No One You Know Page 7

  The rain was coming down hard, thrashing the trees outside and making everything smell earthy and green. Because the room had no air-conditioning, I had left the window open. A screen kept out most of the rain, but a few drops splashed onto the floor beneath the window.

  McConnell leaned forward. His chair scraped against the floor, and his knee touched mine. Instinctively, I reached into my bag for the tryer. His eyes followed my hand. His expression was pained. “Don’t be afraid of me,” he said. “You have no reason to be afraid. I loved your sister, Ellie. I would never, ever, have done anything to hurt her.”

  I wanted to believe him. For Lila’s sake, I wanted it to be true.

  He stood to leave. In his face, I saw defeat. He must have felt that he would never convince me. “Wait,” I said. “I have one more question.”

  “Hmmm?”

  “Your son, Thomas.”

  “He turns twenty-three this year. A few months after I came to Nicaragua, I called my in-laws. Margaret’s father told me that Margaret had remarried and moved out of state. He wouldn’t tell me her new last name, or where they’d gone. I sent birthday and Christmas cards care of my in-laws’ address up until three years ago, when they began to come back marked ‘wrong address.’”

  “Do you ever think about looking for him?” I asked.

  “Every single day. But at this point, I think that if he wanted to find me, he would have.”

  He picked up his book, his hat. “It’s late. You’ve been kind to listen to me.”

  “Wait,” I said again, but I had nothing with which to stall him. I realized I wanted to hear more about my sister, to reminisce with this man who had known an entirely different side of her. How quickly, in the course of one’s day, the unthinkable can become reality.

  He moved toward the door, placed his hand on the knob, and then seemed to remember something. He dropped his hand and turned to face me. “Did Lila ever tell you about Maria Agnesi?” he asked.

  “Yes, along with the others—Sophie Germain, Olive Hazlett, Charlotte Angas Scott, Hypatia.”

  “Then maybe you recall how Agnesi used to solve problems?”

  I shook my head.

  “According to biographers, Agnesi was a sleepwalker. After laboring over some impossible problem, she would go to bed in defeat. The legend is that when she woke up in the morning she would find the solution on her desk. But I’ve always believed that’s only a pretty myth. I think it was simply that when she woke up the next morning it was a new day, and she was able to see things in a different way.”

  He opened the door and disappeared into the dark hallway. I stood there for several minutes. Part of me believed I must have conjured the whole night from my imagination. Finally I went to the window and parted the curtain. In the distance, I could see his dark silhouette moving slowly down the street in the rain.

  Ten

  THAT NIGHT, AFTER MCCONNELL HAD LEFT, I thought back to the conversation Lila and I had just weeks before she died, the day she tried on the slinky blue dress and told me about her plans to solve the Goldbach Conjecture.

  Every even integer greater than two can be expressed as the sum of two primes.

  Lila had explained the conjecture to me quite plainly. It was part of her ongoing effort to educate me in a subject in which I was hopeless. I think she believed that if she worked on me long enough, she might be able to convince me of the inherent beauty of numbers. I humored her in large part because, by some miracle, she managed to make the stuff seem interesting, something not one of my teachers had ever managed to do. She loved to tell me about the people behind the numbers—Poincaré and Agnesi, Fermat and Ramanujan, Euler and Leibniz and Pascal. While the subject itself was dense and, for the most part, impenetrable, I found the human side of math and all of the stories surrounding it to be fascinating.

  One of the things that makes the Goldbach Conjecture so unique is that, despite the notorious difficulty of finding a proof, its basic terms are actually quite simple. A prime number is a counting number whose only divisors are itself and one. Dividing it by any other number will result in a fraction. While the Goldbach Conjecture is generally assumed to be true, in the two and a half centuries since it was first proposed, no one had managed to prove it. One can say that 4 is the sum of the primes 2 and 2, that 6 is the sum of the primes 3 and 3, or that 8 is the sum of the primes 5 and 3. You can continue making these calculations for months, years, even decades, finding that every positive even integer you encounter fits the conjecture, but no one has come up with a way to prove that no positive even integer exists that is not the sum of two primes. Because the even numbers are infinite, a case-by-case proof is impossible. What is needed is a general proof, an argument that covers every possible even number to infinity. Therefore this simple, elegant, and seemingly true statement—every even integer greater than two can be expressed as the sum of two primes—remained only a conjecture, rather than a solid theorem on which others could be built.

  This, Lila explained to me, is the particular onus of mathematics. Whereas scientific proofs are based upon a body of observations which, taken together, add up to what appears to be overwhelming evidence in favor of a particular hypothesis, scientific theories are not absolute. They are always subject to change. When new evidence comes along that disproves an accepted theory, the theory goes out the window. With science, there is always some degree of doubt.

  Not so with mathematics. In order for something to become a mathematical theory, it must have absolute proof. Once a theory is proved, it is true forever, and the advance of mathematical knowledge is powerless to change it. This means that mathematicians are held to a higher standard of proof than anyone else. Take for example the Pythagorean theorem, that bit of triangle logic that forms the basis of every sixth-grade geometry class. The concept had been used by the Chinese and Egyptians for millennia when it was finally proved by Pythagoras around 500 B.C. More than two thousand years later, it’s still true, and it always will be. For eternity, humans can count on the fact that, in any right triangle, the square of the length of the hypotenuse will be equal to the sum of the squares of the lengths of the other two sides.

  For the past eighteen years, one thing had been firm in my mind: the identity of Lila’s killer. My meeting with McConnell had changed that. What McConnell left me with was a problem. I could believe what he had told me, and allow the story of my life as I knew it to completely unravel. “What is a life but a compendium of stories?” Thorpe had said. Thorpe’s story of Lila’s death had become my own; it was the windowpane through which I had viewed the world for my entire adult life. If I chose to believe McConnell, I must face the possibility that the identity of Lila’s killer would never be known, that the person who truly committed the crime had duped everyone, and had paid no price at all. Or I could go on believing Thorpe’s version of events, in which case there was still no justice for my sister, but at least there was an answer—an answer that made some kind of sense—a story with a beginning, middle, and end.

  Eleven

  THE NEXT DAY, I REPLAYED THE EVENING’S events in my mind—the meeting at the café, the walk to the pensión, the long conversation in my room. In the bright light of morning, the previous night took on the fuzzy contours of a dream. I opened the cupboard beside the bed where I kept the rum. Part of me believed the bottle of rum would be full, the glasses unused; but the bottle was half empty, and the bottoms of the glasses were coated with an amber film. On the white tile floor, the ghostly imprint of McConnell’s big shoes.

  I had breakfast downstairs with José and his wife—strong coffee, fried beans, and bland, warm tortillas. José did not ask about the stranger in my room, but he and his wife looked at me differently. Their usual friendly chatter was replaced by silence. I had the uncomfortable feeling that I had disappointed them by bringing a man to my room—thereby acting out of character—and that I had surprised them in an unsatisfactory way.

  At half past nine a car arrived to take
me to Jesus’s farm. It was sixteen miles along a bumpy, unpaved road, the morning sun beating through the windows. The driver chain-smoked and sang softly to himself, occasionally glancing at me in the rearview mirror. On the seat beside me was my bag, containing only a wallet, a couple of small gifts, and my cupping journal. The latter was a thick, tattered, 8×10 moleskin notebook in which I recorded my impressions of various beans. During my career as a cupper the journal had traveled around the world with me—to Ethiopia, Yemen, Uganda, Brazil, Colombia, Costa Rica, Jamaica, Java, New Guinea. This was my diary of sorts, but instead of people and faces it was filled with detailed notes on aroma and body, acidity and balance. The words associated with cupping were as varied as the coffees, and I found comfort in their simple, precise poetry: a taste described as sweet could be further broken down into piquant, nippy, mild, or delicate, while a sour-tasting coffee was acrid, hard, tart, or tangy. Aromas were dry, sugary, or enzymatic, the latter of which could be further described as flowery, fruity, or herby. A flowery aroma was either floral or fragrant, a fruity aroma was either citrusy or berrylike, and an herby aroma was alliaceous or leguminous. Most people sipping their morning java wouldn’t identify the aromas of onion, garlic, cucumber, or garden peas that characterized the herby coffees, or the cedar and pepper aromas in a spicy coffee of the warming variety—but to me a major part of the joy in drinking a cup of coffee came from noticing these subtle variations.

  In addition to my cupping notes, the margins of the notebook were crammed with descriptions of cupping houses, notes on local customs, names and birth dates of farmers’ children, anecdotes about the time I spent with them. If I were to be struck by a bus, my cupping journal would be the most significant thing I left behind, the record by which a stranger might deduce my personal history.

  When the car stalled three-quarters of the way up the steep mountain road, I thanked the driver, paid him, and set out on foot. Walking always calmed me, the feel of earth beneath my feet and the rhythmic motion of my legs and arms. I happened to agree with Henry David Thoreau on the nature of a good walk: “You must walk like a camel, which is said to be the only beast which ruminates when walking.”

  Behind me I could hear the driver working on his car—metallic clangs that made it sound as though he was tearing it apart, punctuated alternately by cursing and impassioned prayers to the Virgin Mary. Soon I was beyond reach of his voice, and could hear animals rustling about on the forest floor, warblers in the branches, the rat-a-tat-tat of woodpeckers. At this altitude the air was thin; my breaths were short and my lungs felt tight. It helped, at least, that I was in shade, protected from the sun by a canopy of trees. I was on farmland now, less than a quarter-mile from Jesus’s home. The rich aroma of the coffee berries was mixed with the tart, sweet smell of lemon trees and the mild scent of plantains. I heard a familiar, raspy note, a series of bright, slurred whistles, and followed the sound to find the bright yellow underbelly of a Baltimore oriole in the branches above.

  A young girl appeared in the clearing. “Ellie!” she called, running out to me, arms outstretched. It was Rosa, just shy of six years old. I’d known her since she was a baby, and was amazed each time I returned by how much she had changed, her hair styled shorter and shorter, her features becoming more defined year by year. I imagined that by the time she was sixteen she would be all elegant angles, with a stylish bob and starlet bangs. I dropped my bag on the ground and lifted her in my arms.

  “I have something for you,” I said.

  She beamed. “What is it?” she said, eyeing the bag. “A present? Can I open it?”

  “Listen to you! When did you learn English so well?”

  “A lady comes to teach us on the weekends,” she said. “Angel is learning, too.”

  I reached into my bag and pulled out a gift wrapped in bright red paper. It was a leather-bound diary and red pencil, each inscribed in gold with her name. Rosa started to untie the ribbon. “It’s for your birthday,” I said. “Promise you’ll wait until next week to open it.”

  “I promise.” She grabbed my hand. “Come on. Papa’s waiting.”

  When we got to the little house, Jesus was standing on the porch. He came down the stairs and greeted me with a hug. I’d first met Jesus five years before, when Mike and I had traveled to Nicaragua to investigate some of the new co-ops that were beginning to take shape in the country following years of civil war. At the time, Jesus had teamed up with three other small coffee growers to form the Rosa Cooperative. Mike and I had been impressed from the beginning by their commitment to shade crops, and their eagerness to learn about the preferences of specialty coffee buyers in the U.S. Since then, they had invited five other small operations into the fold, and their coffee was gaining a solid reputation.

  Jesus invited me inside, where we talked business over a plate of fried plantains. Occasionally my Spanish faltered, and Rosa stepped in to act as translator. There was a burst of conversation outside. Jesus’s wife, Esperanza, came through the door, Rosa’s little brother Angel at her heels. I caught up with Esperanza and played with the children for a little while.

  When Esperanza left to put Angel down for a nap, I followed Jesus out the back door, across a dirt path to the wooden shed that served as a cupping house. I could hear Rosa behind me, her bare feet padding softly in the dirt. Not once had I seen her in shoes. I remembered her feet when she was a baby, the thin, straight toes. Once, I had seen Esperanza lift her, naked save for a cloth diaper, up into the air and pop the baby’s tiny foot into her mouth. Rosa had laughed and squirmed in her mother’s arms. It was the first time I had felt that maternal pang other women talked about so often—the first time I had actually been inspired to envision myself with a child of my own. Several days later, back home in San Francisco, I had told my boyfriend Henry about Rosa’s little foot, how it fit so perfectly into her mother’s mouth, and how Jesus had beamed with pride when he showed me the wooden cradle he had made for their first child.

  “Soon, that will be us,” Henry had said. I was surprised to realize that the idea wasn’t the least bit frightening. I could imagine the two of us together, standing over a crib, gazing down at a sleeping baby that looked like the best parts of each of us—Henry’s nose and chin, my mouth and dimples.

  In the cupping house, Jesus had set out three samples of fresh-roasted beans. While he ground the beans, I boiled water on a Bunsen burner. Meanwhile, Rosa arranged nine small glasses on the table—three cups for each sample. Jesus scooped a bit of coffee into each one, and I poured in the boiling water. The grounds rose to the surface, and steam lifted off the dark liquid.

  Jesus and I sat on stools on either side of the table. Rosa stood beside her father, both of them watching intently as I began to break the crust with a heavy silver spoon. I loved this part of the cupping process, the way the aroma of the coffee wafted up when the spoon broke through the wet grounds. I closed my eyes and breathed deeply. Then I cleared the grounds off the surface and rinsed the spoon in clean water before I began tasting. For the next few minutes, I was able to put everything else aside, to forget the events of the previous day as the coffee slid over my tongue, down my throat. I rarely spit the coffee out when I was cupping. It wasn’t just the taste and aroma that brought me calm and clarity, but also the way it warmed me going down, and the way I felt for hours after, that sweet rush of energy, followed by the slow descent.

  THAT EVENING, I RETURNED TO MY HOTEL ROOM in Diriomo to find that someone had been there in my absence. At first, upon entering the room, it wasn’t obvious, just a feeling that something was off. Immediately I went to the safe on the floor of the closet and found it locked. I punched my code into the keypad and opened the door to find my passport and spare cash just as I had left them. But when I went to the sink to wash my face, I saw that the basin was wet, and the tiny bar of soap had been unwrapped. By habit, I always wipe down the sink after each use, and I always carry my own soap with me when I travel. I told myself that I must, for some r
eason, have broken routine that morning, even though I couldn’t remember doing so.

  I turned on the ceiling fan, took off my T-shirt and skirt, and lay on top of the clean white sheets. The breeze felt good against my skin, and the sensation of lying half-clothed on the firm bed in the simple room, with the fan clacking overhead, brought to mind a similar afternoon three years before, in Guatemala. On the afternoon in memory, I had not been alone, but with Henry. Early in the evening we had eaten at a little restaurant in the hills, and upon returning to our room had partially undressed and lain down together on the bed, intending to make love. For some reason, before we got around to doing so, we had begun to argue.

  Lying alone on the bed in Diriomo, I couldn’t remember what Henry and I had argued about, or what had instigated it. I only remembered that, at some point, several minutes into the argument, Henry attempted to make a joke, and I accused him of not taking anything seriously. Before long the argument grew all out of proportion—we were both yelling, saying the sort of things that hours later you can’t believe you’ve said to someone you love—until finally, in tears, I asked him to turn around so I could get dressed. We had been naked together hundreds of times and the request struck him as melodramatic. Eventually he complied, and I dressed and went out. I took a walk through an adjacent park and had coffee at the same restaurant where we had eaten dinner not long before. By the time I finished my coffee I had replayed the argument in my mind, and had realized how ridiculous it was, that a point of minor contention had brought us to such a passionate standoff.