My mother hummed a few bars of the song, then laughed quietly at herself. “Your sister was so beautiful that night.” My mother never said her name.

“She hated it.”

“Hated what, darling?”

“That whole night. Everything about it.”

“What are you talking about, sweetie? She was on cloud nine.”

“You’re wrong. She was furious.”

My mother hugged herself as if the room had grown cold. “You listened.”

“How would you know? You said you stopped after a few minutes.”

My mother held my gaze.

“You listened, too.”

“Years ago. You were in college and your father was away on business for the week. I just—”

“Couldn’t help it.”

She nodded.

“Then you know what I’m talking about. You know how upset she was that night.”

My mother sighed. “I know that’s what she said, sweetheart. But I was there. I saw her. She was so happy.”

“Apparently not.”

“All I can say is I know what I saw.”

I gritted my teeth. It was so like her, this aloof denial of an unpleasant truth.

“Honey, what was that?”

I stuffed my hand in my pocket. “What was what?”

“Your hand. I thought I saw…”

“An itch.”

Strange, how something can lie dormant in you for years, so long you forget about it, and then it’s back like it never left. It had been happening for a few weeks now, the need growing more difficult to suppress—words prickling in my fingertips, desperate to get out. S-o h-a-p-p-y.

“Sweetheart, are you getting enough fresh air?”

Fresh air? Fanfuckingtastic.

IT’S TEMPTING to paint my nighttime meetings with Clive retroactively with a shiny gloss, to suggest that after a while we achieved an easy rapport, and I want to be careful not to mislead in that way. Even after we’d spent hours together, our conversations remained stilted. Clive often gave only the most perfunctory answers to my questions before falling silent for long stretches. There was one topic, though, that he seemed truly to relish, and that was his job as a hack and the things he had seen, the stories he had to tell. He told me about the crazy conversations he’d overheard. The time someone left a two-hundred-dollar tip on a ten-buck ride. Getting held up in the nineties.

“I had a man once who started talking to himself,” he began one evening. “He was talking about a heist he was going to execute with a partner. He said, ‘Here’s the plan. I’ll go up to the teller, I’ll show her the gun and tell her she has twenty seconds. When I put my hand in my pocket, you get the customers down on the ground.’ He kept going like this, how they will get into the vault and what they will retrieve from it and where the getaway car will be parked. I began to worry that perhaps I was the getaway car. I was thinking about how I might drive to a police station without him realizing where we were going when he said, ‘So? How did I do?’ He was an actor. It was opening night of his first off-Broadway play.”

“No.”

“It’s true.” He grinned. “I’ve also driven three women in labor to the hospital, one of them in a blizzard. She told me she would name her child after me. I remember when I told my son that he said, ‘But what if she had a girl?’ If you ever meet a Clivette, I guess she has me to thank.”

“You have a son?”

He appeared flustered, as if he hadn’t meant to reveal this. He nodded. “He’ll be turning twenty-one soon.”

“He lives here?”

“Oh, no, no. He’s back home, back—with his mother.”

“Your wife?”

He shook his head. “She was a difficult woman. Troubled.”

“Are you and your son close?”

He broke off small tatters from the napkin in his fist and collected them in a pile on the table. “I tried at first. She didn’t permit me to be involved.” He cleared his throat. “Here’s another story for you: Would you believe I once picked up Mike Piazza two hours before a home game? His driver was stuck on the Bruckner. It was just after 9/11 and traffic was very bad. I got him to Shea just in time.”

Clive had spoken the words “my son” like a kiss to a warm forehead. I hadn’t known he had a child. If the boy was twenty now, then he had been two or three years old when Alison was killed. Bile rose in my throat. Clive had been a father when it happened. He should have looked at Alison and seen someone’s child, not whatever she was to him instead: A way of injecting excitement into a life saddled with a kid and responsibilities he wasn’t ready for? The unlucky victim of a man’s anger toward another woman, a “difficult” woman? Had Alison known Clive had a son? As Edwin Hastie slid a cigarette between her lips in the sandy staff parking lot, had Clive told some precious story about his toddler, and had this story made her think these men sweet and safe?

“Wow,” I said. “That’s amazing.”

“Only in New York. Before he got out I told him, Mike, I have a confession. Usually I’m a Yankee fan. But tonight I’m rooting for the Mets.”

HAPPY BIRTHDAY to me. Woo-hoo. Today, old lady Alison, you are sixteen years old.

So I can drive now. Very exciting, blah blah blah. For my birthday my parents got me … drumroll, please … a new car!

That’s right, my dad bought me a brand-spanking-new Audi. So inevitably we had a big fight about it. I wanted a used car. Something low-key. Because, come on. I’m sixteen. Why on earth should I own a brand-new Swedish or German or whatever … why should I have this luxury car that I’m inevitably going to fuck up because I just started driving and, news flash, I don’t know how yet? When I told him that, he was all, “That’s exactly why we want you to have a good, safe car.”

I mean, he’s right. On the one hand, I completely understand why if you could afford it you would buy the best car you can for your kid. On the other hand, I’m mortified. Not just for me. For my friends, too. On behalf of my friends, especially the ones who are, like, super-excited about their new luxury vehicles and see no issue here whatsoever. We’re teenagers and people are just giving us these ridiculously nice cars. We should be embarrassed, right?

But being embarrassed only makes it worse, because if you’re lucky enough to be given a nice, safe, fancy-schmancy car, isn’t it brattier to yell at your dad about it than to just be glad you have it? But then—I feel like there’s this really slippery slope between being glad you have something and thinking you deserve it.

WHEN MY mother had told me that, despite what Alison said in her diary, she was certain my sister had been on cloud nine at her last dance recital, I’d thought she was sticking her head in the sand. But the more I listened to Alison’s diary, the more I began to wonder whether it could be trusted. I began to detect a self-conscious, performative aspect in the things she said. Take Alison’s insistence that she did not want the new car my parents gave her. Are we really to believe that she did not, on some level, want it? Are we really going to accept that she didn’t enjoy having it? Isn’t it more likely that she loved the car—its new-car aroma, its elasticity around a sharp bend, its blue gleam in the school parking lot—but that her own materiality embarrassed her, or she thought it ought to—that she knew a purer person would be embarrassed by it, and she wished to believe she was such a person? Isn’t it more likely that the extended diatribe on the subject that she recorded in the diary was an attempt to reassure herself of her own virtue?

Or let’s return to the recital. What if my mother was right and Alison was simply giddy eating up compliments after her performance? That’s how I remember it, too. You can see how a diary might become a useful tool, how it might be used to rewrite history, to recast the pivotal moments of one’s life to suggest a humbler, more critical self.

At the same time, the urgency and raw emotion in Alison’s words were unmistakable, her turmoil palpable. She was grappling with herself. I believe that. Alison at least meant to be honest with herself. Here we run up against yet another problem—the obstacle of her youth. How much does a girl of fifteen or sixteen really understand about herself? How accurate can she possibly be?