“No,” Alice says. “Greece has extradition. It would have to be Venezuela or North Korea.”
We work our way up the mountain road, past estates and pastures. Around every turn, if you look carefully, you can see a grand house hiding in the woods. Woodside is just Hillsborough with horses. The road goes on and on. Alice doesn’t say a word, even as I identify the address and turn up the long driveway. While this place is not quite on the level of the mansion in Hillsborough, it is impressive. Gene, our host, is an architect, and it shows. Globe lights line a path up to the main structure, a tall, wide sculpture of a house. When they invented the phrase real estate porn, this is what they had in mind.
I pull into a spot at the end and kill the engine. Alice sits there for a moment, her eyes closed. “I might need another beer.”
“No,” I say.
She frowns.
“You’ll thank me later.”
“Bastard.”
We exit the car and stand for a minute, both awed by the beauty of the house and the maze of a path leading up to it. We stand at the edge of the path for a full minute, holding hands, not speaking. It’s very possible that we are on the wrong path; unfortunately, turning around is not an option.
45
In hindsight, I suppose it was fast: Alice and I had only known each other for a little over a year when we decided to purchase a house together. Buying property in San Francisco, of course, is insanely difficult. Alice and I spent less than twenty minutes in the house before we offered a million and change, with 20 percent down, no contingencies. That was a couple of years ago, when houses were still “attainable.”
Months after moving in, I noticed a power line going up and under one of the walls in the garage. It puzzled me, so I pulled back on all of the plywood, one piece at a time. At first I was just expecting to find the innards of the wall, electrical stuff, whatever. But there, behind the plywood, was a tiny room, complete with a chair in the middle and a built-in desk. On the desk there was a packet of photos. They appeared to have all been taken on a family vacation to Seattle in the 1980s. How could we not have known about the secret room when we first moved in?
I think of Alice that way sometimes. I keep searching for the small, hidden mystery. Usually, Alice is exactly who I think she is, but every now and then, when I’m really paying attention, I find that hidden room.
She doesn’t talk about her family, so I was surprised recently when she commented about a trip her father had taken. The television was on, an old episode of Globe Trekker, and the hosts were working their way through the Netherlands. “Amsterdam’s a great city,” she said, “but I can never get out of my own head when I’m there.”
“Why?”
She told me about how, soon after her mother died, her brother joined the Army. I don’t know much about the brother, beyond the fact that in his teens he suffered depression and became an addict, demons that plagued him until his suicide in his early twenties. Alice told me that no one had expected him to enlist, and that it seemed absurd that the Army would let him in, with his documented history of depression. Alice’s father went to see the recruiter and tried to talk him out of it, explaining all the reasons why it was a terrible idea. But the recruiter had quotas, and once he had gotten the signature, it was clear that he wasn’t letting go of the stat.
Alice’s brother shocked the whole family by making it through basic training. They were proud of him but worried when he was shipped off to Germany. “I told my father maybe it was a good thing,” Alice said. “Maybe it would straighten him out. And my father just gave me a look like I was an idiot. ‘There is no magic cure for things,’ he said.” Ten weeks later, when the family got the call that Alice’s brother had gone AWOL, no one was really surprised.
“So close on the heels of my mother’s death,” Alice said, “Brian’s disappearance struck my dad and me like a ton of bricks. When I woke up the next morning, my father was gone too. He left me some cash, a fully stocked kitchen, the keys to the car, and a note saying that he’d gone to find Brian. The world seemed enormous to me then, and so the idea that my father was just going to wander around, expecting to find Brian, seemed crazy.”
Alice’s father called her that night. And every night for the next three weeks. When she asked where he was, he would simply say that he was finding Brian. Then one night he didn’t call. “I cried,” Alice told me. “I’d never cried like that before, and I’ve never cried like that since. I’d lost my mother and my brother, and now I thought I’d lost my father too. You have to understand, I was seventeen. I felt so alone.”
The next day, she didn’t go to school. She stayed home, miserable on the couch, watching TV, not sure what to do or whom to call. She made macaroni and cheese for dinner and was eating in the kitchen, over the stove, when she heard a taxi pull up. She raced to the window.
“It was crazy,” Alice told me. “I see my father get out one side, my brother get out the other. They come in, and we all sit down and eat the mac and cheese.”
Alice said that she always assumed that Brian had gone back to the Army and her father had gotten him discharged. It wasn’t until years later that she learned the amazing truth. Her father had spent those three weeks wandering around Amsterdam, hundreds of miles from where Brian had last been seen—going to cafés, hostels, train stations, wandering around at night looking for him. Her brother and father had always had an intense connection, like her father could almost read Brian’s mind, Alice said. Although Brian had never been to Amsterdam, somehow their father just knew that he would be there, knew exactly where to look.
When Alice told me the story, it felt like that mystery room in our garage. It resonated and made me see Alice in a new light. Brian was obsessive, driven in all the wrong ways, the world outside fading as he pursued something only he could see. Alice’s father, unwilling to accept that his son was gone, was equally obsessive, undeterred in his unlikely search. The genetic foundation of Brian’s illness certainly began somewhere. It was the full spectrum of obsessive behavior, both the best and the worst of it, all in one family. Seen in that light, Alice’s obsessive need to succeed at any pursuit, to follow a plan through to the very end, no matter where it might lead, somehow makes sense.
46
I take Alice’s arm in mine and we walk up the lit path. The trail winds through a grove of fragrant trees that end at the entrance to the majestic home. Glass, wood, steel beams, polished concrete, indoor-outdoor living, a pool, and an unexpected view out across Silicon Valley.
“Nice house,” Alice says, deadpan.
Gene steps out through the massive, heavy front door. “Friends.”