believe him.

  “The next day, Nancy drove to the city and picked me up. I’m ashamed to admit that I felt like a burden had been lifted. I told myself that he wasn’t my responsibility anymore, that he’d have to sink or swim on his own. Of course I know now it was the wrong thing to do—if I’d managed somehow to keep him out here at the farm, all the terrible stuff that came later never would have happened, and maybe he’d still be alive—but at the time I was so fed up, I just wanted him off my hands. You never know the repercussions until it’s too late, do you?”

  It seemed like more than a rhetorical question—as if he was actually waiting for an answer—but I was still stuck on that other part. “He’s dead?”

  “Six years ago,” Frank said. “Tally was the one who found him, out in his car. He’d hooked a hose up to the exhaust and threaded it through the window.”

  “But I thought…”

  “Hmm?”

  “When we came in, I saw someone upstairs. I thought—”

  “Oh, Roy,” Frank said. “That’s Tally’s fiancé. His lease just ran out on his apartment in the city. He’s staying with us for a couple of weeks until he finds a place.”

  “Oh.”

  Frank paused. “You were hoping to see him.”

  I nodded.

  “If you don’t mind my asking, how did you trace him out here? He kept a low profile for a long time.”

  I told Frank about Ben Fong-Torres, about the article he’d written, and his chance meeting with Billy in the Haight, and the tape.

  “A tape? He never told me he was writing new songs. I’d hear him playing the guitar sometimes, up in his room, even singing on occasion, but I figured it was old stuff. I tried to get him to play for us, but he wouldn’t. He said all that was part of another life. Every now and then he’d play for Tally, but not if anyone else was around.” He leaned forward. “Do you have it with you?” he asked. “The tape?”

  “Yes.”

  “I can’t tell you how much it would mean to me to hear it.”

  We went into the green-carpeted room, and Frank inserted the tape into an old cassette deck. “Wait,” I said. “Before you play it, please. I’d like to hear the rest of the story.”

  Thirty-six

  YOUR BROTHER’S STAGE NAME WAS BILLY, wasn’t it?” I asked.

  Frank was standing by the fireplace. Beside him, a pile of firewood rested in a copper bucket. “Yes, his band decided Billy Boudreaux sounded cooler than William. But to me, he was always Will. I remember once, before all the trouble started, we were in downtown Petaluma, having dinner at a little Italian restaurant, and some kid came up to him and said, ‘Hey, you’re Billy Boudreaux.’ Will autographed the kid’s schoolbook, and that was when I realized that he was living this double life. To me, he was just my kid brother, the same one who’d made miserable grades in school, the guy who could never manage to keep more than fifty bucks in the bank, but to some people he was this up-and-coming rock star. I figured you’d have to be a certain kind of person to be able to pull that off, to keep those two identities separate. One night he’d be standing in front of hundreds of screaming fans, and the next night he’d be eating Campbell’s soup for dinner in his crummy studio apartment in the Tenderloin.”

  “You said he showed up at your door early one morning about a month after you kicked him out,” I said. “What happened?”

  Frank came over. There were plenty of chairs, but he sat beside me on the edge of the couch, his body facing me. He was a big, sad-looking man. Out in the field with Dorothy, he had seemed cheerful, easygoing, but now that we were so close, our knees nearly touching, I understood that he exuded the kind of sadness that takes the air out of a room. I wondered what it would be like to be married to such a man, to wake up each morning with that sadness in the bed beside you, to kiss his sad mouth and hear his sad voice saying your name.

  “I guess I never really did figure out what I was going to say to you when you showed up,” Frank said. “I mean, I pictured us right here in this room dozens of times, or in the kitchen, or out on the porch, and I tried to plan it out, the way I’d tell you what I know, but I never could get it right.”

  I still couldn’t fathom how all of it fit together. I didn’t understand how his abandoning his brother at a hotel near the beach had led to what, I was sure, would be the story I’d been waiting to hear, in one way or another, for twenty years.

  “He looked distraught,” Frank said. “He was crying. My first thought was that he’d gone off the wagon in a big way. But I’d seen him on a bender too many times to count, and I’d never seen anything like this. Nancy and Tally were in Arizona with Nancy’s parents, so I didn’t have to worry about them, but I was still nervous about letting him in. I guess I was actually afraid of him right then, which was something I’d never felt before, not on his worst days.

  “I turned on the porch light and stepped outside. His car was idling in the driveway. I told him to go turn it off, and he did. That’s when I noticed the car was all scratched up, mud on the wheels, dead insects on the windows. If there was one thing in the world he took care of, it was that car.
God knows why. It was a sad excuse for a car, an old white Chevrolet, but for some reason he loved it. I think it might have had to do with the fact that he could never really keep an apartment for long, so that car was more like his home than anywhere else. Even during his worst episodes, he somehow managed to hose off the car and keep the windows clean. But not that night.

  “When he came back up on the porch I asked him what was wrong, but he wouldn’t tell me. He just said he was in some trouble, and he needed a shower and a place to sleep. ‘I’m clean,’ he said. ‘Haven’t done shit since you kicked me out.’ I’m not sure what it was—maybe something in his eyes, maybe his tone of voice—but I believed him. What was scary was that I knew whatever he’d gotten himself into this time was a whole lot worse than drugs. But then, I guess what it all comes down to in the end is blood. He was my brother. I just couldn’t turn him away.

  “After he showered, I gave him clean clothes and cooked us some eggs and bacon. He ate like he hadn’t eaten in days, must have drunk four or five glasses of milk. I tried to get him to tell me what was going on, but he just totally clammed up. All he would say was that he’d done something terrible, and it was an accident, and he didn’t know what to do or where to go. I guess if he’d been anyone other than my brother, I would have called the police. But I couldn’t bring myself to do it. For some reason, I was remembering this time when we were kids—he was seven, I was sixteen—and I’d been walking home from school along this wooded road, and I’d heard something in the bushes, some kids laughing, and I went in there to investigate. It was a couple of boys from the fourth grade class, and they had Will shoved up against a tree, and they were pissing on his shoes, these brand-new sneakers, white with red stripes, that he was so proud of. Even though Will was big for his age, they were three grades ahead of him, and he just looked so helpless there, and terrified, trying his best not to cry. I’ll never forget the look in his eyes when he saw me, this look of pure and absolute trust. I just lost it, I let them have it. A few minutes later those boys stumbled away crying, with bloody lips and black eyes, and nobody ever messed with Will again. And that’s what I was thinking about when Will sat in this house that night, eating his bacon and eggs. I was thinking that he was my responsibility.

  “By the time Nancy got home a few days later, Will was clean-shaven and sober and as polite as could be. She let him stay. We never had any problems with him after that. He worked the farm, took care of Tally. By then the girl who’d bought Dorothy from your sister had moved on and left Dorothy with us. Will took care of her like she was his own horse he’d raised from a foal. He never rode her, but he cleaned out her stall every day, fed her, groomed her, walked with her down to the stream where she liked to drink. I’d never seen anybody so devoted to a horse. A few weeks after he moved back in with us, we were all eating dinner together when Nancy wondered out loud what ever had happened to that sweet girl who brought Dorothy out here. Nancy and I were trying to think of her name, and we both had it just on the tip of the tongue, when Will said, very quietly, ‘Lila.’ We hadn’t even started eating yet, but Will said that he felt sick and he needed to go up to his room.

  “Later that night Nancy went to check on him, but he wouldn’t open the door, and he didn’t come out of his room for the next couple of days. I look back on it now and think it’s kind of strange we didn’t know that she’d been killed. I mean, later, when I went back to look at the newspapers from that time, I saw it had been all over the place. All I can figure is that we were so wrapped up with the farm, struggling, trying to make it work, trying to figure out how to be parents, that we just weren’t paying attention to the news or to anything that was happening outside our own little world.

  “Anyway, your sister’s name didn’t come up again until six years ago. Nancy and Tally were asleep. I was sitting in this room, over there by the fireplace, just enjoying the sound of the fire, when I heard footsteps on the stairs. Will must not have seen me, because if he had, there’s no way he would have done what he did next.”

  I took a deep breath and closed my eyes. I wanted to press pause, somehow prepare myself. I realized the story was about to change irrevocably. Moments from now, Thorpe’s book, the book that had provided the only map I knew of Lila’s last days, would be rendered obsolete. After eighteen years of defining the story for me, Thorpe’s book would no longer hold sway. It was strange—Thorpe’s story seemed so much more alive, more persuasive, every fact and supposition backed up by more facts, each sentence working so hard to convince the reader that it was all real, that it had all really happened. And yet, somehow, I knew this new story, so different, so simple and plain, was the real truth.

  I leaned forward. I wanted to know, and I didn’t. It was the same way I used to feel as a young girl when, after dinner, Lila and I would climb into our father’s lap, and he would tell us the tale of the golden arm. “Give me back my golden arm,” he would say in a deep, wavering voice, while Lila and I squealed in terrified delight, waiting for the inevitable moment when he would raise his hands into the air like claws and grab each one of us by the arm and shriek, “Gotcha!” I used to think it was our father’s favorite ghost story, but when I was older he confessed to me it was the only one he knew.

  “He went over to that desk right there”—Frank pointed to an antique oak secretary—“took a key ring out of his pocket, and opened a series of smaller and smaller compartments until he got to the one he was looking for. Other than the car, that secretary was his only significant possession. Our great-aunt left it to him when he was just a kid, and after we left home and my parents sold their house, he didn’t have anywhere to put it, so I kept it for him. But he’d always been the one with the key, and over the years, while Will was out living his life, I liked having this piece of him nearby, it helped me feel close to him. I didn’t know exactly what he had in it, but every now and then over the years I’d see him open it up and put something in one of the compartments—a newspaper clipping about his band, a ticket stub, a photograph.

  “I don’t know why I sat there in silence that night when he came into the room—I was going to say something, and then I saw him pull out the key—and I don’t know, I guess, in a way, I must have wanted to be let in on his secret, whatever it was. He pulled something out, then closed the drawer back, and I must have made a sound, because he turned around, startled.

  “At that point I flipped on the light switch, and I was about to make some joke about him sneaking around in the middle of the night when I saw that he was holding a necklace.”

  “What kind of necklace?” I asked, but I already knew.

  Frank got up and went over to the mantel. He opened a little hen-shaped jadeite dish, took out a small skeleton key, and went over to the secretary. Then he did what Will must have done on that night six years before. He slid open the rolltop lid and began opening the compartments one by one, like a Chinese puzzle. Finally he came to a tiny compartment, buried so deep in the desk that I had to marvel at the ingenuity of the carpenter who made it. He slid two fingers into the drawer and pulled something out. His hand covered it so that I couldn’t see, and he came over to me. I held out my palm, and when he opened his fist it slid into my hand, as cool as if it had been buried deep in the earth. It was Lila’s gold chain with the topaz pendant, the necklace I’d given to her for her eighteenth birthday.

  I couldn’t say anything. I couldn’t breathe.

  “Her necklace is missing,” my father had said, that day when he called me from the morgue in Guerneville to tell me that he had identified my sister’s body. Sitting in Frank’s living room, holding Lila’s necklace up to the light, I remembered how I had felt that day, as I held the phone to my ear and listened to my father’s monotone delivery. What I remembered was this: while I wasn’t quite able to process, during that brief phone call, the fact of my sister’s death, I had felt, quite clearly, a burning sense of injustice and disgust at the thought of someone stealing her necklace. It was just a che
ap trinket, purchased with babysitting money, but she had loved it enough to wear it every day. For Lila, its value had nothing to do with the object itself, everything to do with her love for me.

  Twenty years of my life had been defined by the loss of my sister, the person I had loved most in the world. But now I allowed myself to remember that she had loved me, too, absolutely and unconditionally. The secrecy of her final months, her reluctance to tell me the truth about Peter McConnell, did nothing to change that fact. It occurred to me then that she would have told me about McConnell, she would have told me about the whole affair—eventually, I knew, she would have—it was simply a part of the story that she hadn’t gotten to yet.

  I was stuck inside the moment, unable to speak or even cry. There was shock, but there was also an enormous sense of relief at having the necklace in my possession. It was a piece of my sister’s story, a piece of my own.

  Thirty-seven

  AFTER THAT, THE FACTS I’D BEEN WAITING to hear for twenty years came out in a breathless rush.

  “I didn’t even have to question him,” Frank said. “Will just started talking, without provocation. ‘It was an accident,’ he kept saying, and I had no idea what he was talking about. ‘What was an accident?’ I asked, and he said, ‘I cared about her, I never would have hurt her.’