"Soon, that will be us," Henry had said. I was surprised to realize that the idea wasn"t the least bit frightening. I could imagine the two of us together, standing over a crib, gazing down at a sleeping baby that looked like the best parts of each of us-Henry"s nose and chin, my mouth and dimples.
In the cupping house, Jesus had set out three samples of fresh-roasted beans. While he ground the beans, I boiled water on a Bunsen burner. Meanwhile, Rosa arranged nine small gla.s.ses on the table-three cups for each sample. Jesus scooped a bit of coffee into each one, and I poured in the boiling water. The grounds rose to the surface, and steam lifted off the dark liquid.
Jesus and I sat on stools on either side of the table. Rosa stood beside her father, both of them watching intently as I began to break the crust with a heavy silver spoon. I loved this part of the cupping process, the way the aroma of the coffee wafted up when the spoon broke through the wet grounds. I closed my eyes and breathed deeply. Then I cleared the grounds off the surface and rinsed the spoon in clean water before I began tasting. For the next few minutes, I was able to put everything else aside, to forget the events of the previous day as the coffee slid over my tongue, down my throat. I rarely spit the coffee out when I was cupping. It wasn"t just the taste and aroma that brought me calm and clarity, but also the way it warmed me going down, and the way I felt for hours after, that sweet rush of energy, followed by the slow descent.
THAT EVENING, I RETURNED TO MY HOTEL ROOM in Diriomo to find that someone had been there in my absence. At first, upon entering the room, it wasn"t obvious, just a feeling that something was off. Immediately I went to the safe on the floor of the closet and found it locked. I punched my code into the keypad and opened the door to find my pa.s.sport and spare cash just as I had left them. But when I went to the sink to wash my face, I saw that the basin was wet, and the tiny bar of soap had been unwrapped. By habit, I always wipe down the sink after each use, and I always carry my own soap with me when I travel. I told myself that I must, for some reason, have broken routine that morning, even though I couldn"t remember doing so.
I turned on the ceiling fan, took off my T-shirt and skirt, and lay on top of the clean white sheets. The breeze felt good against my skin, and the sensation of lying half-clothed on the firm bed in the simple room, with the fan clacking overhead, brought to mind a similar afternoon three years before, in Guatemala. On the afternoon in memory, I had not been alone, but with Henry. Early in the evening we had eaten at a little restaurant in the hills, and upon returning to our room had partially undressed and lain down together on the bed, intending to make love. For some reason, before we got around to doing so, we had begun to argue.
Lying alone on the bed in Diriomo, I couldn"t remember what Henry and I had argued about, or what had instigated it. I only remembered that, at some point, several minutes into the argument, Henry attempted to make a joke, and I accused him of not taking anything seriously. Before long the argument grew all out of proportion-we were both yelling, saying the sort of things that hours later you can"t believe you"ve said to someone you love-until finally, in tears, I asked him to turn around so I could get dressed. We had been naked together hundreds of times and the request struck him as melodramatic. Eventually he complied, and I dressed and went out. I took a walk through an adjacent park and had coffee at the same restaurant where we had eaten dinner not long before. By the time I finished my coffee I had replayed the argument in my mind, and had realized how ridiculous it was, that a point of minor contention had brought us to such a pa.s.sionate standoff.
On my way back to the room to apologize, I stopped at a roadside stall to buy a present for Henry, a handmade silver lighter that he had admired the day before. Henry was the only man I had ever dated who smoked-"only cigars," he rationalized, "and only on weekends"-and I knew that the gift of the lighter would be especially meaningful to him, because it was a full concession on my part, a display of genuine affection in that it asked him to change nothing. I paid extra to have the girl who sold me the lighter wrap it in printed yellow paper and add an elaborately tied ribbon, which she did slowly and with a show of great care.
I had left the hotel in such haste that I"d forgotten to take my key, so when I returned to the room I had to knock. I waited for the sound of Henry walking to the door, but my knock was met with silence. I knocked again, called his name, and stood there for a good five minutes, knocking and calling to him with a rising sense of unease, before finally going downstairs and getting a key from the concierge. When I opened the door I saw that the bed had not been touched. Henry wasn"t there. His suitcase and pa.s.sport were gone. I postponed my appointments and spent the next two days in the hotel, waiting for him, only going out for coffee and meals.
On the third day, when I returned to the hotel after work, the concierge had a message for me. Henry had called from San Francisco. We could talk, he said, when I got back home. Over the next few days I attempted to reach him several times, to no avail. I had farms to visit, and another three days pa.s.sed before I was able to return to California. When I did, it was too late. Henry had already begun packing his things. He said he had "reevaluated." He was moving to the East Coast, starting over. No amount of reasoning, and ultimately pleading, on my part could dissuade him. I tried to give him the lighter-I didn"t know what else to do with it-but he wouldn"t accept it. I ended up putting it in a wooden box on my dresser, where I kept my meager collection of earrings and necklaces, and every time I opened the box to retrieve a piece of jewelry, there was the silver lighter, a reminder of our terrible, stupid fight, and of his subsequent departure. For some reason I couldn"t bring myself to throw out the lighter or give it away, nor could I find a different, better place for it in my apartment, the apartment which Henry and I had shared for almost two years. Eventually I moved my jewelry to a smaller porcelain box, but the wooden one was still there on my dresser, a repository for an object that was neither usable nor disposable.
I was lying on my bed in Diriomo, remembering that strange and painful time, remembering how the most significant relationship of my adult life had simply dissolved without warning in a room very similar to this one, when I glanced over at the bedside table and noticed that the small stack of books appeared to have grown in height. I picked them up one by one: a newly published history of the indigenous peoples of Nicaragua; a novel by a friend of a friend whom I"d met back home in San Francisco; the latest copy of Fresh Cup magazine. But underneath these familiar items was something else, book-sized, wrapped in plain brown paper. This, I knew for a fact, I had not brought with me.
I got up and checked to make sure the door was locked, pulled the curtains closed, and stood there holding the package, as if it might contain something dangerous. Then I placed it on the desk and stared at it for a minute or two. Finally, I picked it up again, turned it over, and broke the two seams of tape with my fingernail. When I unfolded the paper and glimpsed the faded blue-plaid pattern on the cover, I could not, at first, believe what I saw. But when I opened it to the first page there was no mistaking what lay before me on the battered hotel desk: it was Lila"s notebook, the one that had gone missing with her almost twenty years before.
Twelve.
HOW TO DESCRIBE THAT NOTEBOOK?.
To me, for whom mathematical formulae were opaque, impenetrable as hieroglyphs, it was like a book of mysteries. It had remained in my memory all these years, my sister"s notebook, the lost thing that I imagined held her deepest secrets. With a sense of awe I opened it, and there they were, just as I remembered them, the stately numerals, letters, and symbols marching across and down the page. Lila"s handwriting was beautiful in its precision. I admired the darker impression of the ink at the endpoint of each number, as if she had lingered there before moving on to the next, as if every single number was not merely part of a larger whole to her, not just a figure in a calculation, but individual, a world unto itself.
On the first page of the notebook, in her tiny, neat cursive, was this: "A mathematical proof should resemble a simple and clear-cut constellation, not a scattered cl.u.s.ter in the Milky Way."
G. H. Hardy Below the quote, she had used a black felt-tip pen to delineate the six stars of the constellation Lyra. In pencil, she had traced the jagged line among the stars and noted the names-Vega, Sheliak, Sulafat, Epsilon, Aladfar, Alathfar.
"Who"s ever heard of Lyra?" I asked her once, when she told me it was her favorite constellation. We were lying in the cool, damp gra.s.s in our backyard, looking up at the sky. It was the summer before Lila started high school, there was a rare electrical blackout in our part of the city, and we had snuck outside in the middle of the night after our parents went to bed to eat cupcakes and plan our futures. I tasted the waxy sweetness of chocolate frosting on my lips, crunched the candy sprinkles between my teeth. All around us, insects ticked and chirped. These were sounds I"d only heard at our Russian River cabin, never in the city, and the effect of the night sounds, combined with the smell of gra.s.s and my mother"s newly planted star jasmine, made me feel as if we had entered a different world.
"The lyre was given to Orpheus by Apollo," Lila said. "When Orpheus played it, the sound was so beautiful that even the animals were entranced. One day, his wife, Eurydice, was killed by a snake. Orpheus was devastated. He couldn"t eat, he couldn"t sleep, all he could do was think about his beautiful dead wife. Finally, he went to the Underworld and played his lyre for Pluto and Persephone. Like everyone else, the king and queen of the Underworld found his music irresistible, and so they gave Orpheus permission to take Eurydice back to the land of the living with him, on one condition."
I held my breath. To be under the stars with Lila, in the backyard on a night without electricity, when everything about our little plot of land in the city seemed entirely different and new, was wonderful. She must have felt it, too, because she reached across the gra.s.s and took my hand in hers. "What condition?" I whispered.
"He couldn"t look back until he had left the Underworld, or Eurydice would be taken from him."
"What happened?"
"For the longest time he kept his promise," Lila said. "He held his wife by the hand, leading her up, step by step, to the surface of the earth. They had almost reached the surface when he couldn"t stand it another second, he had to see her beauty, and he looked back."
"And then?" I asked. Surely, I thought, the G.o.ds would understand. After all, he"d made it most of the way. And he loved her so much.
"When Orpheus reached out to put his arms around her," Lila said, "she slipped away into the darkness. He had to return to earth alone. Back in Thrace, his hometown, Orpheus was so devastated at losing his wife a second time that he completely ignored the company of women. The women of Thrace were so angry they stoned him and tore him to pieces, and threw his head and his lyre into the river."
I heard a noise over the fence and gripped Lila"s hand harder.
"It was Zeus who retrieved the lyre from the river and tossed it into the sky," Lila said. "Come here."
I scooted closer, and she raised her hand, still clutching mine, up to the sky and pointed. "At the tip of my finger is Vega, see?"
I strained to make out the star. There were so many, and they were so far away, how could I tell which one she meant for me to see?
"It"s the upper right point of the summer triangle, the brightest star visible from the Northern Hemisphere. If you can find Vega, you can find Lyra."
We lay out there for a long time. At some point, I fell asleep. When I woke up Lila was standing over me, her long hair wet from the gra.s.s. "Get up," she whispered, reaching down to take my hand.
A few nights after Lila went missing, I stepped into our backyard and tried to find Vega. I lay on the gra.s.s, just as we had as children, but the city lights were bright, so that only a few stars were visible. I looked for the second brightest star in the Northern Hemisphere. Just when I thought I had spotted it, and was attempting to trace a line in the sky with my eyes to the upper left point of Orpheus"s harp, I realized my star was moving. It wasn"t Vega, just a satellite.
It had been a long time since Lila had mentioned Lyra, a long time, in fact, since we"d had a conversation of any significance. At that point I was aware that something was terribly wrong, but I couldn"t have imagined that she was actually gone. The next day, we would receive the phone call from Guerneville.
To me, the cruelest part of Orpheus"s story was not that he had lost Eurydice twice, but that, as she was slipping away from him the second time, he was unable to touch her. When we were children, Lila and I had been in constant physical contact-braiding one another"s hair, tumbling on the floor, dancing together to my mother"s old records. But the older we got, the less we touched, so that by the time she was in graduate school, the only time our skin made contact was when we accidentally brushed against one another in pa.s.sing-or when I crossed her invisible boundary, putting a hand on her arm to bring her back from some deep concentration. Unlike me, Lila was not a physically affectionate person, and on those rare occasions-a birthday, a good-bye at the airport when I was dropping her off for one of her trips to a math conference-when I tried to hug her, I could sense her reluctance the moment my arms circled her neck.
The night that I lay alone in the backyard, searching for Lyra, it occurred to me that it had been a very long time since I had hugged my sister. And I decided that when I saw her again, I"d pull her close and hug her for a long time, whether she liked it or not. It did not occur to me, even for a moment, that she might never be coming home.
Thirteen.
EVERY STORY ENTAILS A CONTRACT WITH THE reader," Thorpe used to say. "The contract is laid out in the first page, possibly the very first line: the setting, the main characters, the rhythm of the language, and most important, the point of view-who is telling the story, from what distance. At any point in the story, if the point of view wavers, the contract with the reader is broken. The foundation falls apart, and the reader is reminded that it"s all just a fiction."
I"d gone through life believing a certain story about my own history, a story which happened to be told from Thorpe"s point of view. The person I was as an adult was deeply influenced by this story. If Lila could be murdered by the man she cared most about, the one man she had invited into her life, then how was it possible to trust anyone? Since Lila"s murder, I had allowed myself the luxury of complete trust only once-with Henry; only with him had I truly let down my guard. When that relationship fell apart, I threw myself into my work. I convinced myself that the way to happiness was to excel at the thing I did best. When I felt lonely, I could travel to a coffee farm or retreat into my cupping notes. This was the shape my life had taken, and I had made peace with it. It wasn"t the life I"d imagined for myself, and it wasn"t the life my parents would have chosen for me-they wanted a son-in-law, grandchildren. Somehow, though, it was a good enough life.
As much as I hated what Thorpe had done, I realized that his book, his answers, had provided a kind of relief. But now, like a mathematical structure that had been built upon a faulty theorem, all the certainties of my life had come crashing down.
Back home in San Francisco the morning after my return, I unpacked my suitcase. Everything smelled like travel, the chemical air of the airplane mixing with the green, wet smell of my hotel. I had stashed three pounds of coffee beans in a side pocket of the suitcase, so the shirts and skirts and everything else bore the aroma of coffee as well. After tossing my clothes into the washing machine, I showered and chose a clean pair of jeans, T-shirt, and sweater. The neighborhood outside my window was sunny, but I could see the fog bank to the west, a wall of brilliant white, and knew that, out in the avenues, it would probably be damp and fifteen degrees cooler.
I walked to Twenty-fourth Street and bought a small coffee at Tully"s. It was my tide-me-over coffee. With the first sip, I felt the mental cobwebs clearing. I found a vacant table in the corner and opened Lila"s notebook. On the third page, she had made a list ent.i.tled Unsolved. Unsolvable? The first, the Goldbach Conjecture, took up more than half of the notebook, and the rest of the pages were devoted to the remaining problems. The second item on the list was the Poincare Conjecture: Every simply connected compact three-manifold (without boundary) is homeomorphic to a three-sphere.
I stared at the problem for a long time, unable to make heads or tails of it. It amazed me that Lila-with whom I shared the same genes, the same loving parents, the same good schools, the same summer weekends at the Russian River-could get her mind around this sentence.
Although the meaning of Poincare"s conjecture eluded me, I remembered the man himself for one reason: during our backpacking trip through Europe, Lila and I had gone to the Montparna.s.se Cemetery in Paris, where Poincare was buried. Beside his gravesite, she had told me his story. Poincare was known as The Last Universalist; he excelled in every field of mathematics, both pure and applied, that existed during his lifetime. But what had caught my interest was the story of his testimony on behalf of Alfred Dreyfus, the Jewish army officer who was charged with treason by anti-Semitic colleagues and sentenced to life imprisonment on Devil"s Island in 1895. Poincare"s attack on the invalid scientific claims made by Dreyfus"s accusers was in large part responsible for Dreyfus"s exoneration.
Lila placed a piece of paper on Poincare"s gravestone and rubbed over it with a pencil. Then she helped me locate someone else on the cemetery map: Simone de Beauvoir. De Beauvoir had been buried just a year before in the same grave as Sartre. The ivory-colored gravestone with its simple double inscription-names and dates-was laden with fresh flowers and gifts. I"d read The Second s.e.x and Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter, I"d read The Words, but the only line I could conjure at that moment was by Lloyd Cole and the Commotions-She looks like Eva Marie Saint in On the Waterfront/As she reads Simone de Beauvoir in her American circ.u.mstance.
"Can you imagine being so deeply in love that you want to have your body tossed on top of your lover"s bones?" I asked.
Lila didn"t even take a moment to consider the question. "No." She didn"t have to elaborate. I knew her perspective on romance, marriage: it would only get in the way of her work.
One might argue that true universalism is no longer possible. Surely even Poincare would be unable to keep up with all the esoteric fields of his subject, as they existed a century after his death. But there was a part of me that liked to think Lila might have had it in her to at least approach universalism. I believed that she might have been, if not the great mathematician of her time, certainly one of them. And this was where the cosmic numbers seemed to be all out of whack, this is what my parents must have considered a thousand times over the years, though they would never, ever say it: they had two daughters. To subtract me from the equation would have been to rob the world of some decent cupping notes, a well-trained palate, a few articles for trade journals about the more elusive qualities of the world"s finest coffees. But it didn"t happen that way. The subtraction that was made turned out to be a far crueler one. Who knows what Lila might have discovered, what problems she might have solved, what elegant proofs she might have constructed, had she been given time? Unlike me, she was poised to do important work, work with significant repercussions.
In hindsight, it was easy for me to see what I was doing in the year immediately following Lila"s death, when, over and over again, I found myself drunk and in bed with some guy from school, or someone I"d met at a party. I wasn"t just trying to forget what had happened to Lila. I was trying to forget that I was the product of a warped mathematics that had managed to end the life of a genius while allowing her sister, who was ordinary in every way, to live.
"It"s like I"m wandering through a house," Lila used to say, as a way of explaining her frequent silences. "I happen to step into another room, and the door shuts behind me. Everything else sort of vanishes."
Sometimes I felt as though I"d wandered into the wrong room twenty years ago, and the door had shut behind me. On one side of the door was my parallel life, the one I was supposed to have. On the other side, the room where I was trapped, was the life I had stumbled into in the aftermath of Lila"s death. I wanted to go back to where I had started before I crossed the threshold, but the door was shut so tight, there was no way out.
Like all condemned men, Dreyfus had been convicted because the judges believed a certain story about him. Poincare came forward with a different version of the story, and it changed the course of Dreyfus"s life. Was there a different story for Lila as well, one that might change the course of McConnell"s life, and perhaps my own?
I had never, in thirty-eight years, done a single extraordinary thing. I often told myself that it was a matter of circ.u.mstance-that I had neither the talent nor the opportunity to make much difference for anyone. Maybe this was my opportunity. McConnell was the one person outside our immediate family whom Lila had let into her life, the one person she had trusted. Like Dreyfus, McConnell had been hanged in the court of public opinion on the basis of a story-quite possibly a fraudulent one. Maybe, after all, I could do one thing right; maybe I could restore to McConnell something of what he had lost.
And in the process I might do something for my parents as well. A decade before, they had divorced. I think they had finally given up any hope of trying to be happy together. The crack that opened between them in the aftermath of Lila"s death had grown wider year by year. At some point they had begun taking separate vacations, my mother spending as much time as she could alone at the Russian River. Eventually they came to a mutual agreement that their marriage could not be salvaged. On the night the divorce was finalized, my mother came over to my apartment for dinner. "I think if there had been something official," she said, "an arrest and a conviction, then we might have been able to get through it. When it comes down to it, this whole business with Peter McConnell is nothing more than a story in a book. Maybe it"s a true story, but it"s not justice. No one has ever paid a price for what happened to our baby."
When she was having trouble making sense of a problem, Lila used to turn the piece of paper she was working on upside down. "It helps to see it from a new perspective," she would say. "This way, I have to concentrate on each number, each symbol. It"s like having a second set of eyes with which to view the same picture. Sometimes a completely different angle is all I need to break through."
Over the years, I had become so accustomed to Thorpe"s picture of Lila"s death that it seemed like the true picture. Now, I had to admit that I"d been lazy to accept Thorpe"s story. Grief had blinded me to logic. If Thorpe was at fault for writing a deeply flawed book, I was equally at fault for believing it without putting it through any sort of rigorous test. After my strange encounter with McConnell in Diriomo, everything looked different, as if the page had been turned upside down.
Fourteen.
OUTSIDE GREEN APPLE BOOKS, THE WOODEN gnome stood sentry. Inside, I took the creaking steps to the second level. Between Frank Thistlethwaite-The Great Experiment: An Introduction to the History of the American People-and Grant Uden-Hero Tales from the Age of Chivalry-I found Andrew Thorpe. That cover: my sister"s face, ghosted over the Golden Gate Bridge. On the back jacket of Murder by the Bay, above several complimentary endors.e.m.e.nts from other writers, was a photograph of my old teacher, looking serious but good-natured in a dark sweater and gla.s.ses. The photo had been taken outdoors, so that his wavy hair blew back from his face. Hands on his hips, staring confidently into the camera, he looked like the kind of man you would trust to tell you a story, the kind of man who would get all his facts straight. The odd thing about the photograph was that, by the time I knew Thorpe, his hairline had already begun to recede. This photograph had obviously been taken years before the book was published, probably when he was in his early twenties. The man who stared out at me from the jacket was, indeed, the same man, but in a very different manifestation. The man in the picture was an optimist, while the man I knew, the one who wrote the book, gave off a very slight but unmistakable air of disappointment bristling with nervous ambition.
Next to Murder by the Bay was a paperback copy of Thorpe"s second book, In Step with a s.a.d.i.s.t, about the kidnapping and torture of the wife of a prominent Sacramento businessman. The jacket bore the same photograph of Thorpe as a much younger man. There were two copies of his third book, Runner Up, Runner Down-the story of a journalist who had been a.s.sa.s.sinated in broad daylight during a marathon in Dubai-same photograph yet again, as if he had never aged. There was a fourth book stamped with his name, although this one had a t.i.tle I"d never seen, Second Time"s a Charm. It was a remaindered first edition, priced at $4.95. According to the jacket copy, it was a memoir of marriage, a love story, a message of hope for lonely men. Think you"ll never find love? So did Andrew Thorpe. Then he found Jane, the woman who would give him a second chance at happiness.
This photo must have been more recent; Thorpe had gone a bit pudgy in the face, and no attempt had been made to hide the fact that he was balding. The picture had been taken in what looked like a home office. He sat behind a desk, hands poised on an old electric typewriter. I figured the typewriter must be a prop, probably calculated to make him look like a romantic figure. When I knew him, he wrote everything on his computer. On the desk, to the left of the typewriter, were two wooden bookends carved to represent the bow and stern of a boat.
"It"s an allusion," I had said, when I gave him the bookends at the end of spring semester, just five months after Lila"s death. "To The Odyssey." It was one of his all-time favorites.
"You didn"t have to get me anything."
"I know. I just wanted to thank you."
He looked surprised. "What for?"
"You"ve been kind. You"ve been a good listener."
"It wasn"t kindness," Thorpe said. "I happen to enjoy talking to you."
Standing in the aisle at Green Apple, looking at an older, happier Andrew Thorpe, I was surprised to discover that he had kept the gift.
Down the street at Blue Danube cafe, I began reading. I couldn"t bring myself to start at the beginning, with Thorpe"s detailed description of how Lila"s body had been found. Instead, I skipped ahead to chapter four, "First Love."
When Lila was eleven years old, Thorpe wrote, she discovered horses.
This much was true. I remembered it well, and it was my account, only slightly altered, that appeared in the book. It happened when she was ten years old, spending her first weekend-indeed, her first night-away from home at the innocuously named Girls" Adventure Camp in Sonoma County. Lila was crying when we drove through the gate. When we pulled up in front of the clubhouse, she clung to her seat belt and vowed not to get out of the car until she was safely home in the city.
It was tall and lanky Sara Beth, the counselor for the Chipmunks Cabin, who finally coaxed Lila out of the station wagon by bringing an old mare named Spice up beside Lila"s window. Sara Beth gave Lila an apple, and Spice ate it right out of her hand. That was all it took. When we went to pick her up Monday morning, all she could talk about was Spice.
After that, Lila took riding lessons in Golden Gate Park once a week. For her thirteenth birthday, when they knew the horse thing wasn"t just a fad she"d grow out of, our parents finally acquiesced and bought her a quarter horse named Dorothy. Dorothy was chestnut brown, with white patches above her hooves that looked like socks and a white stripe running down her face. My parents rented s.p.a.ce for her in a stable in Montara, about thirty-five minutes down the coast. Montara was a small town comprised of newish wooden houses marching up the hills from a long stretch of golden-sand beach. Behind the houses were hundreds of undeveloped acres shaded by redwoods, and a couple of small farms. The stable where Lila kept Dorothy was in a clearing about a mile back from Highway 1; on clear days, I could stand on top of the riding ring gate and see cars pa.s.sing on the winding, rickety highway, and beyond them, the famous waves of Montara State Beach.
"I"ve been thinking about it," Lila said to me once, not long after she got Dorothy. We were sitting on the fence of the riding ring, waiting for her riding teacher. Dorothy was huffing and stomping, kicking up great clouds of dust that made me sneeze. "I"ve decided that we can share her," Lila said, swinging her legs back and forth so that her boots tapped out a rhythm on the fence. "Not forever. Just until Mom and Dad buy you your own horse."
"I don"t want my own horse," I said. I didn"t tell her that I disliked the feel of dust under my fingernails, and although I could appreciate Dorothy from a distance, the coa.r.s.e feel of her fur made my skin crawl. Lila looked at me as if she"d just discovered that I was adopted.
She kept riding through high school. When the stable in Montara closed down during Lila"s senior year, she began boarding Dorothy just north of Petaluma, about an hour and a half drive from the city. The new place was a pasture attached to an apple orchard. The owners also kept half a dozen milking cows, a few ostriches, and a pig. There was no riding ring, and that suited Lila just fine. When she wanted to ride, she loaded the saddle onto a golf cart and took off through the fields. When she spotted Dorothy in the distance, she would whistle and call her by name, then saddle up on the spot. It would be way past dinnertime when she got home, tanned and exhausted and smelling of horse.
The summer before her final year at Berkeley, my parents and I were shocked when Lila announced one evening over dinner that she was giving up riding altogether. "I have to get serious about math," she said.
"Why not do both?" my mother said. "You love riding. You should always keep something in your life that you do purely for pleasure." My mother knew what she was talking about. Although, by that time, her law practice took up most of her energy, she always found a few hours a week for gardening.
"I"ve made up my mind," Lila said. "I have to focus. All the great mathematicians in history have made sacrifices."
A few days later, she placed an ad in the Chronicle and in the Sonoma Index-Tribune. She drove out to Petaluma several times during the next couple of weeks to meet with prospective buyers. One afternoon, I went with her. We drove over the Golden Gate Bridge, past the Marin Headlands. Eventually the highway became less crowded, and the buildings gave way to gently rolling hills dotted with cattle and baobab trees. Lila turned off onto a dirt road, and we made our way slowly over the b.u.mps and potholes until we came to a long gravel driveway. At the end was a big white farmhouse, the kind of house I would have loved to live in, with a wide porch and dormer windows, and a couple of rooms off to the side that looked as though they had been haphazardly nailed on. To the left of the house was a potato patch-long rows of dry brown dirt, with an occasional swatch of green sprouting up from the mounds.
I followed Lila to the fenced-in pasture. We could see Dorothy out in the distance, grazing beneath a Joshua tree. When Lila whistled, Dorothy perked up her ears and came running. Lila rubbed Dorothy"s muzzle and talked quietly into her ear, while Dorothy just stood there, blinking calmly. I wondered if Lila talked to Dorothy in the way she"d never really talked to me, if she shared her deepest secrets with this silent creature. A few minutes later a car came up the driveway. It was a father and his ten-year-old daughter, who lived in the city. Lila helped the little girl up onto Dorothy"s bare back.
"She"s spirited," Lila told the girl. "If you"re firm with her, she"ll respect you. She doesn"t like carrots, but she goes nuts for apples and blackberries. She"s also a fan of Cheerios. She likes when you sing in her ear. If she"s testy, you can usually calm her down with a Simon and Garfunkel song."
I recognized that look in the little girl"s eyes, the look Lila had gotten when she saw Spice all those years ago. The man said he"d come by our house the next day with a check.
After they left, a guy came walking toward us from the farmhouse. He was big and handsome and full of swagger, probably in his late twenties or early thirties. He looked somewhat tired and unwashed, like he"d been out partying all night.
"Hey, William," Lila said.
"Hey there, Lila."
"This is my sister, Ellie."
William reached out to shake my hand, and his grip was so tight it hurt.
"We met once before," I reminded him. He seemed confused. "When the car broke down a while back. You gave us a hand with the jumper cables."
"Oh, that"s right," Lila said. "I"d forgotten."
"Good to see you," he said, but I could tell he didn"t remember me. He was chewing on a sprig of mint. He turned to Lila. "Sold her yet?"
"I think so. The kid who was just here fell in love."
When William was out of earshot, I said, "He"s cute."
"You think?" Lila said, looking at his back as if it was something she"d never considered. "I don"t know about that, but he"s good with Dorothy. I wish he"d buy her. At least I would know she was in good hands."