Satan's Sisters

by Star Jones

  “We’re here, ma’am,” the cabbie said, sounding a bit tentative. Whitney opened her eyes and saw him watching her through the rearview mirror. Poor guy. He must have worried that she was about to have a nervous breakdown in his cab. She pulled some bills from her wallet, giving him an extra twenty-dollar tip for enduring her drama. She saw that there was a dark van double-parked in front of where he had stopped the cab.

  “Thanks, lady,” he said enthusiastically. As she closed the door, he called out to her. “I hope it turns out all right.” Whitney gave him a tight smile as he drove off. She saw that men were in the van. As she approached the front of her home, she could see men inside through the glass doors.

  “Hello, I’m Whitney Harlington,” she said when she stepped through the front door.

  A middle-aged white man with salt-and-pepper hair stepped forward and introduced himself. He told her that they had a search warrant for the property in Manhattan and for their home in Nantucket. He said FBI agents were retrieving files and computer equipment from the Nantucket home at the same time that they served the Manhattan search warrant. He said they were also looking for any photographic equipment they could find. Whitney wanted to be mad, to show the man some anger, but she knew that would do no good. These guys were just doing their jobs. They couldn’t help it that her husband was a disgusting degenerate. In that moment, she recalled the video camera Eric had just purchased, how he had taken some footage of the girls lying around the living room. Apparently that was just practice, preparation for the camera’s real function, to take video footage of somebody else’s daughters. Possibly doing disgusting things to him. Whitney felt her eyes start to moisten again. But when she saw Ashley and Bailey running in her direction, she tried to stop the tears. Yet when her arms wrapped around her daughters, there was no way to stem the tide. All three of them cried together, holding on tight, sobbing for the loss of their family, the idyllic lives they had all lived up to that point. Because of Eric, it was all gone. They had no idea what would be left over in the wreckage.

  After the FBI departed, Whitney thanked Mrs. Dooley for her help and walked the girls back to their rooms. The twins said they wanted to sleep together—for the first time since they were about ten years old. Ashley crawled into Bailey’s bed and let Whitney pull up the sheets and tuck both of them in.

  “Mom?” Bailey said. “Mrs. Dooley said they took all of Dad’s stuff because of child pornography. I know it’s against the law to have nude pictures of kids. But did Dad do actual, uh, stuff to little kids?” Her voice cracked at the end of the question. Whitney felt her heart breaking into tiny little pieces. She gazed down at their beautiful, angelic faces, their eyes wide with wonder as they waited for her answer. They hadn’t really looked identical since they were about seven or eight, but their faces were mirror images at this precise moment. At least the question gave her a partial answer to her worry about whether Eric had touched them; she didn’t think she would have gotten this question if he had. But she still knew she had to ask them the question, point-blank.

  “I don’t really know, Bailey,” Whitney said. “I know what the police think . . . and it looks really bad; but we’ll just have to wait with everyone else to hear the whole story. I wish I had some answers but I don’t. I have to tell you something, though. It’s going to get a lot worse before it gets better. It’s going to be on TV, on a Primeline special about sexual predators, the footage of them arresting Dad in Prague.”

  Bailey sat upright in the bed. “You mean, like that show where they’re always catching perverts trying to have sex with little girls?!” she said, fresh tears springing from her eyes. Whitney nodded sadly. Bailey slammed her head back into her pillow. Ashley reached out for her and they hugged each other tightly, bringing back long-forgotten memories for Whitney of when the twins actually liked and comforted each other. Whitney knew the time had come for the tough question; there was no getting around it. She had to know whether Eric had brought his perversion into their home.

  “Girls, it really hurts me to have to ask you this, but I have no choice,” Whitney said, looking back and forth between them. She saw their eyes widen and her heart hurt for the two of them. “Did your father ever, uh, touch either one of you in a way he shouldn’t have?” she said softly, carefully.

  Whitney saw the pain cross over both of their faces, which managed to hold the same looks of horror. Both girls shook their heads emphatically without looking at each other.

  “No, Mom, he never touched us,” Ashley said. “We wouldn’t let any man touch us inappropriately.”

  “You’ve been telling us that for a long time,” Bailey said. Then she looked down. Her voice got lower. “Actually, Dad has too.”

  “Yes, both of you taught us that lesson,” Ashley said. “We wouldn’t let anybody touch us or do things to us that we didn’t want. And I wouldn’t let anyone do that to Bailey either.”

  “And I wouldn’t let anyone do it to Ashley,” Bailey chimed in.

  Whitney pursed her lips and shook her head. She wrapped an arm around each girl and pulled them close to her. She loved her girls so much. Whether this one was a drama queen or that one was a brooding loner, her girls needed to come first. Always. She felt another wave of guilt wash over her; she had been so preoccupied with Riley that she hadn’t been taking care of business at home. Now they all had to suffer because of it.

  “I’m so proud of you two,” Whitney said through the tears that began to flow once again. Ashley and Bailey were crying along with her, the three of them softly sobbing. “I’m so sorry that you have to go through this horrible thing. If you need to talk about anything, anything at all, don’t hesitate to come to me. And no matter what happens, never think that any of this was your fault. Okay?”

  Both girls nodded their heads vigorously. They remained squeezed together for the next several minutes, all of them holding on tight.

  “Mom?” It was Bailey, speaking into her left shoulder.

  “Yes, dear?” Whitney said tenderly.

  “What’s going to happen when Daddy comes back home?” Bailey asked.

  Whitney pulled away and looked deeply into Bailey’s blue eyes, now puffy and red. She put her hands on Bailey’s shoulders.

  “Baby, your father no longer belongs here,” she said. “And besides, he’s probably going to jail, probably for a very long time.”

  This news brought a fresh stream of tears from the girls. Whitney hugged them tightly until she heard the crying stop. She pulled the covers over them and watched them close their eyes. Both of them were asleep within five minutes.

  When Whitney was finally alone in her bedroom, she ran to a file cabinet and found an old Rolodex, a remnant of a simpler time when people actually wrote phone numbers down on paper. When she found what she was looking for, she picked up her cell phone and dialed the number.

  “Hello?” The voice was groggy on the other end. “Who is this?”

  “Nancy? This is Whitney Harlington. I’m really, really sorry if I woke you up. Seriously. I have a, uh, kind of a situation here. My husband Eric was arrested yesterday in Prague for soliciting a child prostitute.”

  “Oh, that’s terrible!” Nancy said. “I’m really sorry, Whitney.”

  “Yes, thank you, Nancy. Thank you. It’s going to get even worse, though. Apparently the whole thing was recorded by Primeline for one of their specials. I think it’s going to air this Tuesday. I don’t even want to consider being married to this man for another day. I wondered if you could make some time for me on Monday to begin divorce proceedings?”

  “I can do better than that, Whitney,” Nancy said. “How about I come over tomorrow, around noon, so we can talk?”

  Nancy Chemtob, an old friend of Whitney’s, was one of the most sought-after cutthroat divorce lawyers in New York. Whitney had joked with her many times about how she needed to keep Nancy’s number on speed dial in case Eric ever fucked up. She never imagined that she would actually be using it at eleve
n thirty on a Saturday night. When Whitney hung up the phone, she could hear talking coming from Bailey’s room. She slipped out into the hall and stood outside of the door, trying to hear what the girls were saying. Apparently one of them was on the phone. She heard Bailey say “Todd.” She was talking to her oldest brother, Todd, who was a senior at Tufts. Whitney knew she should be calling the boys herself, but she wasn’t up to it. She felt too tired, much too tired, to be going through two more gut-wrenching conversations with her sons. She walked back to her bedroom, turned off the light, and slid into bed. She closed her eyes, and just when she began to drift off, the house phone rang. The caller ID told her it was Ron, her younger son. Sleep would need to wait. Whitney snatched the phone from the nightstand and answered it.

  AFTER THE STORY ON chattercrazy.com said Molly might be losing her slot on The Lunch Club, Molly spent thirty-six hours sliding into another crisis with the pills. She had been popping the Xanax like Skittles, hoping they would stop her hands from shaking and her heart from jumping around her chest. She knew that she needed to find some other way to deal with anxiety besides medicating it. Talk about your short-term solutions. What she probably needed was some type of rehab program—but with The Lunch Club axe stalking around, looking for a head to chop off, a rehab program was the last thing on her agenda.

  Molly tried to watch television, but she was too jumpy to sit still. In the illogical recesses of her brain, Molly came up with the solution: coffee. She needed a big, steaming cup of coffee. But when she went into her kitchen to make a cup, she panicked when she saw that she had run out. She forgot that she had thrown all of it in the garbage the week before during one of her radical mood swings. She had decided she was drinking too much of it and that it was making her fat. So the coffee had to go.

  “Oh God, I gotta have coffee,” she mumbled to herself. She leaned over the counter and took deep breaths, trying to beat back the urge to take another pill. She had just swallowed one less than an hour earlier. She could not take another one so soon. She just couldn’t.

  But still she found herself moving toward her pocketbook, removing the bottle and holding another pill in her hand. She wanted to stop, but she couldn’t. Maybe the coffee would help her! Still clutching the pill, she squeezed her butt into a pair of jeans that were probably too small, pulled on a jacket, and left her building, desperate now for a cup of coffee. She wasn’t even aware that she was mumbling to herself—or that her hair was so unkempt that she might be mistaken for a homeless woman. Though the sight of homeless women mumbling to themselves wasn’t exactly rare on the streets of New York, Molly still got a few lingering glances from passersby who suspected that the loony-looking fat woman might be the funny chick from The Lunch Club. Molly came across Big Nick’s all-night diner on Broadway and she hurried inside. She sat down and ordered two cups of coffee, drawing a frown from the waitress, a pretty young Latina who also recognized Molly.

  Molly sat in the booth, talking to herself and slowly rocking back and forth, oblivious to the fact that she was on virtual display to the city through the diner’s large plate-glass windows. At the same time, walking down Broadway and passing the diner’s windows were Karen Siegel and her husband, Bert. Their night out together was precipitated by the thing that had sent Molly over the edge—the story on chattercrazy.com. Karen’s husband thought he could take her mind off her troubles if he took her out for a great dinner at Isabella’s, one of their favorite restaurants on the West Side.

  “Hey, isn’t that Molly Stein?” Bert said, grabbing Karen’s arm and pointing through the diner window. They stood there and watched her for a moment, their mouths agape as they saw her mumbling and rocking. She clearly looked psychotic, with her hair askew, her clothes disheveled, and what looked like spit in the corners of her mouth.

  “What the hell is wrong with her?” Bert said.

  Karen shook her head. “I don’t know. She looks like she’s on some kind of drugs. I know people on the show have been saying that she’s addicted to pills or something, but I never saw her look like this.”

  “What do you want to do? Should we help her?” he asked.

  “I don’t know,” Karen answered. She was torn; she knew Molly would be mortified that somebody she knew saw her in this condition, but what if she were recognized and pictures wound up in the gossip columns? It was Karen’s duty to protect her show, wasn’t it?

  As they stood outside the diner discussing their next move, Molly looked out the window for the first time—and saw the familiar face of Karen Siegel, staring in at her, like she was in a zoo. Molly’s eyes widened and she screamed. Startled, Karen and her husband looked at each other, then ran toward the front door of the diner, not sure what they were going to do but knowing that they needed Molly to stop screaming. Luckily the diner only had a couple of other customers, who stared at Molly with confused expressions. The waitress was trying to find out what was wrong when Karen and Bert appeared at her booth.

  “Molly! Stop it!” Karen said sternly. Molly instantly settled down.

  “What are you doing here?” Molly said, her eyes still wild. “Did you come to get me?”

  Karen slid into the booth next to Molly. Bert sat opposite her. Karen put her arm around Molly and tried to act jovial and nonchalant.

  “We came to help you get back home,” Karen said. “You ready?”

  Molly looked down at her two coffee cups. “But I need my coffee,” Molly said.

  “I’ll tell you what, Molly. We can get some coffee for you to take home.” She glanced at Bert, who popped up from the booth and went to find the waitress, who was watching the scene warily from the safety of the area behind the counter.

  Molly suddenly started crying. Karen put both arms around her and hugged her. She smelled an odor coming from Molly, sweat and body funk. She wondered when Molly last had a shower.

  WHEN THE CATERERS HAD washed the last dish and moved out all of their junk, Maxine went into the kitchen looking for William. She was so relieved that the whole party was done, she needed a hug. But he wasn’t there. She went into the living room. He wasn’t there either. She wandered through the first floor, wondering where he could have gone. She finally found him in his small living quarters. To her surprise, he had several suitcases on the bed and he was stacking clothing into them.

  “What are you doing?” Maxine said, alarmed.

  “I really don’t think I can take it anymore, Maxine,” he said without looking at her.

  “What are you talking about, William?”

  He looked up at her for the first time while he placed a stack of folded shirts in a suitcase. He shook his head and resumed packing.

  “Would you stop it for a moment and talk to me?!” Maxine demanded.

  William sighed. “I knew that you could be a cold, heartless so-and-so when you wanted to be, but I didn’t think even you could go that far,” he said. “At the party, I overheard a couple of guys talking. You know, I’m the black butler, so I just blend into the wallpaper in these people’s minds. People act like I’m not even there. These two gentlemen were in the library, enjoying some of your good scotch. I think they were both publishing executives. One of them was telling the other one about a book he’s about to publish, written by one of the women who used to be on your show. In this book, she talks about the circumstances surrounding her departure. He said that you forced her to leave the show, and in exchange you agreed not to disclose the fact that some man was wrongly convicted for raping her?”

  Maxine suddenly felt a bit unsteady on her feet. She took in a deep breath and leaned against the doorframe for support. She reached out for the chair in William’s room and sat down heavily, still in her evening clothes. It sounded like her worst fears were confirmed—Missy had gone all out to take her down.

  “Well, it wasn’t exactly like that,” Maxine said. But her voice was missing its usual surety. She was not convincing at all.

  William raised his left eyebrow, his telltale way of ex
pressing doubt. Clearly he wasn’t going to believe a word she said.

  “I . . . well, it wasn’t like I made a trade or anything,” Maxine said.

  “Well then, why don’t you tell me what you did do, Maxine? Is there a black man sitting in jail right now who could have been free years ago if you had done the right thing?”

  Maxine shook her head. “It wasn’t that long ago, William. Only a couple of years, like two or maybe three. And I didn’t make a, like, trade for his life or anything that dramatic. I got some information about Missy’s trial and I let her know that I knew everything wasn’t as it seemed. She had been going around all these years making herself into this conservative darling; even had people saying silly stuff like she could be a vice-presidential candidate. But it was all a lie. All complete and utter bullshit. Knowing that, I told her that it probably wasn’t appropriate for her to stay on The Lunch Club. So she left. That was it.”