She springs, but she hesitates slightly, doesn’t push off with the legs of a ten-year-old but with legs that have been told what they are until she believes it.
She knows, in the way you always know, in any bad fall, that the earth is rising for you, and she manages to twist. Not to right herself, but to turn like a barbershop pole so it’s the back of her head that hits the pool rim. And not even the outer rim, but the inner one, the one under a few centimeters of water. Her head leaves no dent; her blood billows through the water in faint pink clouds.
She struggles a minute, drifting in and out of consciousness. She can’t pull herself out but she follows the lane line to the shallow end, draping herself on the green and gold rings, nestling them under her chin, slipping under, coming up, slipping under, coming up on the far side, but now something has her hair, something’s pulling her head back and down, and the easiest thing, the only thing, is to sleep.
20
After our interview, Britt had sent me a link to a YouTube video from a man named Dane Rubra. He had a whole channel, in fact, that seemed to be ninety percent about Thalia. At two a.m., suddenly wide awake, I decided I could enter this particular rabbit warren for exactly one hour, after which I’d sleep.
Dane Rubra looked, and I’m putting this gently, like he hadn’t seen the sun or eaten a vegetable or gotten laid in a decade. A pastier Norman Bates with stringier hair and doughier cheeks. According to his first video, which I had to scroll to find, he was “between jobs” when he first saw the Dateline special, and he had an epiphany, felt he could contribute.
When he said Thalia’s name, oozed over the vowels, I felt the skin on my neck tighten. He was about my age, and I imagined he fancied that if only he and Thalia had crossed paths, he could have saved her, bedded her, won her love.
He showed a yearbook photo of Puja Sharma and said, “This one wasn’t as pretty as her friend, and you have to think, that could have been a source of jealousy. Miss Sharma is a real possibility here. Someone we can never question, unfortunately.” I nearly slammed my laptop shut at that one, at the gall, the wrongheadedness, the slime. Puja might have been a hanger-on—might have used Thalia’s kindness as entry into the crowd that spent Feb Week at Mike Stiles’s ski house, that went to the Vineyard on long weekends—but she was devastated by Thalia’s death. Two weeks afterward, Puja took off on foot in the middle of the night, walking the roadsides until police picked her up two towns over, muddy and disoriented. She was sent home to London, and we never saw her again. Her overdose two years later at Sarah Lawrence—I always wondered if it was related.
Every time this guy said Robbie Serenho’s name, jealousy crossed his face like a moth. He believed Robbie knew something, thought Robbie was “an entitled boarding school prick” with a “suspiciously airtight alibi.”
In one video, he manages to get Robbie on the phone. Calling his office, he pretends to be a Granby alumni liaison looking for updated information. He gets Robbie to give his home address, which he’s mercifully bleeped out of the video. Then he asks Robbie who else from the class of ’95 he’s in touch with. “We have so many missing addresses,” he says. “Would you still be in communication with someone named Angela Parker?” Robbie says no. “How about”—and here Dane pretends to struggle with the pronunciation—“Thalia Keith?”
Robbie says, “Ah, she—Thalia Keith passed away in 1995.”
“Oh!” Dane says. “I’m sorry to hear that. I just started working here, and that’s not in our records.”
Robbie says, “That’s odd. Yeah, you should cross her off your list.”
Dane says, “Can you tell me more about that? More details? I’d love to update our files.”
There’s a pause, Robbie catching on. He says, “I’m hanging up now.”
I first met Robbie when we were put in the same freshman orientation group, playing games on the quad in groups of twelve, trying to knock pegs down with Frisbees. There were kids who made Frisbee look like ballet. I didn’t know how to throw one (who would have taught me?) and was initially mortified. But Robbie, with no patronizing, showed me how to throw the disc. He was patient, called me by my name, which no one else had bothered learning yet.
You have to understand: He wasn’t a ski star till it snowed. In August, he was just another new arrival—a semicute one, symmetrical and clear-skinned in the manner of adolescent TV stars. Dark hair, nose upturned, chin sharp. That tattered Red Sox cap. The only way to see the ski team compete was to take the fan van and stand for hours in the snow, which would be awkward if you weren’t dating a skier. But we all absolutely knew who was good, and by winter of freshman year we’d seen Robbie’s picture in the Sentinel, goggled and helmeted, shredding the mountain.
By the time Thalia started dating him, late in the fall of junior year, he had a reputation for being a player, for callously breaking hearts, for drunkenly crashing Ronan Murphy’s car over Thanksgiving break.
He wasn’t a perfect boyfriend. He sat back and laughed as Dorian Culler told “Thalia jokes,” which were retellings, essentially, of dumb blonde jokes, but with Thalia as the punch line. (“What did Thalia say when she found out she was pregnant? I wonder if it’s mine.”) Thalia screamed at Robbie one night, in the dining hall, for not stopping his friend, not standing up for her.
Robbie wasn’t mean to anyone; it was more that he tended to pass through the halls like a Zamboni, gliding straight ahead and expecting everyone to move out of his way.
It made me proud that he’d been kind to me right off the bat, that we’d always been cordial. He didn’t have time for everyone. But once, unprompted, he’d been kind to me.
I left a comment under the video: Robbie was nicer than you think. And Thalia never would have dated you.
21
I’m not sure I fully slept after that. My phone pinged with a text from Jerome at seven (the crack of dawn in LA) asking the dosage for Leo’s anxiety medicine. I had the CVS app, so I brought the prescription up and screenshotted it back to Jerome, who absolutely had the same app and could have done this himself.
A minute later he FaceTimed from his laptop. I was ready to answer some question about where the pharmacy was, but the Jerome on the screen was a mess. His eyes were red, his silver hair sticking up in sweaty sprigs.
I said, “Have you not even been to bed yet?”
I watched him sink into his giant leather chair. If he’d been about to give me bad news about the kids, he’d have been panicked, not resigned. This was something else—but still, I climbed back in bed, pulled the covers over my bare legs. I said, “What?”
Jerome said, “You really haven’t been on Twitter, have you. Oh, Jesus. So, I think I’ve been, ah—I got canceled, as they say.”
It took a moment to register, and I doubted he was using the term correctly. I asked where the kids were (still asleep) and then I said, “What did you do?”
“Well. Fifteen years ago.” His eyebrows rose, as if this detail alone should get me on his side. “When I was living in Denver.”
This was right before we’d met. I nodded, wished he could simply hand me a write-up of the whole fiasco so I could skim to the end.
“I was showing at Peter’s old gallery.”
Peter Boll was someone I could see getting canceled. He had a vibe.
“And there was—you know, we used to call them gallery girls. Probably not okay to say anymore. There was a young lady working as Peter’s assistant.”
I said, “Jerome, what did you do?”