The Better Sister

by Alafair Burke

  “I have no idea.” Instinctively, I reached for my phone to text Adam, then shook my head. “People at work, I guess. The clients he met with today, maybe.”

  We were interrupted by a knock on the door. A uniformed officer whispered something to the detectives, and Bowen followed him out of the room.

  Guidry shifted her chair toward the center of her side of the table so we were seated directly across from each other. “There’s another possibility I think we should discuss, Mrs. Taylor. Do you think there’s a chance someone went to the house looking to target you?”

  I opened my mouth to tell her I had no enemies, but no words came out. I couldn’t begin to calculate the number of hours I had spent reading online posts about myself in recent months. I woke up at least once a week from a nightmare built upon the words that had become a familiar part of my daily routine—die, rape, bitch, every possible description of my breasts and genitalia. But at some level, I must never have believed that I was in actual danger. Otherwise, Guidry’s question wouldn’t have caught me so off guard. Can you have enemies if you don’t know who they are?

  I swallowed before answering. “A lot of nasty comments on social media and that kind of thing. But nothing physical.”

  “What kind of nasty comments?”

  I reached again for my phone, pulled up my Twitter mentions, and handed it to her. Her eyes widened and then widened again as she read.

  “Pardon me for asking, Mrs. Taylor, but with these kinds of threats, why wasn’t the alarm set?”

  “The alarm?”

  “At your house. You said when you got home, you entered with a key and that you didn’t need to disarm the security system. And obviously the motion detectors we saw inside the house didn’t activate an alarm after the break-in occurred. But your husband was in his pajamas, and you said it looked like he had been in the bed before getting up—probably because he heard someone in the house. You’re getting these kinds of threats, and he didn’t set the alarm before going to sleep?”

  “You sound like you’re blaming Adam for what happened to him.”

  She sat back and let out a puff of air. “Not at all, ma’am.” Ma’am? She looked like she was older than I was. “I’m just trying to get the best sense possible of what happened tonight.”

  “What happened tonight is someone murdered my husband. And we never really use the alarm when we’re at the house. I use it at night if I’m out here alone—which is rare—but otherwise it’s more for when we’re in the city. Like you said, burglars target the part-time houses.”

  I imagined some amorphous figure peeking through the back window, deciding no one was home.

  “And these threats,” she said, handing me my phone, “all of it was online? No letters or packages? Anyone following you home or something like that?”

  I shook my head.

  “We’ll take a look into it,” Bowen assured me. “We’ll be looking into everything.”

  I managed to keep my cool through all of it, which is absolutely what Adam would have expected of me. The police seemed satisfied. Or at least they were doing a good job of faking it.

  But then I mentioned Ethan. “At least Ethan wasn’t home,” I muttered. He had gone to see the latest Marvel movie with his friend Kevin Dunham and spent the night at his house. My son was safe. At least I could hold on to that. “I need to find him. I don’t want him to hear about this when he wakes up.”

  “We’ll need to call his mother,” Bowen had said.

  I must have looked so confused. And irritated. And dismayed by his stupidity. Adam calls it—called it—my “not having it” face.

  “I’m not having Kevin’s mother tell him about this. I barely know the woman.”

  “Not Kevin’s mother. Your stepson’s.”

  Ethan started calling me Mama around the time he was five, after I was seeing Adam regularly, but before we got married. I corrected him at first, feeling guilty about taking the title from Nicky, not to mention missing the sound of his little voice saying “Glow-y.” But Adam convinced me that it was a sign Ethan missed having a maternal figure in his life.

  And somehow the police already knew that I wasn’t actually my son’s mother.

  The satisfaction they must have taken as they saw my face move from fatigue to offense and finally to realization. I pictured them googling Adam. Finding our wedding announcement in the Sunday Styles section. “The groom has a son from a prior marriage.”

  The police needed to call Ethan’s mother. My husband, Adam, was dead, and now his son—my son, or so it had seemed for nearly a decade—would need his mother.

  I recited her home phone number from memory. It was the same number I’d had for the first eighteen years of my life. When she asked for a second number, I had to look up the mobile information in my contacts. “Her name is Nicky Macintosh. And she’s my sister.”

  7

  I stared at the Dunhams’ house from the passenger seat of Detective Guidry’s car. My right index finger was fixated on a small tear in the upholstery beneath my thigh. I felt something hard and forced my thumb into the hole to get a grip on it.

  Guidry shook her head when I held up a bullet-shaped piece of bright yellow candy. I was pretty sure it was a Mike and Ike.

  “Sorry about that,” she said softly. “Detective Bowen has a weird sense of humor.”

  “Uh-huh.” I went back to looking across the street. It was past first light but not quite sunup. Early enough to see that most of the house was still dark except for a small window to the left of the front door. I’d only been inside once a few months before, when Ethan had taken forever to come outside despite my many texts telling him I was waiting. The lit window belonged to the kitchen, I thought. Probably Kevin’s mom—was her name Andrea?—waiting for my arrival.

  I had called Ethan’s cell before Guidry and I left the police station. It took two more tries before he answered, so he knew something was up. All I told him was that I was going to be picking him up early.

  “How early?” Like I was torturing him.

  “Like, now. In fifteen minutes.”

  “Moooooom. I’m tired. I’m just sleeping, I promise.”

  What did he assume I thought he was doing? If I had to guess, he and Kevin had stayed up all night playing video games.

  “I’m sorry, kiddo. I’ll see you in fifteen minutes, okay?” He didn’t say anything, which meant he’d be complying. Ethan has a way of letting you know when he’s got other ideas. “I love you,” I added, wondering how he was going to go on without his father.

  “Fine,” was all he said before hanging up.

  We were halfway to the house when my cell rang. I didn’t recognize the number, but it was the 631 area code. From the East End, not the city. I picked up. It was Kevin’s mom, whose name I’d already forgotten. Apparently Ethan had been his usual loud self taking the stairs from the bedroom, waking her up. When Ethan told her I was suddenly picking him up, she decided to call me to make sure everything was all right.

  “Is there some reason you don’t want him here?” she had asked.

  I made the mistake one time of telling Ethan that I thought Kevin’s parents weren’t the best role models for their son, and it obviously had worked its way back to the mom, because she always seemed to think I was judging her.

  Honestly, I didn’t trust the woman to keep whatever I said to herself, so I lied. I told her that I needed to get back to the city as soon as possible for a work emergency. I had hoped the story would convince her it was okay for the rest of the house to go back to sleep, but she told me she’d see me in a few minutes and hoped I could come inside for coffee.

  Now we were here, and I had to go inside.

  “You sure you want me to go with you?” Guidry asked.

  I nodded before stepping out of the car.

  Before Adam, the only people close to me who had died were my parents. The first to go was my father, five years earlier. It was only the third time he had ever visited m
e in New York City, and it wasn’t wholly voluntary. He had been diagnosed with prostate cancer, and according to my father, his doctor in Cleveland had told him to “ignore it.”

  That was my father’s way of summing up the doctor’s assessment that, at my father’s age of seventy-one, the risk-benefit calculation weighed against intervention. Put another way, the doctor thought my father would die of something else before the cancer caught up to him.

  I nagged Dad to see someone in New York.

  Dad resisted, telling me that Dr. Millerton was a “good man” who went to “good schools.” I had no doubt that both things were true. But few in the country could match Sloan Kettering, and one of Adam’s coworkers at the US Attorney’s Office was the brother of the chairman of the surgery department. He could get in right away. They’d even accept his insurance. “It’s all about specialization,” I told him. “I guarantee you they see a hundred times the number of patients with exactly your condition compared to Dr. Millerton.”

  I flooded him with rankings of hospitals and physicians, studies of successful outcomes at the best facilities, and summaries of all the treatment options available to him. I got the impression he didn’t read a word of it. The Taylor family—myself excepted—had a tendency to act on impulse, not facts.

  Mom seemed to resent my efforts. “You made it very clear you wanted to get as far away from this house as you possibly could, but now suddenly you care,” she said. “Maybe it was only me you hated.”

  Of course I wanted to get out of that house. According to the outline of the memoir my publisher bought, my life story included an entire chapter dedicated solely to the violence I saw my father heap upon my mother, who refused to do anything to stop it. But I never stopped loving my parents, not even my father. To my mom, though, getting Dad to see a “fancy doctor” was just another way of reminding them that I thought I was better than the rest of the family.

  I was so proud of myself when I managed to change his mind. I looked up the football schedule and found a home game where the Giants were playing the Browns. I pressured Adam to make sure he could get good seats from one of his friends who’d sold out to law firm life, which came with perks like season tickets in the suite level.

  Who needed all those medical statistics when I had my father’s love of football? Dad finally caved.

  I made sure to book him on a flight that landed in Newark. Adam picked him up, and they headed straight to Giants Stadium. My job would come on Monday, when I had him lined up with doctor appointments.

  He texted me the view from Adam’s friend’s law firm’s corporate box, with the caption “Worth getting cancer for.” He even added a smiley face, followed by a crying face, followed by a purple devil. I had no idea until that moment that my father knew about emojis.

  When I saw the final score pop up on Facebook—Browns 24, Giants 10—I pictured Dad going home and telling Mom and Nicky what a terrific time he had in New York.

  But that conversation never happened.

  Forty-five minutes after I saw the score, I got a phone call from Adam. Dad was on his way to New York-Presbyterian Hospital. He was in an ambulance. He’d been complaining about acid reflux as they left the stadium, but had chalked it up to all the greasy food he’d binged on during the game. By the time it became clear that it wasn’t merely a stomachache, Adam was stuck in standstill traffic at the Holland Tunnel. He held my father’s hand while waiting for an ambulance to clear a path to them.

  I knew he was dead before the doctors ever told me. I managed to beat the ambulance to the hospital. When I told the lady at the emergency room window that I was there to see Danny Taylor, brought there by ambulance with a suspected heart attack, she didn’t even make eye contact while tapping away at her keyboard and telling me I must have the wrong hospital. I explained that my husband had just called from the ambulance and was certain my father was on his way. She made a phone call that confirmed her suspicions: no new ambulance arrivals. She told me to go ahead and wait, if that’s what I wanted to do.

  And then a few minutes later, I heard the phone next to her ring, and I watched her answer it. And I heard her say “Uh-huh” and “I see.” And then she got up from her desk, walked around the front counter—outside the bubble of her little window—and headed straight for me.

  “We did just have a new case arrive by ambulance.” Both her face and voice were kind, and she placed a gentle hand on my shoulder. “It’ll be a few minutes, but I can take you in the back to wait for Dr. Tan.”

  I knew right then that she had already been told the news. Fate found a way of proving that Dr. Millerton—the doctor who was a good man who went to good schools—had been right all along.

  I listened stoically as Dr. Tan gave me the details. My father didn’t respond to the EMT’s efforts to revive him. His death was officially called upon his arrival to the hospital. An autopsy would be performed pursuant to New York City’s usual procedures, unless the next of kin objected. He speculated that it was sudden cardiac arrest. “It would have been like the lights just turned out.”

  Except that Dad felt something wrong when he was leaving the stadium, I thought. If I had been there, I would have taken him inside to make sure the pain subsided, wouldn’t I? Of course I would have—to make sure nothing was wrong before he got into the car. The stadium would have had defibrillators on hand. But it was too late, so I said nothing.

  Adam waited until the doctor had left the room to join me. “I’m so sorry.” He put his arms around me while I cried. “I thought it was best for you to hear it from the doctor directly—in case you had questions.”

  I nodded through my tears, agreeing he had made the right decision. Five minutes later, I found Dr. Tan, gave him my mother’s number, and asked him to tell her precisely what he had told me.

  So how do you tell a sixteen-year-old boy that his father has died? If you’re me, you don’t. You have Guidry do it.

  I was right about Kevin’s mom being the one in the kitchen with the lights on. Her name was Andrea, and she had gotten up to wait. The coffee she offered us was weak, but it was hot and desperately needed.

  Ethan was initially annoyed that I’d accepted Andrea’s invitation to come inside. He’d been ready at the door, shoes already on. I knew that kid like the back of my hand. If he absolutely had to get up at the crack of dawn on a Saturday, he wanted to make it quick so he could return to bed as soon as possible.

  Ethan’s irritation shifted to worry when a woman he didn’t recognize followed me in.

  Once we were all gathered in the kitchen, coffees poured, I introduced the stranger with me as Detective Guidry from the Suffolk County Police Department.

  Andrea placed a worried hand to her mouth, and her eyes immediately drifted to the staircase beyond the kitchen, and then to Ethan.

  “It’s nothing the kids did,” I assured her. “It’s—something happened at the house. The police responded.” I asked her if she could give us a moment alone. She nodded and left, but not before giving my shoulder a quick squeeze. I wondered if she could already guess the news that was about to be delivered. Maybe my decision to come inside for coffee was as telling as that hospital nurse’s sudden kindness.

  Looking at Guidry, I guessed that she was in her late forties. She seemed prettier, and more feminine than I would have expected of a person in her role, but I was going by stereotypes. I realized that I had also been operating on stereotypes when I asked her, specifically, if she would come with me to deliver the news to my son. Her partner, Bowen, had stayed at the station to work.

  Once Andrea was gone, I gestured to Ethan to sit down at the kitchen table. He did so, and then crossed his arms in front of him and rephrased my previous assertion as a question. “Something happened at the house?”

  “There was a break-in,” I said, but then looked to Guidry to elaborate.

  “We think your father interrupted an intruder,” she said. “A bedroom window at the back of the house was broken. There wa
s an assault inside the home.”

  Ethan flinched.

  “Your father was badly wounded. I’m sorry, but he did not survive.”

  Ethan stared at the white tile of the tabletop and began working his thumbnail against a section of stained grout. “Did you catch someone?”

  “Not yet. It’s still early.”

  He nodded. “So, like, what happened? You said there was an assault. But how exactly did he die?”

  I swallowed, no longer caring about all the logical reasons I had for involving Guidry. “The person who broke in stabbed him,” I said. Five times. The doctor told me it was five times. “Your father was so brave. He fought back. He was doing his best to defend himself. They think he would have made it except one of the wounds was to an aorta in his abdomen.” I was parroting what the doctor had told me at the hospital, and hoped it was close enough to be accurate. “It collapses the circulatory system. Even though paramedics got there fast, it was still too late.” I had tried and tried to find a pulse, but there was nothing. The doctor told me there would be an autopsy, and then I would need to decide where to have his body moved from there. That’s all he was now. A body.

  Ethan nodded again. His arms were still folded, but when he finally looked up, he looked directly at me. I saw a flash of heat on his face that I couldn’t read. Before I could put my finger on it—was it anger?—his expression fell flat again. “So now what happens?”

  Guidry shifted. Both literally and figuratively. She had been leaning forward, her body language as open and giving as Ethan’s was closed and withdrawn. But now she moved slightly back in her chair. She had only come here out of a sense of obligation, helping out a family during a time of tragedy. But suddenly, she seemed . . . curious.

  I didn’t like the feeling of a detective being curious about us right now.

  “Well, the medical examiner will follow up with your stepmother about making arrangements,” she said. “And we, of course, investigate.”