No One You Know by Michelle Richmond Read Free Book Online Page A

darling,” pleading for her life in the upstairs bedroom. I could still see the farmhouse as Capote had drawn it, with each member of the Clutter family isolated from the others at the moment of his or her death. But the unthinkable depravity of the crime didn’t keep me from feeling a voyeuristic thrill as I turned the pages of Capote’s book.
    There are two characters in In Cold Blood who are mentioned only in passing, so that one easily forgets all about them.

The eldest daughter, Eveanna, married and the mother of a boy ten months old, lived in northern Illinois but visited Holcomb frequently…Nor did Beverly, the child next in age to Eveanna, any longer reside at River Valley Farm; she was in Kansas City, Kansas, studying to be a nurse.

    In the aftermath of the murders, Eveanna and Beverly must have felt the blow more deeply than anyone else. I wondered if they had ever read the book, and if so, what they thought of it. When Capote was writing the story that would make him famous, did it ever occur to him to consider how painful it would be for the surviving sisters?

    A T SOME POINT THAT NIGHT, AS I SAT ALONE IN my room, reading, I heard my mother shuffling down the hall. She tapped on my door, and I stuffed the book under the covers. “Come in.”
    She walked in and sat on the edge of my bed. “Your light was on,” she said, smiling. I’d noticed lately that she was always smiling, or trying to, but the expression never looked quite natural. I reached over and held her hand. It was soft and moist with night cream. She was a woman who believed in minor luxuries. As long as I could remember, she’d used the same expensive lotion on her hands that she used on her face, claiming that you could always tell how well a woman took care of herself by looking at her hands. It worked; despite the endless hours of gardening, hers were beautiful.
    “You don’t have to do that, Mom,” I said.
    “Do what?”
    “Smile. You don’t have to smile for me.”
    She looked down at the comforter, and with her free hand she rubbed at a dot of dried red nail polish that had been there for months. “Windex will take care of that.”
    “Mom?”
    Finally she looked up and said, “I’m not doing it for you, sweetie. I read somewhere that if you force yourself to smile, it will actually improve your mood.”
    “Does it work?”
    “Not yet.”
    I had an idea. “You and Dad should take a vacation.”
    She looked at me as though I’d suggested she quit her job and join a commune. “Whatever for?”
    “Maybe it would help.”
    I wondered if she entirely understood what I was saying. Over the past year and a half, my parents had become so distant with one another that I worried their marriage might end. It was a thought that had never occurred to me before Lila died—I’d never known a married couple who seemed more solid in their commitment, more certain of their love. But lately they had begun moving around the house like roommates who feared invading one another’s space. I couldn’t remember the last time I had seen them touch.
    She reached up and smoothed my hair. “We could go to Timbuktu, it wouldn’t matter, I’d still miss her so much I could hardly breathe.”
    I wished, at that moment, that I could have traded places with Lila. I imagined a scenario in which my mother’s grief was smaller, more manageable, a scenario in which she had not lost her brilliant eldest daughter. Surely, if she’d only lost me, the recovery would have been quicker, the devastation less complete. Perhaps the family would have inched closer together rather than farther apart.
    She hugged me good night, got up, and closed the door behind her.
    It was four in the morning when I finished the book. I hid it under my bed and switched off the lamp.
    What I felt for Andrew Thorpe could only be described as disgust. When I read the long passages about Lila—passages in which my sister was painted as a math prodigy, a loner, something of an