The Favorite Sister

by Jessica Knoll

  “How are you?” Jesse crouches down on her heels and twists the cap off for me.

  “Oh, let me . . .” The officer starts out of the room again, presumably searching for a chair for Jesse.

  “He’s going to tell you they can’t say for sure who is responsible, but it’s obviously Vince.” Jesse is speaking at a fast, whispered clip. I don’t understand what she is saying, and I don’t really care. I’m only hoping for an answer to one question.

  “Have you gotten ahold of Brett?”

  “Babe,” Jesse says, resting her hand on my forearm, “we have really bad news about Brett.” Tears prick her eyes. “I’m so sorry.”

  “What about Brett?” I’m saying as the officer returns with a chair for Jesse.

  “She’s asking about Brett,” Jesse says, in a sort of tattling way. She’s asking, not me.

  The officer sighs, putting his weight on the back of the new chair, leaning on it like it’s a walker in a nursing home. “We wanted you to know before your daughter arrived that we’ve located your sister.”

  “Well . . . where is she?” I look from him to Jesse. “Is she here? Have you seen her?”

  Jesse is looking at me with big this is going to hurt me more than it hurts you eyes, stroking the back of my head. This is the most we’ve ever touched.

  “Ma’am,” the officer says, and I feel this word far sooner than what he says next, because I am still in shock, “there is no easy way to tell you this, but your sister is deceased.”

  My immediate thought is that it was a car accident. That Brett implored her driver to go faster, to get her out of here, and he blew a red light, flipped taking a turn too fast on one of the back country roads. I don’t think to connect what happened to Stephanie and Vince with what happened to Brett.

  I am surprised that I am able to ask, “What happened?” quite normally. Jesse has taken my hand now. She’s still crouched next to me on the floor.

  “I need you to understand,” the officer says, “that we don’t have that answer ourselves, just yet. But as her next of kin, I want to provide you with all the information we have at this point in the investigation. But know that is subject to change as we gain a better understanding of what happened today.”

  I don’t really hear him, but I nod. My head feels heavy on my neck. How did I never notice how heavy my head was before?

  “Your sister was in the car that Stephanie was driving. When they went over the edge, her body was expelled onto the roof.”

  Lauren’s wail. Marc’s moan. They saw my sister. I wish I could be sick. I wish I could purge this feeling, flush it down the toilet, but already I know, this is not a feeling. This is a growth. Inoperable, benign but painfully pressing on a vital organ. It will be with me, hurting me and not killing me, all my life.

  Still, I am trying to understand how my sister got into the car. Did she sneak into the car while we were filming at the picnic table? How did we not see her? I must look very confused, because the officer asks me if I understand.

  I shake my head: No, I don’t. “How did she get into the car without any of us noticing?”

  Jesse and the officer exchange a worried look. They haven’t told me the worst of it yet, I realize.

  “I’m sorry,” the officer says, “I should have phrased that more clearly. Your sister wasn’t in the car. She was in the trunk.”

  “The trunk?” I’m at a loss. “When did she get in the trunk?”

  “Sometime between when she came home from Talkhouse with Stephanie and when you woke up in the morning.”

  “Why didn’t we hear her? Wouldn’t she have been kicking and screaming?” As I ask the question, I work it out for myself. “Oh,” I say, my voice low, the sharp threat of vomit high in my throat. “Oh. She was . . . she was not alive? In the trunk?”

  The officer shakes his head, wincing on my behalf. “We believe she was deceased before she was placed in the trunk, yes, but that is one of the things we have yet to conclusively determine.”

  “You’re saying she was murdered. Is that what you’re saying?” My mouth is sticky and dry. I must look like I’m having difficulty swallowing, because Jesse brings the water bottle to my lips.

  “Drink,” she commands, lifting the bottle. Water leaks from the corners of my mouth, splashing my bare thighs. I rubbed my legs with bronzing lotion this morning, and the real color of my skin is exposed in jagged rivulets. I rode in a car listening to the new Taylor Swift song while my sister’s dead body was in the trunk. Like patting my head and rubbing my stomach, it is a cognitive challenge to have this thought and swallow water at the same time.

  “How did this happen?” In the library with the candlestick my mind answers with a giggle that tells me I am not well.

  “We’ll know more when the autopsy report is in, but your sister sustained a sizable wound to the back of her head. It’s possible she slipped and fell, but if it were an accident, there wouldn’t have been a need to conceal the body. And also. Because your sister was not, um. Well. It would have taken some strength to move her. A woman couldn’t have done that on her own.”

  Because your sister was not thin, is what he was almost about to say.

  “Vince did it,” Jesse says, and the officer shoots her a reproachful look. “I don’t know why she can’t know that is what everyone is thinking. He found out about Brett’s affair with Stephanie and he fucking lost it.”

  I am standing. Why am I standing? I have my hand on the wall. I am doubled over, as if I am in labor, again. Maybe I am, a little bit. This is a realization so awful it must be born.

  Someone killed my sister and that someone may or may not have been Vince, but we are going to say that Vince did it. We are going to say that he did it just like we are going to say that Brett and Stephanie had an affair when they didn’t. We are going to rig reality.

  Jesse and the officer are telling me to sit down. I try but I immediately get back up. To sit on the truth. That’s something people say, and I understand it now. There is a strain of the truth that is a cement-backed chair, a pea in your mattress, and a pebble in your shoe. Bearable, but just barely.

  So I pace until Layla arrives. By that time Jesse has worked out what we should tell her.

  CHAPTER 22

  * * *

  Kelly

  I remember almost nothing of her funeral, except the parts of Yvette’s eulogy already trending on Twitter.

  And Arch.

  Arch came with her mother, but not her father. I felt dirty about that. Like he refused to pay his respects because he knew something in the water wasn’t clean.

  We all rode together in the limo after the burial—my father; his wife, Susan; Layla; Arch; and Arch’s mother. At the curb, right outside of Patsy’s Pizzeria on Sixtieth, Brett’s favorite pizza in the city and now the site of her wake, Arch asks me to hang back a moment.

  “I’ve got her,” my father says, his hand in the middle of Layla’s upper back. Layla seems sleepy, cried out, numb. She has barely let me out of her sight since Brett died, and truthfully, I’m afraid to stray too far from her. Layla is a welcome distraction. So long as she is around, I can focus on comforting her. I can suspend everything I am afraid to feel.

  “We won’t stay long,” I promise her as my father and Susan escort her onto the curb. My father shuts the door. My father. I don’t think he believes my story any more than I do, but I also know he will never challenge it for Layla’s sake. Layla may be devastated, but she is proud to be Brett Courtney’s niece—the Brett Courtney the public thought they knew.

  “The rain held off,” Arch remarks to the gloomy window.

  I nod, feeling like a spring-loaded trap moments from triggering. I have avoided being alone with Arch as much as possible this week. It was one thing to lie to her by omission when Brett was alive, quite another to insist that Brett and Stephanie had an affair ten months ago and that Vince found out about it and killed them both, which is the East Hampton Town Police Department’s working
theory. I have my own working theory, but it’s nothing I can advance.

  “Not that it would have mattered. Right?” Arch turns to me with a limp laugh, bunching a wet tissue beneath her chapped nose. She means because most of the women who attended the funeral wore sneakers, in Brett’s honor. They wouldn’t have had to worry about their heels sticking in the mud at the cemetery.

  “It would have been okay either—”

  “Was she still seeing her?” Arch demands. She cuts me off as soon as I open my mouth to respond, “Tell me the truth, Kel. Please. Please don’t lie to me. Don’t let me be the dumb girlfriend who didn’t know.”

  Oh, the cut of that. I don’t speak quickly enough to be believed. I can’t speak quickly enough to be believed. I feel gagged by my grief. “She wasn’t seeing her. She loved you, Arch.”

  Arch shakes her head disgustedly, skinning her nostrils with that wet, dirty tissue. I reach into my purse, trying to find her a fresh one so that she doesn’t give herself an infection.

  “She didn’t love me,” Arch says. “I didn’t want to admit it, because I loved her. But I could tell. She was never all there. I’m not crazy. I won’t let you make me feel crazy. I know something was going on.”

  I abandon the hunt for clean tissues and cover my chest with my hand. My heart feels old. It feels weak from hurting so many people. “Arch,” I gasp. “Please. I need you to believe she loved you. I love you and so does Layla. We will always be family.”

  “Is it true?” she says to me, sounding stronger, like her anger has taken the lead now. Grief is just a partner dance between sorrow and fury. “Is it true you’re going to let them show what happened? That you’re getting your own show with Layla?”

  I recommit myself to the clean tissue hunt so that I do not have to face her rightful disapproval. “The cameras were turned off when it happened. It doesn’t really show anything.”

  “But you and Layla? You’re doing your own show?”

  “It’s all focused on SPOKE. It will help so many Imazighen women and children, Arch.”

  Arch starts to cry again. No. Wait. Is she . . . ? She is. She’s laughing. A bitter, silent, wet, and red-faced laugh. “You do it all for those women and children, don’t you, Kel?” she says once she catches her breath. Then she climbs out of the car and closes the door so gently it doesn’t even click. I don’t imagine I’ll hear from her again.

  CHAPTER 23

  * * *

  Kelly: The Interview Present day

  I have been reinstated at SPOKE, promoted to vice president. The board immediately revoked the decision to remove me after Brett died. It would have been too much upheaval for the company to survive, and in the aftermath of Brett’s death, women flocked to SPOKE and FLOW, specifically asking for me. For Layla. The demand has been so great that we are going nationwide in 2018, opening studios in Miami, DC, and L.A. Rihanna’s number is in my phone. The Oscar-Nominated Female Director sent me flowers. I wonder if this is how Donatella Versace felt.

  Lisa steps into the shot, conferring with Jesse for a moment, their heads tilted together. Layla and I both watch on the monitor from Jesse’s guest bedroom. For “confessional” type interviews, only the DP, the EP, an audio mixer, and the talent are in the room. Everyone else is sequestered away, to minimize distraction and ambient sound.

  Layla has stuffed her feet into Brett’s furry Gucci slides, which are a size too small for her, but she insisted on wearing something of Brett’s for her interview. “Layls,” I whisper. There isn’t much privacy in Jesse’s cramped, expensive apartment, especially not with eight members of the crew milling about, plus hair and makeup and Jesse’s two personal assistants. “Just checking in that you still want to do this. You’re allowed to change your mind at any time. Even in the middle of the interview, if that’s when you decide you don’t want to do this.”

  “I know, Mom,” Layla groans. She is furious with me that Brett is dead. Only temporary, the grief counselor has assured me.

  Even though we are filming my interview with Jesse and Layla’s interview with Jesse on the same day, they will air months apart. My interview will run after the season premiere of the show—soon, in three weeks—and Layla’s after the finale in a few months. It can’t look like we packed it into the same day, so Jesse has changed into a cashmere hoodie and has moved from her living room, where we conducted our more formal sit-down, to her kitchen, to cook and have a “casual” conversation with Layla about what she’s been up to since the unthinkable happened.

  “Little Big C,” Jesse says into the monitor, her nickname for Layla. She’s the littlest Courtney, as in the youngest, but she’s also the tallest. You’re not a real member of her tribe until you have your nickname. I realize with a greedy thump of my heart that I don’t have one and probably never will. “We’re ready for you.”

  “Just stop,” Layla mutters to me as she hops off the bed, heading for the kitchen, even though I haven’t said anything. Layla turned thirteen three weeks ago. Is it crazy that I’m already counting down the days until the next barbaric year of her teens? Her disposition is too wizened for that of a three-week-old teenager, but at least I can officially blame her precociousness on her teenageness. I’m wary of viewer criticism that I’m forcing her to grow up too fast. Or is it that I am forcing her to grow up too fast? I can’t tell anymore.

  I watch Layla join Jesse on the monitor. Lisa and a PA lay out the tools and ingredients needed to make chebakia: the food processor and the already toasted sesame seeds and the orange water and the baking sheets. Finally, at the marble island set, everyone takes their places and Lisa cues them to start the scene. “Hi, Layla,” Jesse says. “It’s so good to see you.”

  Layla’s smile is embarrassed and cute. “Thank you.”

  “What are we making here today?”

  “Chebakia,” Layla says. “It’s a Moroccan cookie that’s shaped into a flower and fried and coated in honey. It was Brett’s favorite.” She stares at the ingredients on the counter, unmoving.

  “Tell me what I can start on,” Jesse prods.

  “You can crack the egg,” Layla says, and Jesse grins.

  “I think I can manage that.”

  “So this was Aunt Brett’s favorite?” Jesse asks, as she splits an egg on the stainless steel edge of a mixing bowl.

  “Brett’s favorite. I didn’t call her my aunt. She was my best friend.”

  Jesse picks up a whisk. “You two had an unbreakable bond.”

  Layla nods, adding the sesame seeds and other dry ingredients to the food processor.

  “What do you miss most about her?”

  “She bought me the best clothes and bags, even before she could afford to buy herself that stuff. Brett worked really hard to be successful but it wasn’t for her, it was so she could help other people.”

  “She was truly one of a kind,” Jesse says, graciously. “I know it must be difficult to talk about her, but it means a lot that you are willing to share your memories of your aunt with her fans.” Jesse blankets her heart, as if to say count me among them. But if Jesse is a fan of anyone’s it is Layla. It’s like how single men joke about “borrowing” their married friend’s baby to pick up women, knowing women are attracted to hard men with soft babies. Likewise, Jesse is hoping the viewer takes to her, with her tattoos and collection of fierce leather jackets, baking cookies with a sad thirteen-year-old.

  Layla’s hands are coated in flour, and she scratches an itch on her cheek by lifting her shoulder. “It’s not difficult for me to talk about her. I don’t want to ever stop talking about Brett.”

  The network sprung for Layla and I to meet with a media consultant before this interview, and she was the one who supplied that line—I don’t want to ever stop talking about Brett. It positions the interview as a cathartic exercise for Layla, rather than an exploitative one. In truth, it is both. So many things are both.

  There are two versions of what happened the day Stephanie drove Jen’s Tesla off Jess
e’s cliff. The real version and the TV version. Already, in my mind, the TV version is threatening to replace the one that happened. That’s how it goes with the show too, you say something enough times and it buries the real. It doesn’t erase it entirely, but it makes it very, very faint, like in the movies when the bad guy takes down a message on a pad of paper, and the good guy comes and shades the page with a pencil to reveal the time and location that the bomb will detonate. An impression of the truth. That’s what you’re left with.

  This is the story that has dried in the closed police file: Vince showed up at Jen’s house in the early morning hours of August 27, after seeing the video of Stephanie disparaging him on TMZ. Brett is the first person Vince encountered when he entered the house, the person who absorbed the full weight of his rage. She had been making a pizza after coming in for the night—it was found overcooked in the oven. There was a struggle; Brett ended up on the floor of the kitchen. The coroner flagged a series of bloody bald patches on the top of Brett’s head, evidence that Vince had her by the hair when he slammed her head into the ground. He scalped her, a feminist gasped on Twitter, linking to the coroner’s report. Vince’s handprints were also found on the trunk of Jen’s car. (I can see him in my mind’s eye, leaning against the Tesla’s back bumper while we debated how to get to Jesse’s house. You look like you could use some AC, he told Lauren with that signature Vince smirk.)

  The autopsy, performed nineteen hours after Brett expired, determined that her blood alcohol content was .088, which means it was even higher at the time of her death. She was at a disadvantage to defend herself, the detective told me, but that also means she probably didn’t feel much pain or realize what was going on. He was trying to make me feel better, but I cried harder that day than any day since Brett died. It was all so base. My sister made some mistakes in her life, but she did a lot of good in this world, and she would have walked across fire for Layla. And yet she died drunk, in a sloppy barroom fight over a man. It was about so much more than that, of course—about power, about survival—but the public would have reduced it to its Jerry Springer bones. Her death was beneath her, and maybe that’s why I’d prefer her TV one.