How Lucky: A Novel Read online

  Before hitting the only topic anyone in town wants to talk about, “the girl,” today’s topic had been the band Wilco. Travis is exactly my age, twenty-six years old, and thus far too young to have ever enjoyed Wilco in their prime. Their first studio album came out before we were born. The lead singer is old enough to be our dad. But he’s obsessed with them now.

  “The thing is, he was the second guy in a band everybody loved, see, and they thought he was the lame one,” he says, spooning out a massive pile of barbecued chicken onto a Styrofoam plate, spilling half of it on my kitchen table. “But he wasn’t, see? He was the genius all along!”

  I’m condensing what was an extended discussion about Jeff Tweedy’s warmth and humanity for your benefit. Just trust me: Travis has a lot to say on this topic. He has a lot to say on every topic, and those topics are always directly related to whatever he has going on at that particular moment. There’s a woman who works at the 40 Watt Club downtown that he likes, she’s into Wilco, so there you have it: Travis is a Wilco guy now. It’ll be something else next week. Travis wants a little bit of everything so he doesn’t have to choose a lot bit of one thing.

  But now he’s talking about “the girl.” Everybody’s talking about the girl. The first sign that something was up was an Athens Reddit thread I came across two nights before while clicking around to see if anyone was selling tickets for the game against Middle Tennessee State this weekend. Scanning the ticket market for Georgia football games is an excellent way to make some extra cash, particularly when your job is just to sit on the internet all day; there’s always someone selling them for less than they should, and that’s when you pounce.

  There wasn’t much happening on Reddit that night: a bridge flooded off Lake Road, a tree was down in Five Points, someone on Barnett Shoals wanted to sell a chair. I’d been about to sign off for the night when I noticed a new thread appearing at the top of the page:

  ROOMMATE MISSING. LAST SEEN IN FIVE POINTS.

  Five Points is my neighborhood. I clicked.

  Urgent: Student missing. My hallmate, Ai-Chin Liao, left for class last week and hasn’t been back in our apartment since. She is never late and not irresponsible and we are very concerned. She speaks very little English but answers to the name Ai-Chin. Was last seen walking down Southview Drive. Police looking but we’re trying everything. Please email me at [email protected] if you’ve seen her. VERY WORRIED.

  There was a picture attached, but it was blurry and she was looking the opposite direction. It could have been anyone. My synapses briefly fired, regardless. But only briefly. Marjani was ready to go home, and I was very tired myself. I didn’t think any more about it.

  Over the next two days, the disappearance of Ai-Chin has become the number-one topic in town, and Travis, being Travis, is brimming with theories.

  “I bet I know where she is, see,” he says, and I know he’s about to go on another of his rants. I’m always here to listen and indulge. I’m not going anywhere, and he isn’t either. Travis has always been there.

  Travis and I were born within eleven days of each other at Sarah Bush Lincoln Health Center in Charleston, Illinois, a sleepy town that’s the home of Eastern Illinois University, a fantastic record store called Positively Fourth Street Records, and not a helluva lot else. His mom was a philosophy professor at EIU, and my mother, Angela-don’t-ever-call-her-Angie, worked as her secretary. (Technically she was the “executive assistant” for the whole philosophy department, but the only other philosophy professor was an elderly man named Ed who never left his office and might have actually died there in 1983.) Even though his mom was ten years older than mine and lived in one of the biggest houses in Coles County, one of the fake-marble-porched ones out by the country club, with her doctor husband and Travis’s four older sisters, while Mom and I had a cramped row house in neighboring downtown Mattoon, they became best friends in short order. My dad left before I ever knew him, and Travis’s dad was always working at the hospital, so our moms were both used to being lonely and exhausted and overwhelmed with nobody around to either help out or complain to. The school had a lousy family leave policy, so after giving birth they were both back at work before they were ready, and they discovered quickly that the path of least resistance was just to take us to work with them. You could say that we were raised right there in Coleman Hall, listening to frantic students try to get Travis’s mom to change their grade for them while my mom worked the phones and occasionally checked to see if Ed was dead yet.

  Travis and I napped in the same pack-and-play together, crawled through the same dusty hallway together, took countless baths together, and sat and cried to the same teaching assistants brought in to give our moms a break together. There aren’t many memories of Illinois that don’t involve Travis in one way or another. We even had our first birthday party together: Travis’s mom had a huge shindig out at their house, with clowns and a bouncy castle and even some sort of train that drove everybody around their massive yard. We slept through the whole thing, but when I woke up, Mom says I refused to stop crying until Travis woke up and we could get back to crawling all over each other. She says we ended up staying there for a week. They had the space.

  When you are the same age as someone you spend that much time with, you’re inevitably compared to one another, and Travis’s mom was always worried how much faster I seemed to pick things up than he did. I napped better, I cried less, I even figured out how to use a spoon, though the mess that resulted hardly made the discovery worth much. And man, could I move. Mom always said that if she looked away from me and Travis for no longer than a second, she’d turn back around and I’d be halfway down the stairs, scooting away to wherever, while Travis just sat in the middle of the floor, laughing, egging me on. Mom called me Trickle back then, my little Cole Trickle, and she still brings up that name sometimes today. She once joked that she thought she was going to have to put barbed wire around my crib. Travis, though, he just sat there and laughed.

  One day, when we were about eighteen months old, on a lazy Saturday with the four of us lolling around Travis’s mom’s house while the sisters sprinted around and screamed at each other upstairs, my mom noticed something odd. When Travis’s mom picked him up by his hands and tried to guide him across the linoleum floor, he stumbled right along, left foot, right foot, eons of Darwinian muscle memory and instinct working together to create . . . walking! Movement! Autonomy! But me? I couldn’t do it. Not only could I not start to work my legs in concert, my legs in fact couldn’t hold any weight at all. Pull me up, and I flopped right back down. Every time she lifted me up, I collapsed to the floor again. Here was Travis, usually the one lagging, starting to pull himself up and lurching himself forward. But not me. I couldn’t seem to figure that part out.

  The weeks went along, with Mom growing increasingly concerned. She had heard about “floppy leg syndrome,” which is a sign of toddlers having low muscle tone, and I wasn’t getting any stronger, so she thought that might be it. Once Travis started legit walking while I still lay there, she couldn’t wait any longer. She never liked calling and bothering doctors every time I had a runny nose. She didn’t want to be one of those moms. But this was strange. If there was a problem, she wanted it fixed.

  Ai-Chin has been gone for seventy-two hours.

  The initial story was in the Athens Banner-Herald.

  * * *

  CHINESE UGA STUDENT MISSING

  by Matthew Adair

  University of Georgia police are asking for help finding a missing Athens woman.

  Police department spokesperson Michael Cetera said friends notified police this weekend that Ai-Chin Liao, 19, was last heard from about 6:30 a.m. Friday. Multiple attempts to contact her at her home and on her cell phone have been unsuccessful, Cetera said. Police have also talked to friends and checked local hospitals, routine in missing persons cases.

  Liao is a visiting scholar from China studying veterinary medicine. She lived at the Family Housing
Complex on Agriculture Drive in Five Points and was last seen leaving for class Friday morning, Cetera said. Family friend and local resident Melissa Lei is the woman who first alerted the police. She has been putting up posters with Liao’s picture across Athens. Lei told the Banner-Herald that Liao had only moved to Athens in mid-August. Lei says she was recently introduced to Liao through relatives in China and had planned on introducing her to her Christian youth group on campus. “She doesn’t know anybody else in town and I have no idea where she possibly might have gone.”

  The Chinese embassy in Washington, D.C., has been informed of Liao’s disappearance.

  “We’ve exhausted all our options, so we are asking the public for help. We’re not ruling anything out,” Cetera said. Police ask Athenians to call the Ai-Chin Liao tip line at 706-234-4022 if they possess any information.

  * * *

  I have only one detail of her, and it is a big one: I have seen her every weekday for the last two months, at the same time, at the same place. She only waved to me once, that one day. The last day. I only realized this last night, before sleep, when they showed her picture on the news. Ai-Chin looked like her. She sure did. I immediately texted Travis to say that the lady from the news used to walk by my house every morning. It wasn’t until later this morning that I remembered the Thrashers hat and the boot that shone like chrome.

  That is the girl. And that was the car.

  “So let’s talk about the girl, see,” Travis says. His theory, as he scoops BBQ pork into my mouth: Ai-Chin Liao is a stoner.

  It was inevitable that Travis would come up with a theory like this at some point, though I’ll confess I’m a little surprised it’s where he went first. The idea: she’s in a new place. She doesn’t know anyone. She has all this pressure on her to succeed academically. She’s never had any freedom in her life. She’s a little bit more interesting, more rebellious, than anyone thinks, and now, for the first time, she can express it. Her new roommates are stodgy and repressive. They just want her to study—but she doesn’t want to study! America isn’t about studying! It’s about pop music and Netflix and weed. Definitely weed.

  According to Travis, she probably sneaked away from her fellow Chinese nationals one night and got invited into a frat party. (“She’s cute,” he says, shrugging.) She ends up meeting some kids and smoking weed with them, which just opens up her mind further. Why is she spending all this time working so hard? Why is she so far from home? Why does everyone want her to be a vet anyway? Vets have to put animals to sleep, like, all the time. Why would anyone want that shit job? She realizes that her whole world has been a lie, that she doesn’t want to be part of the system, that she’s gotta be Ai-Chin, ya know? So she says fuck it. She finds a weed friend whom she runs off with—“Maybe she’s gay and never knew until now!”—and she’s hiding in a Normaltown apartment ordering takeout, taking bong hits, and binge-watching every episode of Black Mirror. She doesn’t even know people are looking for her. She’s just living America, see.

  It is possible that Travis is projecting a bit with this one. But I note his theory for the historical record.

  He pauses to shovel more BBQ in his mouth, and I wait for him to finish chewing so he’ll go on, but then he spoons another massive wad of pork butt in, and kindly one more into mine, so I have to wait a little longer to hear about his theory. I begin to struggle a little bit, the pork heading down the wrong hole, so Travis walks around the table and lightly taps me on the back. He thinks I’m having breathing issues, but I’m not, so, face still full of sandwich, I growl at him. He snorts, “Sorry, jeez,” and leaves me alone. I’m fine.

  Twenty-five minutes later we’re back to the girl who works at Wuxtry Records downtown who has an eyebrow ring and a tattoo of Kurt Cobain on her back that Travis hasn’t seen but wants to and how she told him to listen to Wilco, and then we’re back on Wilco and I honestly could give two shits about Wilco but this is what you sign up for when you hang out with Travis and I don’t mind, I’m glad he’s here, and the BBQ is aces.

  I look him in the eye so we can talk.

  We should pause for a moment here. If you and I are going to be able to travel this little journey together, you’re going to have to meet me halfway. You see, I can’t . . . well, I can’t talk. At least not like you and most of the people you know can. There’s a whole story behind it, and we’ve got plenty of time to get into all that, but just because Travis and I can’t talk to each other doesn’t mean we can’t talk to each other. I have known Travis my entire life, and we can communicate without words—sort of like twins, but not creepy like twins. He can look at me and I can look at him and we can each understand what the other is saying without speaking a word. I’m oversimplifying it, it’s more complicated than it seems here in two-dimensional prose; you just sort of have to trust me. I can do it with my mom too, and Marjani has also picked it up over the last couple of years. It would be incomprehensible for you if you were to watch it happen, but it works for us. So go with me on this.

  OK? We cool? You with me?

  All right. So. As I was saying: I look him in the eye so we can talk.

  I think that girl is the one who walks by my place all the time.

  Who, the stoner girl?

  I don’t think she’s a stoner, Travis.

  Are you bullshitting me? If you think that might have been her, we need to say something.

  I can’t tell. But it’s weird that I saw her every day, and then she wasn’t there yesterday, and this girl who looks like her has disappeared, isn’t it?

  Fuckin’ weird. Really fuckin’ weird.

  What should I do?

  Want me to call that tip line? I can do that. Later. Later? Tonight. Maybe tonight.

  I think I am going to have to remind you.

  Hell yes you are.

  He shrugs the definitive Travis shrug and says, aloud, “Crazy shit. I gotta get to work.” He wipes my chin with a napkin, tosses the plastic Butt Hutt bags in my trash, and pulls his backpack over his left shoulder. “Your mom’s on that vacation right now, yes?” he says, moving on as usual. “My mom said she’s going to pick her and her boy toy up at the airport when she gets back.”

  He pops one last piece of toast in his mouth and jiggles his keys. “I’ll be by tomorrow, ’kay? I’ll text you when I’m on my way over. You still got my special ringtone?”

  I grin at him. Of course I do.

  “And we got game day this weekend, baby. Game day! WOOLLY MAMMOTH! WOOOOOOOOLLY MAMMOTH!” He throws his arms in the air in triumph. The Woolly Mammoth is his proudest achievement. He’s already counting down the minutes until he unleashes the Mammoth.

  He asks me if I need to piss, I shake my head no, and he moves out of the way so I can wheel back into my office, in front of my computer. Twitter is open. Travis reads the message off my screen.

  @SPECTRUMAIR HONESTLY, FUCK YOU AND YOUR SHITTY AIRLINE. I MEAN IT. GO FUCK YOURSELF. RIGHT NOW. #late

  He bends down and whispers in my ear, like he has a secret to tell me. “Your job sucks, dude.”

  Travis’s visits are always over too quickly.

  3.

  His name was Dr. Morton, a neurologist called in by Mom’s pediatrician to explain what was happening to her son, but my mom, after that day, referred to him only as Asshead Ned. I don’t even know if his name was actually Ned. She might have just liked the way it sounded. Mom has told the story of that day so many times that she knows exactly when to stop for every desired effect, each laugh, each gasp, each tear wrung out for maximum impact. Asshead Ned gets a roar every time.

  Two weeks after Mom took me to the doctor because I was having a hard time standing, she went into a sad office in the bowels of Sarah Bush Lincoln Health Center, three doors down from the chapel and four doors down from the morgue, to meet with Asshead Ned. Asshead Ned drove down from Champaign for the meeting and immediately apologized for the fact that he would have to head back soon, that he was only down here as a favor to Dr. Ga
llagher, who he’d known for years, that he ordinarily didn’t have time to talk to every single patient, as if Mom cared about any of this, as if any of this had any possible connection to her or her son’s life. I was still sitting in my car seat, still strapped in, right there in Dr. Gallagher’s office, chewing on a squeaky plastic giraffe.

  “Anyway,” Asshead Ned said, “I’m also here because what David has—”

  “Daniel,” my mom interrupted. “His name is Daniel.”

  “Yes, sorry, Daniel,” Asshead Ned went on, only barely noticing Dr. Gallagher and my mother both glaring at him. “I’m here because what Daniel has is extremely serious, I’m sad to say.” He said “I’m sad to say” in a way that did not sound like he was all that sad, or all that particularly interested. He said it like a schoolkid saying the Pledge of Allegiance: it’s just the thing you’re supposed to do. “We couldn’t figure out what was going on at first, so we ran some genetic blood tests, and then ran the EKG and the CPK tests, that’s what that was all about. We had to be certain. We are certain now.”

  And then Asshead Ned introduced my mother to the world of spinal muscular atrophy.

  He went on for a long time about it, but Mom always skips over this part of the story, at least when I’m there, because everyone listening always knows what SMA is already. She’ll only mention that she was barely listening to any of his explanations or descriptions—“I didn’t give two Irish shits about the details,” is the phrasing she uses, and a quarter century later I’m still not entirely sure what the difference is between an Irish shit and any other shit—because all she wanted to know was, “Is he going to be OK?” She kept trying to interrupt him, to break in with this essential question, the only question that mattered, but he blew right past her, like the professor who insists that his students save their questions for the end of class. She was trapped once again by another man who wouldn’t listen to her, who wouldn’t even notice that she was trying to talk, until he decided he was finished.