No One You Know (28 page)

“She said that?” I asked. I had a vague memory of a hostel in Venice. But I didn’t remember anything about the midnight trip to the basement to wash our clothes. It amazed me that Lila had remembered, and that it had meant so much to her.

“Yes. When I asked her what the best moment of her life had been, she told me that story.”

“But it was nothing,” I said.

“To her, it was.”

“Thank you for telling me that.”

I heard steps on the porch. I glanced out the window. A young boy dropped a small bundle beside the door before pedaling away on an old bike, wheels squeaking.

“It’s Pedro,” McConnell said. “He brings me pencils each month.”

“Another question,” I said, as the squeaking of Pedro’s bicycle faded.

“Hmm?” He reached over and smoothed the pillowcase at the head of the bed. My gaze followed his hand, the gentle movement of his long fingers over the white fabric. For a moment it was as if I had been transported to another place and time, and had been given the gift of seeing into his most private moments—McConnell in the hotel room in Half Moon Bay, running his hand over Lila’s pillowcase after she had left, memorizing the impression of her head against the pillow.

His voice brought me back. “Ellie? Where are you?”

I met his eyes again. “Sorry, I was just thinking about something—”

“Your sister used to do that. Just wander away in the middle of a conversation. At first I was offended, until she explained it to me—”

“As if she’d stepped into another room,” I said, “and she became so focused on the things in that room that the door shut behind her. You’d have to make physical contact to shake her out of it.”

“Exactly. The moment I touched her shoulder or held her hand, she’d come right back to me, and explain in the most lucid terms what it was she’d been concentrating on. Every time, it gave me the impression of having performed some strange magic trick, as if my touch was enough to lead her back from another world. Funny, I always assumed I was the only one who could do that.” He paused. “You wanted to ask me something?”

“Why did you return the notebook to me?”

“I’ve memorized every page of it, I don’t need the physical object when every figure, every scribble, is stored in my mind. Beyond that, I thought you should have it.”

“I thought it would provide some clue,” I said. “I thought there would be some key in those pages that would unlock the mystery of what happened to Lila. I was disappointed when I didn’t find it.”

“You came back because you still aren’t sure, didn’t you? You went home, you looked for answers, and you didn’t find them. But I’ve told you everything I know. I’m sorry, I wish I could help you, but I have nothing more to offer.”

His gaze came to rest on my throat. He leaned forward, reaching toward me. For a split second, when I felt his warm fingers brushing my neck, I had the strange feeling that he might kiss me. I decided, in that moment, that I would not back away. “It’s hers,” he said, astonished.

I had misread him. I could feel the slight pressure of the gold chain against my neck as he held the topaz pendant between his fingers. He let go, and the tiny stone fell back against my skin. He touched it again. I looked into his eyes, and he was a million miles away.

I reached into my bag and pulled out the magazine. I handed it to him.

He looked at the cover, uncomprehending.
“Rolling Stone?”

“Turn to page sixty-three.”

He looked at me for a moment more, and he seemed like he was about to say something, but then he started flipping through the pages. The top half of the spread was covered with a photograph of the Potrero Sound Station. The title of the article was “Billy Boudreaux’s Last Act.” In a slightly smaller font was the byline, Ben Fong-Torres. Ben had pulled some strings and managed to get the piece in at the last minute.

“What’s this?” Peter said.

“Look at the bass player,” I said. I’d studied the photograph for so long, it was burned into my memory. In the foreground was Kevin Walsh, holding the microphone so close to his mouth it looked as though he might swallow it. Billy was in the shadows, his face barely visible. But the way the stage was lit, you could see his powerful arms, fingers poised on the strings. “That’s Billy Boudreaux.”

Peter looked up at me. “I don’t understand.”

“Take your time,” I said. “I’ll go outside.”

I stood on the porch, waiting. I picked up the bundle of pencils and breathed in the woody, clean smell. I was out there for twenty minutes, watching dogs pass on the dirt road, looking for birds in the branches, before I heard the bedsprings creak. Peter came onto the porch and stood beside me. “Where did this come from?” he asked quietly.

“It’s a long story.”

We stood there for a few minutes, looking out at the road. It began to rain. The raindrops were huge, leaving pockmarks in the red dirt yard. I didn’t know what to say. I hoped he knew that I felt responsible, in some way, for what had happened to him. I hoped he understood that this was the best I could do.

“You could go home now,” I said. “It’s been in the news, you know. I think there are some people who want to apologize to you.”

“Someday, maybe. For now, this is home.”

“The numbers,” I said, “on the paving stones. What do they mean?”

“12-9-12-1,” he said. “L-i-l-a. I used eight stones, spelled it out twice, because eight represents infinity.”

“She’d like that,” I said.

He laughed slightly. “Actually, I think she would find it alarmingly sentimental. But then, I’ve had a lot of time on my hands. A guy can become sentimental when he lives at the end of a dirt road for too long.”

He moved closer and put an arm around my shoulders, just for a moment, and then dropped it. “The first time I saw you in town,” he said, “you were standing beside a fruit stand, your back to me. It was about to start raining. I could tell you were a foreigner, and I wanted to go over and tell you to find somewhere to sit out the storm. Foreigners are always surprised by the rain. It comes down so hard, so fast, you hardly have time to get out of it. Then there was a clap of thunder. It startled you. You turned around and looked up at the sky. And for a second, maybe two, I thought everything they say about Diriomo was true. I believed that it really was a
pueblo brujo,
bewitched village. Because at that moment, when you looked up at the sky, I thought you were her. And for a fraction of a second, I had this picture in my mind of everything coming together, my whole life reorienting itself, as if the last decade had been a dream.”

We stood there in silence for another minute or two before I said, “I should go. I’m visiting a farm this afternoon.”

“Wait. You can’t go out into this rain like that.”

He went into the house and came out seconds later with a white poncho, just like the one he’d been wearing in the photograph in Carroll’s office. “Lift your arms,” he said. I did, and he pulled the poncho over my head. It reached all the way to my ankles. “You look like a ghost,” he said, smiling.

We hugged, a complete hug this time, and I breathed in the pencils-and-rain smell of his skin. I thanked him and stepped out into the downpour. I took my time following the path of stones—12-9-12-1-12-9-12-1—from his porch through the rain-soaked yard. When I got to the end, he called out to me—“Wait!”

He ducked into the house. A couple of minutes later he came out again, plodding across the wet paving stones. His shirt and pants immediately became drenched, clinging to his body. His hair stuck to his head. He handed me a package, something hefty and book-like, wrapped in layers of plastic bags.

“What’s this?”

The rain stopped, just as suddenly as it had begun. I reached into the bags and pulled out a large manila envelope. Inside the envelope, a sheaf of paper, two inches thick, covered in numbers and symbols.

Forty

T
HE NEW CAFE WAS ON
T
WENTY-FIRST
Street between Mission and Valencia, tucked between a used bookstore and a clothing boutique. When I arrived at three in the afternoon, the neighborhood was gearing up for the
Día de los Muertos
procession. As I rounded the corner, I could see Henry down the block, standing on a ladder in front of the café. When I got closer I saw that he had a paintbrush in hand, and was touching up a smudge on the signage above the storefront. The letters were pale green, lowercase.

“Great name,” I said.

“You like it?”

“Shade,” I read. “It’s perfect.”

“I’d hug you, but I’m covered in paint and sawdust.”

“All set for opening day?”

“Getting there. Have time for a cup of coffee?”

“Always.”

Inside, he showed me the beautiful chrome espresso maker, the antique roasting machine. A series of framed photographs depicted the coffee farmers whose co-ops would supply the beans for the café.

“Everything is reclaimed or recycled,” Henry said proudly. “These are the original light fixtures from the Coronet movie theater. The bar and tables are made out of redwood from an old Doelger house they tore down last year in the Sunset. The chairs are from the old U.S. Mint.”

“It’s beautiful.” I pulled a small paper bag out of my purse. “Here, I brought you something. A new blend from Jesus.”

He opened the bag and sniffed. “Mmmm, chocolate and toasted hazelnut.”

“Wait until you taste it,” I said. “Cayenne and citrus. A lovely vanilla bourbon note in the end. I think it should be your signature coffee.”

He went behind the counter and fed the beans into the grinder. The noise of the machine was a welcome distraction. I’d seen Henry half a dozen times since our aborted conversation in the cupping room at Golden Gate Coffee, but each time, there were other people around. “I don’t know if Mike told you,” he said, “but I requested that you handle my account. Nobody else.”

I nodded.

“How was the Nicaragua trip?”

“Really good. I would have asked you to come along, but—”

He stood with his hands in his pockets. He looked tired. When he smiled, I noticed that crow’s-feet had begun to form around his eyes. When I’d met him, he looked so young. He
had
been young, I reminded myself; so had I.

“Funny,” he said, “when Mike suggested that I go with you, I had this whole picture in my mind of how it would play out—me and you down there, eating at little hole-in-the-wall restaurants, running back to our hotel in the rain—the way we used to. I kept waiting for you to give me the go-ahead. Every time I saw you at the office, I hoped that would be the day you’d change your mind. At the very least, I thought you’d let me take you to dinner, catch up.”

I hesitated. “There was someone I needed to see down there.”

“I know. I heard. It’s all pretty amazing.”

A burst of music drifted through the door as a group of old men with trumpets passed by.

“We never really talked about what happened in Guatemala,” he said.

“It’s okay, Henry. It was a long time ago.”

“Not that long.” He spooned the grounds into a coffee press and poured in the steaming water.

“I’d forgotten that about you. You’re still devoted to the French press.”

“It’s the only civilized way.”

I watched the street while he waited for the coffee to steep. He brought two porcelain cups—one blue, one yellow—over to the table.

“Pretty.”

“An estate sale. I thought it would be nice if all of the dishes were sort of random.” The 21 Valencia bus went by, and the chandelier above our table rattled. He poured the coffee and sat down.

“That night in Guatemala,” he said. “I guess I just got scared off. I didn’t want to fight anymore. We were always fighting.”

“I know,” I said. “I’m sorry.”

A series of loud pops erupted outside, followed by shouts and laughter. I turned to see a group of teenage girls heading toward Mission, setting off firecrackers in the street. They wore identical black dresses and dark red lipstick, their hair slicked back in pony-tails. At that moment, as if she could sense my gaze, one of the girls turned, met my eyes, and slowed down. I waved at her, and she waved back.

Henry sipped his coffee. “You seem different.”

“Different how?”

“You were always so nervous, fidgety, always looking over your shoulder.”

“And now?”

“I don’t know. You’ve relaxed.”

“That’s another thing I’d forgotten about you.”

“Hmm?”

“You could always see right into me. It made me uncomfortable. You knew me too well.”

“That’s a bad thing?” Henry asked.

“At the time, I thought it was.”

We sat for a minute or two in silence, watching the police set up barricades for the parade.

“Remember that time?”

“Yes.” I knew that he was talking about the night, several years ago, when we took part in the Day of the Dead procession—his idea.

“You looked good in your skeleton suit,” he said.

“Did I?” I laughed.

I remembered that the white makeup made my face feel tight. And I had carried a picture of Lila in my pocket. I’d taken the photo with a little point-and-shoot camera at the stable in Montara, not long after she got Dorothy. I’d forgotten to turn off the flash, and in the photograph, Dorothy is startled by the light, rearing up. Lila is leaning forward, hanging on, but she doesn’t seem the least bit scared. She looks as if she’s having the time of her life.

“Do you remember that picture?” I asked.

“Of course. You put it on the altar. And then, as we were walking away, you took it back.”

“You saw that?”

Henry nodded.

“Why didn’t you say anything?”

“I figured you had your reasons.”

“After I put the photograph there, I changed my mind. I didn’t want to give her up, even if it was just a picture.”

Through the open door, I could feel the evening growing cooler. The light was fading. “You were right,” he said finally. “This should be my trademark coffee. It’s amazing.”

I reached across the table and took his hand. He seemed startled, but he didn’t pull away. His blue eyes were so unusual, so beautiful. It was the first thing I’d noticed when I met him; I imagined it was the first thing everyone noticed. How could they not? In certain kinds of light, his eyes were so pale they appeared almost clear. Sitting there, I considered the unlikely genetics, the strange combination of his parents’ chromosomes that conspired to give him his most striking feature. For my entire adult life, I had believed what Miss Wood, my high school biology teacher, had told me: that one day such eyes would be gone, a distant memory of a faded civilization. Blue eyes resulted from recessive genes, Miss Wood had said; because of this, one day they would no longer exist. One day, the world would be filled with nothing but brown-eyed people, the dominant gene running its course, taking over the planet. It was the doom of mediocrity, she said, dominant genes battling the recessive genes until one day every human would be the same.

I had never really questioned Ms. Wood’s reasoning, accepting it like so many other wrong things I learned in high school. And so, for years, with Henry, I always looked into his eyes with a bit of melancholy, assuming that our children would have no chance of inheriting his eyes. They were like a beautiful, pale light coming from a star that had died many years earlier.

Only recently had I discovered that Miss Wood had misunderstood one of the most basic and most important tenets of biology. It was McConnell who explained this to me, during that conversation in his room in Diriomo a couple of weeks before. “You look so much like her,” he had said. “Except for your red hair, of course.” And in response, I had said something about how, one hundred years from now, red hair would be obsolete.

“Not true,” McConnell had said. And he’d gone on to tell me the story of the biologist Reginald Punnett, who believed that recessive genes would continue to recur in the population at a steady rate, indefinitely. Unable to come up with any science by which to prove his theory, Punnett turned to his friend, G. H. Hardy. According to Punnett, Hardy thought about it for a few minutes, and then quickly scribbled a simple, elegant equation which proved Punnett’s theory beyond doubt. Punnett was amazed. He immediately suggested that Hardy submit his work for publication. Hardy was hesitant at first, believing that such a problem must have already been solved and that it was not his place, as a mathematician, to propose work in a field so completely foreign to him.

“Ultimately,” McConnell had said, “Hardy relented and submitted the work that is now known as the Hardy-Weinberg Principle and is taught in all of the more reputable high schools and colleges around the world. Blue eyes, red hair—they’ll be around as long as humans are. It’s a huge deal in biology, but when he wrote his famous
A Mathematician’s Apology,
he didn’t even bother to mention it.”

Now, for the first time, I looked into Henry’s eyes and felt none of that old melancholy. A hundred years from now, Henry’s great-grandchildren might look at photographs of him and understand exactly where they got their beautiful blue eyes.

“Why are you smiling?” Henry said.

“No reason.”

For a couple of minutes we just sat there. I remembered what Don Carroll had told me—“a perfect match is almost as rare as a perfect number.”

“That day at the office,” I said. “You were about to tell me something, and then Mike walked in. Remember? I’d just asked if you could tell, the first time you met me, what exactly would do us in.”

He leaned closer, wrapped my hand in both of his. There was no hesitation in his voice, and I wondered if he’d been waiting, all this time, to give me an answer. “When I was a kid I always had this dream where my father finally bought me this bike I’d been desperate for—it was one of those Schwinn five-speeds with the choppers in the front. It was dark green, and it was called the ‘Pea Picker.’ Anyway, in the dream, whenever I reached out for it, it would start rolling away. I never did catch it. In Guatemala, it occurred to me that you were like that bike. You were there with me, but then you were also just slightly out of reach.”

“So, I’m the Pea Picker?”

“Well…”

More noise in the street, more firecrackers, but this time, neither of us turned to look.

“Do you know the story of the constellation Lyra?”

He shook his head.

I told Henry the tale as Lila had told it to me that night thirty years before. I told him about how Orpheus had gone to the Underworld to bring his wife, Eurydice, back from the dead, and how, in the last moments, he had broken his promise to the gods and turned back to look at her. “When he looked at her, she slipped away,” I said. “After Orpheus died, Zeus tossed his lyre into the sky, forming the constellation Lyra.”

“Sad story.”

“Yes,” I said, “but the actual facts are rather unsentimental: Lyra has a right ascension of 19 hours and a declination of 40 degrees. It contains the stars Vega, Sheliak, Sulafat, Aladfar, Alathfar, and the double-double star Epsilon. Four of Lyra’s stars are known to have planets. The best time to view the constellation is in August.”

Henry smiled. “I’m not sure I follow.”

“The whole thing about Orpheus and Eurydice, how he made this crucial error and lost her forever—it’s just a story. You can take it or leave it. Stories aren’t set in stone. It took me the longest time to realize that.”

L
ATER, I HELPED HENRY WITH SOME LAST-MINUTE
details—hanging a mirror in the restroom, putting candles and bud vases on the tables, sweeping the floors. By the time I left, it was dark out, and the streets were crowded with costumed revelers. I walked down Valencia, pressing against the throng. A troupe of scantily clad dancers swirled around me, moving in unison to the spooky beat of the drums. The air reeked of incense. A pair of police officers drove slowly down the street, motorcycles rumbling. I stepped aside to avoid a group of men dressed in tattered suits, carrying an enormous funeral pyre. On top of the pyre was a naked woman, painted head-to-toe in white.

I tried to push my way through the crowd, but I was going the wrong direction. Soon I was swept up in the raucous, swirling mass moving south down Eighteenth Street. The music, the voices, the bodies, the smell of sweat and alcohol and incense, made me feel as if I had been caught up in some impossible dream. The costumes were dark and ghoulish, but the atmosphere was festive. For several seconds I walked side by side with a tall, gaunt man in a tuxedo and bowler hat, his lips starkly red against the white face paint. He held hands with a small woman in a long white dress, wearing a cloak of purple feathers so heavy she stooped under its weight. A man in skeleton gloves brushed past us, playing a trombone. The tuxedo man broke away, down another street, and I was surrounded by Mexican schoolchildren clad in red, singing a familiar melody to the shush-shush of their maracas. Their teacher, a beautiful twentysomething girl, was also dressed in red; her face was painted white—a skeleton, though a happy, smiling one. As the teacher led them in song, a mariachi band appeared from across the street to accompany them on guitars and bass.