Marisha Pessl - Special Topics in Calamity Physics

“We don’t think you’re like, psychotic, or a Menendez brother,” Jade said. “You probably didn’t do it on purpose. But still. We talked it over and decided if we’re honest with ourselves we can’t forgive you. I mean, she’s gone. Maybe that doesn’t mean anything to you, but it means the world to us. Milton, Charles loved her. Leulah and I adored her. She was our sister —”

“That’s breaking news,” I interrupted. (I couldn’t help myself; I was Dad’s daughter and thus prone to blowing the whistle on Hypocrisy and Double-Talk.) “Last I heard, you thought she was responsible for estranging you from mint chocolate chip ice cream. You were also worried she was a member of the Manson Family.”

Jade looked so enraged, I wondered if she was going to fling me to the linoleum and rip out my eyes. Instead, her lips shrunk and she turned the color of gazpacho. She spoke in pointy little words: “If you’re so dumb that you can’t understand why we’re upset beyond all possible belief, I’m not having this conversation. You don’t even know what we went through. Charles went out of his mind and fell off a cliff. Lu and Nigel were hysterical. Even Milton broke down. I was the one who hauled everyone to safety, but I’m still traumatized by the experience. We thought we were going to die, like those people in the movie when they’re stuck in the Alps and forced to eat each other.”

“ Alive. Before it was a movie, it was a book.”

Her eyes widened. “You think this is a joke? Don’t you get it?”

She waited, but I didn’t get it — I really didn’t.

“Whatever,” she said. “Stop calling my house. It’s annoying for my mother to have to talk to you and give you excuses.”

She leaned down and picked up her bag, heaving it up onto her shoulder. Primly she smoothed back her hair, displaying the self-consciousness of the Ones Making an Exit; she was well aware that a great deal of Exiting had been done before her, for millions of years and millions of different reasons, and now it was her turn and she wanted to do a decent job. With a prim smile on her face, she picked up The Norton Anthology of Poetry and How to Write a Poem , took great pains to tuck them neatly into her bag. She sniffed, pressed her black sweater over her waist (as if she’d just completed a first round of interviews at Whatever Corp.) and began to make her way down the hall. As she walked away, I could tell she was considering joining the elite subgroup within the Ones Making an Exit, a sect reserved for the wholly unsentimental and the completely hard-boiled: The Ones Who Never Looked Back. She decided against it, however.

“You know,” she said smoothly, turning to look at me. “None of us could figure it out.”

I stared back, unaccountably afraid.

“Why you? Why Hannah wanted to bring you into our little group. I’m not trying to be rude, but from the beginning none of us could stand you. We called you ‘pigeon.’ Because that’s how you acted. This grimy pigeon clucking around everyone’s feet desperate for crumbs. But she loved you. ‘Blue’s great. You have to give her a chance. She’s had a tough life.’ Yeah, right. It didn’t make sense. No, you have some weirdly dreamy home life with your virtuoso dad you blather on about like he’s the fucking second coming. But no. Everyone said I was mean and judgmental. Well, now it’s too late and she’s dead.”

She saw the look on my face and did a Ha. The Ones Making an Exit had to have a Ha, a truncated laugh that brought to mind videogame Game Overs and typewriter dings.

“Guess that’s life’s little joke,” she said.

At the end of the hall, she pushed open the door and was illuminated for a second by a puddle of yellow light, and her shadow was tossed, elongated and thin, in my direction like a piece of towrope, but then she stepped nimbly through the doorway, and the door slammed and I was left with the carnations. (“The only flower that, when given to someone, is only marginally superior to giving dead ones,” Dad said.)

The next day, Saturday, April 10, The Stockton Observer finally published a terse article on the coroner’s findings.

LOCAL WOMAN’S HANGING DEATH RULED SUICIDE

The death of Burns County woman, Hannah Louise Schneider, 44, was ruled a suicide by Sluder County Coroner’s Bureau yesterday afternoon. Cause of death was determined to be “asphyxiation due to hanging.”

“There was no evidence whatsoever of foul play,” said Sluder County Coroner Joe Villaverde yesterday.

Villaverde said there was also no evidence of drugs, alcohol or other toxins in Schneider’s body and the manner of death was consistent with suicide.

“I’m basing my ruling on the autopsy report as well as the evidence found by the sheriff’s department and state legislators,” Villaverde said.

Schneider’s body was found March 28 hanging from a tree by an electrical cord in the Schull’s Cove area of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. She had accompanied six local high school students on a camping trip. The six students were recovered without injury.

“This can’t have happened,” I said.

Dad looked at me, concerned. “My dear—”

“I’m going to be sick. I can’t take this anymore.”

“They just might be right. One never knows with—”

“They’re not right!” I screamed.

Dad agreed to take me to the Sluder County Sheriff’s Department. It was astonishing he actually consented to my outlandish, fitfully proposed demand. I assumed he felt sorry for me, noticed how pale I looked of late, how I could barely eat, didn’t sleep, how I sprinted downstairs like a Beat junkie looking for a fix to catch First News at Five , how I reacted to all questions, both ordinary and existential, with a five-second transatlantic delay. He was also familiar with the quotation, “When your child is seized by an idea with the zeal of a fundamentalist Bible salesman from Indiana, stand in his or her way at your own risk” (see Rearing the Gifted Child , Pennebaker, 1998,p. 232).

We found the address on the Internet, climbed into the Volvo and drove for forty-five minutes to the station, located west of Stockton in the tiny mountain town of Bicksville. It was a bright, chipper day, and the flat, sagging police building sat like an exhausted hitchhiker on the side of the road.

“Do you want to wait in the car?” I asked Dad.

“No, no, I’ll come in.” He held up D. F. Young’s Narcissism and Culture Jamming the U.S.A. (1986). “I’ve brought some light reading.”

“Dad?”

“Yes, sweet.”

“Let me do the talking.”

“Oh. By all means.”

The Sluder County Sheriff’s Department was a single ransacked room that resembled the Primates section of any midlevel zoo. All efforts, within budget, had been made to lead the ten or twelve captive policemen to believe they were in their natural environment (bleating phones, cinder-block walls painted taupe, dead plants with leaves like tendriled bows on birthday presents, chunky filing cabinets lined up in the back like football players, Department star patches barnacling their clay brown shirts). They were given a restricted diet (coffee, donuts) and plenty of toys to play with (swivel chairs, radio consoles, guns, a ceiling-suspended TV hiccupping the Weather Channel). And yet there remained the unmistakable whiff of artificiality to this habitat, of apathy, of everyone simply going through the motions of being a law enforcer, as struggling for survival was no longer an immediate concern. “Hey, Bill!” shouted one of the men pacing in the very back by the water cooler. He held up a magazine. “Check out the new Dakota.” “Already did,” said Bill, coma-staring at his blue computer screen.