But flaws aside, Sherlock Holmes can read people like no other detective. He spent his whole life studying regular people instead of learning how to become a regular person. When he meets Watson, he knows the guy has been an army doctor in Afghanistan by the stiffness of his arm, the tan on his face, and the paleness of his wrists.
I look at Lilian Eugene and try to read her life. Once she had a husband. Now she lives alone, and if she has coworkers or boyfriends or girlfriends over to visit, there sure isn’t any evidence around her apartment. Lil didn’t even have a second chair set out before Jessa and I came, and there are pictures of no one anywhere, unless you count a Garfield calendar tacked up by the wall phone. I think of how she sat on the kitchen floor with her babies, though it physically hurt her to do it. How her clothes were covered in their hair before they walked all over her, like she spends her whole life down there among them. I think of the bobblehead in her car, the Petco bags she lugs her school stuff and cleaning supplies around in, like she’s got an endless hoard of them. The cats are absolutely everything to her, and she doesn’t love them halfway; she loves them hard.
Once Lil had a cousin, and they loved each other enough that even after they lost touch, she was my mother’s emergency contact, the one person Mom trusted to come if she was called. Maybe Lil loved Sidonie Faye hard, that little girl drawing creatures in the tent in Fitchburg, the girl she shared her family with. Then Mom slipped away, called her once for money and never again, and Lil closed all that love up and put it away like a book on a shelf. So I come around after all this time and she acts like we’re strangers, even if we’re connected by something as everything-and-nothing as blood. I almost wouldn’t believe even that connection, except for Lil’s chin, the tip of an aging heart.
“Okay. Thanks for your help, Lil.”
“If I could tell you more, I would. But by the time she left your daddy, I didn’t really know her anymore.”
A stray thought stops me in the doorway. “Hey, did she ever say anything about marrying Dad? Whether they were, or were planning to, or anything?”
Lil looks surprised. “I guess I always thought they had gotten married. Like I said, we weren’t close at all, not at that point. I was shocked she called me up when she left. But she did talk about getting married, once. In the beginning, when she first came back. Sid said she could see herself happy, and if she and your daddy tied the knot, she wanted to do it on the same date they’d met. Their anniversary, kind of. She thought it’d be romantic, on account of the holiday. I told her sure, though secretly I thought that was strange, because that was the same day she went to claim Siobhan’s body.”
“And that day . . . was it Valentine’s Day?”
“Yes, 1995, that would’ve been.” Lil blinks at me. “Why, that day mean something to you?”
NINE
It’s not that my dad is superstitious, but . . . he does like to find the meaning in things.
He claims it’s because he tells stories. That it’s the job of a writer—even writers of popular medical mysteries—to sift through random events and watch patterns emerge, like finding constellations in a giant star-speckled sky. Maybe that’s why he doesn’t write during the bad times. He once said in a session with Lindy that things seem meaningless in the bad times, and how can he write if he can’t find meaning?
In the spring at the very end of seventh grade, Dad and I were brainstorming a place for our two-man family vacation. It was his idea, a “you survived middle school, now gird your loins for high school” adventure, he called it. We were at the Subway on East Main, in our traditional front corner booth farthest from the bathroom, eating our traditional Spicy Italian on flatbread and Chicken and Bacon Ranch Melt, which we enjoyed at least twice weekly. (Dad wasn’t so much of a cook before Lindy came around.) On the greasy-skating-rink table, there was an ad for Subway’s new Santa Fe Wrap. While we ate, Dad scribbled a list of possible places on the back of the ad. Niagara Falls, he said. The Grand Canyon, he said. Hawaii, I said, which he dutifully wrote down as: Hawaii (yeah right). When our sandwiches were reduced to lettuce shreds he tucked the ad in his jacket and we headed out. We then proceeded to the parking lot, where we had to squeeze our slightly fatter selves around a Hyundai Santa Fe that’d parked too close to Dad’s truck, forcing him to shovel me through the driver’s side.
As we backed out, Dad braked to stare at the back of the Hyundai, then plucked out the Subway ad, and with an alligator clip he had me fish from the glove box, clamped it to his sun visor like a postcard. “What do you think, Immy? Santa Fe, New Mexico. Purple mountains? The Rio Grande? Big sunsets? Saloons? The Wild West!”
I buckled in. “Because of a sandwich wrap?”
“Because of a wrap and an SUV. The stars are aligned.”