AS THE years passed, my mother and father continued to fulfill their parental duties. They signed me up for AYSO and pottery and displayed my endless output of pinch pots on the living room shelves. We went on trips to Yellowstone, London, Washington, D.C. They helped me with long division and took away my television privileges when I sassed. In summary, they behaved. Always fair, always reasonable. Wonderful parents, in a way. We lived on the surface, skated figure eights over a frozen sea.
WHEN I was ten, a women’s television network of the feuding pageant queens and psychopathic stepmothers variety premiered Dying for Fun, an eight-part true crime series about young women whose hedonistic pursuits—wild parties, gap years, vacations—had gone horribly awry. Each episode was a dramatic reenactment of one woman’s story. At the time, I knew only that something was being made about my sister and that my parents were upset about it, though their lawyer had told them there was nothing they could do.
The night Dying for Fun: Alison Thomas premiered, my parents took me to a Dodgers game. We ate hot dogs slathered in ketchup and mustard. We stood and cheered when Mike Piazza hit a home run. We sang “Take Me Out to the Ball Game” too loudly, laughed for too long, and generally tried not to think about the fact that in millions of homes across America, people were sitting on couches and tossing cheese puffs into their mouths as they watched a person who was not my sister die some version of my sister’s death.
IT’S HARD for me to remember exactly what I was told about the details of Alison’s death when it happened, and what facts I acquired later on. I’m fairly certain I didn’t know it was the actor who’d found my sister, or who he was to begin with. But at some point I must have learned this, because there were two periods during my adolescence when I became oddly fixated on the actor. The first such period was in fifth grade. I often had sleepovers on the weekends then, which typically involved renting a movie. If the sleepover was happening at my house and it was my parents taking us to Blockbuster, I would do everything as usual, and we would come home with Free Willy or Homeward Bound or something like that. But if I was sleeping out and it was someone else’s parents taking us, I’d try to make it happen that we would rent one of the actor’s movies. The actor was not in children’s movies, so this involved convincing my friends that a film about a bank heist or prohibition-era Chicago was something we would like. “This is supposed to be hilarious,” I’d say, or, “I heard this is Sean Sawyer’s favorite movie,” Sean Sawyer being the boy we were all in love with. “Are you sure?” the mom or dad would ask when we handed them our selection, and if I’d done a good job, my friend would nod just as enthusiastically as me. Because the movies were actually not at all the kind of thing that interested us, often my friends would doze off after not too long, and then it would just be me, on a beanbag cushion in their playroom in the dark, watching the actor and looking for something I couldn’t explain.
The second period came a few years later, when I was thirteen or fourteen and my friends and I were obsessed with YM and Bop and at night I dreamed steamy soft-core dreams about the shy, sensitive members of various boy bands. For a while during this time, I played out these extended scenarios in my mind where the actor reached out to my family seeking resolution, which he found in talking with me. Our unlikely friendship led to invitations to be his guest at awards shows, where I wore gowns and was photographed on the red carpet, stoic beauty radiating from me like an aura, and I won the attention and sympathy of all the stars I adored. I was ashamed of these fantasies, but I was helpless to stop them, unable to resist the maudlin potential of my own story. I thought I was awful, but now I think I was no more awful than any teenage girl—I simply had more potent material to spin.
I LOST my virginity in tenth grade. My boyfriend was a bassist in a band called Skar Tissue and a budding cartoonist who drew pictures of me with big anime eyes and hair made of flowers. His own hair was black streaked with violet. I helped him dye it every other week in his bathroom. My hands were perpetually stained purple, as if I’d gorged myself on berries. For as long as we were together, I was a skater girl, which didn’t mean I skated, but rather that I stood around with a few other girls while the boys skated. I wore thick black eyeliner and dog cuffs on my wrists and slouched proprietarily against the gym wall when Skar Tissue played at school dances. At homecoming, they debuted a song called “Emily.” I was a girl whose boyfriend wrote songs for her and played them in front of the whole school. I marveled at this, held it proudly in hand.
Four months after we started dating, on a night when my parents were at a dinner party in Toluca Lake, I told him I was ready. He treated me like I was made of glass, and I liked this. He treated sex with the seriousness of death, and I liked that, too. Afterward, it occurred to me that if Alison were alive, I would have told her every detail. Then something else occurred to me: If Alison were alive, it would not have happened at all. There was another life I might have been living, a life in which I was not Emily of Pasadena, but Claire. This other life ran alongside mine like the scenery falling away at the side of a speeding train. While Emily had sex in Southern California, Claire wrote up the mealworm lab in New York. Emily was pink-skinned from the California sun, her white-blond hair cut in a stylish crop. Claire was pale as flour, her haircut the same since she was five. What was I supposed to do with the fact that I was thrilled, I was so very relieved, to be Emily and not Claire?
I KNEW the exact day I outlived Alison. Eighteen years, three months, twelve days. I had calculated the date when I was fifteen, working it out in the back of my notebook as Magistra Kouchner chirped Latin conjugations. Io credo, tu credi, lui crede. For years, I dreaded the day. When it finally arrived, I marked it in secret. I considered telling my friends, who were at that time packing up one by one and saying tearful farewells as we scattered to the well-regarded colleges we would attend. (I would be the last to leave, bound for a highly ranked liberal arts college in the Midwest.) In the end I told no one. I was suspicious of my own impulse to calculate and mark the date. It seemed a theatrical and self-absorbed thing to do. Maybe part of what it means to be eighteen is to feel perpetually caught between the intensity of one’s desires and the dawning self that judges them.
On the morning of the day I outlived Alison, I awoke to find my world suffused by a peculiar falsity. The sunlight streaming through my bedroom window seemed incorrect somehow, a shade too lemony. When I walked into the kitchen, where my mother was eating a bowl of cereal, and she said good morning, her voice, too, seemed to have shifted, like a piano gone almost imperceptibly out of tune. All day I couldn’t shake the feeling that I had been transferred in my sleep to a vast simulacrum. I drifted from room to room, picking up and setting down books, beginning and abandoning the tidying of my bedroom, sitting in the garden, and then, shaken by a sense that I’d remained there too long, moving to the living room. Even my own face seemed to me a not-quite-right facsimile—I studied myself in the mirror and saw Alison’s features skewed just enough to look distorted and unharmonious, my pale skin and hair like some ghostly afterimage. I’d been awaiting this day for years, but I don’t think I ever really expected it to arrive. Now that the critical juncture was behind me. the tension went out of everything. My world hung slack as a sail on a windless day.
WHEN I arrived at college, for the first time since I moved to Pasadena as a girl, I found myself regularly around people who didn’t know me or my story. The usual challenges and possibilities of freshman year—making new friends, conveying one’s identity to others (with some fresh tweaks and adjustments from one’s high school iteration)—were complicated for me by the knowledge that at some point I would have to tell these people who I was, which is to say, who my sister was. I can’t express how much I disliked doing this. Though I’d come out of my shell in Pasadena, I was still relatively shy, and there was simply no way to tell people that I was Alison Thomas’s little sister without drawing attention to myself.
The worst part was seeing
people’s surprised reactions. I don’t mean the inevitable surprise of realizing that someone you know is connected to such an infamous incident. I mean the surprise, plainly visible on their faces, that this had happened to me, that this story was my story. How confused they seemed, how disappointed: something had happened to me, something huge, and yet, somehow, I had managed not to be made interesting by it.
I DATED a few boys in college. There was Nick, a pre-med soccer player who loved nothing so much as the sight of me topless in his uniform shorts. Avi was a stoner from Toronto. Scattered between these longer relationships were brief interludes with Dave and Jordan and Zeb (whose first name was really Richard), all of them so different from one another it was like trying on funny hats in a store. With each of them I changed, shape-shifting until I fit into their world. I prided myself on my chameleonic transformations, and on not having a “type,” which I thought indicated that I was open to the world, and that my essential self was so solid it could inhabit any number of forms.
They had different approaches to getting me to talk about her. But one way or another, they all tried.
“I just want you to know you can be completely open with me. Like, if there’s ever anything you want to talk about.”
“My uncle died when I was seven. He was basically my second dad. It really fucked up my world, you know?”
“You don’t have to talk about it if you don’t want to.”
I could never shake the humiliating sense that, whether they realized it or not, these boys were in love with some idea of me as a tragic, wounded girl, that when they looked at me they saw a sort of double exposure—me and the sister I had lost, a second self whose presence they could sense whenever they were with me, and that it was she, not me, they were really after, that as they kissed and licked and squeezed me they were trying to draw themselves closer to her, to touch the infinite, exquisite void of a beautiful, lost girl.
(BUT WHEN I refused to open up to these boys about Alison, was it really because I couldn’t bring myself to, because it hurt too much, or did I withhold to gain their admiration at my stoicism? Did I, actually, enjoy being their tragic, wounded girlfriend? Deep down, did I revel in the way Alison’s death made me more than myself to these boys? To what extent was my pain a thing I cultivated, a thing I used? Is it possible that these relationships, these boys, were ultimately little more to me than a platform for displaying my suffering and, in doing so, for shoring up my claim to this tragedy, to the death of a sister I was barely old enough to know?)
DESPITE THESE difficulties, I would describe my “college experience” as pretty normal, which is to say that everything I did, whether a winter day spent dug in at the library or a night of dancing capped off by three A.M. pizza, felt equally, salubriously formative. I majored in English and minored in environmental studies. I made plenty of friends. The one worth mentioning, because of how she figures into my time in New York, is Jackie. Jackie was a friend I acquired at the beginning of college more due to proximity than anything—she lived across the hall. Despite our having little in common, our friendship turned out to have staying power. Jackie was an actor (“not musicals”). She saw nothing pretentious about referring to herself as a “thespian,” and though I found this ridiculous, I was also impressed by her sheer gumption. Our relationship consisted mostly of her baring her soul and me listening and proffering advice.
Sometimes I wondered whether, when she wasn’t with me, Jackie brought up her connection to the Alison Thomas murder to people as a kind of currency. I could imagine her, back home in Bethesda for Christmas break, sitting around in someone’s basement with her girlfriends, drinking Yellow Tail:
“You know my good friend Emily I’ve told you about? Her older sister was Alison Thomas. Remember that story from when we were, like, eight?” (I would be referred to as a “good” friend not because Jackie and I were, in fact, especially close, but to emphasize Jackie’s own proximity to Alison.)
“Whoa, seriously?”
Jackie would nod solemnly as if, while her friends might simply consider this to be some novel information, to her it was personal, heavy.
Oh, I didn’t wonder if this happened. Surely it did. There was no doubt in my mind that Jackie trotted out my story for her own benefit. I didn’t even feel mad about it, really, because it was so obvious she couldn’t help herself, and how could you be mad at someone for being the person they were? At least at the time I thought that was why I didn’t feel mad. Thinking about it now, though, the reason seems different. I never let myself get mad about anything back then.
AFTER COLLEGE, I found a job as an assistant to an editor at a publishing house in Manhattan. When I told my parents I would be moving to New York, they were supportive in the polite, aloof way I had come to expect. With Jackie and two Craigslist strangers, also recent college grads, I found an apartment in Prospect Heights. The kitchen was the size of a closet and my bedroom had no closet at all. The apartment was on the ground floor, and out back a cracked concrete patio was littered with things tenants on higher floors tossed out their windows—beer cans, cigarette butts, losing scratch tickets. We figured with some twinkle lights strung up it would be heaven.
Before I moved in and began work, I flew west to spend one last summer with my parents. Two months at home with mom and dad while my friends worked fun, sunburned jobs in resort towns in New England or retraced Che Guevara’s motorcycle journey as far as Valparaíso. My parents had not asked me to do this, nor did I want to do it. It wasn’t just that without Alison I felt I had to fulfill the role of two children. I did things that, were Alison alive, neither one of us would have done. I pitied my parents in a way I did not pity myself. It is easy to discern the contours of other people’s pain, much harder to recognize one’s own.
My parents were in their mid-fifties. My father’s hair had thinned and grayed. My mother had recently had her first knee replacement. Over and over they told me how happy they were that I was there, how wonderful it was to spend “quality time” together. My mother cooked my favorite foods. My father bought tickets for the things we used to do when I was a kid—Dodgers games, sci-fi movies. Their insistence gave them away. I don’t mean they weren’t happy I was there. I could see it in their eyes—a love so strong it hurt. That’s what I mean. They would be relieved when I left. The house would turn quiet again, and they would feel better.
One day when I came back from the gym, I entered the house quietly, and before I let them know I was back, I watched them. Through the kitchen window, I could see my father out in the yard, tending his jewel box garden. My mother sat in the sunny window seat in the living room, a chenille blanket over her feet, reading. I was seeing them without me: two people living out their separate lonelinesses side by side.
A few days before I flew to New York, I went into my father’s home office. There, in his desk drawer, I found the photographs of our vacation at Indigo Bay. They were faded and splotched with fingerprints, and I wondered if looking at them had turned into a kind of compulsion for my father. Perhaps he had looked at the photographs so many times he no longer really saw Alison, had drained the power out of the images years ago. Maybe, subconsciously, that had been the point of the triplicate images to begin with: to stare at my sister until she lost coherence, like reading a word over and over until it starts to crack up. I removed one copy of each picture and brought them with me to Brooklyn. I put them in a shoe box under my bed along with a few other mementos—graduation tassel, prom corsage. The box gathered dust while, above it, I watched Netflix on my laptop while eating salt-and-vinegar chips; cuddled with Jackie after her boyfriend dumped her; had sex, often inebriated, with friends of friends. I rarely took out the photographs. It was enough just to know they were there.
LOOKING BACK, what strikes me is how ordinarily my life developed for years after Alison’s death. I had friends and boyfriends. I excelled academically. Experimented in typical quantities with the kinds of drugs a fundamentally risk-ave
rse girl could feel more or less comfortable with: I smoked pot on weekends, nibbled once on ’shrooms in Prospect Park, imbibed a few sips of absinthe at a party. I fretted about my weight, hamster-wheeled on an elliptical machine after work, caved and ate two egg rolls for dinner. At work, I decorated my cubicle with a framed photograph of myself on the rim of the Grand Canyon and a mediocre sketch I’d done of a cathedral during a semester abroad in Grenoble. My job paid a pittance and was glamour-adjacent, and therefore fit perfectly with a certain vision of what a girl’s early years in New York ought to look like: fetching coffee for a MacArthur genius; ferrying a portfolio of illustrations through the sleet to the West Village brownstone of a writer I adored; referring to best-selling authors in the informal parlance of the office, according to which Astrid Teague was just “Astrid,” and Ian Mann’s forthcoming book was simply “the new Mann.” On first dates, there was a nifty trick I liked to perform, where I would pull the boy into a bookstore, pick up a novel off the display table, flip to the back, and show him, in the acknowledgments, my name. Every Sunday afternoon I posted up at a café, pen in hand and the pages of a manuscript stacked before me, and when I caught the glances of people at nearby tables I quickly looked back down in a way that conveyed that I was busy making an important contribution to the creative economy.
As it happened, the editor I worked for mostly acquired mysteries. Ian Mann published a book a year about a psychologically damaged private investigator. Astrid Teague wrote atmospheric whodunits set in Cornwall, where she’d grown up (and where she was now rehabbing a dilapidated manor house, which had recently been captured in all its shabby-chic glory in a Martha Stewart Living profile, “Astrid Teague Comes Home.”) Many of the books I worked on turned on the mystery of a girl’s death. A beautiful young body turns up in small-town Maine or in an eightieth-floor hotel room in Shanghai. Sometimes the girls didn’t turn up at all—they vanished without a trace, evaporated into their surroundings. In my favorite of Astrid’s novels, The Girl in the Picture, a woman’s body was discovered by a boy and his English setter in a cave on the Cornish coast. The woman had no wallet on her, no identification of any kind. Nobody came forward to claim her, nor did she match any missing person reports. But she did have a camera, and the photographs she had taken before her death became the clues a local detective used to uncover the identity of a hauntingly beautiful woman nobody seemed to miss.
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