I Have Some Questions for You


 
 
 
 Also by Rebecca Makkai
 
 The Great Believers
 Music for Wartime
 The Hundred-Year House
 The Borrower
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 VIKING
 An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC
 penguinrandomhouse.com
 Copyright © 2023 by Rebecca Makkai Freeman
 Penguin Random House supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin Random House to continue to publish books for every reader.
 library of congress cataloging-in-publication data
 Names: Makkai, Rebecca, author.
 Title: I have some questions for you / Rebecca Makkai.
 Description: [New York] : Viking, [2023]
 Identifiers: LCCN 2022032713 (print) | LCCN 2022032714 (ebook) | ISBN 9780593490143 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780593654729 (international edition) | ISBN 9780593490150 (ebook)
 Subjects: LCGFT: Novels.
 Classification: LCC PS3613.A36 I33 2023 (print) | LCC PS3613.A36 (ebook) | DDC 813/.6—dc23/eng/20220711
 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022032713
 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022032714
 Cover design: Elizabeth Yaffe
 Book design by Lucia Bernard, adapted for ebook by Cora Wigen
 This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
 pid_prh_6.0_142492537_c0_r0
 
 
 
 for CGG
 in joyful memory
 
 
 
 
 
 “You’ve heard of her,” I say—a challenge, an assurance. To the woman on the neighboring hotel barstool who’s made the mistake of striking up a conversation, to the dentist who runs out of questions about my kids and asks what I’ve been up to myself.
 Sometimes they know her right away. Sometimes they ask, “Wasn’t that the one where the guy kept her in the basement?”
 No! No. It was not.
 Wasn’t it the one where she was stabbed in—no. The one where she got in a cab with—different girl. The one where she went to the frat party, the one where he used a stick, the one where he used a hammer, the one where she picked him up from rehab and he—no. The one where he’d been watching her jog every day? The one where she made the mistake of telling him her period was late? The one with the uncle? Wait, the other one with the uncle?
 No: It was the one with the swimming pool. The one with the alcohol in the—with her hair around—with the guy who confessed to—right. Yes.
 They nod, comforted. By what?
 My barstool neighbor pulls the celery from her Bloody Mary, crunches down. My dentist asks me to rinse. They work her name in their mouths, their memories. “I definitely know that one,” they say.
 “That one,” because what is she now but a story, a story to know or not know, a story with a limited set of details, a story to master by memorizing maps and timelines.
 “The one from the boarding school!” they say. “I remember, the one from the video. You knew her?”
 She’s the one whose photo pops up if you search New Hampshire murder, alongside mug shots from the meth-addled tragedies of more recent years. One photo—her laughing with her mouth but not her eyes, suggesting 
 Part I
 
 
 1
 I first watched the video in 2016. I was in bed on my laptop, with headphones, worried Jerome would wake up and I’d have to explain. Down the hall, my children slept. I could have gone and checked on them, felt their warm cheeks and hot breath. I could have smelled my daughter’s hair—and maybe the scent of damp lavender and a toddler’s scalp would have been enough to send me to sleep.
 But a friend I hadn’t seen in twenty years had just sent me the link, and so I clicked.
 Lerner and Loewe’s Camelot. I was both stage manager and tech director. One fixed camera, too close to the orchestra, too far from the unmiked adolescent singers, 1995 VHS quality, some member of the AV club behind the lens. And my God, we knew we weren’t great, but we weren’t even as good as we thought we were. Whoever uploaded it two decades later, whoever added the notes below with the exact time markers for when Thalia Keith shows up, had also posted the list of cast and crew. Beth Docherty as a petite Guinevere, Sakina John glowing as Morgan le Fay with a crown of gold spikes atop her cornrows, Mike Stiles beautiful and embarrassed as King Arthur. My name is misspelled, but it’s there, too.
 The curtain call is the last shot where you clearly see Thalia, her dark curls distinguishing her from the washed-out mass. Then most everyone stays onstage to sing “Happy Birthday” to Mrs. Ross, our director, to pull her up from the front row where she sat every night jotting notes. She’s so young, something I hadn’t registered then.
 A few kids exit, return in confusion. Orchestra members hop onstage to sing, Mrs. Ross’s husband springs from the audience with flowers, the crew comes on in black shirts and black jeans.