The Better Sister

by Alafair Burke

  “Great. Now, this is less than ideal, but I’m going to talk to each of you individually, if that’s all right.” She used the Murphy bed as a makeshift interview station, speaking to us one at a time while the two outcasts waited across the room on the built-in window bench. She spoke to Ethan first and longest, which only confirmed my suspicions about the scenario she was predicting.

  Two hours in, she was speaking to Nicky when the office door opened. It was Guidry. “Can you all step outside into the living room again?”

  It happened fast, as if they had choreographed each movement. The uniformed officers quickly formed a wall to separate Ethan from the rest of us. A set of handcuffs appeared at Bowen’s side from nowhere.

  Ethan’s eyes darted between me and Nicky, imploring us to protect him. The scream that came from my throat was more pained than when I had found Adam’s blood-soaked body. Nicky shouted “No!” and ran for him, provoking two uniformed officers to push her against the wall by force.

  “He’s a minor,” Olivia bellowed over the chaos in the room. “He’s represented by counsel. He’s invoking all applicable rights, including the rights to silence and a lawyer.”

  I saw a sudden focus in Ethan’s face. “I’m not talking without my lawyer.” His voice was quiet but assured. My kid was so brave.

  And he was under arrest for the murder of Adam Macintosh.

  22

  She had to have a swimming pool.

  As a starting prosecutor at the Cuyahoga County District Attorney’s Office, Adam made a decent salary, at least compared to what either his parents or mine ever made. And he’d gone to both college and law school on full academic rides, so he wasn’t saddled with debt the way a lot of attorneys are. But he worked for the government, not the private sector, and his wife was an ex-waitress who was supposedly planning to start college.

  Yet when it was time to rent a house, Nicky insisted on having a swimming pool. She said that water calmed her, and that she knew she would study harder for the SATs if she could sit with her books by the pool when it was warm out. She claimed that having her own pool had always been her dream, even though I hadn’t heard her mention it since she was fifteen years old and Mom and Dad took us to Niagara Falls and she was floating on her back in the indoor pool of the Holiday Inn, saying that when she grew up she wanted to be rich and have a swimming pool where she could lie out and tan and have drinks with paper umbrellas in them. Dad had responded by telling her that if she wanted to be rich, she should be more like me when it came to her schoolwork.

  Somehow she and Adam had managed to find a place they could afford that had an in-ground swimming pool in the backyard. It even had a hot tub on the deck for the colder months—not one of the fancy ones, but those clunky plug-ins you can buy at Home Depot. The landlord had given them a break on the rent because he was so certain that a young assistant district attorney and his new bride would be perfect tenants. Adam, always a Dudley Do-Right when it came to ethics, went so far as to confirm with his office that there was nothing unethical about the situation before signing the lease.

  Nicky, to her credit, did love that pool once she had it, but there was definitely no studying going on there. She would lie for hours in the sun, listening to music, painting her nails, flipping through gossip magazines. She had this prenatal aqua workout she claimed she was doing every single day. But once the baby was born, and old Nicky was back with a vengeance, she’d drink for hours, leaving her chaise only when the baby monitor alerted her that Ethan required attention.

  I only went home to visit one or two times a year. Maybe that’s why I could see the change in my sister more than my parents did. The proud girlfriend who had doted on Adam during law school was nowhere to be found. She’d day-drink and then try to hide it from Adam when he came home from work. She’d snap at him for the smallest questions—like whether she’d gone to the grocery store that day or what they were having for dinner. I’d tell her that I thought we should engage the baby with his blocks and other brain-building toys, but she’d leave him for hours in front of the television as long as he didn’t cry. Before Adam, she used to drink a lot, but she was (usually) a fun drunk, more likely to make out with a dude in the bathroom than sulk in her bedroom or scream about old perceived slights from our childhood. But something about her had changed. She was thirty years old and seemed to have given up on her life. I wondered if there was more than alcohol at work.

  I tried intervening once, about a year before it all blew up. It was probably the third or fourth time Adam had called me since the baby was born. I was her sister. He thought I might have some magic formula that would exorcise this new Nicky, who was actually more like the old Nicky, yet still different. But because I never did know what made Nicky tick, the phone calls would turn more into venting sessions where he would tell me how worried he was about her, and I would try to hold my tongue about how I always thought she was in over her head doing the wife and mother thing.

  I called Nicky and warned her she was going to lose Adam if she didn’t get her shit together. “Perfect Adam isn’t going anywhere,” she told me. “He loves the baby too much.” It was so telling that she didn’t say he loved her. He loved the baby. She was willing to use Ethan to keep Adam glued to her for life.

  My parents, of course, took her side. They said that Adam was too “rigid” and didn’t understand that “for better or worse” meant exactly that. That was choice, coming from my parents. My father had been a completely different person before he stopped drinking, and my mother paid the price for it. Why couldn’t they see that Nicky was doing the same thing to Adam? Meanwhile, Adam’s calls to me increased, but, as Nicky predicted, he loved the baby too much to leave.

  The pattern finally stopped the night I was at the Met Gala with Catherine.

  It was the fucking swimming pool.

  He had come home from work but still had prep to do for a trial the next day. It was a beautiful May night, and Nicky wanted to have dinner outside. They grilled quesadillas and corn. When Adam was done eating, he went inside to go over his opening statement again. He got so engrossed in his work that he didn’t realize nearly two hours had gone by without a peep from either Nicky or Ethan.

  He found Nicky half floating in the pool, her shoulders against the steps, as if she’d been sitting there and then slithered down into the shallow end. The baby was in her arms, near her lap. Only the top of his head was visible.

  Adam pulled Ethan out first and turned his head to the side in an attempt to drain the water from his nose and mouth, but Ethan wasn’t responding. Adam did CPR, but does anyone really know how to do it until they have to? And Ethan was only two and a half years old. Adam didn’t know whether to do mouth-to-mouth or to cover Ethan’s entire mouth and nose, like he remembered learning for babies. And how hard could he press a little toddler’s chest without crushing him?

  Adam never stopped having nightmares about those uncounted minutes that passed before Ethan finally spat out a stream of chlorinated water and then coughed. Once he knew Ethan was breathing, Adam pulled Nicky out, too. He didn’t tell me until after we were married that he actually thought about leaving her in the water.

  By the time Adam called me, Nicky was at the Cleveland Clinic. The hospital would be checking, but he was certain she had to have drugs in her system.

  “Just tell me, Adam. Tell me why you’re really calling.”

  “I need your help.”

  He was trying to put her on a psych hold, and my parents were contesting it. “I can’t take another chance, not with Ethan. Every day when I go to work, I wonder if she’s going to leave the stove on or drop him or forget about him in the car. I don’t know how she got this bad, but it has to stop. She needs to get help. The lawyer who handles civil commitments for our office says that if it’s just this one incident, Nicky will probably get released tonight, and then it’ll be my word against hers, plus your parents, in family court about what happens to Ethan. But if she’s put
on a psych hold tonight, I’d go into family court with a head start toward custody. Hopefully that will be the wake-up call for her to get some help, because she’s certainly not listening to me.”

  He was right. There was no other way. Nicky wasn’t the kind of person who cared about consequences until they actually happened. She was going to have to lose Adam and Ethan if she had any chance of getting her life back on track.

  “And what do you need for a psych hold?” I asked, pressing a finger against my ear to block out the sound of the gala. By then Catherine was out of the ladies’ room, glaring at me, wondering why I was on the phone when I was supposed to be soaking in every second of the experience she had bestowed on me.

  “It would help if there was someone else asking for it, other than a spouse.”

  Someone like her only sibling.

  I did it. I took his side. I signed an affidavit the next morning, swearing that I had seen a decline in my sister over the course of more than two years that was consistent with the self-destructive behavior she had exhibited as long as I could remember. And when she tried to say that Adam was lying about her, I signed another affidavit detailing the many times that she had told me horrific things about her lovers when she was mad at them, only to retract them later after they had reconciled.

  Adam was a lawyer who had friends who were other lawyers who were willing to represent him for free, however long it took. And Nicky was . . . Nicky. She had no lawyer and no plan, only denials about the severity of what she had done. I swear, Chloe. I have no idea what happened. I must have fallen asleep. You have no idea how exhausting it is to take care of a kid all day.

  They agreed to a divorce that gave Adam sole physical custody but did not permanently terminate her parental rights. I don’t know whether she signed it because she didn’t care anymore or because she actually believed she could work her way back into a shared custody situation.

  But instead of getting better, she got worse. She would have been homeless if it weren’t for my parents. I’ve always wondered if they both would have lived longer if they hadn’t been constantly dealing with Nicky and her drama.

  When Adam first moved to New York, I persuaded my mom and dad that it would be best for Nicky to stay in Cleveland, where they could keep an eye on her. What we thought would be monthly visits became less regular as my parents got older, Nicky got worse, and Adam and Ethan got more settled in Manhattan. When I called Nicky to tell her that I was seeing Adam and that it was serious, she actually sounded grateful. “All I ever wanted was for Ethan to have a happy life. You’re better at it than I am. Maybe he’ll turn out to be more like you than me. But funnier. That would be good.” I could tell she was wasted, but I think she meant it.

  Somewhere along the way, Nicky started to clean up her act. She never told me the details of how she did it, but I think a switch was flipped after our father died. She had always been so resentful of him, blaming him for all of her troubles. It was like she refused to be who he wanted her to be, just to spite him. And then once he was gone, she leveled out. Mom swore she was getting better, and I could hear a newfound clarity in Nicky’s voice when I called and the couple of times a year she’d visit. And then Mom died, too.

  Nicky thought about moving closer to us, since she no longer had my parents to watch over, and vice versa. But there was no way she could afford to live in New York with no job or higher education. And besides, it was just too late. Ethan was thirteen years old by then. And he was a good, happy, stable kid. He didn’t need the disruption of a biological mother he barely knew.

  To this day, I really don’t believe that Nicky was trying to kill her baby. She was simply never meant to have one.

  Part III

  People v. Ethan Macintosh

  23

  They brought Ethan into the crowded Suffolk County courtroom through a side door. He was wearing the same striped T-shirt and navy blue sweats he’d had on when he was arrested the previous day and was still in handcuffs. Olivia was with him. So far, only she—not I, and not Nicky—had been allowed to meet with him.

  I was now into my fourth day without any meaningful sleep, but Nicky was the one I felt trembling next to me when she saw him. He looked both older and younger at once. Under the fluorescent lighting of the courtroom, his skin seemed gray. His long bangs, usually swept high with product, had fallen straight across his forehead. Beneath them, he peered out like a frightened little boy pushed from behind a curtain onto a brightly lit stage.

  Olivia led the way across the courtroom to the counsel table. A deputy of some kind—bald, wearing a black bulletproof vest emblazoned with white letters reading “New York State Courts”—was at Ethan’s side. Ethan’s eyes bore into me, asking for help that I couldn’t give him.

  “Has he been in those cuffs all night?” I tried whispering to Olivia. Nicky and I were seated in the first row behind the defense’s table, but I felt so far away from my son.

  Olivia brushed off my question as a court clerk called the case. Olivia and Ethan had barely stood up and sat down again before the prosecutor started reading case numbers and statutes from a folder in front of her. My son was now a file. And he was being charged with the second-degree murder of his father. His case was technically being handled in a special “youth part” of the criminal courts, but the murder charge meant there was no way to move the case to family court, which meant Ethan would be facing an adult-like trial and adult-like penalties if he was convicted. Olivia had warned us to expect it, but Nicky let out a guttural cry upon the reading of the murder charge. I may have, too. I could hear nervous movement and whispers in the galley behind us, but didn’t want to turn and look.

  Nicky lowered her head when the prosecutor announced that they were seeking to detain Ethan pending trial. I reached over and grabbed her hand. All these years, I had convinced myself that she was more like a semi-estranged aunt than his actual mother, but she was sharing this pain.

  The only thing that gave me hope in that moment was Olivia. She was good. Really good. She took Adam’s best attributes and made them Ethan’s. She described Ethan moving to New York City with his father when he was four years old after his parents divorced. How Adam, who served nearly ten years as an esteemed federal prosecutor, was Ethan’s role model and lifeline. How devastated Ethan was by his father’s murder. She depicted the police as having treated Ethan and his stepmother as suspects from the second they responded to the 911 call.

  “There is a presumption of innocence, Your Honor, and Ethan is in fact innocent of this horribly unjust accusation. I know we all get so used to defendants being marched in and out of these rooms, and we say we presume they’re innocent, but do we? Really? No, we treat it as a phrase that represents the panoply of rights we afford to those that we believe are probably guilty. So, please, Your Honor, just imagine for one second that this sixteen-year-old boy, Ethan, is actually innocent. He has just lost the man who was his only constant parent throughout his life. And within seventy-two hours, the police snatch him out of his home and accuse him of murdering the father whose death he has only begun to mourn. Holding him in custody while I prove what an injustice this is will change him, Your Honor. It will rob him of any kind of faith he has in adults, or the legal system. I am telling you: if you allow the prosecution to do this, you won’t be able to sleep when you eventually realize how mistaken the police are in this case.”

  I noticed that Nicky’s head was down and her lips were moving. I was fairly certain she was actually praying. I closed my eyes and did the same silently, asking a God I hadn’t spoken to for more than twenty years to send Ethan home today.

  The prosecutor could barely hide her disdain as she dismissed Olivia’s narrative as a “fairy tale.”

  “Your Honor, the police didn’t need to jump to any conclusions. The conclusions leaped into view from the evidence.” As we expected, she depicted Ethan as having lied to the police, offering as a false alibi a friend who instead told the police that Et
han had asked to be dropped off at Main Beach “for what his friend assumed was the defendant’s ongoing practice of selling marijuana on the East End.”

  According to the prosecution’s theory of the case, once Ethan was alone, he walked the three and a half blocks from the beach to our house, killed Adam, and then staged the scene to resemble an interrupted burglary.

  The judge asked for more detail about the evidence of staging, and the prosecutor produced a photograph, first handing a copy to Olivia. “The evidence at trial will be more extensive, but this one photo gives you a clear idea.”

  The judge’s expression was indifferent at first, but then he donned a set of reading glasses. “These arrows are . . .”

  “Pieces of glass, Your Honor. From the broken window.”

  Without a view of the picture, I had no idea what they were talking about, but the tone of the judge’s “Uh huh, I see” had me tighten my grip on Nicky’s hand.

  “Also, Your Honor, the detectives asked the defendant and his stepmother if anything was missing from what was supposed to look like an extensive exploration of the house. His stepmother noticed a wireless speaker missing, and the defendant then added that he was missing a pair of headphones and a very specific pair of tennis shoes. They were described as red, yellow, and black, with a cartoon character holding a ray gun.”

  The courtroom was silent. It was clear the prosecutor was building up to a big reveal. My stomach suddenly hurt. It’s like my body knew what she was going to say before my brain had figured it out.

  His backpack. When we left East Hampton, Ethan wanted to circle back to Kevin’s for his backpack. And when we got to the city, I looked in it and found nothing but a burner phone. If the only thing Ethan had carried off to Kevin’s house was a phone, why had he taken his backpack?