A Common Loss

by Kirsten Tranter

  Where did people live in Vegas, in a city whose population was made up mostly of visitors? From the plane, flying in and out of the city, you could see the uniform blocks of residential neighborhoods that spread out into the desert, apartment buildings, houses with backyards, houses where families would live. Imagine growing up in Las Vegas; imagine going to school there, I thought; and reminded myself that it was probably a lot like growing up and going to school anywhere.

  And there were other places. Driving to and from the airport, you passed plenty of sad motels where people obviously lived on a more or less permanent basis, problem gamblers who went broke and couldn’t leave. That life was a mystery to me.

  Somewhere out there, in some part of the city I’d never visited, was someone who looked just like Dylan. It didn’t occur to me then that I would ever meet this person, that he would ever be part of my life.

  Lily poured herself another drink and switched on the television. She turned the sound down low, and slouched down in the couch so that she was practically horizontal. I sat next to her. She raised the remote control and started flicking through the channels. On a shopping channel a woman was displaying her hands proudly for the camera, showing the rings and bracelets loaded onto her fingers and wrists. Lily kept going. Cops getting into their car, a recent episode of Law & Order or some other police show. A space shuttle hurtling into the sky. The silent face of the moon, black and white. Blips of sound. A submarine movie.

  ‘Stop,’ I said.

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘No submarines.’

  She continued to press the button and eventually came to rest on a repeat episode of ER, old enough that it had George Clooney in his green doctor’s outfit, smiling and then switching into serious hospital mode as the ambulance crew came crashing into the room, pushing a patient on a trolley, shouting commands and statistics. ‘Intubate!’

  I felt suddenly cold. ‘Turn it off,’ I said.

  ‘I want to see this.’

  ‘I don’t want to watch it.’

  ‘So fuck off and go to bed,’ she said, genially enough, and shifted her position, lifting her feet up to sit cross-legged. She looked toward me a little as she moved. ‘Shit,’ she said. ‘Sorry.’ She pressed the button. A different submarine movie appeared, dark interiors and steady red lights, and Lily let it be.

  It must have shown on my face. The medical crew, the emergency room, the desperate, rushing urgency of the actors’ voices and movements — all I could see was Dylan there on the gurney, as I’d imagined him to be after the accident, surrounded by hopeless activity, the life already knocked out of him.

  It had happened in LA, a work trip; he’d been staying with his parents. Sally had been the one to call me, early the next morning. It sounded as though she were reading from a script; she’d probably called several other people before me. It was instantaneous, she said, he was dead by the time he reached the hospital, there was nothing anyone could have done.

  ‘What about the driver?’ I asked.

  It took her a second or two to figure out that I was talking about the driver of the car that had hit him. It was a girl, she told me, driving her parents’ SUV. ‘She’s from Santa Barbara, that’s all I know. She’s fine. The car’s fine. I guess she’ll be totally screwed up for life.’ She started crying then, small, choking sobs.

  I offered to call Tallis and the others. Sally stopped crying and slipped back into script mode. She’d already called Brian. She wanted to call the rest of them herself. I didn’t argue. I called Brian right away, but his phone didn’t pick up and we didn’t talk until later that night.

  ‘It’s OK,’ I said to Lily, ‘I’m going to bed anyway.’

  But instead I sat on the couch, my body seemingly glued there, and stared at the screen without seeing it. I kept thinking about the others — Cameron, Tallis, Brian — and wondering whether they knew about the brother. A strange sensation a little like vertigo crept up on me, as though the mysterious force of gravity had suddenly shifted sideways, altering my balance, my sense of relationship to all other objects and people.

  Dylan wasn’t exactly who I thought he was. Lily knew something about him that had been a secret from me. This changed my idea of her relationship with Dylan, which was evidently more intimate than I had known, and my idea of her as well. And I wondered about the others. Did they know? There it was again, the vertigo, the ground tilting under me.

  I raised my glass to drink and saw that it was empty. I put the weird tilting thing down to being a little drunk, and suddenly relaxed. I thought about calling one of them, but didn’t, unsure whether I wanted to reveal my ignorance.

  Next to me on the couch Lily fidgeted and drank. ‘Can I change it now?’ she asked. ‘You know how claustrophobic I get with these submarine movies.’

  ‘Change away,’ I said, and leaned my head back and shut my eyes, shutting out the sounds of the movie Lily eventually settled on.

  Cameron, Dylan and I had younger sisters, while Tallis and Brian had no siblings; Cameron was the only one among us with a brother, an older brother, and we probably all envied him that a little. My thoughts traveled back to the hospital after the car crash in college, the afternoon I’d visited with Tallis. Just as we were about to go, leaving Dylan sitting next to Cameron, who was sleeping, Cameron’s brother, Sean, had arrived. I guessed that Dylan had called him and he’d driven up from the city. It was the first time I’d met him. Sean was a carpenter of some kind, tall and broad, several years older than the rest of us. Dylan introduced us and we all shook hands like adults, and I immediately felt less grown-up than usual, and as though in some way it was impolite of us to be up and walking around while Cameron was still on his back.

  Just before Dylan stood up to greet Sean I saw something flash across his face, before the solemn, welcoming smile; something swift and immediately concealed. I didn’t quite know how to read it: resentment, hostility, a mysterious angst? I couldn’t think of any reason for it to do with Sean personally, and it didn’t seem directed at him anyway. At the time I had wondered whether Dylan was upset on some level about being displaced from his position as surrogate brother by the bedside, a role he’d taken to so well. Now I looked back on it and imagined that expression endlessly complicated by the idea of his adoption, his distant Vegas brother.

  I saw Dylan not only giving up his place by the bed to Sean, but I also wondered what he saw of himself there, the lost chances he might have perceived to do with himself as an older brother to be looked up to, to act as protector or guide. I didn’t know when Dylan had found out about his adoption, whether he’d always known, or when he’d found out about the extra detail of the younger brother, but when I thought about the way he’d looked at Sean I felt sure that he must have known then, and that he was watching a tableau that he felt excluded from in so many ways. It was a role he played with all of us in his own way, the collection of friends that he’d chosen, the surrogate brothers he’d constructed for himself.

  When my phone rang I was asleep, lying on the couch. My neck gave a twinge when I pulled myself up to a sitting position, echoes of that whack between the shoulderblades years earlier, some muscles and bones that had got pulled out of place and still complained from time to time. The phone bleeped and quivered on the corner of the coffee table, inching its way over toward the edge with the force of its vibrations. Sally’s name and number were illuminated on the little screen.

  ‘Hello?’ I said. ‘Sally?’

  ‘Hey, Elliot.’ The rough, smoky voice. ‘You called me. Are you in town?’

  ‘What? No.’

  ‘Were you asleep?’ she asked in disbelief. I looked over at the clock in the kitchen. It was 12:30. ‘Elliot? You called me.’

  ‘Yep.’ I stretched, tried to wake up, tried to put a question together for her.

  Her voice was muffled for a moment, as though she was talking to someone else with her hand over the receiver, then it came clear. ‘Where are you?’

  ‘I’m at
home for the weekend.’

  ‘OK. What’s up, Elliot?’ I could hear the sound of her lips pinched around a cigarette, then the smoke as it was released.

  ‘I’m good. How are you?’

  ‘I’m just fine.’

  ‘Sally.’

  ‘Is this about Dylan?’ she asked.

  ‘Yes — sort of. No, not sort of. Yes. It’s about Dylan.’

  ‘OK, fire away.’ Her breezy tone slipped and I could hear an edge of sadness in her voice, or maybe I just wanted to hear it. She coughed, a terrible rattle that belonged to a much older body.

  ‘Look, I was just talking to Lily tonight.’

  ‘Lily?’

  ‘You know, my sister.’

  ‘Oh, OK. Go on.’

  ‘Did you know Dylan had a brother?’ A beat of silence. ‘Did you know he was adopted?’

  ‘Lily told you that?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  She sighed. ‘I didn’t know he talked about that with her. That is bizarre. Never mind. OK. To answer your question, yes, I knew about it. And yes, he was at the funeral, he knows about Dylan being dead.’

  ‘I had no idea.’

  ‘No, I know. I can’t believe he told Lily.’

  ‘I can’t believe he didn’t tell me.’

  ‘He didn’t like to talk about it.’

  ‘Are you adopted, too?’

  She sighed again. ‘What, are you drunk? No, I’m not adopted. Just Dylan. Why are you interested?’

  ‘I’m just … surprised, I guess.’

  ‘Dylan was full of surprises.’

  ‘I’m sorry, Sally.’

  ‘I know I woke you up just now. Go back to bed.’

  ‘Can I give you a call in the morning?’

  I could hear her smiling. ‘Oh, sure. Take care, Elliot. Goodnight.’ A singsong pitch to the last word, dragging night out over two notes. She spoke again to someone with her — ‘OK, OK, I’m coming!’ — and the phone went dead.

  Sally was short for Semele, a name she hated. It was Dylan’s custom to introduce her as Semele, and she would always say ‘Sally’, correcting him, blinking and smiling brightly while he watched her, amused. He called her Sally the rest of the time just like everyone else.

  Semele was the name of a nymph in a Greek myth. Greta, their mother, explained it to me when I first visited the house, telling me how she’d come across it while reading Ovid for the first time, and always knew that it would be the name of her daughter.

  ‘And she grew into it, don’t you think — look how she owns it. She could be a nymph. She’s so beautiful.’

  Their house was a sprawling, modernist piece of 1950s architecture, low slung with plenty of glass that made me feel always slightly exposed to outside view. We were in the kitchen looking out over the terrace at the swimming pool. It was late afternoon heading toward evening, blue leaching out of the sky, paint-like streaks of cloud reflected in the glass walls. The place was like a mirror and a fishbowl at once, all display and reflection.

  As we were talking Sally swam across the pool with an elegant breaststroke. She climbed out, wearing an orange swimsuit with holes cut out to show the sides of her body, long hair streaming water down her back and her high, sharp cheekbones glowing in the harsh final rays of sunlight.

  ‘A water nymph,’ Greta said, admiring her.

  I had to agree. Greta seemed to watch me to make sure I was also appreciating her daughter to the proper extent, willing to offer whatever worship was due to unnaturally beautiful nymphs. She smiled, content and statuesque, a little like a goddess herself, and seemed to be satisfied by whatever I said and however I looked as I watched Sally wrap herself in a midnight-blue shirt and walk up the terrace from the pool to the house.

  From what I remembered about Ovid, nymphs that got a mention in his stories usually met bad ends: got raped or cursed, metamorphosed into trees or birds or plants. Sally stepped inside, making wet footprints on the floor, just as I was about to ask Greta what had happened to Ovid’s Semele.

  ‘I was just saying to Elliot what a beautiful water nymph you are,’ Greta said.

  Sally opened the fridge and pulled out a can of soda.

  ‘Oh, Mom,’ she said. ‘Give me a break.’ Her wet swimsuit and skin had soaked through her shirt, darkening the fabric. She opened the can with a loud crack, handed it to me, and took another for herself. She took a long drink and wiped her hand across her mouth. ‘The water’s nice, Elliot. Are you going to swim?’

  ‘Ah, no.’

  She went back outside and unwrapped herself, and lay down on her stomach on the tiles by the side of the pool, reading a Penguin paperback whose cover matched her swimsuit. It was Camus, or Sartre, something serious and French. The sunset that came on was fiery orange — everything in LA was edged with that color, it seemed.

  Greta had a similar kind of powerful affection for Dylan, a fierce pride that was potent in everything she said to him, every touch. She loved to be around him, but never harangued him into spending time with her, or at home, or complained that he wasn’t staying for dinner or calling often enough.

  My own parents’ pride in my achievements often left a sour taste in my mouth. Without meaning to I had managed to fall into a career that matched with their sense of what was valuable and significant. ‘He’s a professor,’ my mother loved to say, and would use the word literature as much as she could in connection with my work, never the more prosaic English. She and my father both pronounced my work ‘wonderful’ on the few occasions I gave them samples of it. One of these was my first published article, an overly long piece on an obscure collection of plays that appeared in a decent journal the year I graduated. The journal had sent me ten copies of the piece, beautifully typeset on small sheets of paper, and in a moment of happiness and generosity I had sent one to my mother. ‘Wonderful.’

  They had insisted on receiving a copy of my dissertation, bound in its ugly green cover. It was now gathering dust on their bookshelf, causing me some revulsion whenever I visited and caught sight of it, taller and fatter than anything else around it apart from the ancient encyclopedia set with which it was placed.

  My sense of how Greta felt about Dylan was colored by my own desires, my fantasy of what it would be like to have her and Leo as parents. Greta’s way of being proud and admiring of Dylan had always struck me as having a kind of integrity, not contaminated and overdetermined by her own priorities. She asked him questions about his studies, about his work, that seemed to stem from actual interest in what was important to him, never peppered with the ‘Haven’t you thought about …’ and ‘Wouldn’t it make more sense to …’ that characterized my parents’ conversations with me. You could tell that she was always aware of Dylan’s place in the room, her ear tuned to the sound of his voice, even when she took part in other conversations. She loved Sally as well, but although I never saw them argue, there was a simmering tension between them that was less evident with Dylan.

  I marveled at the way Greta never seemed to become overbearing. Dylan felt differently about it. If I ever expressed anything of my admiration for his parents and their relationship with him, particularly his mother, he quickly became dismissive.

  ‘Oh, she knows how to perform. The perfect mother.’

  ‘I’m not saying she’s perfect,’ I would protest, at the same time wondering, guiltily, what imperfections there could possibly be.

  ‘All I’m saying is, you see her in public. And she’s very good at reading people. She wants to be liked. She wants you to like her,’ he said once.

  This was surprising, because she always seemed so confident, so sure of herself. It was also absurdly flattering.

  ‘See, she has everyone all figured out. She …’ He sighed. ‘She calculates. She thinks everything through. She’s always busy being perfect. And she expects us all to be equally busy being perfect for her benefit.’

  This was confusing to me.

  ‘It’s lucky I’m so perfect, isn’t it?’ he said, wit
h a rare dose of sarcasm. ‘It reflects well on her. She’s very pleased with how I turned out.’ The bitterness in his voice surprised me.

  Knowing about the adoption now, I struggled with new interpretations of all those dynamics. Dylan, the adopted one, the child who was chosen and definitely wanted — although perhaps only on terms that Greta established. I couldn’t help reflecting on whether his charm, his charisma, was something he had worked at in order to compensate for having been given away in the first place, or to earn his parents’ love. It hadn’t occurred to me that Greta’s love would be conditional like that — it seemed so fixed and complete — but now I wondered. What if he hadn’t turned out good-looking and good with people — so evidently perfect? And what if Sally hadn’t turned out like a nymph; how would she have worn her name then?

  As I tried to fall asleep in my old bed later I made another effort to remember the funeral in more detail, to see if I could put a face to the Vegas brother with more confidence, but the scene was as hazy as it had been earlier. I’d taken the red-eye to LA and the plane had been late. In a way the delay was probably not a bad thing: I spent hours waiting at the airport, on the plane, in the taxi in bad traffic from the airport worrying about being late to the funeral or, worse, missing it entirely, and this anxiety overshadowed all the nervousness and difficult feelings that went along with the event. If I had started thinking about what it would be like to see Greta or Leo in person, or Sally, I would have been overwhelmed with concern that maybe I wouldn’t get to them at all. At the same time, a small, treacherous part of me sat calmly throughout the whole journey, quietly thinking that maybe it wouldn’t be the biggest disaster, the worst thing ever, to miss the funeral, to miss seeing all those people and going through the whole thing, especially through no fault of my own … That voice grew quieter as I grew closer, and by the time it became evident that I was going to make it after all, the feeling of relief worked in its own way to drown out the other worries.

  Another taxi pulled into the drive outside the small chapel at the same time, and Cameron stepped out seconds after I had closed the car door. He turned and saw me, and I walked toward him.