Widows-in-Law

by Michele W. Miller

  Emily turned and saw Lauren approaching. Tear-smudged eyeliner bruised the undersides of her almond-shaped gray eyes. She ran, crying. “Mommy.”

  Lauren took Emily in her arms and stroked her hair, murmuring, “It’s all right, baby. Everything’s gonna be okay.”

  Jessica’s pale-blue eyes were puffy, her face drawn. She was six inches taller than Lauren with legs up to her now-bloodshot eyeballs. Jessica had a dancer’s posture and six-pack abs you could sense even through her bulky black sweater. Lauren was five years older than Jessica, a working mom who fit workouts in during lunch hours if she wasn’t on trial. No one had ever accused Lauren of being ugly, and she was in good shape, but some women were trophy-wife material and some weren’t. Jessica was. She looked frail now, though. Stooped and skinny, in as much need of a mother as Emily. Lauren had to do her part to disarm the minefield that separated them, she knew that. For Emily’s sake. Lauren’s eyes met Jessica’s, and Lauren reached for her, awkwardly, a part of her brain shouting at her outstretched arms: no, no, don’t hug her, not that.

  Jessica broke into sobs. “Oh, God, Lauren. What are we going to do?”

  Lauren brought Jessica into a three-way hug. She flinched inside when she felt Jessica’s hair against her face and the fragile bones of her shoulder under her hand, but she hugged her anyway.

  ***

  It was approaching midnight in an ICU waiting room in Miami General Hospital when the green-clothed surgeon turned and left. The wailing started. Brian was dead.

  Not my baby, too. Lauren flashed back to her own pain at fifteen, losing her father. Now, Emily.

  Jessica and Emily hung onto each other, sobbing. Brian’s law partner and his wife huddled with their arms around the two. Lauren wanted to embrace her daughter but stepped back, placing her palm against a cool windowsill to balance herself, confused by the onslaught of feelings: loss, shock, and a tinge of anger, too, that a group of people were entwined around her daughter, weaving a barrier between mother and child at the worst moment of Emily’s life. But Emily had to share her loss with those who loved Brian. Emily knew Lauren didn’t love him.

  Of course, Lauren had once loved Brian intensely, almost from her first day of college when they met. Lauren remembered the icy face of the NYU registration clerk. “I’m telling you, Miss, your financial aid check hasn’t arrived. You can’t register.”

  Unlike the other students who filled the cavernous room, Lauren didn’t have a single adult in her life who loved her and could step in when systems failed. The drug program had basically put eighteen-year-old Lauren on the bus to college and slapped its rump. Tears welled up.

  She felt a hand on her arm and looked back into deep gray eyes. “Ask that guy over there,” Brian said. “He’s a supervisor.” He talked over Lauren’s head to the clerk. “Hey, buddy, she doesn’t have to wait in line again after she straightens it out, right?”

  The line behind them snaked the length of the registration hall.

  “No, she can come right to me.”

  “Thank you.” She smiled at Brian, amazed once again how the counselors at the program had been right: life would take care of her if she didn’t pick up a drink or a drug. People would even help when she just showed up for life and didn’t run from it.

  Brian was older than her, starting law school that day. He took a half-chewed licorice root from the corner of his mouth and smiled. “Thank me at coffee after, I’ll wait for you.”

  “It might take all day. Look at this crowd.”

  “All right, on second thought, when you get done here—you know where they play chess in Washington Square Park, at MacDougal and West Fourth?”

  She nodded.

  “Meet me there. I’ll be out losing my shirt to the chess sharks.”

  An hour later when she showed up, Brian waved a twenty-dollar bill. “Come on, I’ll buy lunch.”

  Lauren was impressed: a college guy who could hustle the hustlers in Washington Square. She wasn’t looking for a he-man—or at least her better half wasn’t—but she couldn’t see dating a guy who needed her protection if some crazy New York shit went down.

  “Mom.”

  Emily had left Jessica’s embrace. Lauren took her daughter into her arms. Jessica’s perfume then her arms surrounded them. “Lauren, oh, God,” Jessica cried, the heat of her breath touching Lauren’s ear.

  Lauren realized with a jolt: Jessica was trying to comfort her.

  “Jess,” Brian’s law partner spoke, gently. Steve was Brian’s best friend. Wearing an Italian suit—having come straight from his Manhattan office to the Miami hospital—Steve was tall, his dark hair and facial structure politician neat. He put an arm around Jessica’s shoulder. Steve’s wife, Nicole, reached for Emily. Nicole was a lawyer, too, and Steve’s perfect female counterpart, wearing a designer suit and a thousand-dollar highlight job on her short, flawlessly styled hair. With Nicole’s arm around her shoulder now, Emily listened, her eyes fixed on her father’s best friend.

  “It’s time to go, Jessica,” Steve said, patiently. “I have my plane. I’ll fly you all to Westchester Airport and take care of everything here. I’ll talk to the hospital about flying Brian back and get them the address of the funeral home.”

  Over Jessica’s head, Steve’s eyes flicked to Lauren’s for an instant. Lauren didn’t know if she’d imagined it, but she saw a hard, challenging glint in his eye. As if he were sizing up an opponent. She didn’t mind that Steve was taking control of the arrangements. Jessica was in no shape to do it, and the last thing Lauren wanted was to take charge of burying her ex-husband. Still, why had Steve looked at her like that? Although atrophied from disuse, Lauren’s street-honed antenna set her nerves on end.

  CHAPTER 3

  Monday, October 21

  Steve sent an SUV to pick up Emily and Lauren for the funeral. Emily’s chest clenched as the car turned down a narrow block lined with double-parked cars. Apartment buildings bookended the funeral home. They cast a tall shadow over the one-story brick house with its white shutters meant to make the house-of-the-dead look like a home. They weren’t fooling Emily. She backhanded away tears. She didn’t want to go in there, a place of only one truth: her father was dead. The thought vibrated through her: her father was dead. She said it to herself again, trying to make the idea less shocking, waves of sadness flowing over her. He was dead. Daddy was dead. In her mind, she was wailing, doubled over on the pavement, even when she was shaking people’s hands and accepting hugs from those who waited outside in the cold. She felt her mother’s arm around her, anchoring her.

  Jessica and her stooped-over parents stood on the short path that led to the funeral home’s entrance. Jessica looked nice, as usual, thin as a model in a long black coat. She’d left her fur coat at home, but there were enough fur coats in the crowd to populate a small forest. Lauren never wore fur. She wouldn’t, even if she had the money. It was one of the few things Emily and her mother agreed on.

  Emily tried to make eye contact with Jessica to say hello. But Jessica’s eyes were unfocused, half-open. She’d been dipping into the medicine cabinet, or a doctor had prescribed something new to help her. No help for the kid though. If Emily had done that Amy Winehouse shit, swaying on her feet, eyelids weighing a million pounds, they would have sent her to a rehab boarding school, poof, no questions asked. The kid had to feel all her feelings, no matter how hard. At least it was a consolation that her mother had to feel hers too. She didn’t drink or do drugs. She said she’d used up her quota when she was a teenager. She’d told Emily a little about it—running away, living on the street, sleeping in a drop-in center. Emily didn’t think her mother told her everything because the stories she told weren’t that bad. And she got through it in the end, became a mom plus a lawyer.

  Except her mother did become a crazy woman, screaming and turning all shades of red in the face when she smelled weed or alcoho
l on Emily. A couple of times, Emily told her: “I’m not half as bad as you were at my age and, look, your life turned out okay.” Her mother really went out of her mind when Emily said that, which was like the only power Emily had when she was about to get a “consequence.” Her mother said her own recovery was a miracle, and lightning might not strike twice. Plus, drugs were stronger nowadays and a lot of kids died before they got help. Jeez. Like Emily hadn’t read about all the kids dying? Her mother was always overreacting. Emily had never even tried heroin or pills, none of her close friends had, not that her mother would believe her.

  Crisp, gold leaves gusted down from a big tree onto the lawn in front of the funeral home. Car doors slammed. It was almost time to go inside. More people crowded the sidewalk, coming from their cars, surrounding and hugging Jessica.

  Jessica’s father seemed even shorter than the last time Emily’s father forced her to spend part of her Disney vacation visiting Jessica’s parents in Florida. Jessica’s father hovered, shrunken to below his daughter’s height now. Jessica’s mother held Jessica’s arm, the top of her head reaching her daughter’s chin. Steve Cohen appeared, towering over all of them. He and Nicole each kissed Jessica, the two women air-kissing. Nicole’s eyes scanned the crowd, her mouth set in a funeral-sad smile, not really listening to whatever Steve was saying to Jessica. Emily always admired that about Nicole, how she was so smart that people only required half her attention. Emily edged closer to the small group, wondering where Jessica’s friends were, the college friends she must have had or the ones Emily imagined she hung out with after spin class or Pilates. Emily looked around, seeing no evidence of anyone.

  Steve didn’t have a coat on, and Emily watched to see if he’d let it show that he was cold. Daddy said Steve’s suits cost ten thousand dollars each, and Daddy had started buying suits like that too. Her father was “on his way up,” people kept saying. He and Steve had whole towns for clients. They sued toxic-waste dumpers and companies that poisoned workers with asbestos or lead. Emily’s dad had been one of the good guys. He’d said that now that he was a partner with Steve instead of an employee, he’d be rich enough to retire in just a few years, at the rate he was going. But that was all over. She used to imagine becoming really rich, but she didn’t care about any of that stuff anymore. She felt as if she were standing under a huge, endless sky with nothing to ground her now that her dad wasn’t in the world. She wiped tears from her eyes and turned back to see her mother greeting an old man with a wide hat.

  “Emily, this is Chief Judge Clark,” Lauren said. “Your dad clerked for him, and he married us.”

  “My condolences, Emily. Your father was a good man and a brilliant lawyer.”

  Emily could tell the judge meant it. Hearing good things about her father poked a pinhole through her darkness for a second. “Thank you.”

  Lauren gave Emily one of those around-the-shoulder hugs that mothers gave when they were proud of you for just acting like a human being, remembering to say thank you and stuff like that. After the judge moved on, a van double-parked and a bunch of kids from Emily’s old school tumbled out. She straightened her black-and-white dress that she wore under a leather jacket. None of her friends had ever seen her in a dress. She ran over to them, beyond the edge of the crowd of adults, and her friends each hugged her. Someone handed her a vape that looked like a pink magic marker. She inhaled, feeling the soothing nicotine hit her bloodstream. One of the girls held her hair back when the wind blew it in her face, making her feel like she wasn’t alone in a crowd, the way she’d felt before.

  Emily’s friends were all different races, diversifying the place. It was a little embarrassing that her father had only white friends and family. Emily wasn’t used to that in Manhattan, where even one person’s family often contained all shades of people. She scanned the crowd again. She did see her mom’s friend, Constance, and her dad’s secretary, Peggy, who were black; and there were a couple of guys waiting to go in, one Latino, one black. She wondered who they were. They looked like cops, stiff in wool coats over suits and shirts buttoned tight around their thick necks. Probably investigators who worked with Daddy on cases. They seemed too uneasy to be lawyer friends, unless they were just uncomfortable being in this sea of pink faces in the age of Trump and the alt-right.

  From the circle of her friends, Emily saw her mother approach a couple of her cousins. Emily’s grandmother didn’t show; not a surprise. Emily’s mother hadn’t seen her in years, and Emily had only met her a few times. Lauren didn’t want Emily to have anything to do with her grandmother, who usually asked for money whenever she saw Lauren. Emily’s mother made less money than the rest of the lawyers here, less than their legal secretaries, too. She said she couldn’t afford to support drug addicts. She probably hadn’t called Emily’s grandmother to tell her about Dad.

  The crowd rippled and moved toward the funeral home entrance. Thick mauve carpet muffled their footsteps inside the large chapel, and the hum of two hundred hushed voices formed a blur of words. The closed coffin was at the front of the center aisle. Emily stiffened, taking a step back. She felt the arms of her two best girlfriends around her. “I’m okay.”

  Like a wedding, friends and family of the wife and ex-wife divided themselves up. Jessica and her family took the front row to the left of the aisle, in front of a podium. Lauren, her cousins, and her friend Constance sat in the second pew on the right side of the aisle. Lauren turned back to Emily. Emily was torn about where she was supposed to sit. Leaving her friends, she went to her mother. “I’ll sit with Jessica, Mom.”

  Lauren squeezed her hand, permission to leave, a worried look on her face. Jessica slid over and made a space for Emily in the front pew with Jessica’s immediate family. Jessica put her arm around Emily’s shoulder. Emily exhaled with relief that she was part of the important family at her own father’s funeral, not just a bystander. Emily saw her mother watching, making sure she was in good hands with Jessica, as if Emily were a toddler who couldn’t take care of herself. For a change, Emily didn’t mind.

  A rabbi who seemed to know Brian—which was amazing because her father never stepped foot in a synagogue except for weddings and bar mitzvahs—talked about him. Friends took turns at the podium. They mostly talked about work, until Steve Cohen loomed over them at the podium. Steve had a set of index cards but talked without looking down. His eyes scanned the front pews, making eye contact with Emily for a split second then settling on Jessica.

  He smiled sadly at her and recounted the Jessica-Brian love story and how they first met during a big case. Emily winced. Steve knew her mom and dad were still married then. Now, in front of hundreds of people, he was telling how Brian thought Jessica was a heroine and irresistible as if Brian marrying Jessica zeroed out his cheating on his wife. Emily looked over at her mom. She was staring ahead, expressionless. Emily’s father traded her mother in for a newer model, that was the whole effing story.

  Steve looked out at the audience. “He was my best friend. We sailed together, we flew together. When we first met, he taught me everything I know about toxic tort litigation. He was brilliant and generous with his knowledge. We sat up late into the night at the office, talking about the issues. He loved the law, and I know he particularly loved practicing before the Honorable Betsy Clayton of the Southern District Federal Court.”

  An older woman a few rows back nodded and smiled at Steve. Her father and Steve must still have had a case before her. Emily groaned inside. Even she knew it was tacky to brownnose during a eulogy.

  Before Emily faced forward again, she caught sight of the two hulky investigators, smirking. The Latino one put his head down, hiding it. They didn’t seem to be good friends of Emily’s father, and they obviously didn’t think much of Steve. Emily again wondered who they were, but she faced front and listened to the end of Steve’s eulogy.

  ***

  Rick Stuart blew his nose as Carl Cintron drove awa
y from the funeral home. “The widow was pretty,” Rick said, wiping with a napkin.

  “Pretty stoned.”

  Rick half laughed, half snorted in agreement. The auburn skin of Rick’s nose was ruddy and irritated where he’d rubbed it raw over the last couple of days. Rick never listened to Carl about vitamin C and echinacea. Loosening his tie with one hand, Carl guided the car around a curve that led from the Cross County Parkway to Sawmill Parkway. “Judges, fancy-ass lawyers, politicians. The place was packed with them.”

  “Jordan Connors didn’t show up. Not much of a friend.”

  “Unless trouble kept him away. I keep thinking someone got to Silverman first, pulled him right out from under us.”

  “The fire marshal’s preliminaries are in,” Rick said, loosening his tie, too. “There was no irregular burn pattern.”

  “I guess. But you heard the audio of Jordan Connors. He’s scared. Connors is in way over his head, and so was Brian Silverman. Now Silverman’s dead.”

  “Jordan’s definitely been playing with fire,” Rick agreed. “He should be scared.”

  Carl and Rick rode silently for a while, Carl mulling over the funeral service. “Did you hear Steve Cohen’s story about how Silverman met his wife? Silverman was married to someone else then.”

  “Yup.”

  “Guys like him make life hard for the rest of us.”

  The eulogy had brought Carl’s thoughts back to Kansas City, returning home at dawn after a grueling night of surveillance at a trap house. His wife leaned against a wall, her eyes red from crying. “You know I heard something funny, Carl. From the other wives. I heard the guys all back each other up when they’re out whoring. That there’s no way of knowing whether your husband is really working a stakeout on radio silence all night, and half the time he’s not.”