COULD IT BE? Surely it wasn’t him, I told myself as I sat in my cubicle that afternoon. There could easily be five men named Clive Richardson—ten, two dozen—in the five boroughs, never mind that I had no reason to believe that the man who had been a suspect in my sister’s death was in New York in the first place. I stared at the manuscript for “the new Mann” on my computer, unable to think, let alone work, for the rest of the day. At five-thirty on the dot, I fled.
Back in my studio I sat on my bed beneath the harsh light of the bare bulbs. It wouldn’t be accurate to say I was thinking about what to do. I had not been thinking when I left my phone in the taxi and I was not thinking now. It was more like I was waiting for my body to writhe into instinctive action and carry me along with it. I ate a few bites of my salad. I sat and felt the time drip. Then I dug a handful of quarters from the change jar on my desk, ran out of my studio and up the stairs, and went out into the evening in search of a working pay phone.
I hadn’t used a pay phone since I was a middle schooler calling my parents for a ride home in Pasadena. I couldn’t recall the last time I’d noticed a pay phone in New York, but it turned out there was one not a five-minute walk from my apartment. Apparently I had been walking past it for over a year without noticing it, and though rationally I knew it had been there all along, that in the city one’s mind renders much of the detail in the landscape invisible out of necessity, still, in that moment, I had the uncanny impression that this sorry-looking kiosk spackled with bird droppings and gum and Sharpie graffiti tags faded as the names on an ancient gravestone, had been planted here just now, for me, to make possible whatever was going to happen. I picked up the phone and heard, to my disbelief, a dial tone. I deposited my quarters and dialed my own number.
The phone rang and rang. I was about to lose my nerve and hang up when a soft voice said hello.
“Hello?” I replied.
“Yes?” the voice said.
“Yes,” I echoed. “Are you the taxi driver? I’m the one who accidentally left this phone in your cab.”
I regretted the word accidentally as soon as I said it. Nobody who had actually left something by accident would bother to say so. It was a tell, a slip. But I was being paranoid. He would take no notice of the word. Why would he?
“My shift begins at five A.M. I could meet you in midtown tomorrow morning to return it.”
“Can I come to you? I’d like to get it tonight if possible. I need it for work.”
I did not need it for work. But the lie flowed seamlessly. I had to see him tonight. I had to—what? I had no plan. I felt only a need to lock eyes with this man, to speak to him, to make something happen and see what it would be.
“That would be possible. But I live in Flatbush.”
“No way!” I said cheerily. “I’m practically your neighbor.”
“Small world,” he said with a (genuine? perturbed?) chuckle. “In that case, there’s a place called the Little Sweet on Church. I can meet you out front if that would be convenient.”
I knew the place; it was one of several popular Caribbean restaurants clustered near the Church Avenue subway stop on Nostrand. I had passed them many times with interest, but I had never gone inside, figuring the people there probably didn’t want people like me encroaching. (Or was this a justification for staying away from places that made me nervous?)
I told him I could be there in fifteen minutes. “I seriously can’t thank you enough,” I said before hanging up. “I’m wearing a blue blouse. I’m Emily.”
AS I made my way to the Little Sweet, I told myself it wasn’t him. Though I could not deny that the voice on the phone had a familiar softness, it simply could not belong to the same Clive Richardson who’d spilled my french fries in the sand all those years ago (chips, he’d called them, and how I’d loved that), the one everybody had called Gogo, the man with whom, along with Edwin Hastie, my sister was last seen alive. I would meet him on the sidewalk and see immediately that his face was all wrong, or that he was too short, or too light- or dark-skinned. I would give him twenty bucks, thank him, and be on my way, and though I might be shaken for a couple of days, my life would quickly snap back to its usual dimensions. Whether I hoped for or dreaded this outcome, I’m no longer sure.
The landscape changed as I walked north and east. Though the building I lived in was run-down and situated on an unlovely block of vacant lots and midrise apartment buildings, it was also not far from the Edison-bulb eateries along Cortelyou Road, from cafés whose menus featured an entire section of “alternative milk” options (soy, almond, cashew) and boutiques where one could purchase a vintage Berber rug or an olive-wood cheese platter for exorbitant sums. I was just a few minutes’ walk from an especially picturesque stretch of Argyle Road, where in the summertime the Victorian mansions with their wide front porches and twilight-hued hydrangeas seemed to have been lifted from some seaside idyll and set down gently on this street in central Brooklyn. Though I prided myself on living beyond such places, it was also true that I found comfort in my proximity to them. As I neared the Little Sweet, I left all of this behind. The signs on the commercial thoroughfares became more urgent: CHECKS CASHED! PLAY NOW! WIRE CASH LOW FEE!
By the time I reached my destination, the sky was dingy pink, darkness touched by neon storefronts. The Little Sweet was a take-out spot with half a dozen tables, a long steam table behind the counter, and an illuminated menu with stock photos of combination platters hanging above it. It was located between a MoneyGram and a Chinese takeout called Hunan Star, across the street from a West Indian grocery and a discount shop with a hodgepodge of merchandise on the sidewalk: coolers and pushcarts and mop heads, reflective vests and nursing scrubs. Farther down the block, a Creole and English bookstore transmitted ESL recordings into the night: I run to the house. She bakes a cake. He goes to sleep.
I stood in front of the narrow storefront and tried to appear occupied. I put a twenty-dollar bill in my pocket to give to the man as a reward. I cleaned out my handbag, disposing of fistfuls of receipts and a cough drop that had been floating loose in my bag, stuck with grit and lint. It had not been necessary to specify what I was wearing. I was the only white person here, with the exception of a man about my age, bearded and man-bunned, who sat at a table in the center of the Little Sweet and alternated between eating and drawing in a sketch pad.
When I saw Clive Richardson coming up the sidewalk I knew at once it was him. It was his walk. The hunched shoulders, the bowed head. He moved like he thought he took up too much space and was sorry. I clenched my jaw to quell the chattering of my teeth and willed myself to be still.
In a flash I saw my parents. They would be sitting down now to one of their abstemious locavore dinners in their kitchen in Pasadena. I imagined them seeing me seeing Clive Richardson on this sidewalk in Brooklyn. I felt them reaching out, pulling me back into the safe, blind world our family had inhabited all these years, our aftermath of SoCal sunshine and ceramics and racket sports. Forget my phone. Turn around. Run straight home and don’t look back. That’s what they would want me to do.
“Emily?”
I nodded. I couldn’t raise my eyes to look at him.
“I hope you didn’t wait long.”
“Not long at all.”
He pulled my phone from his pocket.
“Thank you so, so much. You just have no idea how much I appreciate this.” I held out the twenty-dollar bill to him.
“I can’t accept this.” He spoke softly, as if worried his refusal would offend me.
“Please take it,” I implored.
“I would prefer not to.”
“You’re sure?”
“Yes, miss.”
Miss.
I looked up and for the first time our eyes met. Clive Richardson must have been at least forty now, and he looked it—his hair had already started to go white and his forehead was deeply lined. My body trembled. My jaw was clenched so tightly it would ache later. At the same time, my mind spasmed as it tried uselessly to understand that this ordinary man standing before me in a windbreaker and black loafers was him.
I tucked the money back in my pocket. “Well.”
We stared at one another awkwardly. The moment was lifting away from me. Could it be that I would do nothing? That I would simply let him leave? But what else could I do? Even as I wondered this I was saying, “Thanks again. I really appreciate it,” and Clive Richardson was telling me it was nothing, and I was wishing him a good night. The bells on the door of the Little Sweet jingled as he opened it and stepped inside. I turned and hurried down the sidewalk. My eyes filled with hot, stinging tears. It had happened too fast. I hadn’t been ready, had missed my chance. My chance for what, exactly, I wasn’t sure, but I was filled with the sense that I’d failed to capitalize on this extraordinary convergence and, more than this, with a sense that this failure was at the center of who I was—a person who let things slip through her hands.
THAT NIGHT I dreamed I walked out of my apartment to find that a stone staircase had opened up in the middle of the sidewalk, leading down. Only the first few steps were visible. After that, the staircase disappeared into the darkness below the city. The stairs went on and on, and I walked for what felt like an eternity in the pitch-black, step, step, step, down and down and down, until I found myself standing on a beach. White sand, curving palms, mint waters. It had been here all along—this place, this past, waiting only for me to return. (In the dream I knew without having to know that I was Clairey again, a child.) Some distance from me, standing at the water’s edge, her ankles lapped by the gentle waves, was Alison. She was turned away from me, staring out. When I reached her, she looked down at me and smiled, and I smiled back. She raised a finger to her lips. Shh. Don’t tell. She tossed back her head and laughed.
I awoke drenched in sweat and full of self-recrimination—I hardly ever dreamed of Alison and I’d ruined it, expulsed myself from the dream prematurely. For the first time in months, I took out the photographs from the shoe box under my bed. I needed to tell her what had happened to me and how helpless I’d felt as I thanked Clive Richardson and walked away. All this time, he had been right here. How was it possible that I hadn’t known it, sensed it?
There she was, nut-brown from the sun and grinning at dinner with a giant red lobster on her plate. Singing at the beach barbecue. Smiling beside me beneath that faded blue umbrella. My, you a patient child. The photos felt volatile, as if they might burst into flame in my hands. There she was on a paddleboard, clinking glasses with my mother, listening to her Walkman in the shade. There she was leaning against a palm tree in her bikini, hands on hips, salt in her hair, looking off down the beach. My father had taken this picture. I remembered watching Alison pose for him. Now, looking at the photograph for the thousandth time, I saw something I’d never noticed before. Down the beach, so far in the background their bodies were nothing but tiny, blurred silhouettes, were Edwin Hastie and Clive Richardson.
I perceived something else, too. A distance in Alison’s eyes. It was as if she saw Faraway Cay in her mind’s eye and knew that, in the subtext of each moment, as we swam and giggled and tried to tie knots in the stems of maraschino cherries with our tongues, she was moving through the becalmed cerulean water toward it. It occurred to me that maybe I hadn’t known my sister very well at all.
AT WORK the next day I was distracted and unsettled. I reread the same sentence over and over without grasping its meaning. The photograph my father took of Alison gnawed at the edges of my mind. For whom had she really been posing?
Eventually I gave up on work. Instead, I opened Facebook and searched for Clive Richardson. There were dozens of profiles, but eventually I found the one I was looking for. His profile picture was a selfie blurred by a burst of light from a lamp behind him. He was not active on the site—he had posted no other photos and had only two friends. The first was a man named Ousseini. This man did have an active social media presence; his timeline was filled with family photos and inspirational quotations set against backdrops of sunsets and mountains. Clive’s only post was a birthday message to his one other friend, a man named Bryan Richardson. The post was several years old and was written the way people who do not understand Facebook write messages: Dear Bryan, Wishing you a very happy birthday. Sincerely, Clive. Presumably, Bryan Richardson was a relative, though he looked nothing like Clive—he was tall and slender; in his profile picture he wore a trim-cut suit and sat at a keyboard, his hands touched down lightly over the keys.
Edwin Hastie had no profile. A Google search for his name turned up nothing but old articles about Alison’s case.
Next, I typed “Alison Thomas” into Google and the autocomplete options popped up:
Alison Thomas murder
Alison Thomas Dying for Fun
Alison Thomas obituary
I had never read my sister’s obituary. I was too young to have read it when it came out, and in more recent years, when I might easily have found it online, I hadn’t looked for it. Not that it hadn’t occurred to me. But I had absorbed a lesson from my parents not to permit myself to plunge into the depths. I clicked on the link and found the brief notice that had been published by our local suburban paper.
Alison Brianne Thomas, 18, died January 3rd, on a family vacation to the island of Saint X. She was born September 8, 1977, to Richard (Rick) and Ellen (Wolfe) Thomas.
Alison was a talented performer and athlete who loved modern dance, swimming, tennis, and the great outdoors. A budding scientist, she had aspirations toward a career in medicine and had just completed her first semester at Princeton. While her life was cut far too short, she lived every moment to its very fullest and gave so much joy to her family and friends.
She is survived by her parents and younger sister, Claire, as well as grandparents Sylvia, Edward, Jean, and Fred, and great-grandmother Helen.
A life, pared down to what were at once its most essential and meaningless facts. I was surprised to read that Alison had “aspirations toward a career in medicine.” I had no memory of my sister expressing any desire to become a doctor. Come to think of it, I didn’t remember her expressing an inclination toward any particular professional path at all. Maybe I’d simply been too young to attend to those aspects of her life, but I didn’t think so. Something about this line rang false. Who had written the obituary? My father, presumably. Maybe he wished to suggest to the world that my sister was more directed, more fully formed, than she really was. Here was a girl with plans! But I think something deeper was at play: with this brief mention of Alison’s “aspirations,” she became not just an eighteen-year-old girl but also a medical student, a resident, a fellow, chair of Pediatric Cardiology at Brigham and Women’s. Aspirations toward a career in medicine. A false claim, and a necessary one. To mourn a budding physician was a terrible task, but it was a thing you could do. To mourn a girl with infinite futures was to mourn infinitely.
WHAT IS the neurological experience of a person? When you think of someone, what sound, image, scent is summoned? For instance, in my mind, my father is forever bent over his African violets in our garden in Pasadena, inspecting them for aphids. My childhood friend Kelsey Johnston is the hyper-particular hammy odor of her farts. Aunt Caroline is gray roots at the nape of a long, graceful neck.
Alison is flowers and white teeth. I know where this image comes from. The high school dance recital, Alison’s senior year. She wore a dove-gray leotard and a flowing chiffon skirt and leapt across the stage. I don’t know the name of the song she danced to, but I remember its melancholy sound. Watching her was like watching the music itself spin and bend through the air. How deeply I felt her feeling it, infusing the auditorium with a snowy perfume of longing. I remember sitting there, watching the other people in the audience watching her. My sister. Mine.
Afterward, in the auditorium lobby, my parents and Drew McNamara and her friends piled bouquets into her arms. She wore glitter on her cheeks. She grinned. Flowers and white teeth.
This was a child’s version of a person. My parents’ version of Alison was different but, it occurred to me now, no more accurate. When they spoke of her, it was not to reminisce about the past, but to imagine her into the present.
Of the mandarin tree that grew in our tiny yard in Pasadena:
“Alison would have loved this.”
“She would have eaten the fruit right here under the tree.”
At times, their invocations struck me as almost willfully inaccurate.
At Yellowstone, beholding Old Faithful:
“Alison would have thought this was so neat.”
Would she really? Alison had never been one to be especially impressed.
In my parents’ version, Alison was buffed like a piece of sea glass, her edges and points worn away over time and yielding to a pleasing smoothness.
THAT EVENING I once again traveled to the Little Sweet, drawn there as if by a spell. As I neared my destination, the racing of my heart became almost unbearable, but I did not turn back. I had to find him. I could not let him disappear. Still, I didn’t expect to actually come upon him, and when I arrived and looked through the plate-glass and saw him, seated at a table in the corner beside a potted palm, a plate of crimson stew and a blue can of beer on his tray, I had the sense that this image was not, could not be, real. He sat with his shoulders hunched, his legs squeezed awkwardly beneath the small table, casting off an aura of both physical and metaphysical discomfort.
I lingered only a moment outside, terrified that he would lift his head and see me. Then I crossed the street. Hidden by the shadow beneath the awning of the West Indian grocery, I watched him. From the speakers of the bookstore down the street, a lesson on daily tasks reverberated. They drive to work. I go to the store. He comes home. Clive ate his meal in slow, distracted bites while he watched what I assumed must be a television on the wall, out of my view. He finished his beer and purchased another. He nodded a wordless hello to a fellow customer. With a paper napkin he kept crumpled in his fist, he wiped the crimson stew from his lips. Ordinary actions, objectively of no interest. I couldn’t look away.
BACK AT my apartment later that night, I found Dying for Fun: Alison Thomas on YouTube. In it, my sister is played by Selena Richter, an actress who, a decade later, would rise to superstardom when she played the heroine in a trilogy of dystopian films based on a popular book series. Someone had posted each episode in the series: Kristin Broekner, Maggie Donohue, Flora Salter, Alicia Madigan. I changed into my pajamas and got in bed with my laptop to submit myself to Dying for Fun: Alison Thomas (Selena Richter in Early Role!!!).
The episode had been viewed some 47,000 times and received approximately 2,400 thumbs-up and 650 thumbs-down. (Whether these “dislikes” were meant to indicate disapproval of the quality of the film, or of Selena Richter, or of the dated anti-feminism and clunky moral suasion of the entire Dying for Fun enterprise, I don’t know.) The comments section was no more illuminating:
OMG I loved this when it aired and watching it now is a blast from the freaking past.
This is ’90s AF.
Selena Richter = overrated.
I can’t even with those platform shoes.
Selena Richter looked nothing like my sister. She was voluptuous and busty, while Alison’s body was straight and athletic. Her portrayal of Alison featured an entire register of all-wrong sounds: squeals of delight, giggling fits, the occasional deployment of a pouty-lipped baby voice. She had none of Alison’s bristle, no flash of intelligence in her swimming-pool-blue eyes. I appeared in a few scenes, though for some reason I was called Katie. I was played by an angelic child with golden ringlets and rosebud lips. When Alison’s body was found, Katie cried harrowing, captivating tears, and I felt like some failed version of what Alison’s sister should have been.
According to Dying for Fun, my sister was a sheltered girl lured to her death by tactics only a total naïf would fall for. For simplicity’s sake, I assume, Clive Richardson and Edwin Hastie had been streamlined into a single character named Apollo, with dreadlocks and a gold hoop earring.
“I’ve never done a body shot before. Won’t you show me how?” Alison implores Apollo in an early scene.
“First ya must be lickin’ da salt wit ya tongue,” Apollo says.
Alison gets down on her knees and licks a line of salt from his muscled abdomen. She looks up at him with guileless eyes and giggles.
In this version, my sister lies bathed in moonlight on a beach that appears made of stardust and allows Apollo to unzip her dress.
“Relax,” he says with blatantly evil eyes. (The acting is uniformly one-note and overblown.)
“I want you to be my first,” she whispers into his ear. She flushes and pants as if shocked by her own arousal; she is a pale pink peony, poised on the edge of blooming. “Don’t you dare be gentle with me.”
He presses his hands over my sister’s nose and mouth. She struggles. He thrusts. The whole thing slouches to its terrible conclusion as a thousand housewives squeeze their pillows.
“I gon’ be ya last.”
I COULDN’T sleep that night. I kept replaying the final moments from the movie in my head. Only instead of Apollo, I imagined Clive Richardson, as I had seen him earlier that evening, transposed into each scene—laying her in the sand, unzipping her dress, smothering her with the same hands he’d used to wipe the stew from his lips. Could he have done it? Could he have played a part? Apollo was an obvious cliché, not a person but simply a murderer. But the man I had observed earlier that night evinced no coldness or cruelty at all, and this chilled me to the bone. Yes, of course he could have done it. You see a mug shot on TV and think, Him? But he has such a kind face. But his eyes are so gentle. Nannies drown children they cared for lovingly for years. Perfect couples become a husband who shot a wife. We see so little of people. We forget how much submerged darkness there is around us at every moment. We forget until we are forced to remember.
OVER THE week that followed, I watched the remaining episodes of the Dying for Fun series. I had felt guilty for ignoring the other girls. But I admit I also watched at least partly for the same reason anybody else would, for the trashy, low-fi, comically dated pleasure of it. I’d been aware of their stories to varying degrees when they happened. Perhaps you remember them, too. Maggie Donohue (Thailand, Ecstasy, a dalliance with an Aussie on his gap year). Kristin Broekner (Mykonos, an entanglement with the scion of a Russian oil baron). Flora Salter’s story captured the American imagination for a few weeks’ time, owing to its tragic outcomes—the apartment set ablaze in Montmartre, the suicide of that handsome young tennis phenom. Maggie. Kristin. Flora. Alicia (whose name was pronounced like satin ribbon—A-lee-see-a). What is the appeal of such stories? You know the kind I’m talking about. All the pretty dead white girls. The one backpacking in Eastern Europe and the one at the full moon festival in Bali and the blossom-cheeked blonde in Aruba. You see their photographs on the evening news. They wear graduation caps or prom dresses or a peasant blouse and a wreath of white flowers—it’s Halloween and they’re the darnedest little hippie you ever did see. You hear the eyewitness interviews. “I saw her get on the back of his motorbike.” “I think she was on something.” “She always had to be the life of the party.” You think how stupid it was of them, whatever they did to end up as they did. You feel a bit indignant, actually. You see their honey-blond hair, their red ringlets, their auburn ponytail frozen mid-swish in the photographs, their blue, green, caramel eyes, and always, a smile so blunt it’s like they don’t have even the faintest notion that anything bad could ever happen to them. You find them naïve and smug. Maybe they are. Maybe Alison was.
DURING THIS same period, I walked to the Little Sweet every evening. Now that I had found Clive, it was simply not possible to stay away. He was always there, and he always sat at the same table, in the corner beside the potted palm. I would watch him from the shadow beneath the awning of the grocery across the street for as long as I felt I could without becoming conspicuous. Then I would loop the block a few times, slowing my pace as I passed the Little Sweet. I would duck into one of the nearby stores. Browse the GED prep guides at the bookstore as if they held genuine relevance for me. Peruse the unfamiliar produce in the grocery store—cassava, turmeric root, dasheen—and smile periodically at the elderly Korean couple behind the counter, purchasing a pack of gum on my way out to justify my presence.
Over these nights of observation, my inchoate need to keep tabs on Clive Richardson, to bear witness to his presence, coalesced and sharpened into a sort of plan. I would uncover everything I could about Alison, searching for clues with which to build a portrait of my sister—her emotions and relationships, the dramas and preoccupations of her life, anything that might help me to understand the kinds of dangers to which she might have been vulnerable at the time of our vacation. And I would continue to surveil Clive, watching and waiting for even the smallest detail, the tiniest slip of evidence that might point me toward the truth about the kind of man he was and the role he might have played in my sister’s death. What this evidence might look like I didn’t know, but I had to believe that a person couldn’t take a life and simply melt back into the human crowd—such an act must leave traces, scars, and if I was vigilant, if I could attune myself to this man, I would find them.
I shared none of this with my parents. I told myself I was protecting them. But looking back, I think the real reason I didn’t tell them is because I knew that if I did, they would make me promise not to seek Clive out anymore, for my own safety, and I would do as they asked because I always did as they asked, and because it still would have been possible for me to loosen my grip on him then, in the fall, in a way it no longer would be by the time winter came. I would be relieved, their concern just the permission I needed to leave it alone, to go back and continue living my life as if Clive Richardson were not living his just a few blocks east. I could no longer abide such cowardice in myself. I saw clearly now that cowardice is what it was, what it always had been—our nice family life, so remarkably functional, so totally cut off from the depths of our own pain. It fell to me. If my parents could not, would not, then I must inhabit the depths alone to uncover the truth, no matter what.