I perceived something else, too. A distance in Alison’s eyes. It was as if she saw Faraway Cay in her mind’s eye and knew that, in the subtext of each moment, as we swam and giggled and tried to tie knots in the stems of maraschino cherries with our tongues, she was moving through the becalmed cerulean water toward it. It occurred to me that maybe I hadn’t known my sister very well at all.

AT WORK the next day I was distracted and unsettled. I reread the same sentence over and over without grasping its meaning. The photograph my father took of Alison gnawed at the edges of my mind. For whom had she really been posing?

Eventually I gave up on work. Instead, I opened Facebook and searched for Clive Richardson. There were dozens of profiles, but eventually I found the one I was looking for. His profile picture was a selfie blurred by a burst of light from a lamp behind him. He was not active on the site—he had posted no other photos and had only two friends. The first was a man named Ousseini. This man did have an active social media presence; his timeline was filled with family photos and inspirational quotations set against backdrops of sunsets and mountains. Clive’s only post was a birthday message to his one other friend, a man named Bryan Richardson. The post was several years old and was written the way people who do not understand Facebook write messages: Dear Bryan, Wishing you a very happy birthday. Sincerely, Clive. Presumably, Bryan Richardson was a relative, though he looked nothing like Clive—he was tall and slender; in his profile picture he wore a trim-cut suit and sat at a keyboard, his hands touched down lightly over the keys.

Edwin Hastie had no profile. A Google search for his name turned up nothing but old articles about Alison’s case.

Next, I typed “Alison Thomas” into Google and the autocomplete options popped up:

Alison Thomas murder

Alison Thomas Dying for Fun

Alison Thomas obituary

I had never read my sister’s obituary. I was too young to have read it when it came out, and in more recent years, when I might easily have found it online, I hadn’t looked for it. Not that it hadn’t occurred to me. But I had absorbed a lesson from my parents not to permit myself to plunge into the depths. I clicked on the link and found the brief notice that had been published by our local suburban paper.

Alison Brianne Thomas, 18, died January 3rd, on a family vacation to the island of Saint X. She was born September 8, 1977, to Richard (Rick) and Ellen (Wolfe) Thomas.

Alison was a talented performer and athlete who loved modern dance, swimming, tennis, and the great outdoors. A budding scientist, she had aspirations toward a career in medicine and has just completed her first semester at Princeton. While her life was cut far too short, she lived every moment to its very fullest and gave so much joy to her family and friends.

She is survived by her parents and younger sister, Claire, as well as grandparents Sylvia, Edward, Jean, and Fred, and great-grandmother Helen.

A life, paired down to what were at once its most essential and meaningless facts. I was surprised to read that Alison had “aspirations toward a career in medicine.” I had no memory of my sister expressing any desire to become a doctor. Come to think of it, I didn’t remember her expressing an inclination toward any particular professional path at all. Maybe I’d simply been too young to attend to those aspects of her life, but I didn’t think so. Something about this line rang false. Who had written the obituary? My father, presumably. Maybe he wished to suggest to the world that my sister was more directed, more fully formed, than she really was. Here was a girl with plans! But I think something deeper was at play: with this brief mention of Alison’s “aspirations,” she became not just an eighteen-year-old girl but also a medical student, a resident, a fellow, chair of Pediatric Cardiology at Brigham and Women’s. Aspirations toward a career in medicine. A false claim, and a necessary one. To mourn a budding physician was a terrible task, but it was a thing you could do. To mourn a girl with infinite futures was to mourn infinitely.

WHAT IS the neurological experience of a person? When you think of someone, what sound, image, scent is summoned? For instance, in my mind, my father is forever bent over his African violets in our garden in Pasadena, inspecting them for aphids. My childhood friend Kelsey Johnston is the hyper-particular hammy odor of her farts. Aunt Caroline is gray roots at the nape of a long, graceful neck.

Alison is flowers and white teeth. I know where this image comes from. The high school dance recital, Alison’s senior year. She wore a dove-gray leotard and a flowing chiffon skirt and leapt across the stage. I don’t know the name of the song she danced to, but I remember its melancholy sound. Watching her was like watching the music itself spin and bend through the air. How deeply I felt her feeling it, infusing the auditorium with a snowy perfume of longing. I remember sitting there, watching the other people in the audience watching her. My sister. Mine.

Afterward, in the auditorium lobby, my parents and Drew McNamara and her friends piled bouquets into her arms. She wore glitter on her cheeks. She grinned. Flowers and white teeth.

This was a child’s version of a person. My parents’ version of Alison was different but, it occurred to me now, no more accurate. When they spoke of her, it was not to reminisce about the past, but to imagine her into the present:

Of the mandarin tree that grew in our tiny yard in Pasadena:

“Alison would have loved this.”

“She would have eaten the fruit right here under the tree.”

At times, their invocations struck me as almost willfully inaccurate.

At Yellowstone, beholding Old Faithful:

“Alison would have thought this was so neat.”

Would she really? Alison had never been one to be especially impressed.

In my parents’ version, Alison was buffed like a piece of sea glass, her edges and points worn away over time and yielding to a pleasing smoothness.

THAT EVENING I once again traveled to the Little Sweet, drawn there as if by a spell. As I neared my destination, the racing of my heart became almost unbearable, but I did not turn back. I had to find him. I could not let him disappear. Still, I didn’t expect to actually come upon him, and when I arrived and looked through the plate-glass and saw him, seated at a table in the corner beside a potted palm, a plate of crimson stew and a blue can of beer on his tray, I had the sense that this image was not, could not be, real. He sat with his shoulders hunched, his legs squeezed awkwardly beneath the small table, casting off an aura of both physical and metaphysical discomfort.

I lingered only a moment outside, terrified that he would lift his head and see me. Then I crossed the street. Hidden by the shadow beneath the awning of the West Indian grocery, I watched him. From the speakers of the bookstore down the street, a lesson on daily tasks reverberated. They drive to work. I go to the store. He comes home. Clive ate his meal in slow, distracted bites while he watched what I assumed must be a television on the wall, out of my view. He finished his beer and purchased another. He nodded a wordless hello to a fellow customer. With a paper napkin he kept crumpled in his fist, he wiped the crimson stew from his lips. Ordinary actions, objectively of no interest. I couldn’t look away.

BACK AT my apartment later that night, I found Dying for Fun: Alison Thomas on YouTube. In it, my sister is played by Selena Richter, an actress who, a decade later, would rise to superstardom when she played the heroine in a trilogy of dystopian films based on a popular book series. Someone had posted each episode in the series: Kristin Broekner, Maggie Donohue, Flora Salter, Alicia Madigan. I changed into my pajamas and got in bed with my laptop to submit myself to Dying for Fun: Alison Thomas (Selena Richter in Early Role!!!).

The episode had been viewed some 47,000 times and received approximately 2,400 thumbs-up and 650 thumbs-down. (Whether these “dislikes” were meant to indicate disapproval of the quality of the film, or of Selena Richter, or of the dated anti-feminism and clunky moral suasion of the entire Dying for Fun enterprise, I don’t know.) The comments section was no more illuminating:

OMG I loved this when it aired and watching it now is a blast from the freaking past.

This is ’90s AF.

Selena Richter = overrated.

I can’t even with those platform shoes.