The only time Davis ever asked me directly about Chris was not long before he died. It was after a backyard barbecue we gave for his office staff.
I’d asked Davis if I could invite Chris so I could have someone to talk to. Our guests would mostly discuss design and office gossip, with a polite question about Miles thrown in to acknowledge that I was the one who’d made the potato salad and bought the hot dogs. And had the boss’s child. Not that any of them had any real interest in Miles—or me. It was all about Davis—the genius, the star.
Davis said, “Sure, why not? Ask Chris.”
He must have thought it was better than having me complain afterward that everyone had ignored me. It was risky having Chris there. But I hadn’t seen him for a while, and I knew that I wouldn’t be bored if I could just look at him from across the yard.
For the first hour of the party, I noticed Davis watching me. He must have seen that I was half there, half somewhere else—until Chris showed up.
I was at the food table. Chris came up behind me. When I turned around, there he was. My happiness, when I saw him, was more than brother-sister happiness. It seemed so obvious. I looked across the lawn and saw that Davis had seen it too.
That night Davis said, “Stephanie, I need to ask you something. Maybe this is going to sound weird, but . . . is there anything . . . unusual about your relationship with Chris? Maybe I’m just being paranoid, but sometimes I get the feeling that you guys are a little . . . too close. And sometimes it kind of freaks me out. Your bond is so intense, it’s almost like you’re lovers.”
I was sitting in front of the bedroom mirror, brushing my hair. I pretended I’d dropped something on the floor so I wouldn’t have to meet his eyes.
“Hey, I thought I was supposed to be the paranoid one in this marriage,” I said. “Because that’s ridiculous. We’re just close. Maybe because we’re siblings who missed out on our childhood together, we’re making up for lost time.”
Davis knew that I was lying. He knew in that way that people know and don’t know things that they don’t want to know about the person they love. But he knew just the same.
We had some dinner plates—off-white with bands of jade—that Davis was very fond of. He had laboriously selected them, one by one, from a bin of vintage crockery at a store on lower Broadway.
That night, when I refused to admit that my relationship with Chris was anything more than ordinary family affection, Davis went into the kitchen. I heard a crash, then another. I ran into the kitchen to find that he’d thrown several plates against the wall.
“What was that for?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” he said. “Maybe I’m just making up for lost time.”
That was unlike him. It was more in character for him to do what he did then: He apologized and vacuumed up the broken pottery shards.
I thought that my having Miles, that Davis and I having Miles, would change things. I thought it would make Chris and me come to our senses. But it had only driven us further underground, where the air was closer and steamier and hotter.
On the day that the two of them died, the summer heat was suffocating. I was in the backyard by the pool, with Miles splashing in the baby pool beside me, and Davis was farther down toward the deep end, under an umbrella. He was fair skinned and sunburned easily, unlike my brother and me.
Late in the afternoon I heard the sound of Chris’s truck pulling up in front of the house. I stared at Miles so I wouldn’t be looking for Chris as I heard him come up the walk. I couldn’t look at Davis. He would have seen everything on my face.
There was nothing to do but exchange a hasty hug and kiss. Davis was watching us.
He knew. And I knew that he knew.
I closed my eyes so my husband couldn’t see the desire in them. I went to get Chris a beer. Then the three of us sat around and watched Miles, who was taking his plastic monkey for a ride in an orange plastic boat.
On the day they died, after the argument, when the two men got in the car, I remember wondering, Where do we go from here? The truck coming straight at them and the tree they struck answered my question for me.
Davis was buried in New Hampshire, in the country cemetery near the house where his mother’s family has lived forever. I left Miles with his grandma’s housekeeper so he wouldn’t have to see his father’s shroud lowered into the ground. Unbeknownst to me, Davis had left a will requesting a green burial and leaving everything (including the future income from his design products) to me.
There were lots of people at the service. His whole office staff had come up from Manhattan, as had some of the clients who lived in the houses he’d built and renovated: strangers who had worked with him and grown fond of him. Plus he had a huge family all over New England, aunts and uncles and cousins I’d never met, a whole clan assembled to say goodbye, and (some of them) to meet me for the first and last time.
At the reception at Davis’s mom’s house, there were cold cuts and a wheel of hard cheese that no one could hack into. Crackers and carrot sticks. Coffee. Tea. That was it. I thought: Are there people in the world who don’t know that people really need a drink on a day like this? It explained a lot about Davis, but it was too late for me to be helped by—or to care about—a new take on how my husband’s upbringing had formed him.
The next day I left Miles with his grandmother and flew to Madison for Chris’s funeral. I was the next of kin. There was no one to help me make any of the decisions that had to be made, but I was so numb that I got through it on automatic. I assumed that Chris (who didn’t have a will) would have wanted to be buried next to his mom. It took a little sleuthing to track down her grave, but I was grateful for the distraction.
It was a very different service from Davis’s. No relatives except me. No aunts or uncles or cousins. But Chris had had a lot of friends. An announcement appeared in the Madison paper, and a couple of Chris’s friends posted it on Facebook. It seemed as if half the class of his large public high school was there.
They’d all loved him, and—except for one guy named Frank who had worked in construction with Chris and reminded me of him, a little—they were all surprised to learn he had a sister. They’d thought he was an only child, that his mom was a single mom. Which she was, in a way. But they were glad to meet me. They were sorry it had to be on such a sad occasion. They were sorry for my loss. As if they had any idea what I’d lost!
There was one woman—an old girlfriend of Chris’s—who kept staring at me in a funny, excessively curious way. The weird thing was that she looked a little like me.
I was sure that Chris’s former girlfriend knew or sensed something . . . off . . . about me and my brother. But the guilty always think that someone knows their secret.
None of them seemed aware, and I saw no reason to tell them, that my husband had died in the same wreck as Chris. I pretended that it was only Chris in the car when it hit the tree. It seemed easier that way—less explaining to do, less unwanted pity. There was enough of that already.
After the service, we went to a local bar. Everyone bought rounds and gave tearful toasts to Chris’s memory. Everyone got roaring drunk. I stuck very close to Chris’s friend Frank, clinging to the phrases and gestures that reminded me of my brother. We were the last ones left at the bar.
That night I did something I was later deeply ashamed of. I told Frank that I was too drunk to drive back to my motel, which was true. But I also invited him to my room where, I said, there was a minibar. We could have a nightcap. I knew that wasn’t true. The motel was too cheap to have a minibar.