No One You Know (30 page)

This was a city of windows. Behind every window were enough stories to fill a book. I thought of the photographs inside the white gazebo, how each face was the starting point of a thousand different stories. Some of them were true, and some were not. I thought of my family’s story—how, for so long, we let it be told by someone else.

I closed my eyes. If I concentrated hard enough, I could almost hear my parents’ voices coming from within. Of course they were not there, but there was something to be said for reinvention. In the world as I reordered it, at that moment, standing on the steps of my childhood home, my parents had never divorced, never moved away. They sat at the kitchen table, talking. My father was telling my mother a story about a business trip he’d recently taken to Sweden, some chance encounter with an old college friend in the airport in Stockholm. My mother met his story with her own, about a decade-old guilty verdict against one of her clients that had recently been overturned. Each one of these stories had indeed been told to me by my parents in recent weeks, but separately. My mother told me hers as we sat in her new garden in Santa Cruz, among the bright bougainvillea and soft, silvery lamb’s ear. My father told me his over the phone from London—another business trip. In reality, they were thousands of miles apart. Only in my imagination did my parents come together, talking with their old ease, as if nothing had ever happened to split their world apart. I realized I could have stood there for hours, listening, inventing.

“There was only one perfect ending,” Thorpe had said of his first book. “Once I understood what it was, writing the story was like following a map.” At the time, he was sitting at the table in his house at the top of the hill, and he was staring at me, as though he was trying to decide if I was really there, or if he had only imagined me.

Even then, I knew he had been wrong. There is no such thing as a perfect ending, no such thing as an infallible narrative map. “Arbitrarily one chooses that moment of experience from which to look back or from which to look ahead.” Every story is flawed, every story is subject to change. Even after it is set down in print, between the covers of a book, a story is not immune to alteration. People can go on telling it in their own way, remembering it the way they want. And in each telling the ending may change, or even the beginning. Inevitably, in some cases it will be worse, and in others it just might be better. A story, after all, does not only belong to the one who is telling it. It belongs, in equal measure, to the one who is listening.

Acknowledgments

I wish to thank my wonderful agent, Valerie Borchardt, and my excellent, insightful, and very patient editor, Caitlin Alexander.

Many thanks to Lauren Mountanos at Mountanos Bros. Coffee for the eye-opening tour and for her wealth of coffee knowledge. Thanks to Dora for demystifying the art of cupping.

My gratitude to Susan MacTavish-Best and Jim Buckmaster for giving me the keys to the house on the hill when I needed a warm, quiet place to write. Thanks to Ben Fong-Torres for being Ben Fong-Torres.

Thanks also to Katie Rudkin, Madeline Hopkins, Chris Jones, Brenda Orozco, Jay Phelan, Erin, and, as always, Bill U’Ren.

Above all, thanks to Kevin, where all of my stories begin and end.

About the Author

MICHELLE RICHMOND is the author of
The Year of Fog, Dream of the Blue Room,
and
The Girl in the Fall-Away Dress.
Her stories and essays have appeared in
Glimmer Train, Playboy, The Oxford American,
and elsewhere. She has been a James Michener Fellow, and her fiction has received the Associated Writing Programs Award and the
Mississippi Review
Prize. A native of Mobile, Alabama, Michelle lives with her husband and son in San Francisco, where she is at work on her next novel.

ALSO BY MICHELLE RICHMOND

The Year of Fog

NO ONE YOU KNOW
A Delacorte Press Book / July 2008

Published by
Bantam Dell
A Division of Random House, Inc.
New York, New York

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved
Copyright © 2008 by Michelle Richmond

Delacorte Press is a registered trademark of Random House, Inc., and the colophon is a trademark of Random House, Inc.

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

Richmond, Michelle, 1970–
No one you know / Michelle Richmond.
p. cm.
1. Sisters—Death—Fiction. 2. Murder—Investigation—Fiction. 3. Domestic fiction. I. Title.
PS3618.I35N6 2008
813'.6—dc22
2008013508

www.bantamdell.com

eISBN: 978-0-440-33781-2

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