by Andrea Bartz
“God, the irony: Mikki didn’t actually want word to get out either. She just wanted money.”
“And they both started feeling suffocated by the masks they were wearing.” She pointed at me. “Exactly like you’re going to talk about in your book. I love this new direction so much. It’s the kind of messaging we actually need.”
I didn’t tell her about Gary and Karen’s offer or about Mikki’s proposition. They were frozen assets, useless to me for now. Instead I asked when Mom would come by for dinner (“any minute now”) and she asked, absentmindedly, what Mom had done for New Year’s last year.
“She went to Aunt Emmy’s.” I frowned at the limes in front of me, debating which way to slice them first. “I can’t remember if she had more people over or if it was just them.”
Hana turned on a burner, then the vent hood. She had to yell to be heard over it. “Remember when Mom and Dad had that big New Year’s party?” she called. “And they invited my band teacher, Mr. Zimmerman, and he got kind of drunk?”
I laughed, piling lime wedges in a bowl. “Did you talk to Dad today?”
She looked at me over her shoulder. “Have I talked to Dad all year?”
I pulled tortillas from their wrapper and padded over to the stove. “I haven’t either. But maybe we should text him.” She didn’t reply and I swallowed. “What’s your thing with him?”
She flipped two tilapia fillets and then shut off the fan. Instantly, the room felt calmer. “Did you know Dad had to talk Mom into adopting me?” She half laughed. “Apparently that’s very rare. Usually the woman wants to adopt and the man is like, ‘Hell no, I’m not raising someone else’s spawn.’ Some BS caveman stuff. But they both wanted kids, and they weren’t having any luck, and Dad was sick of trying, apparently. Enter: me.”
The fillets frizzled on the pan, growing hazy in the smoke the fan was no longer inhaling. “And then I was three when Mom found out she was pregnant. I’ve probably made this up, but I could swear I remember her telling me, pointing at her belly and just leaving me mystified.”
She nudged the fish with a spatula. “And then I was at peak bitchiness when they split. Of course I wanted to go live with Dad in Los Angeles. California over Kalamazoo? When you’re fourteen? No-brainer.”
“But you left me,” I said, like the ten-year-old I’d been at the time. “It was bad enough that he abandoned us. Then you left too.”
“Ohh, Katie.” She put down the utensil and pulled me into a hug. “I’m so sorry. Fourteen-year-olds are stupid.” She smoothed my hair. “I guess I thought you’d be okay, because you and Mom were so close.”
“But you’re my sister.”
“I know. That’s why I had to move to New York. I realized what an idiot I’d been. Well, that and Eleanor begged me to come help her launch the Herd.” She suddenly noticed the tilapia was leaking smoke and switched the vent back on. “Whoops.”
“Blackened tilapia is totally a thing. Cajun.”
She smiled. “Now, should we—”
I took her by surprise with another hug, and I heard her little giggle/sob near my shoulder. She pulled away and we were both laugh-crying. There was a sharp knock at the door, followed by the doorbell, and we both wiped our eyes, breathed deep.
“What are we gonna do, Katie?” Hana rubbed at her nose.
“I don’t know,” I admitted. “But at least we’re together.”
* * *
—
Mom fell asleep on the loveseat a little after eleven, and Hana and I stayed up, squished next to each other on the couch, sharing a faux-fur blanket and attacking the funfetti cake whole with our forks. Hana kept finding YouTube copies of old Christmas specials we’d taped off TV and watched every year as kids: Frosty the Snowman, Garfield, this odd Claymation California Raisins special (Now that’s some branded content, I’d remarked). My phone buzzed on the cushion next to me—a text from Ted, the first time I’d heard from him since Beverly. I had a vague sense he was still in Massachusetts, ahead of Eleanor’s funeral. I’d see him then, red-eyed and somber, but I hadn’t dared to hope I’d get together with him socially again.
“Here’s to a happier 2020,” it read. “Meeting you was a bright spot in an otherwise shit year.”
I smiled, flicked through a few funny things I could write back. Instead: “Likewise. And happy new year. ”
I checked the time. “Quick, Hana! We’re going to miss the ball dropping!”
She switched over to live TV, plosive and blaring, and I shook Mom awake as Hana dashed into the kitchen to open a bottle of Champagne. We counted down together, time moving backward for once, backward to when we were carefree little kids, arranging benches in the snow for elaborate games of make-believe. We hit zero and cheered, clinking our glasses and smiling at one another, and Hana’s and my phones blooped with a text from Daniel: “HNY!” I volleyed the well wishes back. He was with his parents tonight, Hana had mentioned, and doing fine.
“Mom, what does ‘auld lang syne’ mean again?” I asked, because it’s one of those unspoken, knee-jerk family traditions, like Hana pointing and saying, That’s Jean Shepherd, he wrote the book during his featured-extra moment in A Christmas Story.
Mom grinned. “To times long past!”
To auld lang syne. To clever little Eleanor and her neighbor Cameron, biking back and forth between their grand front doors. To gawky teenage Mikki, thrilled to be part of a crowd, one of the girls, for the first time in her life. To Hana and me, stealing cheese cubes and red-spangled sugar cookies from the table and sitting under the Christmas tree, watching Mom and Dad’s glamorous New Year’s Eve party, observing all the adults in their blouses and dresses and jackets and confidence, such grown-ups with their glasses of foamy Champagne.
Hana refilled all of our flutes, slender cups of kindness yet, and we clinked them together one more time.
EPILOGUE
Karen sat in the kitchen, a fluffy white robe tied around her, practical cork-bottomed slippers on her feet. It was March, but frost still licked the windows and coated the grass beyond the patio and pool. She and Gary had just returned from two weeks in Saint Martin, hot, sunny days at the pool or on the beach or on one of their two balconies, watching the sun rise and then set, over and over.
It’d been Gary’s idea, a way to relax and reconnect after the hellishness of the holiday season. Her beautiful daughter’s funeral, the saddest day of her life. The sudden loss of their best friends, the Corrigans down the street—a For Sale sign had just appeared in front of their white-columned mansion, mercifully. The weird, tense weeks when detectives kept popping by the house, asking more and more questions about a weekend in 2010 that Gary and Karen couldn’t possibly remember. Neither of them kept diaries or hung on to their old agenda books. But clearly the police were taking seriously the awful rantings of Eleanor’s killer. Karen went to check the weather on Gary’s laptop one day and found “posthumous trial” at the top of his recent Google searches, and she’d rushed to the toilet and thrown up on the spot: The idea was just too awful, Eleanor’s ghost being tried for some ghastly crime. But she’d never mentioned it to Gary, and eventually, the visits from detectives had stopped.
The sun wouldn’t set for a few more hours, but it seemed late enough to treat herself to a glass of wine. She rifled through the fridge and cabinets and, finding none there, opened the door to the basement and flipped on the light. She hated going down here, past the refurbished part, the leather sofa and enormous TV—hated pushing through the folding doors into the dank, cold section where bald lightbulbs hung, their pull cords swaying. She especially hated passing the spot, now a jumbled four-shelf storage unit, where the chest freezer once sat. She hurried past it, reaching the rack of dusty bottles, and selected a 2015 Cab Sauv from Sonoma Valley. She tugged on the string near her head, flicking off the light, and turned to leave. Then she locked eyes with a
face staring out from the storage rack.
She screamed and dropped the bottle, wine splashing onto her slippers and spreading out along the cement floor. Flailing around, she found and yanked the bulb’s cord again, bathing the area in light. She stepped forward, her pulse pounding, and squinted, but she couldn’t figure out what object on the shelf—books, ski gear, boxes, old magazines, a bin of gently used gift bags and crumpled bows—had looked to her like a face. On the ground, the blob of wine lapped at a nearby box, and she hurried back upstairs to grab paper towels from the kitchen.
As she ripped the roll from the wall, her memory betrayed her, cueing up the one thing she begged it nightly not to show her: that beautiful black-haired girl, a chunk of her hair sheared down to fuzz, her smooth skin frosted over like it was dusted in flour, resting calmly in the chest freezer while Gary ordered Eleanor away, yammering about all the ways you can identify a body: clothes, teeth, marks, fingers. He ranted and muttered and slammed the freezer door closed as Karen’s mind homed in on the smallest detail, one that worked its way into her dreams even now—the girl’s beautiful nails, ebony speckled with tiny white stars. How rich the black looked against her delicate, milky fingers. Gary had walked in small circles, repeating the words, turning them into a mantra: clothesteethmarksfingers. Clothesteethmarksfingers. Like a puzzle he had to solve.
And he had, somehow, though he’d never told Karen how. He and Cameron had handled it one night, a night Gary assumed she’d slept through, and in the morning, to be kind, she played along. Cameron had never been the same after that, poor thing—missing work, moving from painkillers to heroin, his life like a car speeding off a cliff. All for Eleanor. All for their luminous little girl. All for Eleanor, dead at thirty.
She’d never told Gary her horrible secret. There was no point, not by the time they got home and found the body in the breakfast nook, just inside the patio doors. She heard the girls’ story, looked at the missed calls and voicemails on Gary’s phone until she’d nailed down their timeline, figured out exactly when Mikki, Hana, and Eleanor had given up and called it a night. But Karen knew how long it took for rigor mortis to set in, for a soft body to grow stiff; she was, after all, a nurse, familiar with this odd biological detail. And their story didn’t check out. The pale neck Karen thrust her fingers against to feel for a pulse—still supple. The body they carried into the basement once the girls had packed their things and left—not nearly stiff enough. Karen knew her daughter and her friends weren’t lying; there was no doubt in their hungover minds that this black-haired girl was dead by the time they went upstairs. What good would it have done to correct them, after the fact?
Karen forced herself back into the basement. Shit—her slippers had tracked wine out onto the carpet, ruby footsteps that looked just like blood. She gasped as she took it all in: jagged red ovals alternating their way past the sofa and up the stairs, out to the light, out to freedom.
She walked to the edge of the puddle, which had formed the shape of a kidney, of a baby in the fetal position. Slowly she sank to her knees, watching the wine seep into her robe. She walked her hands out in front of her, barely noticing the shards of glass cutting into her palms. She lowered her body down onto its side, her head resting on her forearm, and as the bare bulb droned overhead, she wept.
For Tom and Cathy
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
First and foremost, I’m so grateful to you, the reader. You walked around in my brain and let my words leave little fingerprints on your mind, and for an author there’s truly nothing more incredible. Of all the books in the world (and all the things you could do with your time), you chose to read this novel, and that means more to me than I can say. I hope something in it felt true to you. Thank you, thank you, thank you.
I’m grateful to my brilliant and kind big sister, Julia, who proved to me that sisters can also be best friends and who let me build snow forts and create elaborate worlds of make-believe with her when we were kids. Thanks for being supportive and insightful, always. I’m the luckiest.
I don’t know what I’d do without my intrepid first readers, Megan Brown and Leah Konen, who provided swift and thoughtful notes when the first draft was so rough, you could light a match against it. (That honestly might’ve been the manuscript’s fate if it weren’t for you two.) I can’t thank you enough for your time, help, and support. Massive thanks, too, to early readers Jennifer Keishin Armstrong, Erin DeYoung, Alanna Greco, and Jinny VanZanten for your generosity and insight. I’m so lucky to have each and every one of you in my life, and not just because you’re all incredible wordsmiths.
In fact, I’m unspeakably fortunate to be surrounded by amazing women (and super-healthy female friendships) in New York City, Milwaukee, and beyond. Lianna Bishop, Blaire Briody, Kate Dietrick, Katherine Pettit, Abbi Libers, Kate Lord, Anna Maltby, Erin Pastrana, Katie Scott, Nicole Stahl, Jen Weber, and others (you know who you are)—I just love you so damn much.
I still kind of wake up expecting to learn there’s been some mistake and the legendary Alexandra Machinist is not, in fact, my literary agent—but then you show up for me in ways I couldn’t imagine and make even my most outlandish dreams come true. I’m honored to work with such a kind, down-to-earth, outrageously talented badass. That’s true of the entire ICM family, including Ruth Landry and Josie Freedman: You are so startlingly brilliant and good at your jobs and also such great people; I’d hate you if I didn’t adore you so much.
Speaking of unstoppable women, there aren’t words for how grateful I am to my editor, Hilary Rubin Teeman, who knew what an Andrea Bartz Thriller [hand flourish] should look like well before I did. It is truly a pleasure writing for you and soaking up your genius. Thanks so much to the wonderful Angeline Rodriguez—what a privilege (and a treat!) to work with you. Sarah Breivogel puts every other publicist on the planet (<
I’ve been so fortunate to meet many warm, generous, empathetic, and talented fellow authors over the last couple of years. Huge thanks to Megan Collins (The Winter Sister), Kate Hope Day (If, Then), Angie Kim (Miracle Creek), Julie Langsdorf (White Elephant), Nicole Mabry (Past This Point), Daniela Petrova (Her Daughter’s Mother), Julia Phillips (Disappearing Earth), Melissa Rivero (The Affairs of the Falcóns) and the whole DA gang for your encouragement, camaraderie, and kindness throughout this nutty process. (Reader, do yourself a favor and buy their amazing novels!)
A billion thank-yous to the social justice warriors and intersectional feminists fighting to make the world a kinder, fairer place for women and other marginalized groups. It’s a scary time to be a woman and an even scarier time to be rising up and battling inequality and injustice. We see you.
Last but certainly not least, thank you to my parents, grandparents, and entire extended family—your support and encouragement mean the world to me. I love you.
Also by Andrea Bartz
THE LOST NIGHT
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
ANDREA BARTZ is a Brooklyn-based journalist and author of The Lost Night. Her work has appeared in The Wall Street Journal, Marie Claire, Vogue, Cosmopolitan, Women’s Health, Martha Stewart Living, Redbook, Elle, and many other outlets, and she’s held editorial positions at Glamour, Psychology Today, and Self, among other titles.
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