by Dani Lamia
The screen shows a grainy, shaky video of Bernard’s helicopter flying over an empty field. It is Middle America, probably Pennsylvania farmland. I wonder for a moment if it might literally be Gettysburg.
The bottom drops out of my stomach.
Pez sees me stricken and maneuvers out of his seat to come stand behind me. We watch as the helicopter rotors stall in the sky. The helicopter starts to wrench sideways, advancing jerkily in first one direction and then another. Then the camera zooms in, so the helicopter takes up the entire frame. I think I can even see a pale white face looking out. Suddenly the helicopter snakes out of view and there’s a mishmash of blue sky and green field and the sickening boom of a crash.
The helicopter doesn’t explode. Nothing so dramatic as that. When the camera finds its target again and pans back, we see the helicopter crushed beyond recognition in the field, smoking, silent, motionless.
Pez and I stare at the screen, willing someone to climb out of the wreckage, to stumble from the crumpled mess and then to run toward whoever is holding the camera and snatch it from them and punch them in the face.
But no one gets up. The camera zooms in close again and I see bodies in the belly of the ruins, twisted and lifeless. We watch for what feels like a solid minute. And then the feed goes dead, returning to the character-creation screen, which shows me that I have only one life left.
“Call the police,” I say. “That has to be Pennsylvania. Surely the helicopter has some kind of GPS chip or something? Maybe call the helicopter company first. That’s what the police would do. Maybe somebody saw it go down. They could still be alive.”
Pez nods. He runs out the door.
I feel sick. I fumble around under my desk for the tiny wastepaper basket that is largely ceremonial, since my office is cleaned several times a day and I do all my work at the computer, generating basically zero paperwork. Every so often I toss a bag of chips or a takeout clamshell into it, but thankfully right now it is empty.
I heave out my guts into the tiny trash can. I puke up my hangover and the Indian food and the toxic swirl of anxiety and despair overtaking me. Bernard is dead. I know it. Even if he managed to survive the crash, the first person to arrive on the scene will be whoever was taking the video, and it won’t be much work to make sure that whatever is left of Bernard doesn’t make it to a hospital.
Three Nylo men dead in one week. The contractions of my stomach turn into sobs and I don’t give a fuck if anybody hears me or not.
32
I wimp out and let the cops go to Bernard’s house to break the news to Phoebe. It should be me who tells her what happened, but I am simply not brave enough. I want to talk to her, but I don’t want to be the one who tells her that her husband is dead.
And he really is dead. I got a confirmation from the tunnel and subway detectives within an hour of seeing the video. The police are still trying to figure out what happened. Perversely, against all circumstantial evidence, they think it was some kind of pilot error. They see no reason to assume that it was murder.
Even though he’s the third Nylo to die this week.
So the police are clearly not going to help. At this point, the FBI should get involved. If I wanted, I could bring that kind of pressure on the city and make it happen. But I can’t stand the idea of the agents’ smug faces as they go through our phones, our computers, our lives.
I don’t want to travel in a helicopter to Long Island. Not after what happened. I can’t land on Bernard’s lawn in a helicopter and give Phoebe even a fleeting glint of hope that it might be him.
Plus, I don’t think I could bring myself to climb aboard a helicopter right now. Instead, I take a car. I arrive with Ed and Mel an hour or so after the cops. On the way I try to call Gabriella and Alistair, but they are still avoiding me, possibly afraid I might try to bend them to my will, like Pez said I do to people. But didn’t they see the video? Bernard is dead, for fuck’s sake.
Phoebe’s au pair answers the door, a dowdy Irish woman in her fifties. She shakes her head when she sees me and opens the door wide. I hear wailing from deeper inside the house. The two boys are standing by the foot of the stairs. The littlest one runs up to me and hugs my legs.
“Make it stop,” he says. “Make her stop.”
“I can’t, little guy,” I say, rubbing Julian’s back as he clings to me. “I can’t turn this one around.”
“Yes, you can,” says Maxim with a sneer. “Yes, you can! You can do anything you want. You need to bring our dad back here and make Mom go back to normal.”
I leave them at the stairs; there’s nothing else I can do. They let me go, unsure whether my silence is acquiescence or defiance. I suppose they are going to have to get used to the ambivalent feeling of absence from the ones they love. This won’t be good for either boy, but it will be especially bad for Maxim, who is already a toxic soup of behavioral problems.
I find Phoebe in one of the small libraries on the ground floor. There is a packet of papers on the table in front of her. It looks like a printout of grief counseling phone numbers and meeting times that the cops must have left behind.
She sees me and stifles a sob, then offers a half-smile. Even after her world’s been turned upside down, she’s still trying to be nice to me.
“What happened?” she says. “How could this happen?”
“It’s all so horrible,” I say. “And so sudden.”
“Where was he going, that bastard?” she says. “Was he going to one of his women? Without even bothering to lie to me? Just taking off for the night to visit some piece of ass in another state? Without so much as a phone call?”
“We don’t know where he was going,” I say, which is the truth. He didn’t tell me which city he had picked at random.
“I know he was cheating on me,” says Phoebe. “I mean, he never actually started being faithful, so it was just a continuation of the cheating he was doing before we were married. But he was usually discreet about it. He would give me a lie. Why didn’t he bother to give me a lie this time? Do you think it was some kind of suicide? I know he wasn’t happy. But he couldn’t be happy, could he? That wasn’t in his character. He was happy enough, though, wasn’t he? Why was he running away?”
“It wasn’t suicide,” I say. “I know that for a fact. He loved you. He loved his boys. Whatever he was doing was business related. I can tell you that much. I won’t lie and tell you that he never cheated on you. But this wasn’t about that. I know that for a fact.”
“How can you say that?” says Phoebe. “You don’t know his mind any better than me. How can you stand there and pretend like you knew him?”
I move closer to her. It doesn’t feel right, but I guess it will never feel right. My family has been basically cut in half in one week. I do something I never would have done a week ago and put my arms around Phoebe, hugging her as tightly as I can.
“We are going to get through this,” I say, not really believing it myself. “We are going to keep each other strong for our children. Whatever is left of Bernard is in those kids. They need their mommy right now.”
Impossibly, she nods at me, somehow soaking up my bullshit. In situations like this, it really doesn’t matter what you say, as long as you say it with sufficient zeal and gravitas.
“I want you to know, first of all, that this changes nothing,” I say. “You will be taken care of just as if Bernard were still alive.”
She looks a little shocked at this.
“Of course I will be,” she says. “What do you mean?”
“I just mean, in case you were worried,” I say. She thrusts her jaw out at me. She wasn’t worried before, but now she is.
“Nylo will always take care of you,” I say. “No matter what.”
“They are supposed to send the body back tonight,” says Phoebe. “He broke his neck in the crash. That’s what they say. At le
ast he didn’t suffer.”
“Bernard never suffered,” I say. “Not one day in his life.”
“That’s true,” says Phoebe, smiling ruefully. “He didn’t know how.”
“Listen,” I say. “I need to know something.”
“Yes?”
“I don’t quite even know what to ask. But have you seen anybody new around lately? Anybody suspicious, watching you or making you feel uncomfortable? One mother to another: sometimes we have a sixth sense about these sorts of things. Was there anybody who sent hackles up your neck? Anybody who didn’t belong?”
To her credit, Phoebe doesn’t dismiss me immediately out of hand. She thinks about it for a moment before shaking her head.
“Everything has been pretty quiet around here,” she says. “Nothing exciting at all. Just the same daily dramas. I give the kids everything I possibly can, and Bernard fucks any old slut that comes into view, and I pretend not to see and we don’t talk about it.”
I nod, not wanting to let her pull me over to her side quite yet. My loyalties remain with my brother. I always told him that getting married was a bad idea, especially to someone so self-sacrificing who would seemingly let him get away with anything, but who was secretly bearing all of his insults and neglect like a metastasizing cancer. Eventually, one day, she would overwhelm him with pure righteous fury. Better to marry someone as awful as him, I said.
I almost feel bad for Phoebe that Bernard has denied her a cleansing final moment of rage, but I assume that in six months or so she will smash his convertible with his golf clubs or deck one of his many mistresses in a Wegmans or something and then she will write a cathartic “friends only” locked social media post about it that will have a similar effect and will let her begin the process of demonization that will fuel her spite tank for the rest of her life.
Not that Bernard wasn’t an awful bastard. But he was my brother. And I am an awful bastard, too.
“It can’t possibly have been easy being married to my brother,” I say, standing up. “But you have been a good and loyal wife to him. I have always admired you for that. You were a really good team together, despite your differences. I hope now that he is gone we will be able to become closer, you and I, now that we are no longer divided by something so lame as a man.”
She bursts into tears, nodding. It would be so easy to capture all of her self-abnegating, submissive energy and make it my own. But what purpose would I bend her toward? For now, it’s good enough to keep her docile, to keep her from hating my brother for dying for just a little while longer as a gift to his memory.
“Henley’s funeral is tomorrow,” she says.
“Yeah, or whatever,” I say. “Listen, you are in no shape to go to anything such as a funeral right now. I get it. You just stay here with the boys and take care of yourself. No one will blame you for not showing up. I guess we have to stagger our grief right now.”
“Bernard was going to give a speech,” she says. “He was working on it last night. It wasn’t much, but maybe you can read it for him instead?”
“Yeah, okay, maybe that will be nice,” I say.
“He sent it to me to proofread,” she says. “Hold on, I’ll text it to you.”
I let her cry as she works her phone and then I give her a bottle of lorazepam. She smiles and tells me that she already has her own, but I leave the bottle anyway. You can’t ever have enough.
I go looking for Ed and Mel. I find them playing with my nephews, letting Maxim and Julian climb all over them and giving them piggyback rides where they almost scrape the vaulted ceilings. Their insane levels of inhuman patience are proudly on display, and I envy their easy, laconic way of existing in the world.
I’m glad that Bernard dismissed his security detail before getting in that helicopter. I make a note to make sure that the helicopter pilot’s family is generously compensated beyond whatever insurance claims they’ll be able to make from the company and beyond whatever whole-life policy helicopter pilots must surely get for themselves as a matter of course. Whatever his family is paid, Nylo will match it.
“Aunt Caitlyn, did you make her stop crying?” asks Maxim as I pry my nephews off of my security guards. “Is everything back to normal?”
“Well, little guy,” I say, “it isn’t. But that doesn’t mean you won’t get used to the way things are now. You have to grow up a little bit faster, that’s all. I wasn’t much older than you when your grandmother died. Did you know that? Right now, I have to get back to the city, but when this is all over, you and I are going to get together and we are going to have a real special grown-up talk, okay?”
He nods at me, satisfied.
33
Somehow, I manage to sleep. When I wake up, I check to see if Alistair or Gabriella has texted, but they still aren’t responding to my messages.
I hop into the shower and let the hot water rain over me, steeling myself for Henley’s funeral, followed by another round with the Game Master. I throw on a nice black dress before getting a car to Ugly American.
Maybe Alistair and Gabriella will bother to show up. Or maybe not. After all, any one of us might be next. Whoever is running the game has proved that there is nowhere to run and nowhere to hide from what is coming.
For the first time, I start to wonder what people will say if I win this horrible game. How will I spin it? Won’t people be suspicious if I am the only one left alive and therefore have total control over my family’s fortune?
I start to think about the Netflix documentary on this whole sordid affair that I will have to produce myself. I start to think about the way in which the police will be blamed for bungling the case and letting my siblings be killed by a terrorist one by one.
What will people say about me when they are asked? Will they tell the police that I would never be capable of something like this, of something so brutal and calculating with so many moving parts? Will they tell the police that they could never imagine me doing something so ruthless and diabolical?
Of course not. They’ll tell the police that I am the only person they know who could actually pull something like this off.
Even Ben won’t be able to spin a yarn that makes me heroic. My little girls will wonder about their mother. They will slowly become certain that I’m a murderer as they become rebellious teenagers. I don’t exactly project warmth.
It dawns on me that my only way out is to pin it on Angelo Marino. He is just as much of a possibility as me. He would have had the same access to our father in order to make this all happen. If I go down, he will go down, too.
I get to Ugly American shortly before 10 a.m. One of the bartenders lets me in. The caterers have put out a spread of Henley’s favorite foods in accordance with his wishes: SpaghettiOs, incredibly expensive French cheeses, rosemary and cracked black pepper crackers, kolaches, marzipan. There is a giant bong and a crystal bowl full of weed.
At first, I’m afraid no one is going to show up, but then Henley’s dirtbag friends start to trickle in. It is a motley collection of posh-looking private school sneaks and paunchy local scumbags. My Midwesterners arrive as a pack, looking like they’ve been up all night. When the one with the new chin sees me, he gives a wave. Everybody begins eating and drinking, periodically hitting the bong. It is a relatively upbeat and festive affair. Henley has always mocked anyone who worried about life, death, or anything in between. He didn’t learn that from our mom and dad. He got to that particular wisdom all on his own.
Pez and Angelo Marino arrive one after the other. Pez has his arm around a weeping woman dressed in skintight leather, whom I assume is Henley’s ex Sheila.
We are just about to start giving speeches when the tunnel and subway detectives slink up to me, sizing me up, both of them eating electric blue freeze pops. Their tongues are bright turquoise. They must have gotten them from the cart down on the corner, which also sells dirty-water hot
dogs and probably cocaine.
“Detectives,” I say. “I’m glad you could both make it.”
“It’s official NYPD policy,” says Detective Jay.
“We’re supposed to attend the funerals of every homicide victim that we’re investigating,” says Detective Rutledge. “You never know. The killer might show up just to gloat, or else show some kind of weepy melodramatic remorse in public to throw us off the scent.”
“Well, it’s a nice gesture just the same,” I lie.
Peter shows up and gives me a weary but sympathetic look. I have been trying to keep a firewall between my business and personal lives. Of course, that means I’ve been keeping him in the dark about the game, not letting him help me.
“I brought what you asked for,” he says, shrugging a cooler off his shoulder. “I packed the cooler full. The bottles were just where you said they would be.”
I take the cooler and open it up. Should I make an announcement? Should I tell the bar what this means to me, sharing from my personal stash?
His whole life, Henley bugged me for a taste and I always denied him. My White Coke was the one vice that I refused to share with him. Now, perhaps by filling his friends and lovers with White Coke, some of it will spiritually reach his spectral essence. I tell myself that ghosts surely attend their own funerals.
I decide that the people here will not enjoy the White Coke as much if they realize how precious it is. It must be a quiet novelty, something fun and frivolous.
I grab a bucket of ice from the bar and fill it up with clear bottles sporting red stars. Peter looks at me plaintively, like a kicked puppy. I nod at the bottles in the bucket and smile at him. He eagerly reaches out and takes one. He cracks it open and takes a long, luxurious sip.
“Tastes like freedom,” he says with a happy sigh.
I grab a bottle of my own and tap it with a spoon to get everyone’s attention and then I deliver Bernard’s short speech about Henley. It is all wooden pleasantries, the kind of eulogy that you would write after Googling “how to write a eulogy.” It is well-received. The gathered throng claps at the end. A few people make themselves cry.
