Every night she actually managed to fall asleep, Kate would dream she was falling—from the roof of Grace Hall, her office window, the top of the stairs—jolting awake just before she smacked into pavement. And every morning when she awoke she’d be compelled to the top floor of her brownstone, where she’d open a window and lean out, hands pressed against the frame, staring down. Not that forcing herself to see what Amelia had in those last seconds of her life would ever be punishment enough. Nothing would ever be punishment enough.
Because it was Kate’s fault, of course, that Amelia was dead. That she had killed herself. It was a mother’s job to protect her child, even from herself. And Kate had failed, utterly and completely and awfully.
Kate thought often about killing herself, too. About how to do it—her many tranquilizers; where—in her bed; and when—immediately. Thinking she needed to pay for her catastrophic failings by living with her guilt was the only real reason she hadn’t gone through with it. Kate went back to work when she could no longer bear sitting there, waiting to slowly decompose.
And so there Kate stood in one of the many reception areas of the illustrious Slone, Thayer—four weeks, two days, and sixteen hours since Amelia had leaped off the roof of Grace Hall—wondering how she could have ever cared what went on there. Because she didn’t. Not anymore. Not in the least. She didn’t care about anything.
An arriving elevator chimed behind Kate, and she lurched forward down the hallway toward her office before anyone could emerge from behind the doors. She picked up the pace around the corner as a light in an office down the hall went on. She should have known there would be someone already there, no matter how early she arrived. At a place like Slone, Thayer, there always was.
“Hey!” Someone shouted just as she was about to open her door. Kate startled and dropped her keys. Daniel Moore, of all people. Kate knew it was him without looking up. He was the last person she felt like seeing at that moment. Rushing over, he grabbed her keys from the floor before she could bend to pick them up. “I didn’t mean to scare you. I was just . . . I’m surprised to see you. I thought you were going to work from home for a while.”
He sounded disappointed, but he was trying to hide it. Kate wasn’t surprised. For Daniel, one less junior partner was one less person to compete with. Not that their relationship was as simple as being fellow partners. Ever since the two had met their first week of Columbia Law School, they’d swung between distant respect, outright hostility, and something else—something substantially more humiliating—that Kate had worked hard for a long time to forget. Surprisingly, perhaps, she’d often succeeded. Right now, though, that ugly ancient history loomed over her.
“Being alone in my house day after day . . . I needed to go somewhere,” Kate said, meeting eyes with Daniel for the first time as he handed her keys back to her. He had on a tie, loosened at the neck, and a rumpled shirt. He was unshaven, and his eyes were bloodshot, as if he’d been up all night. But on Daniel, the effect was flattering. His perfectly shorn blond hair and meticulously preppy clothes had, for Kate, always been some of the least attractive things about him. But not the least. The least attractive thing about Daniel was his utter lack of compassion. “You look like you’ve been here all night.”
Daniel looked down at his clothes and smiled sheepishly. “This Associated thing has kind of exploded.”
His voice was trying to make that sound as if it was a bad thing, but the glint in his eye said differently. Kate’s and Daniel’s careers at Slone, Thayer had been in lockstep ever since they’d both joined the firm as summer associates. A decade and a half later, they were both well-respected litigation partners. But only Kate was one of Jeremy’s disciples, an inequity that seemed to drive Daniel to quiet, but utter, distraction. Handling Associated in her absence had been a huge opportunity for him.
Kate could tell that Daniel was desperate for her to inquire further about Associated. But she didn’t care if the big news was that the SEC had come down and subjected Victor Starke to a cavity search. Jeremy had gone to great lengths to assure her that she didn’t have to worry about Victor or Associated Mutual Bank while she was on leave, and she hadn’t. Now that she was back, she couldn’t have forced herself to care about it if she’d tried.
“Exploded.” Kate heard herself say. It was more statement than question. Still, she hated giving Daniel the satisfaction of even her perceived curiosity.
“Not in a bad way,” Daniel said eagerly. “Turns out we got the subpoena quashed after all. SEC appealed, of course.” He shrugged as if it was all in a day’s work. “Arguments are later today. I was up half the night briefing Jeremy by phone. You know him, smart enough to pull his all-nighter from home so he won’t look like crap when he gets here. Speaking of which, I should probably go shower. Jeremy said I could argue part of the brief. Don’t want to give him any reason to leave me at the courthouse door.”
“Right.” Kate tried to smile but couldn’t really. She wanted to get away from Daniel, now. “Don’t let me hold you up. I should probably be getting inside anyway. I’m not exactly fit for public consumption.”
“Okay,” Daniel said, narrowing his eyes slightly, as if he was contemplating saying something more but then decided not to. “It’s good to see you, Kate. I’m glad you’ve made it back. We . . . the firm missed you. Let me know if there’s anything I can do.”
Daniel was trying his best to be nice, Kate could see that. And he meant well—or at least didn’t mean terribly—even if there was nothing on earth he, of all people, could possibly do for her.
“I appreciate that, Daniel,” she said. “Now you should go. Good luck.”
“Thanks,” Daniel said, blowing some air out of his puffed-up cheeks. “I think I might need it.”
Kate closed her office door and leaned back against it for a minute before pushing herself forward and dumping her things on her desk. She made a point of not looking out her wide window at the jumbled cityscape below. Kate’s office was on the twenty-eighth floor, near the corner, so that if she leaned into her window and looked down, she could see both Forty-third Street and Seventh Avenue. But looking down from that height, imagining—as she surely would—the sensation Amelia must have felt as she was falling, would only bring the nausea right back.
Her computer hadn’t even fully started up when her office phone rang. UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO, the caller ID read, followed by the main campus number. Theoretically, it could be either of her parents. With many years of illustrious work in their respective fields, Gretchen Deal and Robert Baron were both professors, her mother at the medical school and her father at the business school. But Robert—the more distant but comparatively warmer of the two—never called Kate. He’d e-mail occasionally, and they had nice talks when they saw each other once a year at Christmas, but for Robert the telephone was far too intimate and much too deliberate.
Kate stared at her phone, debating whether to let the call go to voice mail. But Gretchen was relentless. If she had something she wanted Kate to hear, she would hunt her daughter down and make her listen to every last keen, insightful word. Finally, Kate took a deep breath and picked up the phone.
“Kate Baron,” she said quietly, pretending she didn’t know who was on the other end, as if that could magically make it be someone different.
“You’re there!” her mother called out cheerfully. “I was hoping you’d make it.”
Gretchen had been the biggest advocate of Kate’s returning to work as soon as possible. Immediately, preferably. Gretchen made clear this was only because she felt it was in Kate’s best interest to get out of the house, to be distracted. But Kate knew her mother better than that. In reality, Gretchen was probably more worried about Kate’s missing out on important advancement opportunities at work.
“Yes, here I am.” Kate exhaled. “I made it.”
“Really, I think that’s for the best, Katherine,” Gretchen said in her usual rapid-fire staccato, the one that always made Kate feel as
if a timer was about to go off. “I’m sure they’ve missed having you there. Jeremy especially. He depends on you more than you think.”
“He works with two dozen junior partners. He depends on all of us,” Kate said flatly. She was annoyed that this was why her mother was calling her. And even more annoyed that she was annoyed. By now, Kate should have been used to her work being her mother’s focus. Gretchen had called every couple of days since Amelia’s death, and in each conversation she’d been far more concerned about the state of Kate’s career than her grief. “I’m sure he survived just fine without me.”
“I wouldn’t be so sure,” Gretchen said, her voice lifting into an I-told-you-so singsong. “In any case, I think it’s good progress. Forward momentum. A look on the bright side.”
Kate felt her stomach tighten. “Bright side?”
“Yes, Katherine, to this whole, terrible mess.”
“Mess?” As though Amelia’s memory were a thing that could be swept up and discarded into a trash can.
“You’ll get angry at me for saying this, but someone needs to.”
Gretchen could always render herself simultaneously the hero and martyr, even in situations that had nothing to do with her.
“Needs to say what?” Kate heard herself ask, even though she did not want to know.
“Amelia is gone, Katherine, and that is a horrific tragedy,” Gretchen said briskly. “But it’s also a fact of life. A life which, last I checked, you were still here living. Personally, I think it would be easier for you to move on if you took advantage of some of your newfound freedom.”
“Freedom?” The word came out sounding gummy.
“Come now, dear, don’t be deliberately obtuse,” Gretchen said. “I was a working mother, too, remember? I know the stress of being forever torn between work and home. Freedom from that, that’s what I mean. Who knows, maybe you’ll even have time to meet someone now. Stranger things have happened. You could start all over again. And Amelia would want that for you. She would want you to be happy.”
Kate’s heart was pounding in her ears. She could have imagined that in some small, dark corner of her mother’s heart, she would see Amelia’s death as a chance for Kate to get on the straight and narrow. But saying it out loud was monstrous, even for Gretchen. Kate was gripping the phone so hard she thought she might snap it in half.
“Mom?”
“Yes, dear?” Gretchen sounded so pleased with herself. Like having offered Kate this brutal insight had been a grand act of selfless charity. “Oh, wait, hold on.” There were some voices in the background on Gretchen’s end. “Lee just popped in. There’s a Times reporter on the other line for me. Apparently, I agreed to do some interview. I don’t even recall what this one’s about.” She laughed breezily. “In any case, what was it you were going to say?”
“Fuck you, Mom,” Kate said calmly. “That’s what I was going to say: fuck you.”
Kate placed her phone gently down into its cradle and stared at it. She kept waiting for the receiver to explode. It didn’t. Nothing happened. It was liberating, and oddly embarrassing, that it had taken her this long to stand up to Gretchen, to tell her mother how she really felt about anything. But she was done making people happy, behaving well, being polite. She was done being a good girl.
Kate exhaled in a long stream, her shoulders sagging forward. Her computer had finally started up, her e-mail in-box open in front of her. There were only a handful of new messages since she’d checked from home the evening before, far fewer than there would have been in the days before Amelia died. Now that Kate was back in the office, though, people would probably take that as an invitation to stop pulling punches. And a part of Kate was looking forward to getting swallowed by the grind of her job, even if it was a job that meant nothing to her anymore. Kate was still staring at her e-mail in-box when her cell phone alerted her that she had a text message.
“Here we go,” she muttered as she dug around in her bag.
Gretchen was never just going to take being told to fuck off.
Finally, Kate laid her hands on her phone and pulled it from her bag. She looked down at the message on the screen.
Amelia didn’t jump.
Kate snapped her eyes closed. No, that message hadn’t said what she thought it had. It wasn’t possible. Kate squeezed her eyes even tighter before finally opening them. But when she looked down at her phone again, the message was still there. AMELIA DIDN’T JUMP. She read it three times more, and yet the words remained the same. Kate’s heart was pounding as she rested her phone gently on the center of her desk. Then she rolled her chair slowly away so that she could stare at the phone from a safe distance.
Please, was all she could think. Please don’t do this to me. Please don’t torture me.
Why would someone play such a sick joke? And who? Kate had been too startled even to check whom the message was from. She was leaning over her desk, peering at her phone for the sender, when her office door opened. Kate bolted upright.
“What in the world?” Kate’s secretary, Beatrice, asked. She was staring at Kate as if she’d lost her mind. “I was about to call security when I saw your lights on. What are you doing here?”
“Beatrice, you scared me,” Kate panted, a hand to her chest.
“I can see that.” Beatrice looked Kate up and down with wide, disapproving eyes. Beatrice, a mother of six children, treated Kate and her other assigned lawyer as if they were her seventh and eighth. “I thought we’d agreed you’d take at least six more weeks working from home. Jeremy didn’t pull some of his oh-please, you’re-so-talented, you’re-the-only-one garbage, did he? Because I swear, I’ll—”
“Jeremy didn’t call me back in.” Kate shook her head. “I needed to get out of the house.”
“So you came here?” Beatrice asked. “Back to work?”
“I didn’t have anywhere else to go.” Kate glanced over at her phone. She thought for a second she might tell Beatrice about the message, but it felt premature. She was still hoping she’d imagined it.
“You had best keep your door closed,” Beatrice said. “Otherwise, these vultures will have your carcass picked clean by lunchtime.”
Beatrice’s face froze then, as though she wanted to stuff her inadvertent reference to death back into her mouth. Kate wanted to tell Beatrice not to worry, that it was okay. But all she could think about was that text.
Amelia didn’t jump.
It was especially cruel, given how long it had taken for Kate to accept that Amelia had killed herself. The notion that Amelia had been caught cheating—on an English paper, no less—was especially absurd. Detective Molina informing Kate that all the preliminary physical evidence pointed to Amelia’s having committed suicide hadn’t really convinced her otherwise, at least at first.
Instead, Kate had wanted someone to blame, and the school had been her primary candidate—a faulty lock on the roof, inadequate supervision, an inherently dangerous condition. Kate had also considered the possibility that Amelia had been pushed, but not very seriously. Someone wanting to hurt Amelia was almost as unbelievable as her wanting to hurt herself.
And Detective Molina had done his investigating—he’d searched Amelia’s room and talked to her teachers and friends; he’d checked her computer and her phone; he’d looked for signs of something that could have caused a fall, a dip in the roof surface, something that Amelia could have tripped on. He’d looked for evidence of a struggle, too. But there had been nothing, except the word sorry on the wall. A week later, Molina had called to inform Kate that the medical examiner had made the preliminary finding of suicide official. And that was that: Amelia had killed herself.
The whole thing had taken nine days. Nine days to be told that the daughter she had been best friends with, the daughter she had looked after and laughed with and loved, had been someone she hadn’t really known. That she’d been someone filled with a sadness so great it had taken her last breath and yet Kate had somehow missed all the signs.
They’d had a handy explanation for that, too: impulsive suicide. It happened more than anyone knew, or so said Dr. Lipton, the school psychologist from Grace Hall. People apparently routinely decided to kill themselves and then went ahead and did it all within hours. No giving away prized possessions, no suicide note like in the after-school specials of Kate’s youth. According to Dr. Lipton, Amelia’s getting caught cheating could easily have been the trigger, especially if she’d already been feeling emotionally overwhelmed by problems with a friend, a breakup, trouble at home. Just the ordinary stress of being a teenager could have been enough to set the stage. And Kate’s arguing otherwise only made her feel more responsible.
“You sure you should be here?” Beatrice asked. She sounded even more concerned now, probably because Kate had been sitting there, staring at the floor, for God knows how long. “You really don’t look okay.”
There was a knock on Kate’s office door before Beatrice could press her for an answer. Standing there in the doorway behind Beatrice was Jeremy. He was wearing a sharp navy suit and striped tie that set off his blue eyes. Kate hadn’t seen him since the funeral, but they’d talked a couple of times by phone, and Jeremy had sent several e-mails—brief, but flawlessly kind—checking in on her.
“Hi,” he said quietly, staying near the door.
“Hi,” Kate said, trying to pull herself together.
“You’re back.”
“I’m back.”
As they stared at each other, Kate could feel Beatrice watching them, looking from Jeremy to Kate then back to Jeremy. Kate knew Beatrice’s eyebrows were raised without even having to look at her. People talked about Jeremy and everything he did and everyone he did it with. They always had. Much was made of too many cases assigned here, too many dinners behind closed doors there. Some of it might have been true—parts definitely were—but most of it certainly wasn’t.
Reconstructing Amelia Page 5