The Favorite Sister

by Jessica Knoll

  “I’m sorry,” Jesse sighs, “but you’ve lost me.”

  “There has never been a woman past the age of thirty-four on the show,” I say.

  “Whoa,” Lauren breathes, her brow furrowed, taking inventory of our fallen soldiers, realizing I’m right. Jen raises a glass of water to her lips, taking a trembling sip. She has not said a word or even made a facial expression since we sat down, just sat there like a pasty statue. I had almost forgotten she was here.

  Jesse fans her face. “Everyone is overheated and exhausted, Stephanie. Jen is clearly not feeling well and we should get her into the air-conditioning. We came out here and we did this for nothing. Just let it go. Go home. Get some rest. There will be a new chapter for you, but not until you take the time to step away and reflect.”

  I am not going home, getting some rest, and reflecting. I am never going home again. I lean across the table, serving myself some salad from the large ceramic mixing bowl. These hypocrites have worked up my appetite. “Why has there never been a woman past the age of thirty-four on the show?” I persist.

  Jesse turns her hands palms side up, as though I must be kidding her. “I guess not then. Sorry, ladies—and, well, I was going to say gentleman, but I’ll just say Vince instead—that Stephanie is dead set on making your Sunday so unpleasant.” Jesse focuses in on me, her tone that of a reasonable person tasked with subduing a madwoman. “The reason,” she continues, “that there has never been a woman on the show past the age of thirty-four is because it’s a show about female millennials who have accomplished amazing things without the financial support of a man.”

  “Thirty-four-year-olds are millennials.” I smack her down. “In another year, thirty-five-year-olds will be millennials, and a year after that, thirty-six-year-olds will be and on and on and on. A generation’s ages are fluid, not stagnant.” I dazzle her with a smile. “Try again.”

  Jesse decides to antagonize me further by matching my smile. “Forgive me. I misspoke. It’s a show about young women who have accomplished amazing things without the financial support of a man. Is that more to your liking?”

  “It is extremely to my liking.” I spear my bed of lettuce with my fork. The leaves are fluffy in texture, young green in shade. Rich-people-who-mistreat-their-staff lettuce. “Closer to what I’m getting at. So after thirty-four, you’re no longer young?”

  Jesse tilts her head at me, pityingly. “No, you’re not. I’m sorry if that’s a reality that scares you, but that says more about you than it does about me. I’m forty-six years old and I’m proud of my age.” Oh yeah, you celebrate it now that the cameras are off. “I’m proud to provide young women with a platform so that they too can find themselves where I find myself today. You should move into the next bracket with grace and pride. You should pass the torch generously.”

  “I’m not passing anyone anything from where I stand today. I’m a fucking leper. No one would take anything that’s been touched by me.”

  “I’m sorry,” Jesse says, and it only sounds like she means it. “But those are the consequences of your actions. Woman-up and deal with it.”

  Oh, she wants me to woman-up and deal with it, does she? I spear a shrimp and jam the whole thing into my mouth, tail and all, feeling like Daryl Hannah in Splash. My fly friend does not scare off, only does a two-footed hop onto a lower tier of shrimp and rubs his fly-paws faster. I take this for anticipatory support: He can’t wait for me to woman-up. “And what about the consequences of your actions?” I snarl, spewing a pink shard of shrimp shell onto the table. Jen covers her mouth with a silent gag. “You sold us on a show about sisterhood, and then you flipped the script, but only on us. Everywhere else, you continue to pat yourself on the back for lifting women up. I cannot read one more breathless fucking profile about you and your commitment to empowering women in the New York Times. I cannot listen to one more viral fucking Ivy League commencement speech where you implore twenty-two-year-olds to negotiate their salary like a man, to wear the label Difficult with pride. To get that money, girl.” I snap my fingers in the way we’ve come to expect sassy black women to do. “Everyone sitting at this table knows the truth. You are manning the fucking Zamboni so that we can body slam one another on clean ice. Girl fight! Reconcile. Girl fight! Reconcile. Those are our marching orders, and you get richer and more self-righteous while we get bloodier and older. And then, when we have the audacity to follow your own Pollyanna advice and ask to be paid more than forty-one dollars and sixty-six cents a day, you cut us loose and blacklist us from the Cool Feminists Club. This show is not a platform. It’s a mass gravesite for thirty-four-year-old difficult women.”

  I get up and head for Jen’s car with gamey underarms and clear eyes. I wish the cameras had captured my speech—I’ve been working on it for weeks—but I did the best I could do with what I had to work with, and for once, my best will have to be good enough.

  I practiced this next part in my head, hundreds of times since I hatched my exit plan. Only I didn’t control for another factor, which was the jughead I married. I didn’t control for him being there, chasing after me, probably thinking I am about to drive straight to the New York Times offices and shove the video under Gary the Photographer’s nose myself. He grabs my arm, spinning me around, pinning me to his chest and trying to shove his hands into my pockets, grabbing for my phone. People are shouting behind us, screaming at Vince to let me go. Stupid gashes. They should be begging Vince to restrain me. I sink my teeth into his wrist and keep sinking until I feel the skin give way with a satisfying snap. Vince yowls like a cat with his tail caught in the door, his grip on me loosening enough that I am able to worm out of his grasp.

  I throw myself behind the wheel of Jen’s Tesla. Did it lock? I didn’t hear it lock. In the second and a half it takes for me to wonder this, Vince has the passenger-side door open. Goddamn you, Elon Musk. I try to accelerate before Vince can dive inside, but he manages to throw his body lengthwise across the front seats, his elbows in my lap, his head between my chest and the steering wheel. The passenger-side door flaps like one good wing as I gun it for the picnic table, for the whole vomitous, infected girl squad, though it’s Jesse Barnes, patient zero, I’d most like to leave a pink smear on her eroding lawn.

  “You’re fucking crazy!” Vince shrieks, and he seizes the wheel, his hands over mine, forcing me to turn, turn, turn—fuck, fuck, fuck—away from my squealing, scattering targets. He can control our direction but not our speed, so time for Plan D, E, F . . . ? I’ve lost count at this point. I pulverize the gas pedal, Vince unwittingly aiming us for the edge, for the peacocking sea. It wasn’t how I wanted it—I wanted an unholy slaughter—but as the wheels run out of ground I remind myself done is better than perfect Done is better than perfect. Done is better than . . .

  PART IV

  * * *

  Post • August–November 2017

  CHAPTER 21

  * * *

  Kelly Present Day

  The officer is my age, but he occasionally calls me ma’am. His wedding band is black silicone, the kind you wear to the gym or the beach, to protect your real ring from sweat and sand. He’s in good shape and he smells a little. I decide I have interrupted his Sunday afternoon run on the beach. Well. Stephanie did.

  “What did Stephanie and Vince argue about at the table?”

  “Um,” I say, slipping my hands under my thighs. I’ve mentioned that I have a daughter, and I don’t want him to see my unadorned finger and know I’m not married. I need to be regarded as an upstanding and dependable member of the community, and people have their notions about unwed mothers. Not that I’ve had much free time over the years to worry about how it looks that I have a child but not a husband. It was what it was, until the show came along and made single motherhood this very deliberate and punk-rock choice. The show. Will it survive this? Do I want it to survive this? Yes, desperately, I realize, the thought producing an echo of shame.

  “Everyone knew that Vince wasn’t fait
hful to Steph,” I say, my posture attentive and ladylike, the posture of a woman you would be inclined to believe. “And I think Steph always knew but looked the other way until recently, when she just decided she had had enough.”

  “Had something happened recently to set her off?”

  Yes, Officer, but you can’t prove it given the fact that Jesse’s phone conveniently ended up at the bottom of the pool in the mad dash to get out of Stephanie’s path. We are the only ones who watched it, Jesse said to me, quietly, while the rest of the crew and cast huddled together in mini support groups, comforting each other and waiting for the ambulances and the Coast Guard to arrive. A man attacked a woman and she drove into the ocean trying to escape him! Jesse told the emergency dispatcher, after dialing 911 from my phone. It was one way of looking at it, but it seemed rash to write history with one person’s clearly biased interpretation. I was still bouncing all the possible scenarios around in my head, trying to decide what I thought had happened. Was Stephanie just trying to get away from all of us and she became disoriented in the struggle? Was she intending to kill herself in a blaze of glory and Vince just happened to get in the way? Or, I considered with a shudder, had she come here with the intent to take all of us with her?

  I couldn’t look. I stayed back, with Jesse. Lauren and Jen had wandered over to the edge of the property, along with a few members of the crew. Lauren had dropped to her knees with a wail when she saw the wreckage. Jen had actually shushed her. Marc was the one to go and comfort Lauren, moaning in agony himself, which, shell-shocked as I was, seemed strange. He hadn’t been particularly close to Stephanie or Vince, who I had no doubt were dead, shark food along with Stephanie’s phone, with the GoPro app that contained evidence of Brett’s affair with Vince. Do you want people to know that Brett isn’t gay? Jesse asked, privately on her lawn, and I shook my head, speechless, in shock. I knew Stephanie was unraveling, I didn’t realize she had come so perilously undone. So just say it was a tape of the two of them having an affair if it comes up, Jesse said. I looked at her sharply. A tape of Brett and Stephanie having an affair, she clarified, though I had understood. I cut Stephanie off before she could say what was on the tape. It’s not on camera. Don’t you think Brett would rather have people think she had an affair with Stephanie than with Vince? She would have been single when it happened. Technically, she did nothing wrong. No! Don’t text her! Jesse snatched my phone out of my hand. Nothing in writing. They might subpoena your phone. So I called Brett instead. Going on thirty times now and she still hasn’t picked up. She’s pissed at me. This is payback for the way I toyed with her during the Mrs. game.

  I do not know if I will be able to tell a bald-faced lie to a police officer, and I’m praying he does not specifically ask if Brett was having an affair with anyone. “Stephanie was definitely reeling from what had happened with her book,” I say vaguely, in answer to his question.

  The officer screws up his face. “Her book? She wrote a book?”

  “She’s Stephanie Simmons,” I say, but he shows no sense of recognition. “She’s a very successful author.” I sit up straighter, taking umbrage on Stephanie’s behalf. She’s dead. She was maybe trying to kill you. She maybe tried to kill Layla in Morocco!

  “She wrote a memoir about her childhood,” I continue. “Recently. It was a bestseller. People loved it. But then it came out just a few weeks ago that she lied about a lot of her life. She lost everything—her publisher, her fans, Vince.”

  “Vince left her?”

  Again, the ludicrous urge to defend Stephanie’s honor. “She left him. She kicked him out. She was serving him divorce papers, last I heard.”

  The officer writes something down. He hasn’t written anything down since he brought me in here, just relied on the recorder. “Did your sister come up in the argument at all?”

  My throat constricts. We can pull this off, Jesse had said, as the sirens neared and I started to waver. I know the police chief. I will make sure you and Brett are protected. “My sister did come up,” I say, delicately. “Vince made the comment that Brett was threatened by him. That she was jealous Stephanie had someone in her life, and that she wanted Stephanie to be alone just like her.”

  “Wasn’t your sister engaged, though?”

  “She’s engaged now. But he was talking about before, when she was—” I stop, abruptly. Wasn’t your sister engaged, though? Why is he speaking about my sister in the past tense?

  “Do you think you could check again?” I ask him. “On Brett? I’ve been trying to get through to her, but I’m wondering if maybe I just have bad service in here. I really want her to hear about this from us, not the news. Do you know if it’s made the news?” I swipe left to check my Apple-curated Top Stories for the umpteenth time but it’s exclusively headlines about Hurricane Harvey. I make a mental note to talk to Brett about doing a ride to raise money for Houston when we get home.

  The officer clears his throat with a fist at his lips. “As soon as we are finished here I will check.” His thumb twiddles his silicone wedding band. “Tell me how Stephanie and Vince ended up in Jennifer Greenberg’s vehicle.”

  I nod, cooperatively. Of course. Of course he has to ask this question. “Stephanie was sort of disgusted by the conversation and the way he was speaking about my sister. He called her fat too, which, you just don’t do that—ever—but particularly in front of a table full of women. She just wanted to get away from him. I don’t think she was thinking clearly. She got up from the table and he followed her. He put his hands on her.”

  “So it got physical?”

  I nod, emphatically, relieved I don’t have to lie about this.

  “Did anyone try to stop it?”

  “Of course we tried to stop him!” Him, not it. Why are men so obtuse when it comes to the violence they inflict against women? “We yelled at him to let her go, and we all started to get up, and so he did. Let go, that is. And when he did that, she ran for the car, and he ran after her and he, like, threw himself into the passenger seat.” I demonstrate with flying Superman arms. “Like that. Stomach down, stretched out across both seats. And Stephanie started driving. His door was still open, and I think she thought she could maybe, like, throw him out of the car. But he had his hands on the wheel.” I demonstrate again. “And they were driving right at us. It looked like they were fighting for control of the wheel.”

  “She could have braked,” the officer says.

  She could have braked. She could have not worn such a short skirt. She could have not gone up to his room. She could have not laughed at him and made him feel small. There is a blitheness to the statement, a maleness to it that sets me straight. My voice is different when I speak again. It is resolved. “She was terrified. You don’t think or act rationally when you’re in fear for your life. I think she thought he was trying to kill her.” Did she think that? Does it matter? “I think she was trying to turn the wheel away from us, to spare us.” There is such a gap between how much I want this to be true and how untrue it is that my voice catches. A memory of Layla surfaces then. Three or four. We were waiting to be seen by a Genius at the Apple store. I had booked an appointment but they were running behind, and we were going to be late for a checkup at the doctor’s and then a playdate after that. I was grumbling and huffing, griping with the other customers whose reservations hadn’t been honored either, my stress palpable. I had given my purse to Layla to occupy her—one of her favorite pastimes was sorting through its contents—and from her perch on the floor, my wallet and keys and loose change and lip gloss and sunglasses and dry-cleaning tickets scattered around her, she said something so quietly I had to ask her to repeat it.

  “Layla, speak up,” I’d snapped.

  “I’m happy,” she said, only a little bit louder. The girl next to me, older than me but still young, gasped and squeezed her boyfriend’s hand.

  “It’s the little things in life,” he laughed.

  Would the little things in life ever bring Layla joy
again had Stephanie not turned the wheel?

  The door opens and another officer asks for a word. My guy stands, his chair rolling back. “Can I get you anything? More water?”

  “Please,” I manage, remembering how small Layla’s voice was that day. I’m happy. “And you’re going to ask if anyone’s heard from my sister?”

  “Hang tight,” he says, closing the door.

  While I wait, I check to see if Brett has responded to my anthology of abusive texts. Nothing in writing, Jesse had said, but when phone call after phone call went unanswered I resorted to a verbal thrashing. Even if they do subpoena my phone, there is nothing implicative in a sisterly spat. You are a stubborn fucking brat, I have texted. I know you are mad at me but SOMETHING MAJOR HAPPENED and you need to swallow your pride and call me the fuck back. To continue to punish me with silence, because I merely hinted at the real reason she shouldn’t marry Arch? Grow the fuck up. I text her that now. Grow the fuck up. Until you do, I don’t want Layla anywhere near you. My anger is only displaced fear. I’m restless to speak to Brett, to tell her what really happened, to ask her if it is a dangerous and stupid idea to lie about it. To ask her if she is even willing to lie about it. What if I say that it was Brett and Stephanie on that tape, but she tells the truth? Can they arrest me for that? I think they can. Could I lose custody of Layla if I am arrested?

  I drop my head into my hands with a low groan. How do I explain what happened to a twelve-year-old? Layla is on her way up here now (Out here, comes Brett’s voice). Our local police department in New Jersey is giving her a ride, and the officers have confiscated her phone to be sure she hears what happened from me, and not from Facebook.

  The door opens. The officer is back with Jesse, of all people, and a bottle of water. The plastic is foggy from the refrigerator, still sporting a price tag, which tells me the bottle did not come from a bulk pack. An officer bought this bottle, for himself (Because only men can be police officers, comes Brett’s voice again), and he put it in the fridge to drink later, and now it’s being given to me. I need it more than he does. To have a train of thought like this, I must suspect what is going on.