by Darcey Bell
Love,
Stephanie
18
Stephanie
What happened was nothing like that. Well, not nothing. My husband and brother drove off in a car. They were going to buy something to grill. Their car hit a tree, and they were both killed instantly. That was what happened, but not how it happened.
They didn’t just dislike each other. They hated each other. They had always hated each other.
They couldn’t have been more different. Chris was down to earth, and Davis was up in the clouds. They had such different senses of humor that sometimes Chris would say something that he meant as a joke and Davis took it as an insult—or vice versa. If they hadn’t been related—through me—they would never have spent five minutes in the same room. They had only one thing in common: me. And Miles, I guess. Devoted father. Doting uncle.
There were always fights that got nasty and mean, arguments that blew up. I don’t recall what started it that day. They often argued about the make and year and model of some vintage auto they saw. It could have been that. It hardly mattered. The two guys went from zero to sixty in ten seconds. Faster than a Maserati.
It got loud and ugly. Fast. The same old things got said. One of them accused the other of thinking he knew everything, and the other one called him a fraud. One said he was sick to death of the other’s shit, and the other said . . . I don’t know. They fought like brothers, except that they were brothers-in-law. If Cain and Abel had been related by marriage, instead of blood, things might have turned out even worse, though it’s hard to imagine what worse could have happened.
It had been like that for so long, I knew exactly how it would go. One of them would stalk out of the room, and there would be a few moments of peace. Then the other would follow him, as if something was finally going to be settled. And they’d start shouting again. Or else it was so quiet I could feel the tension all through the house. It made me want to scream.
Miles heard every word. I don’t think he understood much. But he heard the tone of it. His dad and his uncle were mad. Miles began to cry.
I blogged about how the two guys decided to get some meat to grill. But again, that’s not quite true. I was the one who suggested that they take a ride to the butcher’s. I will never forgive myself, not for the rest of my life.
I said, “Why don’t you go for a ride? Cool off. Go to the Smokehouse and get something delicious for dinner.”
The Smokehouse! That got their attention.
The Smokehouse was one of the things we loved most about living here. It’s an old-fashioned German butcher. They make their own sausage and cold cuts and have the best cuts of meat. Cheerful blond German girls wait on you and, regardless of what you order, say, “You got it!” Davis and I adored it. Even when I was trying to cut back on eating meat, I’d break down and go there and get a warm homemade-liverwurst sandwich on a kaiser roll.
Brokering an accord between my husband and my brother was like breaking up a dog fight. There was a lot of cursing and snarling, but finally both Davis and Chris were relieved (as they always were) that things hadn’t gotten physical. They’d never come to blows. But the two men I loved most in the world despised each other and didn’t care who knew. They wanted me to know it. They didn’t want me to forget.
They were glad for a chance to get out of the house, even with each other. It was a safe, easy way to end the fight, a way for them both to save face.
Davis grabbed his keys and kissed me a quick goodbye.
“Drive safely,” I said. “I love you.”
“See you,” my brother said.
They didn’t come home. They didn’t come home. They didn’t come home. Where were they? They didn’t answer my texts or calls. Had they gone out for a drink? Miles took a nap and woke up grumpy. Hungry. Where were his dad and his uncle? When was dinner?
When the police came to the door, my first thought was that my husband and brother had gone into town and started fighting again and been arrested. How would Miles and I get them out of jail?
It took forever to understand what the cop was saying.
The officer must have been used to dealing with people in shock, but still he looked at me oddly when I said, “Was there meat in the car? Did they even get to the Smokehouse?”
“Meat?”
It was at that moment that I became a vegetarian.
The cop asked if there was someone—a family member, a close friend—I could call. Officer Something-or-Other (I didn’t catch the name) could stay with me until someone arrived. He motioned toward the police car in the driveway, at a woman in a police hat in the passenger seat.
I was holding Miles, who started to cry. The officer gave him a pitying look. Poor little fella just lost his dad.
I said, “No, thanks, you can go. It’s fine. I’ll call my mother.”
Nothing was fine, and my mother had been dead for five years. I just wanted them out of there.
That it was my idea for the guys to get meat to grill would be tough for anyone to live with—and stay sane.
After the police left, I spent a long time trying to calm Miles, who was crying his head off, even though he couldn’t understand what had happened. I was so busy with him I didn’t have time to go to the bathroom. Mothers of small children learn to postpone or ignore their most basic needs.
Miles and I lay down on my bed. Miles drifted off to sleep, and I slipped off into the bathroom, keeping the door open so I could hear if he woke up.
I saw a piece of white printer paper taped with Band-Aids to the bathroom mirror. The Band-Aids were at odd angles and the whole thing looked psycho, like the way serial killers decorate their lairs on TV crime shows.
It was Davis’s handwriting, except that Davis’s handwriting was normally, like everything about him, orderly and neat. This was the way Davis might have written if he’d taken bad drugs. Hasty. Careless. Angry. Scrawled. I had to read it several times, not only because it was hard to decipher but also because I was still in shock.
The note said: I’m sick of all the lying.
On the sink was a photograph of me and Chris standing and talking in our backyard. Laughing. Davis had torn the photo down the middle, and a jagged rip separated me and my half brother.
I knew that it was a suicide note or that someone might see it that way. I burned it in the bathroom sink. I didn’t want anyone thinking that Davis had killed himself. On a practical level, we had insurance to consider. It would affect how Miles and I lived from then on. Miles didn’t need to know. Davis’s mom didn’t need to know. I didn’t want or need anyone to know.
I must have blacked out for a moment. The next thing I knew, I was sitting on the bathroom floor. I must have hit my head on the edge of the sink.
As I pressed a washcloth against my forehead to stop the bleeding, I heard Miles crying in the bedroom. When he saw me, with blood trickling down my face, he began to scream.
I thought: You’re right to cry, my darling boy. You’re right to be afraid.
Your mother is a monster.
19
Stephanie
I knew what Davis meant. I knew what he meant by “lying.”
Chris and I had been in love ever since that day he walked into my mother’s house. There was never a moment when we didn’t know we were doing something wrong, just as there was never a moment when we thought that our love affair wasn’t going to happen or when we believed it was going to end. We would swear off each other; we’d promise ourselves that we’d stop. Then Chris would call or drop by, and it would start again.
When I went to college, Chris left Madison and rented an apartment near my dorm. Because he was a carpenter, and good at it, he could pretty much find work anywhere. After I got out of class, I’d go to his place and wait for him to come home. We’d spend the late afternoon and early evening on his bed, just a mattress on the floor of his cold room, as the New England winter sun went down early and the light turned charcoal, then blue. We were so happy being together, naked s
kin against naked skin. We were each other’s drug and each other’s dealer.
People who wonder why we couldn’t stay away from each other and behave like decent human beings—why we couldn’t get over it and move on—all I can say is that they never had something like that happen to them. It lasted—on and off—for years. Things got crazy. There were a couple of months when just looking at my mom and dad’s wedding photograph would get me hot. How sick is that? Is there a twelve-step group for this? There is probably a group for survivors of everything that has happened in my life. Not that I would have gone.
Chris and I would agree: This isn’t right. This isn’t healthy. We’re hurting people, hurting ourselves. We’d end it again, for as long as we could hold out.
It was during a period when we were actually keeping our promise that I met Davis. The ultimate nice guy, as long as you didn’t cross him about a paint color or where the couch goes. How solid and sane and large-hearted he was! He cared about the planet, the future. He wanted a family, a house. He was so earnest, so sincere. He seemed to live in a bright, shiny world where people did the right things and didn’t have sex with their half brothers.
I could even imagine—almost imagine—that Davis would be forgiving if I ever told him the truth about Chris. Assuming our affair was over. But I didn’t tell Davis. And it wasn’t over.
It would have seemed suspicious for him not to meet my brother. And he knew the story—some of the story—of how Mom and I learned that Dad had another family.
I decided their first meeting should be in a public place, which is what you’re advised to do when there might be some kind of scene or conflict. I don’t know why I thought there would be. The conflict was all in my head.
We went out to dinner at an old-fashioned Italian red-sauce restaurant in Brooklyn that Davis liked because it was authentic. Unchanged since Christopher Columbus.
Chris had a girlfriend, tall and blond like all the women he dated at the time. I think her name was Chelsea. Those girls couldn’t have looked less like me. Maybe my brother was trying to show me that he’d gotten over me. But he was always so distant and cool with those girls; I was never fooled. I knew how he acted when he was turned on. When he cared. I wasn’t even slightly jealous, though he wanted me to be.
Davis was not the kind of person who would imagine someone, his wife, a woman he thought he knew and loved, having sex with her half brother. And that evening, nothing happened that would have made anyone suspicious. Chris and I had gotten good at being undetectable.
Still, he and Davis got into a stupid argument about—of all things!—Frank Lloyd Wright. Davis was going on and on about what a genius Wright was.
Chris said, “Sure, he was a genius. But a real genius would have cared if his clients’ roof leaked. And Wright told them to put a pail under the leak or move the furniture.”
I agreed with Chris on that one. I was imagining what it might be like to live in a gorgeous, leaky house. But it would have been unwise to take my brother’s side.
How easily that could have been a friendly conversation, a bonding thing. They both knew about Frank Lloyd Wright; they both had strong opinions. They knew about architecture and construction, though from different angles.
I looked around for the waiter. More wine! Where the hell was our pasta?
Finally, Chris said, “What if we agree to disagree?”
“Fabulous!” I shot a grateful look at my brother.
Later, at home, Davis said, “If he wasn’t your brother, I’d say the guy was a moron.”
“He is my brother,” I said. “So you’d better watch what you say.” We laughed, and I thought: I’ve dodged a bullet. For now.
One night, when Davis was in Texas visiting the site of a museum that his office was competing to design, Chris came over, uninvited. I swear I didn’t call him, so it was like some sixth sense, some intuition that let him know I was alone.
He walked in the door. We looked at each other. He hugged me hello. The hug turned into a kiss. And once again, it was on.
My affair with Chris stopped when Davis and I got pregnant with Miles, and Chris and I relapsed only once (and not for long) after Miles was born. I didn’t want my precious son raised by an incestuous adulterer. Me.
The only time Davis ever asked me directly about Chris was not long before he died. It was after a backyard barbecue we gave for his office staff.
I’d asked Davis if I could invite Chris so I could have someone to talk to. Our guests would mostly discuss design and office gossip, with a polite question about Miles thrown in to acknowledge that I was the one who’d made the potato salad and bought the hot dogs. And had the boss’s child. Not that any of them had any real interest in Miles—or me. It was all about Davis—the genius, the star.
Davis said, “Sure, why not? Ask Chris.”
He must have thought it was better than having me complain afterward that everyone had ignored me. It was risky having Chris there. But I hadn’t seen him for a while, and I knew that I wouldn’t be bored if I could just look at him from across the yard.
For the first hour of the party, I noticed Davis watching me. He must have seen that I was half there, half somewhere else—until Chris showed up.
I was at the food table. Chris came up behind me. When I turned around, there he was. My happiness, when I saw him, was more than brother-sister happiness. It seemed so obvious. I looked across the lawn and saw that Davis had seen it too.
That night Davis said, “Stephanie, I need to ask you something. Maybe this is going to sound weird, but . . . is there anything . . . unusual about your relationship with Chris? Maybe I’m just being paranoid, but sometimes I get the feeling that you guys are a little . . . too close. And sometimes it kind of freaks me out. Your bond is so intense, it’s almost like you’re lovers.”
I was sitting in front of the bedroom mirror, brushing my hair. I pretended I’d dropped something on the floor so I wouldn’t have to meet his eyes.
“Hey, I thought I was supposed to be the paranoid one in this marriage,” I said. “Because that’s ridiculous. We’re just close. Maybe because we’re siblings who missed out on our childhood together, we’re making up for lost time.”
Davis knew that I was lying. He knew in that way that people know and don’t know things that they don’t want to know about the person they love. But he knew just the same.
We had some dinner plates—off-white with bands of jade—that Davis was very fond of. He had laboriously selected them, one by one, from a bin of vintage crockery at a store on lower Broadway.
That night, when I refused to admit that my relationship with Chris was anything more than ordinary family affection, Davis went into the kitchen. I heard a crash, then another. I ran into the kitchen to find that he’d thrown several plates against the wall.
“What was that for?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” he said. “Maybe I’m just making up for lost time.”
That was unlike him. It was more in character for him to do what he did then: He apologized and vacuumed up the broken pottery shards.
I thought that my having Miles, that Davis and I having Miles, would change things. I thought it would make Chris and me come to our senses. But it had only driven us further underground, where the air was closer and steamier and hotter.
On the day that the two of them died, the summer heat was suffocating. I was in the backyard by the pool, with Miles splashing in the baby pool beside me, and Davis was farther down toward the deep end, under an umbrella. He was fair skinned and sunburned easily, unlike my brother and me.
Late in the afternoon I heard the sound of Chris’s truck pulling up in front of the house. I stared at Miles so I wouldn’t be looking for Chris as I heard him come up the walk. I couldn’t look at Davis. He would have seen everything on my face.
There was nothing to do but exchange a hasty hug and kiss. Davis was watching us.
He knew. And I knew that he knew.
I
closed my eyes so my husband couldn’t see the desire in them. I went to get Chris a beer. Then the three of us sat around and watched Miles, who was taking his plastic monkey for a ride in an orange plastic boat.
On the day they died, after the argument, when the two men got in the car, I remember wondering, Where do we go from here? The truck coming straight at them and the tree they struck answered my question for me.
Davis was buried in New Hampshire, in the country cemetery near the house where his mother’s family has lived forever. I left Miles with his grandma’s housekeeper so he wouldn’t have to see his father’s shroud lowered into the ground. Unbeknownst to me, Davis had left a will requesting a green burial and leaving everything (including the future income from his design products) to me.
There were lots of people at the service. His whole office staff had come up from Manhattan, as had some of the clients who lived in the houses he’d built and renovated: strangers who had worked with him and grown fond of him. Plus he had a huge family all over New England, aunts and uncles and cousins I’d never met, a whole clan assembled to say goodbye, and (some of them) to meet me for the first and last time.
At the reception at Davis’s mom’s house, there were cold cuts and a wheel of hard cheese that no one could hack into. Crackers and carrot sticks. Coffee. Tea. That was it. I thought: Are there people in the world who don’t know that people really need a drink on a day like this? It explained a lot about Davis, but it was too late for me to be helped by—or to care about—a new take on how my husband’s upbringing had formed him.
The next day I left Miles with his grandmother and flew to Madison for Chris’s funeral. I was the next of kin. There was no one to help me make any of the decisions that had to be made, but I was so numb that I got through it on automatic. I assumed that Chris (who didn’t have a will) would have wanted to be buried next to his mom. It took a little sleuthing to track down her grave, but I was grateful for the distraction.