Privilege

by Mary Adkins

  Warmly,

  Les Bertrand

  Ann Arbor, she thought, was on the way to Portland.

  33

  Stayja

  DECEMBER AND JANUARY

  “The period of shock we all go through is grace,” Stayja had read the one and only time she googled “how to recover after someone dies.”

  For her there was no period of shock—life did not grant her that grace. She knew instantly what had happened. She watched it. She could not undo it. She could not fix it. And it was much, much worse than any feeling, experience, or tragedy she’d ever imagined.

  You have your list of things that can happen. Her mom could die. Her aunt. Nicole might do something stupid and wind up in prison. But she never expected to be holding her cousin in her arms as she died, and she never expected that experiencing such a thing would turn life on its head, yanking her out of one universe and into another. This new one didn’t contain Nicole, but it didn’t contain Stayja either. She might as well be named Jane or Claudia, or, shit, just let people spell it the way they’ve always wanted to: Stasia.

  The stages of grief Stayja encountered were not the kind she’d studied in her Psych class. In the place of denial and anger and bargaining, her grief was physical and paradoxical and impulsive. She developed a flaky red rash on her arms and calves. She lost weight, but her face looked so bloated that Donna kept insisting she must be having an allergic reaction. She became overtaken by an urge to dye her hair pink and spent three hours one night searching the Internet for the best at-home hair dyes.

  The only perk of not being the person she was before was that the things she’d cared about before no longer mattered to her.

  Maybe that was her grace.

  THE FUNERAL WAS dumb. The minister hadn’t known Nicole but acted like he did, using words to describe her that didn’t come close to the truth. As if anyone who’d known Nicole at all thought she was a “sweet soul.”

  Chet showed up, destroyed. He couldn’t stop telling Stayja how much he had loved her cousin, how she had been everything to him that a woman could be.

  “I don’t know how I’ll go on without her,” he said tearfully, so full of heart that Stayja wasn’t even tempted to mention his wife.

  Adrienne hosted a gathering at her house after the funeral, which Chet attended, whimpering the entire time. LA showed up and thanked Chet for sharing his HBO GO password, which caused Chet to snap out of his mourning just long enough to appear nervous. Then he and LA began discussing possible lawsuits that Nicole’s family could bring against the Brands.

  “Can you guys not talk about that right this second?” Stayja asked after overhearing “wrongful death” and “damages.” Chet resumed crying and reminding them how much he’d loved her, and LA told her he’d gotten a job as a manager at Home Depot.

  Tyler was being charged with involuntary manslaughter, and his parents had hired some lawyer from DC with a specialty in white-collar defense. The lawyer must have been good, because according to the local paper, Tyler had been released on bail, was finishing up school, and would be graduating with his class. Walking across the goddamn stage and everything.

  Meanwhile, Nicole was dead.

  A week passed, then another. Stayja hadn’t bothered going back to work, and Donna hadn’t bothered her about it. Frank hadn’t explicitly said she was fired, but she didn’t care either way.

  It was so devastatingly quiet without Nicole around.

  One day in early January, Stayja received a letter from Gibson College informing her that she’d succeeded through the first round of the application cycle and had been invited to interview for the premed track. She was to submit references immediately.

  Thank you for applying, and congratulations on making it this far. Following this stage, approximately 80 percent of our interviewees are offered placement in the class.

  Even after all that had happened, her first thought was that Tyler had applied for her. It was only after she’d called and requested a copy of her application and recognized the handwriting on the pdf that was emailed back to her that she realized it had been Nicole. Nicole’s last gesture of love toward Stayja, and Stayja hadn’t even considered it possible that she could have done such a thing.

  That evening at dusk, wearing her jacket and scarf and wrapped in a knit throw blanket, Stayja carried a kitchen chair into the yard, eager to get out of the house. In the side yard between their houses, the one she and Nicole had cleared of weed, she sat, looking up. She watched a bright fluff of cloud change from white to yellow to silver to orange to pink, then suddenly go gray and opaque. Dead. The sun hadn’t set yet, but it was no longer shining on the cloud, and without it the cloud just looked like a regular rain cloud. The sun’s reflection had been the only reason it had looked anything close to brilliant.

  That’s it, she thought. I am that cloud. And Nicole was the sun.

  Dear Nicole,

  Remember the time when I was ten and you were eight, and we walked out on that frozen lake by Grandma’s? More like a pond than a lake. We were by ourselves, and you kept going farther and farther out. I ran back and kept calling you to stop, come back. You kept looking back at me and just laughing. Fucking laughing and laughing. Cracking up at how scared I was. You were having the best time, and I was terrified you were going to crack the ice and fall in.

  Sometimes I feel like our whole lives have been a version of that day.

  What I never told you, and maybe never really admitted to myself, was that I didn’t know how to be like that. I didn’t understand how you did it. How you acted so free when we had so much stacked against us.

  Do you remember what you said after your settlement money got snatched up by the state? After that stupid snafu with your mom’s account? You made a joke. You said, “Well, I can probably find someone else to grab my ass and then fire me.”

  It was twenty thousand dollars, Nicole.

  I think I yelled at you or rolled my eyes. I’m not sure I yelled, but I’m positive I rolled my eyes. I’m also sure I made a show of acting annoyed by your flippant attitude, making sure you knew that I knew the burden of it would fall on me somehow.

  But you know what I’ve realized? You never once asked me for help. You accepted it. But you never asked for it—that was all me.

  When you told me you were paying my tax bill, I didn’t know what to do. That wasn’t how we worked.

  Now I look back and see that it was probably, I don’t know, sort of threatening maybe. If you were going to start taking care of shit, not only your own shit but mine too, and you were the free spirit, where the fuck did that leave me?

  I acted embarrassed of you. I’m sorry. I wanted to be more than poor and was scared I wasn’t.

  You already knew you were.

  Stayja

  JUST BEFORE NOON on a Saturday in mid-January, Stayja and Donna lay on the couch and in the recliner, respectively, watching Frasier when there was a knock at the door. Was it already time for a gas meter reading? Annoyed, Stayja shuffled over in the same gray sweatpants and T-shirt she’d worn for three days. Her socks—Nicole’s old ones—were dirty and too big but kept her feet warm. They’d been keeping the heat off at night to save money.

  The woman at the door was rich. That was all that really registered when Stayja opened it and saw her there—that she was not the kind of person who showed up in the neighborhood.

  “Stayja?” the woman said, pronouncing her name correctly. “May I come in?”

  “Who are you?” Stayja asked.

  “Kitty Brand,” she said. So this was Tyler’s mother. “I was hoping to speak with you and your mother.”

  Stayja expected to feel rage, but she still hadn’t actually felt anything since Nicole’s memorial service, and she found that this remained the case.

  “Come in,” she said.

  Mrs. Brand followed Stayja inside.

  “Mom, this is Tyler’s mom,” Stayja said. “She wants to talk to us about something.” It occu
rred to Stayja that her old self would have been self-conscious of the stained tan carpet and wood paneling of their house, its low ceilings, and the kitschy objects Donna kept on every surface: ceramic angels and glass gnomes and dusty unlit candles. But now she couldn’t bring herself to care.

  Donna slowly reached for the remote and turned off the television. Stayja sat back down on the sofa. Mrs. Brand remained standing.

  “Your sister preferred not to speak with me. She sent me here to talk to you all instead. I want you to know that we feel absolutely terrible about what happened, and we want to make it better for you however we can.”

  Donna grunted.

  “I know we can’t compensate you for your niece’s death, but if there is a way to ease some of the burden, we are happy to. We don’t feel that it’s necessary to involve the courts, because we aren’t going to fight you on this. We’re good people. And we have the means to help you. So why wouldn’t we?”

  She seemed to ask this as if she wanted one of them to respond. They didn’t. She focused her attention on Stayja.

  “For example, Tyler tells me that you are in nursing school. Perhaps we could defray some of the costs.”

  A light rapping sound drew Stayja’s attention. On the windowsill, a squirrel tapped at an acorn. She watched it.

  Stayja had questions. If this woman went around cleaning up Tyler’s messes, why hadn’t she done something sooner? Here she was trying to make things better, but Nicole was already dead.

  “You’re a poet?” Stayja said.

  Mrs. Brand looked surprised.

  “I know a lot about your family,” Stayja said.

  “I see. Well, you have to understand, Tyler isn’t always truthful. He gets by on his charm, really. I’m constantly surprised by what he can talk his way out of. He has a knack for bending facts to get what he wants.”

  “No fucking way,” Stayja said sarcastically.

  “Not to make excuses, but he’s been this way since Max, his dog, died. Max was his lab until he was eleven. Liver cancer. We had no choice but to put him down. Tyler was furious we didn’t try chemo. Things changed after that. Truth became a fuzzy thing with him.”

  Was she suggesting that Tyler’s losing his dog explained why he raped people? Why he drove drunk? Why he killed Nicole?

  Donna cleared her throat, a signal to Stayja to get back to the offer: Take the money.

  “So you’re not a poet then,” Stayja said.

  “Oh, I am. I didn’t mean he lied about that.”

  “I tried to find your poems,” Stayja said. “I couldn’t.”

  “I write under my maiden name. And my first and middle initials—P. K. Fox.” Reading Stayja’s stunned expression as confusion, she explained, “Kitty is short for Kathryn, my middle name.”

  Stayja stared, her arms tingling. What kind of awful coincidence, what cosmic joke—she tried to swallow and couldn’t.

  She studied the woman. Her white-blonde hair was wild and curly, like her son’s, but tamed with product. Her face, smooth for a woman her age, contained other just noticeable traces of plastic surgery—a slight lift at her lips’ corners and eyes, an upturned quality to the whole thing. She wore a tailored, fuchsia A-line dress with a thin gold belt. This was not how Stayja had pictured P. K. Fox.

  She certainly hadn’t pictured her being related to Tyler.

  The Brands had ruined her life and also changed her. The Brands were terrible and also the reason she was going to be a doctor. The reason she wanted to stare down the brightest light she could find on earth and not look away.

  “Listen, again, I am absolutely not trying to make excuses for my son. But he has had a very difficult fall. I don’t know if you know this, but he was falsely accused of sexual assault, and it almost destroyed him. . . . He’s not his best self right now. It’s just terrible that his poor decision making had to lead to something this tragic.”

  Falsely accused. As Mrs. Brand spoke, it suddenly struck Stayja that if she’d struggled to reconcile Tyler’s behavior with who she wanted him to be, what must it be like to be his mom?

  She almost pitied her.

  “So, we can pay for nursing school?” Mrs. Brand said, reaching into her purse and pulling out a checkbook. “I can write you a check.”

  What would Nicole do?

  “I’m not going to nursing school,” Stayja said. Her gaze had drifted to Mrs. Brand’s shoes. They were the shade of milky coffee made of what looked like alligator skin, shiny cells of leather.

  “You shouldn’t make that kind of decision right now, teacup,” Donna said to Stayja, her voice taking on a worried urgency.

  Stayja, making eye contact with Mrs. Brand, ignored her mother.

  “You can pay for medical school.”

  Epilogue: Annie

  Each Other’s Backs became my thing, the project of my college days. Outside of class and orchestra, it was what I spent my time thinking about. I worked with students at other schools to start chapters on their campuses. An Art major named Emma and I came up with a T-shirt design, and within a few years it was worn by thousands of students across the country annually on September 9. My last year at Carter, we incorporated and became a nonprofit. We spread to high schools. I was proud. Through this community, I made friends, found a purpose, and eventually my version of peace.

  And yet.

  As I look back on my time at Carter—in particular, that fall—I find the phrasing of how it changed me elusive: “Nothing happened to Tyler Brand, but I found my version of peace,” Or “I found my version of peace, but nothing happened to Tyler Brand”—with the “but” as ellipsis, as coda.

  . . . but I never saw the world in the same way again.

  . . . but I still don’t understand how injustice is accepted and shrugged off.

  . . . but will I ever be free of rage?

  The summer after we started dating, Henry and I broke up. We stayed friends, of course. He’s Henry. Two years later, after graduating, Matty and I moved to New York, where we shared an apartment in Brooklyn. He got a fact-checking job at the Daily News, and I worked in communications at a nonprofit focused on childhood hunger. We afforded our rent by tutoring English on the side, both of us. I learned to squeeze breakfast and lunch out of a single three-dollar bagel. At night we shared seven-dollar bottles of Malbec and binged shows on his laptop, and in the morning we took the R train to our respective stops in Manhattan.

  Three years after graduating, I heard from Bea, who was moving to the city to get her master’s in Public Health. She said we should have coffee. I wrote back saying I’d love to but never followed up when she asked me to pick the day.

  As for Tyler, I heard that he’d been paralyzed in a ski accident in Colorado but didn’t confirm it or bother trying. I also heard he was in law school in Houston. Whether that time of my life, and what took place between us, still ripples through him the way it ripples through me is a question I can’t answer.

  Because that’s the thing about these stories—where the “but” falls for the Tyler Brands of the world. Does it sneak into their thoughts, reminding them of who they are or at least of who they once were?

  One morning, a few months after we’d moved into our apartment, Matty was running late, so I left without him.

  As I swiped my card and passed through the turnstile at the station, I spotted him ahead of me on the platform. He’d beat me.

  “Where were you?” he asked. “I thought I’d catch up.”

  I explained that when we weren’t together, I took a different route—down Second Street to Fourth Avenue instead of down Third. It was longer, if only by a little, and it wasn’t until I said it that I realized why: I’d once spotted an old college face, a PiKa, on Third.

  I didn’t say that last part to Matty.

  “Why?” he asked. I shrugged as the sound of the R train rumbling into the station drowned out our conversation, preventing me from having to answer. We entered the car, which was near empty for once, and took
seats next to each other, sitting close as the train hurtled through the underground tunnels and into the mornings lying ahead of us.

  Acknowledgments

  This book sold the day I had my first baby. It was surreal and thrilling. I didn’t know how to raise a new baby or write a book while raising a new baby. Suddenly life was full of glorious unknowns.

  Reader, I will spoil the ending: I wrote the book, and the baby now walks (and sings!). I wrote it in large part by leaning on others. Thank you to my incredible editor, Emily Griffin, and my phenomenal agent, Claire Anderson-Wheeler. Thank you also to my husband, Lucas Richter, my mom, Clista Adkins; and my angels, Rachel Fischer and Rachael Fowler, for lovingly caring for Finn in 2018 while I wrote.

  I’m so grateful to my writing community and to my friends who supported this book’s genesis in one way or another: Lucas Schaefer, Chandler Phillips, Emily Stirba, Naomi Shatz, Tamara Giwa, Haley Hoffman, Rachel Abramowitz, Kate Tellers, Stephen Ruddy, Gregg Lachow, Sarah Stone, Joselin Linder, Jorge Novoa, Nicole Solomon, Alex DiFrancesco, Jess Mannion, Joanne Solomon, TJ Wells, Gabra Zackman, Katie Beth Ongena, Jack Thomas, Tony Brown, Melissa Feldman, Simone Policano, Christian Probst, Carly Stern, and Niev Mooney.

  Finally, to the women of All of the Above at Duke—all the generations of you—I hope you keep owning and sharing each other’s stories for years to come.

  About the Author

  MARY ADKINS is the author of the novel When You Read This, and her work has appeared in the New York Times and the Atlantic. A native of the American South, she is a graduate of Duke University and Yale Law School, and teaches storytelling for the Moth. She lives in Nashville, Tennessee, with her family.

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  Also by Mary Adkins

  When You Read This

  Copyright

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.