“You’re saying she was murdered. Is that what you’re saying?” My mouth is sticky and dry. I must look like I’m having difficulty swallowing, because Jesse brings the water bottle to my lips.
“Drink,” she commands, lifting the bottle. Water leaks from the corners of my mouth, splashing my bare thighs. I rubbed my legs with bronzing lotion this morning, and the real color of my skin is exposed in jagged rivulets. I rode in a car listening to the new Taylor Swift song while my sister’s dead body was in the trunk. Like patting my head and rubbing my stomach, it is a cognitive challenge to have this thought and swallow water at the same time.
“How did this happen?” In the library with the candlestick my mind answers with a giggle that tells me I am not well.
“We’ll know more when the autopsy report is in, but your sister sustained a sizable wound to the back of her head. It’s possible she slipped and fell, but if it were an accident, there wouldn’t have been a need to conceal the body. And also. Because your sister was not, um. Well. It would have taken some strength to move her. A woman couldn’t have done that on her own.”
Because your sister was not thin, is what he was almost about to say.
“Vince did it,” Jesse says, and the officer shoots her a reproachful look. “I don’t know why she can’t know that is what everyone is thinking. He found out about Brett’s affair with Stephanie and he fucking lost it.”
I am standing. Why am I standing? I have my hand on the wall. I am doubled over, as if I am in labor, again. Maybe I am, a little bit. This is a realization so awful it must be born.
Someone killed my sister and that someone may or may not have been Vince, but we are going to say that Vince did it. We are going to say that he did it just like we are going to say that Brett and Stephanie had an affair when they didn’t. We are going to rig reality.
Jesse and the officer are telling me to sit down. I try but I immediately get back up. To sit on the truth. That’s something people say, and I understand it now. There is a strain of the truth that is a cement-backed chair, a pea in your mattress, and a pebble in your shoe. Bearable, but just barely.
So I pace until Layla arrives. By that time Jesse has worked out what we should tell her.
CHAPTER 22
* * *
Kelly
I remember almost nothing of her funeral, except the parts of Yvette’s eulogy already trending on Twitter.
And Arch.
Arch came with her mother, but not her father. I felt dirty about that. Like he refused to pay his respects because he knew something in the water wasn’t clean.
We all rode together in the limo after the burial—my father; his wife, Susan; Layla; Arch; and Arch’s mother. At the curb, right outside of Patsy’s Pizzeria on Sixtieth, Brett’s favorite pizza in the city and now the site of her wake, Arch asks me to hang back a moment.
“I’ve got her,” my father says, his hand in the middle of Layla’s upper back. Layla seems sleepy, cried out, numb. She has barely let me out of her sight since Brett died, and truthfully, I’m afraid to stray too far from her. Layla is a welcome distraction. So long as she is around, I can focus on comforting her. I can suspend everything I am afraid to feel.
“We won’t stay long,” I promise her as my father and Susan escort her onto the curb. My father shuts the door. My father. I don’t think he believes my story any more than I do, but I also know he will never challenge it for Layla’s sake. Layla may be devastated, but she is proud to be Brett Courtney’s niece—the Brett Courtney the public thought they knew.
“The rain held off,” Arch remarks to the gloomy window.
I nod, feeling like a spring-loaded trap moments from triggering. I have avoided being alone with Arch as much as possible this week. It was one thing to lie to her by omission when Brett was alive, quite another to insist that Brett and Stephanie had an affair ten months ago and that Vince found out about it and killed them both, which is the East Hampton Town Police Department’s working theory. I have my own working theory, but it’s nothing I can advance.
“Not that it would have mattered. Right?” Arch turns to me with a limp laugh, bunching a wet tissue beneath her chapped nose. She means because most of the women who attended the funeral wore sneakers, in Brett’s honor. They wouldn’t have had to worry about their heels sticking in the mud at the cemetery.
“It would have been okay either—”
“Was she still seeing her?” Arch demands. She cuts me off as soon as I open my mouth to respond, “Tell me the truth, Kel. Please. Please don’t lie to me. Don’t let me be the dumb girlfriend who didn’t know.”
Oh, the cut of that. I don’t speak quickly enough to be believed. I can’t speak quickly enough to be believed. I feel gagged by my grief. “She wasn’t seeing her. She loved you, Arch.”
Arch shakes her head disgustedly, skinning her nostrils with that wet, dirty tissue. I reach into my purse, trying to find her a fresh one so that she doesn’t give herself an infection.
“She didn’t love me,” Arch says. “I didn’t want to admit it, because I loved her. But I could tell. She was never all there. I’m not crazy. I won’t let you make me feel crazy. I know something was going on.”
I abandon the hunt for clean tissues and cover my chest with my hand. My heart feels old. It feels weak from hurting so many people. “Arch,” I gasp. “Please. I need you to believe she loved you. I love you and so does Layla. We will always be family.”
“Is it true?” she says to me, sounding stronger, like her anger has taken the lead now. Grief is just a partner dance between sorrow and fury. “Is it true you’re going to let them show what happened? That you’re getting your own show with Layla?”
I recommit myself to the clean tissue hunt so that I do not have to face her rightful disapproval. “The cameras were turned off when it happened. It doesn’t really show anything.”
“But you and Layla? You’re doing your own show?”
“It’s all focused on SPOKE. It will help so many Imazighen women and children, Arch.”
Arch starts to cry again. No. Wait. Is she . . . ? She is. She’s laughing. A bitter, silent, wet, and red-faced laugh. “You do it all for those women and children, don’t you, Kel?” she says once she catches her breath. Then she climbs out of the car and closes the door so gently it doesn’t even click. I don’t imagine I’ll hear from her again.
CHAPTER 23
* * *
Kelly: The Interview Present day
I have been reinstated at SPOKE, promoted to vice president. The board immediately revoked the decision to remove me after Brett died. It would have been too much upheaval for the company to survive, and in the aftermath of Brett’s death, women flocked to SPOKE and FLOW, specifically asking for me. For Layla. The demand has been so great that we are going nationwide in 2018, opening studios in Miami, DC, and L.A. Rihanna’s number is in my phone. The Oscar-Nominated Female Director sent me flowers. I wonder if this is how Donatella Versace felt.
Lisa steps into the shot, conferring with Jesse for a moment, their heads tilted together. Layla and I both watch on the monitor from Jesse’s guest bedroom. For “confessional” type interviews, only the DP, the EP, an audio mixer, and the talent are in the room. Everyone else is sequestered away, to minimize distraction and ambient sound.
Layla has stuffed her feet into Brett’s furry Gucci slides, which are a size too small for her, but she insisted on wearing something of Brett’s for her interview. “Layls,” I whisper. There isn’t much privacy in Jesse’s cramped, expensive apartment, especially not with eight members of the crew milling about, plus hair and makeup and Jesse’s two personal assistants. “Just checking in that you still want to do this. You’re allowed to change your mind at any time. Even in the middle of the interview, if that’s when you decide you don’t want to do this.”