No One You Know Read Free Page B

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