Saint X (ARC)

by Alexis Schaitkin

  Larissa Venable, captain of MoDE (Modern Dance Ensemble), shared that Alison was one of only three freshmen admitted to the selective squad this fall. “Usually the frosh hang back in rehearsals, but she was throwing out choreography ideas right off the bat. Her ideas were totally integral to our ‘Like a Prayer’ routine.”

  Alison’s roommate, Nika Ivanova, reflected, “I still can’t believe she won’t be here when I wake up in our room tomorrow. I just want to say we will always remember her.” …

  From “For Vacationers, Grief and Questions After a Daughter’s Mysterious Death” by Vince Cerusi, January 17, 1996, The New York Times:

  … “Alison was an absolute sweetheart,” her aunt, Colleen Thomas, said. “Just the sweetest, gentlest soul you could hope to meet. My dog is a rescue and he really struggles with trust, and she was just wonderful with him.” When asked about reports that her niece was seen drinking and smoking marijuana at a popular local bar on the night of her disappearance, Colleen Thomas replied, “I don’t care what the police down there say. It’s a tourist island; they have an incentive to make her look a certain way. That is not the Ali we know and love.” …

  From “Our Town says Goodbye” by Kate Cafferty, January 23, 1996, The Patent Trader:

  … Becca Frankel, seventeen and a high school classmate, remembers Alison Brianne Thomas as being a girl who had it all. “She was totally that girl. Smart. Pretty. Great athlete. Awesome dancer. I could probably name ten guys who had huge crushes on her. She got a lot of attention, and you could tell she loved it, you know?” When it was asked whether Thomas was promiscuous, Becca replied, “She was all about Drew.” Alison dated classmate Drew McNamara, who is a freshman at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, for three years. According to Becca, “They were the couple.” We could not reach McNamara for comment.…

  IT HAD been two weeks since I stepped into Clive Richardson’s taxi, and at work my productivity had dwindled to almost nothing. Every morning on the subway, I scribbled a to-do list: mail off cover-art proofs, draft the back-cover copy for a movie tie-in edition, write rejection e-mails for half a dozen recent novel submissions. Arriving at the office, I hung my coat in the locker at my cubicle and settled in at my desk with every intention of getting things done. But soon, almost without realizing it, the work at hand was abandoned and I was lost in the digital sea of stories about Alison. None of the mysteries in the books I worked on could compare to my own sister’s.

  It seemed everyone who had known her, however distantly, had given testimony on the question of who Alison Thomas had been. The articles were filled with tidbits about my sister’s last months that were new to me. She had been to an R.E.M. concert at Nassau Coliseum the fall before she died. She loved the mocha frozen yogurt in the dining hall. She had been a ballerina for Halloween. Each piece of information was like a wound, a reminder of how little I knew about my own sister.

  From “An Enigma Abroad” by Sean Winokur, Esquire, June 1996:

  … I meet Richard Conti, Thomas’s high school English teacher, at the Station, a diner in the mock-Tudor downtown of the affluent suburb where she grew up. In a town whose quaint main street is crowded with dry cleaners, nail salons, and gourmet take-away shops, the Station stands unmistakably apart. The interior is beyond unfancy—it’s downright dingy. Flickering panels of fluorescents overhead, a skein of mysterious stickiness underfoot, a deli case of mayonaissy potato, macaroni, and chicken salads. A jar of magenta pickled eggs occupies pride of place by the ancient cash register on the counter. My western omelet is emphatically mediocre. From the get-go, I wonder at Conti’s choice of meeting place. You can sniff out someone trying to control the narrative, hoping to convince the world that Alison Thomas was not a silly little rich girl.

  Conti is thirty-three, tall and handsome, with the broad and limber build of the Division I soccer goalkeeper he once was. Despite having agreed to this interview, he is hesitant, at first, to discuss his former student. As he bites into his egg and cheese sandwich, he confides that he almost canceled on me this morning. “I teach English, so I know the same story can be spun a thousand different ways.”

  But as we speak, Conti grows increasingly comfortable sharing his impressions and memories of Thomas. “She was a very bright girl. Not necessarily the most diligent student, but very bright. There’s a type of student, and I think it was hard for me to recognize in Alison at first because it’s a type that skews male. These kids do the work that interests them and say screw the rest. They turn in papers late but their work is so good you don’t want to penalize them for it, even if you know they don’t really give a shit what grade you give them, and also that they’re kind of banking on that, kind of playing you.” Asked if he’d describe Thomas as arrogant, Conti grows flustered. “No, no, no. She was a good kid. She was just a really intelligent, nice, good kid. That’s what I’m trying to say. She was a star.” …

  ALISON WAS an attention whore. She was a gentle soul. She was that girl. The one everybody envied. The one all the boys wanted. A star. She was what all the dead are: whatever the living make them.

  AS I pored over the articles, I encountered the same two photographs of Alison over and over. The first was taken after her performance in the school dance recital her senior year. Her cheeks and eyelids are brushed with glittery makeup, so that she seems to shimmer—celestial, angelic. Her smile is soft and dreamy, an unusual facial expression for my sister. Put simply, she does not look like herself. Maybe you’ve experienced this: you see a photo of someone you know well, and they look like an altogether different person. What makes this phenomenon possible? Is it some trick of the light, distorting the planes and angles of the face? Something about the transference of a three-dimensional form to two dimensions? Is it that we’re accustomed to seeing people in motion and the total stillness of an image throws us off? A final possibility seems most convincing to me: We don’t know what people look like. We know only what they look like to us. We have an idea of them, shaped by our affections, our memories, and this is the real distortion. In this photograph my sister looks like some romantic ideal of a girl too lovely for this world. A girl fated for death.

  The second picture is different. It was taken at a dorm party a month before Alison was killed. The room is dark, lit only by the harsh flash of the camera. The party must have been pajama-themed. Some boys wear boxers. Others are dressed ironically in fuzzy onesies. There is a keg visible in the corner, plastic cups in every hand and cluttering every surface. My sister wears a tiny blue slip—negligee would be the proper term, I think. Her nipples press visibly against the silk. She is dancing with her arms raised over her head, a cup in her hand. Her hair is sweaty, her eyes rimmed with smudged eyeliner. She smiles seductively at whoever is behind the camera.

  Don’t you understand? My sister was an innocent, blameless in her horrific fate. And it was all her fault.

  MY OBSERVATION of Clive continued. What I saw was always the same, his habits repetitive and fastidious: that crimson stew and a beer, then a second when he’d drained the first. Silent nods hello to the other regulars. A napkin crumpled in a fist. I watched until he rose to scrape his plate into the trash. Then I hurried down the sidewalk, not slowing until I reached my apartment.

  Of course, sometimes I had evening plans, or something came up. For instance, one afternoon Jackie texted that she needed to see me for “emergency girl talk,” and that night we met for drinks at her favorite bar near our old apartment. Jackie ran late as a rule. I arrived on time, then sat there twiddling my thumbs and excoriating myself. Why did I always set myself up to wait for her? What was it that rendered me incapable of deviating from this pattern? (I think I know the answer to these questions now. I think I liked this pattern, this banal benign and predicament in which to seethe.) This time, my annoyance was compounded by the fact that Jackie was keeping me from Clive—what if tonight was the night something happened, and I missed it? I worked myself up into quite a state before she arrived, and
as usual I shelved this feeling when Jackie whirled through the door, half an hour late and full of apologies.

  The reason for the emergency girl talk was that Jackie was “just so overwhelmed.” I listened for a long time as she described the sources of her trouble with mounting distress. She wasn’t a priority to her boyfriend. She hated her job. She never had time to practice her “craft.” (Though she seemed to have plenty of time, I thought, to attend her boyfriend’s dodgeball league games and to transform bushels of produce into six ounces of juice twice a day. I didn’t say this.)

  “Of course you’re overwhelmed,” I said instead. “It’s too much.”

  Jackie nodded. “Right? It would be too much for anyone.”

  There were tears in her eyes. I hugged her. I stroked her hair. I offered what seemed to me rather boilerplate advice: She should deal with one thing at a time. Step by step. Et cetera.

  Jackie blew her nose into a cocktail napkin. “How are you so fucking wise?”

  We stayed at the bar for another hour.

  “So, what’s new with you?” she asked as she tossed her credit card down on the check.

  I thought of Clive Richardson, of the Little Sweet, of Alison’s obituary and the golden-haired, rose-lipped child from Dying for Fun who was and was not me.

  “Nothing much.”

  AT WORK one day I went on Facebook to track down Nika Ivanova, Alison’s roommate at Princeton. I found her easily. She was Nika (Ivanova) Cunningham now; she lived in Philadelphia and worked for a pharmaceutical company. Her profile picture was a selfie in which she sat sandwiched between two freckle-faced boys on a chairlift. I sent her a message:

  You probably don’t remember me, but I’m Alison Thomas’s younger sister. I’m working on a project to compile remembrances about Alison. It would mean so much to have a contribution from you. I know you didn’t know Alison long, but she loved being your roommate. Maybe we could arrange a phone call and I can tell you more about what I have in mind?

  I felt weird for lying, but pinning my request to a formal project seemed to normalize it. Amazing, the power of a premise.

  Nika replied that evening. She would be very happy to help me in whatever way she could. We scheduled a phone call for a night later that week, but a few minutes after we were supposed to talk, Nika texted to cancel. She had forgotten it was her turn to pick up her son’s tae kwon do carpool. Twenty minutes later, I was standing outside of The Little Sweet. Stew, beer, nod hello. For over an hour, I wandered the neighborhood, circling back to watch Clive as often as I dared. The streets were busy with people. A mom herding three kids in school uniforms. An elderly man leaning against a storefront and sipping a pineapple soda. The periodic upward rush of bodies from the subway at Nostrand. A stray white kid hefting a mesh laundry basket down the sidewalk. When I circled back once more and found that Clive had departed while I was walking, I was left with the unsettling feeling of a necessary process cut short.

  Nika canceled again the next time we were supposed to speak—her other son’s basketball game had gone into overtime. Again I left my apartment at once and headed to Church Avenue. Stew, beer, nod hello. Clive maintained this ritual with such consistency that I half wondered if he knew he was being watched and was determined to reveal nothing of himself. At times it seemed to me as if we were engaged in a battle of wills. I had not yet found my way past the mesmeric repetition of his routines. But I was not concerned. I would wait as long as it took. I was patient.

  NIKA AND I finally spoke that Sunday.

  “Sorry I was so hard to get on the phone. This week has been completely insane,” she said, in a rote tone that suggested that for Nika, every week was completely insane. In the background I could hear the crinkle of what sounded like grocery bags being unpacked.

  I had a single memory of Nika. When my family arrived at Alison’s dorm to move her into her room, Nika and her parents were already there, arguing with each other in urgent, whispered Bulgarian as they looked down at her bed. They hadn’t known to buy extra-long sheets and now they couldn’t make her bed. When they realized we were standing in the doorway, they looked stricken. Nika was dressed in a pleated skirt, a blouse, and loafers with a low, square heel. My sister wore mesh shorts and flip-flops. I understood implicitly that Alison was wearing the right thing and Nika was wearing the wrong thing. In my head she was still the painfully overdressed girl pressed close to her parents.

  I told Nika I wanted to create a book of memories about my sister. “I was so young when she was killed. I’ve been finding it really therapeutic lately to hear stories from people who knew her.”

  I heard the refrigerator door opening and closing, the garbage disposal churning. Nika’s inattention wasn’t hurtful, exactly. It was callous in a bland, quotidian way I didn’t really hold against her. My tragedy wasn’t hers, and that wasn’t her fault.

  “Your sister was a big deal for me,” Nika began. “I could not have been more clueless when I showed up at Princeton. We immigrated when I was ten, but my parents still barely spoke English. I had this horrible bushy hair. I used to go to the dining hall, fill a mug with soup, and go back and eat it in our room because I was so intimidated by the other kids at the tables. I got a sixty-three on my first calculus test. I went to this awful high school in Chicago. I had no preparation whatsoever. I just cried and cried about it. There were tutors you could go to, but I was afraid to. I literally thought if I went to them, they’d realize Princeton had made a mistake accepting me and kick me out. I had no idea what to—Excuse me a minute.” I could hear her hand press against the receiver. Not now, Logan, mommy’s on the phone. “Sorry about that. Anyway, right, I had no idea what to do.”

  “That must have been hard.” I straightened a paper clip and used the tip to clean under my fingernails. Her tragedy was not my tragedy, either.

  “Your sister made such a difference for me. I’m not just saying that. She included me. The first month of school I made zero friends. I was basically a recluse. Your sister obviously knew everyone on campus within five minutes, and everyone wanted to be her friend. She just had that personal power, you know?”

  “She was special,” I said vaguely. Charisma, you might call it, though this word doesn’t explain the mystery, because charismatic people are all different. It’s the feeling they evoke in others, that tipsy glow, that tidal pull, that they share. It’s Edwin Hastie with a passel of children scrabbling over him in the sand. It’s a dozen men falling in love with Aunt Caroline as she peels a tangerine in the Luxembourg Gardens. Who was Nika to tell me about Alison’s power? I thought with irritation. But I composed myself.

  “Every time she was going to a party or an event or anything, she invited me,” Nika continued. “I must have said no to her a hundred times. I was just scared. Finally one night she grabbed my arm and said, ‘You’re coming, Nika Nika’—she used to call me that, like the Singing Nun song?—and she dragged me out of our room. We went to this dorm party. I was so freaked out. I’d never had a sip of alcohol. Your sister didn’t leave my side the whole night. She introduced me to everyone like I was this extremely cool person who had finally deigned to grace them with my—Sorry.” Her hand pressed against the receiver again. Jackson, why do I hear video games?… Don’t “I don’t know” me … Five minutes … Fine, eight. She sighed. “Sorry. Where were we?”

  “My sister took you out with her.”

  “Right. Anyway, after that she basically adopted me into her friend group.” Nika was speaking more hurriedly now. The video game business had pulled her out of the sea of memory and back onto the shore of her busy life. I could sense she was eager to be off the phone, to check this task off of what was surely a long list.

  “And when she died?”

  “We were shocked. Devastated. The way it happened. I still feel bad I couldn’t go to the funeral. I was home in Illinois for break and I couldn’t afford the ticket. Our group stayed together, though. We’re all still friends. We go to Steamboat ever
y winter with our kids. My husband, Alex. Alison was always teasing me that he had a thing for me and I never believed her.”

  “That’s so great.”

  Nika’s hand went over the receiver again. We don’t interrupt people on the phone, sweetheart. “Sorry. What was that?”

  “I said it’s nice to know all of this.”

  “Listen, I’m really sorry, but I have to go. But I have a few pictures and notes and things. I can send you color copies for your memory book.” I told her I would like that very much and gave her my address. “I really am sorry to dash off. I need to help my son with this project. We’re working on a Prezi about the chaparral,” she said dryly.

  “I miss the days of the shoe-box diorama,” I replied, as if I, too, were a harried mother befuddled by my child’s Information Age assignments.

  Only after I hung up did I realize that my entire body was clenched. This wasn’t a nice story about the good my sister had done in her short life. It was a story about Nika’s life. Alison was merely the device by which the universe had conspired to ensure Nika’s destiny as Nika (Ivanova) Cunningham, mommy to Jackson and Logan. The dead’s stories are lifted away from them; they are sentenced to an eternity as deus ex machina in the stories of others.

  “Alison Thomas Autopsy Report, Abridged Text,” Special to the New York Post, June 20, 1996:

  Decedent: THOMAS, Alison Brianne

  Authorized by: Cardigan Ralston, Coroner

  Assisted by: Diandra Young, M.D.

  Identified by: Thomas, Ellen, and Thomas, Richard parents of decedent.

  Date of Birth: September 8, 1977

  Race: Caucasian

  Sex: Female

  Length: 165 cm

  Weight: 52.6 kg

  Eyes: Brown

  Hair: Reddish brown

  EXTERNAL EXAMINATION

  The body is presented in a black body bag. The victim wears no clothing. Jewelry includes three pierced earrings in the left ear: one gold hoop, one gold stud, and one small blue gemstone, and two pierced earrings in the right ear: one gold hoop and one gold stud. Fingernails and toenails are painted sky blue. The body is that of a normally developed, normally nourished Caucasian female. The appearance of age is approximately as stated. The eyes are closed. The irises are light brown. The teeth are native and in good condition. The tongue is smooth, bloated, and white-gray. The hair is reddish brown, straight, and fixed in a ponytail on the top of the head, secured with a yellow elastic band. It measures 35.5 centimetres at its longest length. The genitalia are that of a normally developed adult female. There is a scar measuring 12 centimetres in length on the lower left abdomen, which the parents of the decedent confirm is the result of an accidental injury sustained in 1981. There is significant bloating and draining of the skin, consistent with the body being submerged in non-saline water.