by Andrea Bartz
In the Amtrak waiting area, Hana was jealously guarding two seats, tucked between a pile of shrieking toddlers and a dude in a baseball cap loudly braying into his phone. Two wrestling kids tumbled onto my foot as I picked my way through.
“Oooh, heaven is a place on Earth,” I sang, jazzily sweeping my arm out. Hana glanced up and it was clear she’d been crying; I collapsed into the seat next to her. “Hi. I got us cinnamon-sugar pretzels. Self-care.”
“Thanks.” She gave me a side-hug. “How are you doing today?”
“Well, you know.” We’d both spent Sunday alone in our beds, binge-watching the same Netflix show and texting occasional commentary, ignoring the torrent of calls and emails from journalists seeking comment on Eleanor’s untimely death. She nodded and plucked open her greasy bag, then chewed thoughtfully.
We rushed down to the train the second the track was announced, arms and hips and children and suitcases buffeting us about as we Tetrised our luggage onto the rack and plonked into seats. I yanked on my headphones as we emerged from under the station and into a gray-white wonderland, the air still swollen with snow. There was something sad but soothing about our pilgrimage to Beverly. There, I wouldn’t have to worry about Mom and Hana snapping at each other. There, we wouldn’t need to act cheery or try to put into words who Eleanor was or what she meant to us. It was like a multiday memorial, a walking wake. Remembering Eleanor: The Experience.
“Hey, I meant to ask: What happened with Daniel on Saturday?” I said as we pulled away from a stop. “Was he okay?”
“Yeah, he just needed someone to sit and cry with him. Said he was numb when the cops told him the news Friday night, and then he didn’t sleep, so by the morning he was a wreck. But he was okay by the time I left.” Outside the window, an occasional sight pierced the white: a flicker of tree trunk, the flash of a red house. “What’d you do after I left?”
I thought back; she had no way of knowing I’d paid Carl a visit at Ghost Cafe. “Pretty much the same—I sat around and cried. Only with Cosmo, instead of Daniel.”
She regarded me for a second, then nodded. She got out her earbuds, prepared to seal off the conversation.
“Did you ever call Mom?” I asked.
“Ugh, I completely forgot. I will soon. How’s she doing?”
“Okay.”
We both went back to staring at the woolly world outside.
A few hours into the ride, Hana’s phone rang. She’d been dozing and I watched as she startled, then stared at the screen. I didn’t catch the name, but she answered in a low voice.
She listened, hunched over, piping up with the occasional, “I’m sorry, what?” and “Can you repeat that?” and “Are you sure?” The female voice on the other end of the line was fucking livid, and Hana turned to shoot me a barbed stare before standing and walking off toward the end of the car. It was the shocked, betrayed look a dog aims at you when you’ve pretended to have a treat and then opened your empty fist. My heart plummeted. It was over. As Erin had warned. Hana knew.
I sat there, bathed in that cold, rushing feeling. My teeth began to chatter and I wished there were an escape hatch, somewhere I could run and hide. Finally, Hana returned and sat down carefully, staring straight ahead.
“That was Aurelia,” she said, her voice soft and terrifying. “Katie, please tell me. That you did not tell your publisher. That you’d write a tell-all exposé about Eleanor.”
My jaw was chittering too hard for me to open it and speak. Slowly, slowly, she turned to look at me.
“Tell me it’s not true.”
“I didn’t call it a tell-all exposé,” I said with the voice of a five-year-old. She made me repeat myself and I knew I was fucked.
“Let me get this straight,” she said, lifting her eyebrows. “You told your editor you’d write a book about Eleanor.” I nodded. “And you didn’t ask for permission or come talk to me about it.” Nodded again. “And so you were secretly reporting out this book for a proposal, knowing full well Eleanor hadn’t and probably wouldn’t sign off on it.” I started to protest and she went on: “No, don’t even. Because I also know that you’ve been feeding your agent confidential information, and that—no, listen to me—that is the reason news of her death was leaked. Which fucked up the investigation and has made the NYPD furious. That’s what you’ve done.”
I knew I should apologize, should roll over and show my belly, but defensiveness barreled out first: “Okay, I had nothing to do with the leak. I told my agent everything we discussed was in confidence and she messed up, she let it slip to a coworker, who apparently passed it on. And I one-hundred-percent planned to talk to you—and, and Eleanor, originally—when the time was right. I hadn’t even started a proposal yet. I was just trying to see if I could report this out instead of my other book idea because that didn’t work out. But this was just deep background, and obviously that was before she went missing, and I would never—”
“Just stop!” Hana shot both palms out and I recoiled, like she’d hit me. “Katie, stop. You’re not talking your way out of this. You’re not—actually, you’re doing exactly what you always do, using my connections and then making a mess of them and then trusting that ol’ Hana’s going to be here to clean it up for you.”
My jaw dropped. “What are you talking about? You kept—”
Someone shushed us, fiercely, and we both whipped our chins over to an elderly man across the aisle.
I lowered my voice. “You kept trying to hook me up with your fancy-ass contacts, and you know what? I didn’t take a single meeting. I didn’t take you up on a single goddamn thing, because I knew you would do this, you’d lord it over me and continue to tell yourself and everyone else that I can’t do shit without you, that I’m this useless little kid who can’t take care of herself—”
“Can you? I mean, look at yourself. You get all this money to write this amazing book, and what do you do? You throw it away. And what do you mean that other idea ‘didn’t work out’?”
“It’s not—I wasn’t trying to—”
“And anyway, my God, I am so sorry for trying to help you. For trying to get you into the Herd when there are hundreds of women dying to get in.” This was disorienting, this was churning around in a dangerous riptide, which way was up, who was this Hana? It wasn’t like my sister to be cruel, to go for the throat.
“Hana, I—”
“You ride on my coattails and then you’re shocked, shocked, when shit blows up in your face. Well, guess what, this bomb managed to take a bunch of us out with it too. I hope you’re happy, Katie. Even I can’t swoop in and fix this.”
“I ride on your coattails?” I tapped furiously at my collarbone. “I force you to deal with the real shit? Answer me this: Who the fuck moved to Michigan when Mom got her diagnosis?” I sat up straighter. “Who ran off to California with Dad and left her ten-year-old sister behind the second shit got tough? You think you’re the one who has to deal with real problems? You know what, fuck you. I know I’m supposed to be grateful that you deigned to let me into your life at Harvard, just like you’ve deigned to help get me into the Herd. But guess what: Mikki and Eleanor liked me too. They wanted to be my friends and you hated that.” I leaned my face close to hers. “I’m sorry to break it to you, but I’m not just your fuckup, piece-of-shit little sister. I’m a real person, and honestly? People seem to like me better than you.”
The train thundered along its track, jolting suddenly and sending both of our shoulders swaying. But she kept her eyes on me and, after a second, my insides did something complicated. I’d thought it would make me feel better, winning the fight, landing a true burn. Instead I just felt sick.
“Well, that escalated quickly,” I said feebly. The second that followed contained this whole shimmering alternate timeline where Hana cracked a smile and pulled me into a hug and said something smart and soothing about
how stressed we both were, how racked with grief, and let’s try it again and find a way forward.
The vision faded as the intercom crackled: “South Station, South Station, this is the last and final stop, all passengers must depart.”
“If you’re so independent,” Hana hissed, “find somewhere else to stay tonight.” Then she stood and reached over me, yanking down her suitcase with such ferociousness, it almost clocked me in the head.
* * *
—
The snow was lighter here, and actually pretty, an idyllic scene like those porcelain winter villages old ladies set up in their living rooms. Orange-brick churches with spindly spires and immaculate parks and fat streetlamps all stamped with quivering towers of snow. I admired it with a kind of Dickensian sullenness, feeling unwanted and pitiful as I stood behind Hana, looking out over the parking lot. She’d huffed off of the train and out of the terminal without so much as a look back, and I’d trailed her here, darting around people and tripping over suitcases to keep up. Now she was sighing impatiently and calling someone over and over, presumably Mikki, who’d gotten into town a few hours ago and was supposed to pick us up. Hana flung her arm in the air—“I’m waving, can you see me?” and finally I tapped her arm and pointed toward Mikki on the opposite end of the pickup zone. Hana spotted her and took off.
Usually Angry Hana was exasperated and lively, rolling her eyes and muttering, You’ve got to be kidding me. This was worse. Quieter, more controlled. We finally, mercifully, all made it inside the car, and Mikki and Hana chatted in the front: This was the Walshes’ car, yeah it was nice of them to invite us, they seemed to be doing okay, keeping it together. Hana ignored me so completely, so aggressively, that Mikki followed suit.
I tried to find a hotel for the night, halfheartedly, but since it was Christmas Eve Eve, most places were fully booked or astronomically expensive. Hopefully the house would be big enough for Hana and me to avoid each other inside. And she’d have to be nice to me in front of the Walshes, I figured. The last thing she’d subject them to was our own familial strife.
I texted Ted: “You with your fam this evening?”
Warmth spilled across my torso as I saw he was typing right back. “Glad you’re coming. Heading over to the Walshes’ now to snow-blow their driveway.”
Knee-jerk, my brain whipped up a joke (Does this make you the blowjob guy?), and then I felt a sickening punch. Eleanor is dead. None of your stupid wisecracks matter.
We rolled through the eerie white streets as Christmas jazz leaked from the speakers. A few final turns and Mikki turned into a driveway. Here it was, the Walshes’ grand eighteenth-century home, now squatting on the corner of a street with smaller, newer Colonial houses spreading out in all directions. It was like something out of a novel: a perfectly symmetrical mustard-yellow Georgian with an odd stubby roof, orderly white trim, and huge, stark shutters flanking the seeming millions of windows. A portico stuck out over the front door like a snout, and beneath it Ted was clearing off the front porch. Everything was frosted in a dollop of snow.
As Mikki killed the engine and we gathered our things, I went over my mental checklist: tracking down the photo album. Meeting Cameron, perhaps asking a few pointed questions about his feelings toward Eleanor, his activity on secret Facebook groups. Seeing Ted, getting one of his long, healing hugs. Hana may be furious and the book might be fucked, but those were feelings I pushed down the road, onto the snow-covered lanes that stretched to the left and right of us.
CHAPTER 18
Hana
MONDAY, DECEMBER 23, 12:50 P.M.
I could feel Katie smiling in the backseat, I could feel it without looking, as if the corners of her mouth were disturbing the air inside the car, shaking up the molecules. I was so angry the anger was blinding, something I had to keep blinking through, like a blindfold somehow yanked on from beneath my skin. We passed the Corrigans’ white mansion, and while the columned home was dark, light spilled out from the cottage in the backyard. Cameron’s domain, the old carriage house. A half block down, we pulled into the Walshes’ driveway, snow crackling under the tires, and Ted stopped snow-blowing and waved cheerily. Ted, the reason the Herd lacked security-cam footage from Monday, December 16. I hated him in that moment.
Gary and Karen appeared in the door: “Come in, we can’t have you freezing to death out there.” We stamped our boots on the welcome mat and hoisted our suitcases into the foyer. I breathed deeply—a faint cedar smell, that woody tang of historic homes.
Pleasantries were even more awful than expected: The Walshes had crinkled bags under their eyes, sadness wafting off them in waves, and yet they welcomed us bravely, took our coats, offered us cider. They’d set out sandwich fixings in the kitchen, but none of us ate anything. In my torso, I felt a deep, internal ache, more like exhaustion than hunger.
Gary and Karen had pulled out the sofa in the den for Katie and made it up with plaid sheets and a triangle-pattern quilt, and the sight of it made me want to weep. Their perfunctory kindness blasted through me, a grenade. They left us alone to “freshen up” and Katie turned and said something about hotels being sold out tonight, and I stalked upstairs without letting her finish. I rolled my bag into Eleanor’s room—they’d placed me here and Mikki in the guest room, which only felt creepy now that I was alone among Eleanor’s things.
This was where we’d hung out when visiting from college, sprawling across her bed or on the floor. I could almost see the three of us, our younger, silkier, frothier selves. Once, fascinated by these close new friends whose pasts were a mystery, we’d all described what we were like in high school. Mikki had been an arty kid, choosing her outfits from the thrift store at first out of necessity and then with determined weirdness. And though she didn’t use the word, it wasn’t hard to ascertain that Eleanor had been popular. At the time I’d felt even more thrilled that they wanted to be friends with me: straight-A, straitlaced, teacher’s pet Hana, now in with the A-listers.
Nearly a decade had passed since graduation, but the room was untouched. I felt like someone entering a museum exhibit as I moseyed up to the bed, smoothing a palm over the cloud-print comforter. Framed posters studded the teal walls: a Miro print she’d purchased at a museum store, a woodcut pattern that was probably a sheet of expensive wrapping paper, an unofficial movie poster for Pan’s Labyrinth, pink and black and eerie. I flopped onto the bed and cried, an indulgent, sobbing, sniveling cry with long wet sniffs powering huge, braying cries.
The holidays always made me feel sad. Ninety-nine percent of the year, I could be happy with my life, with everything I’d built for myself: the close friends who served as my surrogate family, the career I loved and clients who adored me, the quiet thrill of competence and action and determination and, of course, external validation: You did good. And then the holidays rolled around and with them, a torrent of pictures and updates and hashtag-grateful (somehow less basic than #blessed), shiny happy people with their beloved families, writing odes and ’gramming pies. And something about all the Rockwellian joy split something open, a crack through which envy flowed, a little girl crying up at the sky and realizing life’s not fair. I want that. I wanted a mom who actually wanted to see me. A dad who made special cheese dips and built fires on Christmas Eve, not a man I’d stopped calling years ago only to realize he didn’t care, wasn’t about to pick up his end of the relationship. I knew these were Champagne problems, peanuts compared to the family strife millions of others felt. But every year, around this time, I’d look around at the wreaths and pies and blinking holiday lights and ask into the starry heavens, my own “Silent Night”: Why these parents, why this, why me?
But at least I’d had Katie. Even when we were thousands of miles apart on a holiday, I knew I could reach out, squeeze her hand under the metaphorical table. She had the same shitty dad, one even more distant to her than he was to me, and while she and Mom were closer, she s
aw it, understood how Mom pushed me away like the opposite end of a magnet.
And then this year, my makeshift, chosen, surrogate family had whiffed away like a candle flame. Eleanor with a hole in her neck. Katie with her secret project, just inches behind my back. It was so hurtful, it still felt unfathomable. And then to whip it around on me? I realized why that move felt so familiar: It was right out of Mom’s playbook.
I was an idiot. I’d stupidly thought being here would be nice: This loving couple, unlike the parents I’d grown up with, scooping us in as if we were their foundlings. This grand home, with its multiple family/living/recreation rooms—it was like a life-size dollhouse, unlike the small ranch we’d all lived in before high school, and then the two-bedroom apartment Dad rented in Culver City.
Oh, Culver City. What a bold move that’d been, in retrospect: announcing, adultlike, that I was leaving Kalamazoo and joining Dad in California. He and Mom had been fighting for months, for years, and then one night, as Mom was scooping out the casserole and complaining that he was late for dinner, he called to say he was in a hotel in Wheaton, heading west and never coming back. I was fourteen years old and gutted by the two months that passed without him. I told everyone it was just because Mom and I had never gotten along; Dad was laid-back and lax, the kind of “cool” parent all teens want. Plus, as I admitted only in my angsty middle school diary, Mom seemed to resent my presence, though it was entirely her own fault: She and Dad had adopted me when I was two, shortly after a series of miscarriages and dismayed acceptance that they’d never be biological parents. Two years later, Katie had been their miracle, their dream come true. And I was the odd-looking child inconveniencing them.
