The Decent Proposal (30 page)

“Our neighbors did what they could. They helped us look, and pray, and wait. But we never found him. He just disappeared. As soon as I had some real money of my own, the first thing I did was to hire a private investigator. I've hired three of them, actually, the last one a year or two ago. I'm pretty sure he's dead. I know that's what my parents think.”

There was a pause. She knew without looking that her face had acquired the pained, squinty-eyed expression she'd seen on her mother's face so many times before, and which usually meant there were tears on the way. But she also knew she would not cry.

She heard his lips part before he spoke. They sounded dry. She wondered dully why he wasn't drinking any of the water she'd given him.

“Did he have a mole on his forehead?” he asked her. “Above his left eyebrow?”

“Yes,” she said, turning to him, the dread rising inside her. “How did you know that?”

Richard winced. “I think—”

He cut himself off. Elizabeth watched dumbly as he took a few sips from the neglected water bottle before speaking again.

“I think your brother was responsible for Kyle's death,” he said finally. “My best friend from high school. Remember?”

Elizabeth stared at him: petrified, uncomprehending. Eventually Richard took the opportunity of filling the silence with a monologue of his own.

“Kyle was visiting his aunt and uncle in San Diego over spring break. It happened on the Five, and even though he was killed instantly, the driver only had minor injuries. They arrested him at the hospital. He had no license or ID, and he wouldn't tell anyone his name. I remember they guessed he was around nineteen, so it must've been a few years after he ran away. The car he was driving was stolen, too. He was . . . he obviously wasn't in a good place. I guess they never matched him with any missing person cases. The one your parents made was probably long gone by then, or maybe the police never even bothered to make one.

“I told you how I testified at the trial, right? To help put the driver away for as long as possible? He got twenty years to life. Which was a lot, considering he didn't have a record. But I remember the judge making a lot out of the fact that he wouldn't identify himself. She said she was going to have to assume there were prior convictions under his real name. I think it was meant to call his bluff, because that was pretty much a worst-case scenario. But he still wouldn't say who he was. So he got sentenced like he had all these prior felonies, no chance of parole for at least nineteen years. That was thirteen years ago. I can still remember
him staring at me as they read out his sentence, before they took him away. I'm pretty sure he hated me. I know I hated him.

“There was a plaque at the castle today. I think she put it out as a clue. It was for charity work at a prison, and it made me think of him because he's the only person I know, not that I really
know
him, obviously, who went to jail. That's why when you said he ran away—” Richard hesitated. “I mean, maybe it's not him—”

“It's him,” said Elizabeth flatly. It was all so awful, it had the unmistakable ring of truth to it. She supposed she should have been elated that her brother was still alive, but all she could think about was that she'd been responsible for another person's death. She'd always known this, somehow. Even though her lawyer's brain was already arguing that this accident was in no way foreseeable, that her actions were nowhere near proximate enough for legal guilt—she thought of
Palsgraf v. LIRR
, plunging all the way back to first-year torts—there was no question according to her personal code of ethics that she was 100 percent guilty.

“You're probably right. That birthmark would be too much of a coincidence. The only reason I remembered it is cuz I mentioned it in the first sentence of my college essay:
The man who killed my best friend had a large, round, black birthmark approximately one inch above his left eyebrow.
” He paused. “He must've told her about us. About both of us. But I still don't know why she'd go and do all this. There's no way
he
would've wanted it.”

I know why
, thought Elizabeth. Her parents believed their only son was dead, and all that old witch could think about was playing matchmaker. But she guessed Hugo had told Beverly Chambers not to tell his family where he was. If he'd gone this long without contacting them, he probably never wanted to see them again.

Elizabeth had an overwhelming desire to be alone, like an animal that retreats to some dark, solitary place to lick its
wounds in peace. “Thank you for telling me,” she said. Her tone was formal, distant. “It'll help my parents to know, no matter what's happened to him since. So—thank you. For that.”

There. Done. Over. Mystery solved, duty discharged. She'd said what she needed to say.

But this wasn't true. There was a great deal she'd left unsaid. And it was more than the three words that had been repeating themselves in her head over and over again like some ancient, muttered curse ever since they'd left Stan's Castle.

She wanted to tell him she knew what he was thinking: that her teenage views were archaic—backward even—but that there was nothing backward about treating homosexuality as a mortal sin in the L.A. she knew growing up. All their neighbors were Catholic (at least the ones they talked to), and everybody took their faith seriously; her parents proudly gave ten percent of their paltry income to the church, and believed whatever the pope told them to believe. Elizabeth read constantly as a child, but avoided any books the church told her not to read, anything that would have opened her up to a different perspective. The biggest scandal to have touched her till Hugo's disappearance was her parents having only two children. As an addendum to the “birds and bees” talk, her mother explained that after Hugo was born, she'd had a hysterectomy for medical reasons. But people still whispered about them going to hell for interfering with God's plan, and sometimes her schoolmates made her cry about it. She did not know a single self-identifying gay person growing up.

And yet blaming her environment only went so far. Why didn't her sisterly love overpower everything she was taught? Why didn't she embrace Hugo and tell him they'd figure it out together? Why weren't her prejudices and misconceptions washed away, as they were for the heroes and heroines of the stories she loved?

She wanted to explain to Richard that she gave up asking why—that she went to Yale instead of UCLA to get as far away as she could, and that she stopped going to church. That she let her membership in the Young Republicans lapse. That like so many people, she grew up during college. That she read every book the church told her not to read, and that she evolved, her worldview expanded. That she did all she could to separate herself from the girl who bought into the groupthink of religion and politics, which included separating herself from her parents, who were far from bad people—who had in many ways been wonderful parents, but who were so broken from losing one child they actually, in their grief and weakness, allowed their second child to drift away. That when she emerged from this dark period of her life, her “rough patch,” with the help of antidepressants and twice-a-week therapy—both of which she eliminated from her life as soon as she could do so responsibly—she forced herself to move on, because wallowing in the past helped no one. That it took Orpheus entering her life to realize she'd been conflating thinking solely
for
herself with thinking solely
about
herself, and that she was working on this, too. That she would never be done improving herself.

But most of all she wished she had the courage to tell Richard that it wasn't until she got to know him—
really
know him—that she knew what it was to truly desire another person. That even before the incident with Hugo, she worried secretly she was asexual. That she told all her school friends who teased her for being such a good girl that she was too focused on her studies to entertain the notion of a silly teenage “romance,” and that every time her mother thought she was comforting her by saying that crushes were “normal,” and “nothing to be ashamed about” as long as she didn't do anything about them, Elizabeth felt both abnormal and ashamed because she never had an adolescent crush, not even one. That she realized only after it was
too late there was an element of jealousy, of covetousness in her condemnation of Hugo, in her disgust at seeing him with another boy. She wanted to tell Richard that this failure, this lack only deepened in all her years at Yale and NYU—that it took hold of her and became a part of who she was. That it was the same at the firm. That the few men she dated she never saw more than two or three times, and only ever kissed, nothing more. That when she turned thirty she panicked about still being a virgin and picked up—in some sleazy bar—a guy whose name she purposely didn't learn, and used him to deflower herself, except that the process was so mechanical that afterward she felt, outrageously, as if she were
still
a virgin, that she had concluded she would
always
feel like a virgin, and that she had tried to make her peace with this condition by committing to the role of La Máquina, sturdy and implacable. . . . Until him.

She wanted to tell Richard that in the beginning she used to think she'd have her fill of him eventually, that there would come a time when his presence failed to thrill her. And it did; the thrill
did
fade. But it was only because she'd grown used to having him around—not just each week for dinner and conversation, but each second in her thoughts—and if it wasn't a thrill to picture him every time, it was because she could no longer imagine her life without him.

It was fear of losing him that held her back from saying all this, though she knew instinctively this was the time to let it all out, to not lose courage and stop halfway, to tell him
everything
or risk losing him anyway at the end of their year together. The seven months they still had might as well have been seven seconds compared to the eternity she craved. She would gladly have paid back the half a million dollars to ensure their weekly sessions continued for as long as they both were breathing. She would have read any book, watched any movie.

But she couldn't do it. She couldn't say any of it. Maybe she
would find the courage tomorrow, or the next day, though her instincts were telling her it was now or never. . . .
No.
She was done. She looked out at the purple-gray mountains and waited to see what he had to say, if anything. Who knew? It was entirely possible he wanted nothing to do with her now.

RICHARD DIDN'T KNOW
what to say. He knew she'd been keeping something from him about her family, but never would he have guessed it was linked to the one event in his life he could reasonably term a tragedy. He had a million questions for her, but held off. Now was not the time.

He turned, regarding her silently. She was staring at the mountains, and the sunlight was pouring down her back, unlocking the rich, chestnut hue that remained hidden inside her dark brown hair in every other type of light. Sitting there on top of this lonely dune, she looked like the last woman on Earth—or maybe the first. Either way, she was the only woman in the world who undoubtedly belonged here with him, in this unreal landscape, on this unreal day. It seemed impossible to him now that he had ever wanted or looked forward to being free of her, and this made him think of
Tess of the d'Urbervilles
, of all things. During his two sleepless hours in bed that morning, he had actually finished the damn thing, in the hope it would have its usual soporific effect. But
Tess
had moved along in the last hundred pages, and he'd stopped reading only once, to look up a phrase Hardy had quoted from Shakespeare: “love is not love which alters when it alteration finds.” It was meant to be a description of the inferior love of Tess's fickle, unworthy husband, who rejects her when she confesses she isn't a virgin, but at the time Richard hadn't understood it. If someone changed, why wouldn't your feelings about that person change too?
Because it was the perception, not the thing that mattered
, he answered himself now, and the phrase came back to him with unexpected
clarity all the way from their first date at In-N-Out:
you have beautiful eyes.

Richard turned away from her, flashing back to a series of moments radiating outward from that first date: Elizabeth slurping on her milk shake, Elizabeth spilling soy sauce in the excitement of explaining
Ivanhoe
to him, Elizabeth spinning on the dance floor in his arms, Elizabeth asking him to sleep over, Elizabeth in that slightly ridiculous yet undeniably sexy purple dress, Elizabeth checking him out in the rearview mirror while he pretended not to notice, at the tail end of his nap. It was like piecing together clues at the end of a movie with a big twist—
The Usual Suspects
,
The Sixth Sense
—in support of a seemingly impossible conclusion, except that he was cherry-picking because there were other memories too: Elizabeth checking her watch a million times at In-N-Out when she thought he wasn't looking, Elizabeth berating his myopic worldview at Factor's, Elizabeth wanting desperately to go home after being pelted with his
vomit
(this still humiliated him, this would always humiliate him), Elizabeth hating his gift of the size-12 skirt, Elizabeth leaving the premiere immediately after
Fight on a Flight
ended exactly as she said she would, despite his desperate pleas (masked in cowardly irony) for her to reconsider.

Richard tried to picture what she had looked like the first time they met—less than five months ago, and yet a different era—in the lawyer's office in June. The image he managed to conjure actually confused him, because she looked nothing like that to him anymore.
Perception
, he thought.
All perception.