The Better Sister Read online

  So I wasn’t the only one wondering what our lives would be like once the news of Adam’s murder broke. All any teenager ever wanted was to blend in with the crowd, and Ethan already had a hard time fitting in.

  I put in my order for a Reuben and handed him a fifty from my wallet. Once he was gone, I poured myself three fingers of scotch and downed it. No amount of the stuff was going to help. I laughed to myself as I realized that Ethan’s mention of marijuana was stuck somewhere in the back of my mind.

  Adam had found the bag of pot last summer when he went wading through the swamp of accumulated clothes, soda bottles, textbooks, and game controllers on Ethan’s bedroom floor, in search of the tennis racket I thought Ethan had used last. We had three others in the closet, but Adam was adamant that he needed the Yonex. The summer tournament had him going up against Colin Harris, a handsome lawyer who had a way of bringing out my husband’s competitive side.

  We never did find that stupid tennis racket, but Adam emerged from Ethan’s bedroom carrying a freezer bag of weed. He was screaming out the back door for Ethan to get out of the pool before I even registered what he was holding. I still remembered Ethan standing on the bluestone deck, water dripping from his swim shorts, while Adam threatened to drive him to the doctor right then and there for a drug test.

  I finally convinced Adam to keep his cool while I gave Ethan a towel so he could come inside. The neighbors didn’t need to hear every word of what was about to happen.

  Ethan swore up and down he was only holding on to the pot for a friend. He said his unnamed friend worked as a cashier at a store where “they search the employees’ stuff when they leave, like for shoplifting and stuff.”

  “Which friend?”

  Ethan had never had a particularly active social life, but it was easy enough to keep track of the people he knew in the city—same private schools, same circle of parents who kept each other in the loop. But East Hampton was another story. There, he could befriend whatever group of kids he happened upon at the beach for the afternoon. Some stuck, while others washed away.

  It was clear to me from Ethan’s crossed arms and pursed lips that he had no intention of answering his father’s question. Ethan could be more stubborn than Adam and me combined when he wanted to.

  “Seriously?” Adam had asked. “You’re acting like a lowlife criminal right now. Snitches get stitches? Is that it?”

  When Ethan started to smile, the veins in Adam’s neck flared and he balled his fists. “That was my fault,” I said. “I made a face. I’m sorry, Adam.”

  Adam turned toward me, but his expression didn’t soften. “Come on, babe,” I said. “That was a little bit funny, okay?”

  He told us there was nothing funny about it. That the quantity involved was serious—right around half a pound, by his estimate. He said that amount would be a felony under New York law, not to mention the penalties for distribution, which that quantity probably indicated. “Is this how you paid for those goddamn shoes?”

  He disappeared into Ethan’s room again, reemerging with a high-top sneaker in each hand, slamming them down on the dining room table next to the bag of weed. He was still screaming, but at least he was in something of a comfort zone at the moment—building an argument using laws that he knew and we didn’t.

  “I swear to you, Dad, I am not selling pot. I told my friend I didn’t want him to put that in my bag, but he had to leave for work. I didn’t even touch it. He stuck it in there and left. What was I supposed to do?”

  “I don’t believe you, Ethan. Not until you tell me the name of the friend.”

  “No way. You’ll call the cops or whatever. Just, please, Dad. Can you just let me leave it there until I see him later? It’s only pot.”

  I continued to hear Adam haranguing Ethan as I carried the pot, unnoticed, to the kitchen and stuffed it down the garbage disposal. Holding the empty bag open as I returned to the room, I announced that there was nothing more to discuss. I told Ethan to go to his room, and then Adam continued to take his anger out on me. He must have told me ten different times that he had been a federal prosecutor and that it was hypocritical to allow his son to wriggle out of a position that would land a poorer, darker kid in a cell. I eventually got him to see that the two of them had been at a standstill and that my approach had solved the problem. “What were you going to do?” I asked him. “Ethan’s as headstrong as you . . . when he wants to be. You can’t waterboard him into giving you a name.”

  The next day, I handed Ethan $500 to give to his friend and made him promise he’d never do anything so stupid again. No parent wants their kid around drugs, I explained, but his father was a former prosecutor. Of course he was going to be tougher than the typical dad. Ethan had no way of knowing that Adam’s sensitivity about law-and-order issues might stem from his own family’s history in that arena.

  Now, nearly nine months later, I found that same backpack in Ethan’s bedroom and unzipped that same front pocket. On the one hand, I didn’t want to think he’d broken his promise to me. On the other hand, I couldn’t remember a time when I would have been so happy to stumble upon a joint. The pocket was empty. As I was zipping it back up, something inside the main compartment of the backpack shifted. It was open. Without meaning to, I saw a glimmer of silver inside. I reached for it and found a flip phone.

  For half a second, I felt pain in my lungs, wondering how Ethan had found the burner phone I had disposed of earlier that day. Then I realized that this was an entirely different device. I flipped it open and scrolled through the recent calls. I didn’t recognize the numbers, almost all of them with 631 and 516 area codes—Long Island numbers. The contacts were stored with initials only—J, M, N, and P.

  Just like I had told Adam: “Ethan’s as headstrong as you . . . when he wants to be.” It would have been just like him to get a second phone after his father threatened to report one of his friends to the police. Now that he had made some connections to kids on the East End, all Ethan wanted was to keep them. I of all people knew how strident his father could be. I couldn’t blame him for going behind Adam’s back to have a private way of contacting people that his father might label “bad influences.”

  Ethan was sixteen years old and knew ten times more than I did about technology. He would find a way to talk to anyone he wanted to talk to, regardless of what I did with his secret phone. I started to return the phone to the backpack, but then I heard Adam’s voice in my head, telling me that I was enabling Ethan. Giving him too much slack. Ignoring warning signs. Being one of those parents.

  Then I heard myself arguing that Ethan was a good kid, but also stubborn. That the more we tried to control him, the more he’d do the exact opposite.

  I could hear every word of a fight I’d never have with Adam again. I turned the phone off, carried it to my office, and dropped it in the top drawer. It wasn’t what Adam would do, but at least it was more than nothing.

  It never dawned on me to wonder why Ethan had been carrying around a backpack with nothing in it but a tiny phone.

  Part II

  Nicky

  15

  Thanks to the smell of bacon in the apartment, I managed to get Ethan out of his room to eat breakfast. Even though it was nearly three in the afternoon and his first meal of the day, he chewed in silence and left half his eggs on the plate.

  “I wish I could make this easier for you,” I said.

  He shrugged. “I don’t think it felt real until today. I’m getting texts from kids who have, like, never once spoken to me, saying how great Dad was and they can’t believe they’re not going to see him again. It’s so fake, but it’s also making me realize he’s really gone.”

  “People don’t know what to say when someone passes on, that’s all.” I told him his father would always be around as long as we remembered him, but I knew the words were no less hollow than the texts coming in on his phone.

  News of Adam’s murder traveled quickly once the Daily News published its story in t
he early morning hours, first online and then in the print edition in time to hit newsstands. The latest White House scandal dominated the front cover, but Adam’s murder landed in the local crime headline along the bottom edge: Husband of #ThemToo Writer Murdered in East Hampton.

  Of the articles I had skimmed briefly, about half reported that he had left a wife (me by name) and a teenage son. A few mentioned that his son was from a former marriage. And only one specified that the former marriage was to the sister of his current wife.

  Until now, the only public interest in our family had been focused on me, not Adam. I had seen no reason to highlight the fact that Ethan was technically my stepson, let alone my biological nephew. How do you tell people that you married your sister’s husband without sounding horrible? But now that one news outlet had gone in that direction, it would only be a matter of time before that juicy little tidbit was in the first paragraph of every single story about Adam’s murder—or about me, for that matter. At this point, I could no longer imagine caring what strangers had to say about me.

  “When’s Nicky supposed to be here?” Ethan asked, pushing his uneaten scrambled eggs into a pile of ketchup.

  I wondered whether my sister’s imminent arrival was at least partially responsible for the shift in his mood between last night and this morning. Nicky had called right as we were turning off the television for the evening, and I made the mistake of answering. She had insisted on coming to New York, and I hadn’t been able to talk her out of it.

  I glanced at my watch. “Her flight got in half an hour ago. She should be here any second.”

  He left his plate on the table and retreated to his room without comment.

  When the apartment phone rang, I was expecting it to be the doorman announcing Nicky’s arrival, but it was Bill Braddock, calling to check in. I assured him that we were holding up as well as we could under the circumstances.

  “I could sense the media hounds circling yesterday when one of them called me trying to get to you, but I took the liberty of trying to give you some time to grieve in private. I’m afraid my efforts were not successful.”

  I considered Bill a friend, but wasn’t particularly surprised he hadn’t called before now. He was the kind of person who liked to mingle at the center of the party, not necessarily hold your hand during a dark time. I told him that, if anything, maybe the media attention would bring in information that might help the police solve the case.

  “Not to pry, but what do they think happened?” he asked.

  The coverage, although widespread and splashy, was short on details. There were descriptions of us and our “celebrity-soaked,” “sought-after” East Hampton “enclave,” but little information about the crime itself other than mention of a late-night break-in and fatal stabbing.

  “They seem to think it was a burglary after Adam had gone to bed. He might have heard a noise and gotten up.”

  Bill was making sympathetic sighs on the other end of the line. It was on his third offer to help however possible that I finally brought up the subject of Adam’s hours out of the firm the previous week. “He told me he was meeting with people from the Gentry Group, but on his time sheets, he marked the hours as client development. Do you have any idea where he might have actually been?”

  “Lawyers aren’t exactly shift workers, as you know. You can sit in the office all day, but if you don’t do something we can charge a client for, you may as well be playing golf as far as the bottom line is concerned. Client development is a bit of a catchall. It could be the real deal of putting on a dog and pony show for a potential client, but half the time I think it’s socializing—lunches with a college buddy in town, that kind of thing—because you never know where the next piece of business might come from.”

  “And did you know of any dog and pony shows that Adam might have had?”

  “No, but partners don’t tend to share that kind of news until it’s official. Show me the money, as we like to say. I’m very sorry not to be able to tell you more, Chloe. And forgive me for prying yet again, but I hope you’re not wondering about Adam’s fidelity to you. I never once saw him turn an eye toward another woman.”

  “I know, and I keep telling myself the same thing. But I have to wonder if this has something to do with his murder.”

  “Knowing Adam, he was probably planning some big surprise for you. I’m sure there’s an explanation.”

  Maybe, but it was an explanation I would probably never have. My husband had lied to me about where he spent the last two days of his life. There was no way around it.

  A beep on the phone told me that another call was coming through. It was the doorman calling from the lobby. I told Bill that I needed to go. Nicky was here.

  Everything about Nicky is always bigger and louder than it needs to be. Normal people fly in airplanes every day and manage to make it to their ultimate destination all by themselves. I had even offered to arrange (and pay) for a car service from LaGuardia, but Nicky assured me she could find her own way. Now, nearly two hours after her flight landed, she was finally at my apartment door with two hip-high suitcases, a purse roughly the size of my wine fridge, and, most surprisingly, a man I didn’t recognize.

  “Chloe, meet my guardian angel, Jeremy.”

  Jeremy held up a sheepish hand. “Hey.” His hair was thinning, and his denim shirt didn’t hide a slight paunch, but he had bright green eyes and a dark beard. I could see him being Nicky’s type. He was looking at Nicky expectantly.

  “Oh, right, sorry. It’s down that hallway. The first door on the right, as I recall.”

  I watched, dumbfounded, as this stranger walked past me and made his way to our powder room.

  “What the hell, Nicky.”

  “I should have known you’d freak. He was on the shuttle bus with me and saw me struggling to get my bags off at Grand Central. He gave me a hand and we ended up sharing a cab downtown. By the time we got here, he needed to pee. It’s no big deal.”

  I thought of all the hours I had spent around random men Nicky managed to befriend. This one sort of resembled an older version of the guy she’d brought to Asiago, where I had my first waitressing job in high school. After ordering a three-course dinner and an entire bottle of wine—he was older than her, of course—they left without paying. It was the only time I was ever fired.

  Nicky insisted her date probably just forgot, but a month later, she came to my room sobbing because the same guy had used her ATM card to clear out nearly a thousand dollars from her savings account to cover a football bet. And then she kept dating the guy for another three months after that.

  It was a familiar cycle with my sister. She’d complain to me about her boyfriends, alleging wrongdoings ranging from drug abuse to theft to drunken attacks of rage. You can’t tell your sister that a man spit in your face and called you a stupid whore unless you’re planning to leave him. But that’s how it was with Nicky. She’d say too much and then accuse me of being judgmental when the relationship continued, brushing off her earlier grievances as “venting.” As a result, I was skeptical about every man she brought around. They were either as bad as she said they were during the low phases, or were off-kilter enough to be drawn to a woman who seemed to thrive on histrionics. Either way, I had no interest in knowing any more than necessary. Until, of course, she met Adam.

  When my unexpected bathroom guest emerged, he extended his hand for a quick shake. I was relieved when I caught a whiff of our lavender hand soap. “Jeremy Lyons. Sorry about barging in like this. And sorry about your loss.”

  Of course Nicky had told a total stranger why she was in town.

  I thanked him for helping my sister and ushered him out the door just as Ethan emerged from his bedroom. Usually he was reluctant around Nicky, especially when a long time passed between visits. He hadn’t seen her for well over a year, but rushed to greet her with a hug.

  “So that was you,” he said. “I thought I heard some dude.”

  “Someone helping
with the bags,” I said, managing to mask my annoyance.

  I could tell Ethan was trying his best to seem happy to see Nicky. Of course he tried. But as we made polite conversation about whether the flight was okay and why she had opted for the shuttle (“I guess I didn’t want to be alone in my thoughts in a taxi, plus it’s cheaper”), I could see Ethan shrink from a sloppy second hug that lingered too long, and the way she touched his hair like he was a baby.

  “I don’t even know what to say about Adam,” Nicky said. “I’m so sorry. For both of you,” she added.

  I nodded. “Thank you. I know it’s a loss for you, too. Let me give you two some time to catch up together.”

  I had already spoken to Ethan about this in advance. Nicky would be less likely to do something rash like insist on taking custody of Ethan if she didn’t feel like I was trying to control the situation. But Ethan had promised to come get me if she was too much to bear. And under no circumstances was he to trust her with a word about the details of his father’s murder. Remember when that beautiful American actress married a handsome prince, and the trashy side of her family sold stories and pictures to the tabloids? I had thought of Nicky.

  As I passed Ethan’s bedroom, I noticed that he had straightened it since we got home the previous day. By his standards, it was almost clean. I wondered if he did it because Nicky was coming, or for the same reason I had scraped my bathroom tile grout with a bobby pin until four in the morning.

  Once I was alone in my office, one look at my screen saver—a photo of Adam, Ethan, and me in front of a Louse Point sunset—had me trembling again. I wondered if I was ever going to regain control of my emotions. I forced myself to try to work, jotting down notes for a piece I would probably never publish. I had rejected Catherine’s suggestion of a press release, but she had called again this morning, suggesting that I write something for next month’s Eve about Adam’s murder. “Nothing salacious,” she said. “But people will want to hear from you. You’re the face of the magazine. And I know you, Chloe. Writing is how you digest. How you feel. How you live. You’ll know when you’re ready.”