Don't I Know You? Read online

  The day and date were printed on the top of every page. Under that was a count of the number of days in the year left to go. 32nd Day—333 days to follow. It was the kind of thing you might do in prison. In the other corner of each page, a small box with four choices: Clear, Cloudy, Rain, Snow. A box was always checked, even when whole weeks were skipped, their pages blank.

  Lily read. The sun dipped lower behind her, getting darker and cooler as it fell. Dust motes floated around her.

  Gina Engel had a son named Steven and an ex-husband who lived in San Diego. She tried to be polite about him, even in her journal, but Lily could tell they didn’t get along.

  Steven had hair like a boy Gina had known in grade school, still had some of his baby teeth, and smelled like the air off the river, the plastic of the models he liked to build, and the beginning of teenage boy. Gina worried about him. He was somber, moody, secretive. Pages went by without a mention of him. It wasn’t clear what any of this had to do with her or Nikolai or Tina.

  There was someone named Phil who came up a lot, and other men. Details about meeting them. About going home with them, during the day mostly, when Steven was at school. Sometimes at night, when Steven was at a friend’s. Sometimes they came over after he went to sleep. Their names came up, then disappeared, then came up again. Or didn’t.

  Sometimes Gina Engel dramatized whole scenes as if fulfilling an assignment. Lily was put off by her style. Flowery adjectives, too many adverbs.

  There were arguments with Phil. A long story about someone named Kurt who’d stayed until four in the morning and who wanted to make love to her on the living room floor, but Steven had been asleep in the bedroom, so they’d gone downstairs to Kurt’s car on Riverside Drive.

  She registered that Gina Engel lived near her.

  Kurt and Gina made love against the open passenger door, laughing and whispering, and then Gina had rushed back up to her apartment, using her son as her excuse. The next day Kurt called to tell her the car door was broken. By the following week, she didn’t want to see him anymore. She didn’t return his calls; she told Steven to tell him she wasn’t there. He came to her window one evening, standing in the middle of the street, calling her name. She pulled Steven down to the floor, telling him it was just some guy who thought he was in love with her. They crawled beneath the windows, and she let Steven peek up over the sill. “He’s talking to Manuel,” Steven reported. “He looks sad,” Steven said. “Why does he think he’s in love with you?” he asked. Gina hadn’t recorded her answer.

  She worked as a nurse in a hospital. She didn’t say which. She felt lucky to have the job, but she didn’t get up every morning thrilled with where she was heading. Lily got the sense that for a long time her son had been enough, and now maybe he wasn’t.

  She didn’t understand why Tina had wanted her to read this.

  She flipped ahead. There were pages in May missing. They’d been precisely extracted so close to the spine that she didn’t even notice at first. The same thing for the first week in August. Gina Engel’s last entry was on August 10.

  Steven to Juan’s. It’s like we’re guests at the same hotel. One day I’ll wake up and he’ll have checked out.

  Thinking of calling in sick.

  9—Ice cream with Phil.

  It was four twenty. She got Tina’s card out of her date book, picked up the phone, and called.

  A man with an accent answered. She asked if she could please speak with Tina Hernandez. Nervousness made her excessively polite.

  The man wanted to know who was calling.

  The feeling that she was lying filled her throat. “Lily Chin,” she said.

  “Lily Chin?” he repeated. And then he said it again. “From three F?”

  She shouldn’t have given her real name. “Yes,” she said. “May I ask with whom I am speaking?”

  “It’s Manuel,” he said. “From the building. The eight-to-four guy,” he said.

  She was watching a schoolyard full of children race ahead of her to the good swings.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I must have the wrong number, though it’s lovely to talk to you.”

  He laughed. “No, no. You got the right number; Tina’s not here. I didn’t know you and my wife were—well, knew each other.” He was curious, not suspicious, willing to have everything explained.

  Lily didn’t know what to say. Nikolai was sleeping with his doorman’s wife. She knew she should be concentrating on other things, but she just kept coming back to his doorman’s wife.

  “I met her on the street the other day,” she said. “She was with your girls. They were sweet.” She wasn’t lying. They were. She had.

  “Yeah,” he said. “Taking years off my life,” he said warmly.

  Your wife is sleeping with my fiancé, she thought. She realized abruptly that she’d continued to think of Nikolai and Tina in the present tense.

  She cleared her throat. “I actually just have a quick question. I lost the address and number of a friend of mine that Tina knows.”

  “Tina knows a friend of yours?” he asked.

  Her lies tumbled around her like bricks off a tall building. He’s a doorman, she thought. He’s not an idiot.

  She couldn’t imagine anything but to keep going. “Gina Engel?” she said. “Do you know her?”

  There was silence, and for a moment Lily thought he’d put down the phone and walked away.

  “Did you?” he asked. His voice had gotten clipped.

  She wanted to know about Gina Engel more than she wanted to get off the phone. “I haven’t seen her in a long time. I’m trying to reconnect.”

  He exhaled. It came out like a whistle. “She died,” he said. “Murdered the summer before last. I’m sorry.”

  Breathe, she told herself. Think. She closed her eyes. Of course, she thought. Of course. Gina Engel. She remembered now. The woman from her block. She sat there, silent and stupid.

  “How did you know her?” he asked.

  She commanded her mind to work. Possibilities and implications took slow shape. It was like watching a water ballet. The best lies were the ones closest to the truth. She remembered a school friend telling her that once.

  “I knew her son,” she said. “Steven,” she added. He went to her school. She knew all kinds of children.

  “Steven was a good boy,” he said as if arguing with her.

  He gave her the details of the case that she remembered from the newspapers. But something about him kept her wary. She was the girl in the house alone in a horror movie. It was just a feeling.

  “Did they catch the guy?” she asked.

  “Not yet,” he said. “They never even found the weapon.”

  “Do they know anything about him?” she asked.

  “Not really,” he said. “Someone she knew, they think. Maybe someone she was, you know, with.”

  Nikolai. She remembered the photo the papers had run. Dark hair. Dark eyes. Good Mediterranean skin hidden under too much makeup. Someone who didn’t think she was as attractive as she was. She imagined Nikolai with her. So what? she thought vehemently. So he slept with someone who was murdered. That was all.

  She swept her mind for what a normal person should say in this situation. “That’s horrible,” she said. “The whole thing is horrible.”

  “Yeah,” he said, as if she couldn’t have articulated the problem more eloquently. “Tina’s been in a real mess over it all.”

  “Yes,” Lily said. “Of course. Yes.” She slid her finger along the edges of the missing journal pages. She was suddenly hungry. Could she ask how he knew Gina Engel, or was that something she should already know? How did people spend their lives as liars? How did they keep track of it all?

  She felt like she’d made a prank call that had backfired. “I’ll try Tina later then,” she said.

  “Okay,” he said. “I’m sorry,” he said again.

  “That’s okay,” she said. “It’s not your fault,” she said, and she meant it.
She replaced the receiver in its cradle and hung her head between her legs.

  Matthew was where she knew he would be. On top of the double stairs above the side entrance to the Museum of Natural History. They had gone here often late at night during the months they had been together. It was a staircase that led to nowhere, and felt temporary in a permanent way, like a construction site after hours.

  He was bouncing lightly on the balls of his feet, holding a cigarette with all four fingers and thumb in that way of his. When he saw her, he flicked it away. There were several others already on the ground.

  His cheek, when she palmed it, was cold and dry. He closed his eyes, leaned into her hand, and covered it with his. He had always been able to make her feel as if his need for her had twin proportions to hers. In someone so entitled, so lucky in terms of what life had to offer, it always surprised her. Reminded her how difficult it was to know someone with anything like real confidence, how much of a blessing it was to receive even a glimpse behind the curtains of someone you loved.

  Her hand was still on his cheek. What was she doing here? What did she want from him?

  With his eyes still closed, he said, “Days aren’t days without you. Life without you is stupid and impossible.”

  She wrapped her arms around him beneath his coat. She worked her hands under his shirt and placed her fingertips in the small of his back, where they had discovered, years ago, a spot built just for them.

  She was not herself. She was some version of herself that knowing these two men had brought to the surface. Maybe that meant she was more herself.

  “Let’s pretend,” she said. “Let’s pretend we’re making love for the first time.”

  He was kissing the corners of her mouth. The tip of his tongue moved under her lip.

  “It’s always the first time,” he said.

  “No,” she said, feeling his shoulder blades, the scar from the tractor accident, the mole on his stomach. “The first time. Do you remember?” She didn’t want approximation, she wanted recreation.

  His knee and thigh moved between her legs, as they had years ago against her apartment door. She closed her eyes and let him undress her only as much as they had then. She opened his belt, the same one, she was sure, he’d been wearing then. He moved inside of her, and again, his mouth found her ear, and she shivered, anticipating. He asked quietly, “Whadja get for me?” The childlike desire made her feel as if she were being pulled from quicksand.

  And she was grateful, as she had been then, but this time she knew what she wanted. She wanted to be in control, to have a say in how at least one thing in her life would resolve itself. So when they were done, she would tell him he must leave her alone, and his face would register more surprise than sadness. He would leave her alone, and he would be fine without her. And perhaps she would teach him what he had taught her: that the least likely people are capable of the most unexpected things.

  eight

  The next night, Lily and Nikolai took the Town Car out to Queens for her parents’ annual Chinese New Year party. The Year of the Horse. A time of change, a crossroads. The end of the bad; the beginning of the good. Lily believed very little of it.

  They spoke of the usual things. Nikolai held her hand, playing with her fingers as he always did whenever in moving vehicles.

  She watched his fingers until she couldn’t watch them anymore. She leaned back against the seat and concentrated on the sky rushing by.

  He blinked his eyelashes against her cheek. “Butterfly kisses,” he said. He spread his fingertips across her kneecap. “Starfish.” He rubbed the tip of her nose with his thumb. “Eskimo,” he said.

  “Not with your thumb,” she said without looking at him. “With your nose.”

  She closed her eyes. Nikolai, she thought. Nikolai and his little-boy games. Gina Engel’s newspaper photo spread across her mind like water.

  He rubbed her nose again with his thumb. “Iguanadon,” he said.

  “I never know what you’re talking about,” she said sleepily.

  “Dinosaurs,” he said into her hair. “Big thumbs.”

  “How do you know this stuff?” she asked. Her eyes were still closed. An image of those bookshelves filled her mind. Her stomach felt as if they’d taken a turn too quickly. In her mind, she formulated one question in various ways.

  He didn’t answer. He sang softly into her hair. Something Italian. How did he know Italian?

  “What did you do yesterday?” he asked.

  The cold air on the museum’s terrace moved through her. She repeated the question in her mind, straining to read his tone.

  “Work,” she said.

  He was still humming.

  “What else would I be doing?” she asked. How had her life become a spy movie?

  “Of course,” he said. “Friday.”

  When she was six, her parents had taken her to the July Fourth fireworks. They’d explained what she’d see, her father lecturing her about the art of fire—a Chinese invention when a cook had mixed sulfur, charcoal, and saltpeter. But they hadn’t told her about the noise. She’d been startled by sound she could feel. She’d fallen asleep against her father. They’d covered her ears, and she’d slept through the entire show.

  Now, she rested her head against Nikolai’s mouth, watched the wires of the bridge flashing by, and hoped for sleep.

  “You should quit your job,” Nikolai said softly.

  Lily kept staring out the window. There was the bridge. There was the water.

  “You’re getting married,” he said. “You don’t need to work.”

  She sat up. She regarded the back of the driver’s head. He was wearing a blue cap. Nikolai liked the drivers to wear caps.

  “I like to work,” she said.

  He brushed something invisible from his pants. “You do,” he said, as if congratulating her on her insight. “But that’s not so much the point,” he said.

  “It’s not?” she asked.

  He smiled.

  “Why are you smiling?” she asked.

  The driver glanced in the rearview mirror.

  “You’re mad,” he said, still smiling.

  “What about the children?” she asked. “You don’t just leave a classroom full of three-year-olds without any warning.” She was filled with righteousness, with a mother’s mock surprise. Don’t you know better than this? Use your brain. Be a smart boy.

  Beneath the righteousness was what she imagined to be beneath a mother’s surface as well: fear. Fear at doing or saying the thing that would end up making all the difference. She saw herself as witness to an apocalypse of her child’s doing. I didn’t know. He always seemed so quiet. It’s not my fault.

  He put his hand beneath her skirt and smoothed his way up her stockinged thigh. “You are mad, and I am hard,” he said as if memorizing their names.

  She held his wrist. “Don’t,” she said. “It’s not good.”

  They turned onto her parents’ block. Their door and stoop were decorated with red lanterns and banners with the characters for longevity and good luck in gold. Chinese people milled around on the sidewalk. She could hear the gongs.

  He put his face close to hers and squeezed her inner thigh.

  It was not what he was doing or saying. It was a feeling. She was in the open doorway of an airplane.

  He was the ground rushing toward her.

  Then he sat back and shrugged. “Okeydokey. You want to work? You work,” he said as if none of this had been his idea in the first place.

  She breathed again. He was her parachute.

  He was the only white person at the party. Her parents were thrilled with him. Her mother ushered him here and there, introducing him to all her lady friends. They squeezed his forearms. He laughed, he smiled, he kissed them on both cheeks. Sometimes he hugged them, lifted them off their tiny feet.

  He got drunk on Maotai with her father, and the two of them sang a loud, center-stage performance of “Sunrise, Sunset.” Her father kne
w none of the words but murmured along gamely, smiling shyly next to this man who must have seemed more like a bear than a son.

  Nikolai was like a tree on a plain of shrubs. She basked in the association. The daughters of her mother’s friends regarded her from across the room, occasionally tilting their black shiny heads toward each other to whisper like the chorus in an opera. The sons lined up to congratulate her, glad for the chance for any kiss with any girl under any circumstances.

  It was a certain kind of going-away party. Like they were watching her step onto a rocket ship for a trip they were willing to believe could be worthwhile, though they hadn’t yet figured out how.

  At one in the morning they finally left. She’d never known her parents to stay up this late. They were red-faced from the wine as they walked them to the car. Her mother hugged her, told her she loved her, and reminded her how lucky she was.

  “Be glad,” she said. “Feel lucky.”

  “Ma,” Lily protested, pulling back to look at her. So much of her mother’s life had not been her own. “What am I going to do?”

  Her mother hushed her. “You always thinking something.”

  The driver held the door open. Lily felt as if her mother had been at the museum the night before.

  “Don’t think,” her mother said, ushering Lily into the car.

  Go to the West Side,” Nikolai told the driver.

  The driver seemed to know what he meant.

  Nikolai pulled her to him. “I want to take you somewhere,” he said.

  He opened the door with his own key. Hers was in her bag, wrapped in its shoelace.

  The apartment was as she had left it the day before. He gave her a tour. She watched him for signs that he was seeing through her performance.

  She found herself in tears.

  He put down the photo of his eighteen-year-old self he was showing her. “Why are you crying?” he asked. “It’s not good?”

  She pressed her eyelids with her fingertips. She thought of what she could say. She thought of Matthew. That was a colossal betrayal, and it might be the least of the problems between them. She thought of the journal in the oven drawer beneath the cookie sheet. She thought of Gina Engel. She feared she would never stop thinking of Gina Engel.