No One You Know Read Free Page A

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