No One Tells Everything (3 page)

When she thinks of Callie, Grace remembers the long flaxen braids, the impish cackle, the fierce longing she felt to know her sister’s blitheness, to grab hold of it and swallow it whole.

###

Grace hoists herself up onto the couch and finds the remote control flush against the edge of the coffee table, this dependability one of the benefits of living alone. Even though drunk—a bottle is such a lovely amount—she doesn’t want to miss the local news in case there are any Sarah Shafer updates. It seems, at the moment, vitally important to follow the story to its conclusion. She clicks on the television.

Before she can decipher the words, she sees Sarah’s mother, her face collapsed in her palms, being led into the police station by her husband. Grace knows that look, turned in on itself, imploding. Despite her tears, the woman does not yet comprehend the enormity of the moment, still thinking that her child might come back. Grace’s mother said that for years after Callie died she would occasionally wake up and for a few seconds not remember. Cruel bliss she called it, like it was the name of a perfume.

Grace turns up the volume. An anonymous tip led police to the remains of a body believed to be that of Sarah Shafer, buried behind a beachfront apartment complex five miles from campus.

Remains. It shouldn’t be a surprise that she’s dead, but its resounding finality settles heavily in Grace’s chest. She had hoped against reason that the girl had gotten away, that she was doing something no one had expected.

There is a lightness about Sarah, a look of openness to the world that has always been foreign to Grace. She wonders if someone wanted to snuff that out.

The news has moved on to the weather, a week of warmth and sunshine ahead. Grace’s head spins when she closes her eyes.

I
n the morning, Grace finds a story on her desk waiting for her to copyedit. A large picture of Sarah Shafer takes up half the page. She is laughing, her mouth open wide, a wad of pink bubble gum formed to her molars. How Callie might have looked in high school. Tan and freckled. At ease and happy. The photo is a close up, the strings of a bikini top around her neck, a strand of blond hair caught on her lip. The toast of spring break in Cabo San Lucas. Pretty, popular, all-American. Nutley High School’s Sweetheart Dance Queen. The magazine couldn’t ask for a better victim.

A smaller inset photo shows the parents, huddled against their grief, heads bowed, faces shadowed. Sarah’s mother’s eyes are closed, her face crumpled, her head curled into her husband’s chest as if he might protect her from her flayed heart. Grace knows they will spend hours, days, weeks, imagining what they could have done differently, how one little thing, a phone call even, might have been enough to change the course of events. Their other kids will always be part of a larger story about their sister, and they will be angry with her for all of it.

The article calls it “a senseless murder,” a phrase that lets people luxuriate in their outrage, puts them on the right side of good. Grace checks the byline—a writer whose prose tends to be overwrought and sappy. She circles “senseless” and writes “overused?” just to be irritating since it’s not her job to suggest word choice edits. She knows what’s next: “killed in cold blood.” Another gem. She circles it and scribbles “find another phrase?”

But in the next paragraph, she’s jolted out of her smugness by the report of Sarah Shafer’s autopsy results. One deep stab wound to the chest that severed the aorta and another flesh wound near the left lung, both made with what appeared to be a short-blade knife. Grace puts her palm over her heart but its beating is muted by her sweater. She reaches under her shirt and bra and feels her skin, up under her breast, the rapid pumps of blood churning within a protective cage of bone. The knife would have had to hit just right to slip between the ribs.

“Hey, Grace,” Brian says, standing in the opening of her cube.

“Hi,” she says startled, quickly pulling her hand out.

“What’re you working on?”

“Finishing up the piece on the college murder.”

“God, that’s so sad. She wasn’t that different from us, you know?”

“Yeah,” she says, her neutral smile barely more than a line.

“Kind of freaky. So anyway. I was just checking on the front-of-book section.”

“It’s finished,” she says. “It was pretty clean.”

“Oh, great, great,” he says, nervously picking imaginary lint from his ripped-on-purpose jeans.

She looks at him in hopes of making him leave. She wiggles her toes inside her shoes.

“Grace?”

“Yeah?”

“I was wondering if you wanted to get a drink after work,” he asks, catching her unprepared.

She blinks.

“Just a drink.” He reddens.

She’s jumpy, antsy to finish the article, which accounts for what she says next.

“Okay.”

“Really? Cool. I’ll swing by later,” he says.

Grace watches his head bob away down the hall before turning back to Sarah.

###

The bar is a dark and modern midtown after-work place, loud with pre-commute revelry. Brian yells their drink order to the bartender, a skinny wannabe actress with fake breasts bunched together in painful-looking cleavage.

“How long have you lived in New York?” he asks.

“Almost thirteen years,” Grace says, realizing he was about that age when she moved here.

“Wow. That’s a long time.”

“Yeah,” she says, raising her eyebrows. “You’ve been here what, a year, year and a half?”

He nods.

“I arrived right after 9/11,” he says. “That must have been an insane experience for you.”

Not this conversation, she thinks.

“I hate how it’s all so fetishized,” she says. “It’s a cottage industry. The justification for everything these days. A collective excuse.”

“I kind of feel like I’m not really part of the city because I didn’t live here then,” Brian says.

“I wouldn’t worry about it,” she says. “It doesn’t make me feel more a part of it anymore.”

He eyes her, not believing.

“It must have changed you.”

Brian is looking for a way in, but he’s chosen a dead end.

“You know how it changed me? I know that if I had been in the second tower,” she says, “I would have stayed where I was. I would have respected that vague authority on the loudspeaker and followed instructions. And now I know that I wouldn’t.”

She takes the last of her wine in too big of a gulp and whacks her glass down on the bar. Brian flinches but then he does the same thing with his drink and smiles.

On that sunny September morning, Grace left her desk with coffee in hand and walked down Seventh Avenue, straight toward the smoke and licks of orange. At Canal Street she watched in a trance as the towers burned and then fell, unaware that there were people inside. She walked across town and up to the East Village, sunburn blooming across her cheeks and nose, her feet wrecked in high-heeled sandals, numb amidst the people moving about, yanked out of routine. There was almost a giddiness, a mania to the chaos: this is huge and scary and exciting and we’re alive! People stopped at restaurants for lunch and chattered with each other. Fire trucks flew down Second Avenue. Grace walked south again, through the choking air and the murmur of voices that tried to put meaning to the events, to the Manhattan Bridge, and she kept walking through Brooklyn until she saw Jimmy in the cafe across the street from Chances.

It was one of the only times she has seen him outside the bar. He looked smaller, more timid. It was strange to see his feet, and to see them in running shoes. He wiped the powdery ash from her shoulders. A woman at the table behind them looked out the window, crying. Outside, a group of men in paint-splattered pants huddled around a radio.

Next to his coffee mug, Jimmy had a pocket paperback of T. S. Eliot poems.

“I didn’t know you liked poetry,” she said, picking up the book.

“My patron saint,” Jimmy said. “The bard of missed opportunities and lives not fully lived.”

He hiccupped a mournful laugh. Grace knew she should have reached out for his hand then, but instead she slapped the book on the table and slid it back to him.

They didn’t know yet the scope of the disaster, the deaths, the fear, the sadness that would shroud the city in darkness, the footage of the planes that would be shown again and again and again, as if this time they might see something different. The endless caravan of debris-carrying trucks that would rumble their way to Staten Island and the Fresh Kills Landfill. The smell of smoldering metal, fuel, and bodies that would last for weeks. But they did know that there would forever be a before and an after.

Brian drains his glass and the ice cubes hit his teeth. He winces and rubs his mouth.

“Ow. Okay, so I know that you’re a great copyeditor. You catch everything. And you like white wine,” he says pointing to her glass. “And you live in Brooklyn. What else?”

Grace wonders if this is a date or if Brian is just lonely, too. She doesn’t understand his interest in her. Maybe he wants to know why she’d rather sit alone on the sidelines than play along with everyone else. It’s by default, Brian, she says to herself. It’s not evidence of an independent character.

“There’s not much to tell,” she says. “I grew up in Cleveland.”

He circles his hand to elicit more.

“I was born on the day the Cuyahoga River caught fire.”

Brian looks sidelong at her, curious.

“It’s the river that runs crookedly south from Lake Erie. At the time it was so polluted it was more like brown ooze than water.”

He smiles, wrinkling his nose.

“They used to say anyone who fell in didn’t drown, they decayed.”

He laughs and wipes his finger through a water ring on the bar.

“What else about you?” he asks.

“Um. I don’t know. I’m kind of boring. In college I majored in art history, but I can’t tell you a thing about art.”

“You really don’t like to talk about yourself, do you?” Brian asks.

She shrugs.

“Pets?”

She shakes her head.

“Pet peeves?”

This makes her laugh a little.

“When people say ‘impactful’ or ‘literally,’” she says. “Loud laughers. Being rude to waiters. Taking up more than one seat on the subway.”

“Now we’re getting somewhere,” he says.

This isn’t so bad, she thinks.

“Let’s see. How about favorite color?” Brian’s cheeks are flushed pink.

“Don’t have one.”

“Any siblings?”

“No,” she says quickly.

She remembers Callie’s funeral like she’s looking through a tunnel. There is an echo to the sounds—the sniffles, the organ, the words that she can’t understand. Her dad sat alone and she sat behind him with her mom. He smelled of alcohol. Grace wore a white-collared black dress she didn’t like that her grandmother had sent from Saks for Christmas. She was there too, her mother’s mother, Grace’s only grandparent, with her hawkish nose and Ferragamo shoes, tissues up her cashmere sleeves, her arm a rigid fence around her daughter’s small shoulders.

The air conditioning didn’t work well in the church so there were two giant fans blowing from the back. There was sweat on Grace’s father’s neck. Her mother didn’t cry. Instead she turned off the light inside and checked out, leaving her empty body sitting in the pew. Grace was afraid to touch her hand for fear it would be cold. She had wanted to be the only child, the one her parents would gaze upon with pride and love. But when she looked up at the little coffin in the front of the church, she knew she would be lonely for the rest of her life.

Brian has asked her something.

“What?” she asks.

“What do you want to be when you grow up?”

Grace wishes she were someone who could do this.

“Why don’t you tell me something about you,” she says.

He smiles and settles in his seat, happy to talk, ready to reveal himself. She finishes her wine and orders another.

###

She leaves Brian at the bar and jumps into a cab home. Her mother has left her a message, but when Grace calls back, her father answers. She cringes.

“Hi, Dad.”

“Well hello there. What’s new in New York?”

“Not much.”

“How’s your weather?”

“Springish. Getting warmer.”

“Good, good. Job’s okay?”

“Yeah. It’s fine.”

“Your mother’s not here or I’d hand her the phone. She went to one of her Junior League meetings.”

Ice clinks in his cocktail glass.

“You can just tell her I called,” she says.

It’s the same conversation they’ve always had, each of them trying to get off the phone as quickly as possible.

“I was just remembering that time that you chased the monarch butterfly all the way to the Cooks’ yard.”

Her stomach seizes.

“That was Callie,” she says.

“Oh,” he says, taking a sip. “Why sure. I remember now.”

“Dad.”

“Hmm?”

He’s in his den, she knows, in his beige Eames chair, with his octagonal wooden coaster under his glass, looking out into the dark, toward the cluster of maples between their house and the Millers’ driveway where she and Callie used to play a version of kickball, using the trunks as bases.

“Are you okay?” she asks.

“I’m just fine,” he says.

“Okay,” she says.

“She was such a great kid,” he says. “So much energy all the time.”

Grace closes her eyes. She was the last to see Callie alive. They had been playing Marco Polo in the front yard.

“Dad,” she says, with quiet impatience, frightened by his wistfulness.

“Oh, I know, I know,” he says. “That was a long time ago.”

Grace finds the remains of a bottle of Chianti in the refrigerator, left by the professor. From the smell she knows it has turned but she takes it to the couch anyway.

After a long swill from the bottle, she flips on the TV for the late local news, for any developments.

“Late today, police arrested 19-year-old Emeryville College freshman Charles Raggatt, Jr. for the murder of Sarah Shafer. Shafer, also a freshman at Emeryville, was found stabbed to death and buried in a shallow grave behind a Long Beach condo complex. No word yet on what led investigators to Raggatt.”