Page 32 of The Better Sister

“See?” she said, pointing an accusatory finger. “That’s your tell right there. You get all formal and clippish: ‘Persons? Plural? No third party. Or parties. It does happen.’”

I didn’t appreciate the harpy, robotic tone she used for the impersonation, but it was hard to refute the point.

“I could always tell when you weren’t shooting straight, Chloe. Remember when you discoveredThe Muppet Showin repeats? You’d bogart the remote control by telling Mom it was educational because it looked likeSesame Street. I’d tell Mom it was just puppets and that you knew all that shit anyway, and then I’d get in trouble for not being a good sister. I missed the entire last season ofRemington Steelebecause of you. You couldn’t even resist smiling when Mom wasn’t looking, you were so proud of getting away with it. Or what about that time you got a UTI your senior year and let all your friends think it was because you finally lost your virginity? I knew it was because you worked so hard on your history paper you forgot to pee all day again, you OCD weirdo.”

I felt an involuntary smile struggling to break out on my face.

“See? Things can be funny even when the world sucks.”

“And it really, really sucks. I can’t believe Adam...” My lower lip began to quiver as the enormity of it snuck up on me again. I did not want to cry, especially in front of Nicky. As much as she had deserved to lose him—and Ethan, too—she was the last person who should be expected to comfort me.

Lucky for me, Nicky never was one to give comfort. “So who’s the guy?”

I shook my head. I wasn’t going to confirm her suspicions, but I didn’t have the energy to fight with her over it, either. Eventually, we’d need to fight about what really mattered—what was going to happen to Ethan. I wondered if she had meant it when she told the police she had brought the legal documents with her.

“Now I’m the one being serious, Chloe. Maybe you should tell the cops about whoever this guy is. I mean, you never know.”

I resisted the urge to tell her that I was never the one who dated guys who might be capable of murder. “I already told them I had nothing else to say without a lawyer.”

She took the statement as verification. “No wonder you’ve been walking around with a limp. A word of advice: if the sex is a pain in the ass, you’re doing it wrong.”

I couldn’t help myself. It was so inappropriate, I started to laugh.

“Remember: children in the back seat cause accidents, but accidents in the back seat cause children. Hey, what’s the difference between a G spot and a golf ball? A guy will actually look for a golf ball. Why did the chicken cross the basketball court? He heard the ref was blowing fowls.”

How many times had I looked at Ethan, wanting to convince myself that he hadn’t inherited my sister’s worst traits? Yet I had to admit that one of the many things I loved about him was his take-no-prisoners sense of humor, which he certainly didn’t get from Adam or me. Nicky’s increasingly ridiculous jokes finally stopped when we heard Ethan’s bedroom door open. “Mom. You need to see this.”

We both reached for the phone in his outstretched hand, and then Nicky deferred, sinking back in her chair. I took it from him and extended the screen so she and I could read it together.

The article was only six minutes old, uploaded to theNew York Postwebsite: “Stab Victim’s Son Brought Gun to School.” According to the first sentence, “The sixteen-year-old son of slain attorney Adam Macintosh, husband of #ThemToo author Chloe Taylor, had previously brought a gun to school, sources tell thePost. Despite concerns from alarmed classmates and teachers, Taylor reportedly used her influence to prevent the son’s expulsion, chalking the incident up to a ‘misunderstanding.’”

“A gun?” Nicky was saying. “You never told me about this.”

I pressed my free hand against my forehead, willing it to stop pounding. “They’re blowing it out of proportion.”

It had been yet another episode when Adam and I disagreed about whether and how to discipline Ethan. Most of what I’d told the police about the gun was true. Without even consulting me, Adam had bought the gun for the house in East Hampton shortly after the online threats against me became a regular part of our daily existence. Four months later, we got a phone call from Ethan’s school, saying that a kid had seen it in Ethan’s backpack after classes broke out. Adam acted as if Ethan was one step away from going postal on the student body. It had taken nearly an hour to get an answer from Ethan, but he finally confessed that he was trying to “seem like the cool, edgy kid” by letting another student catch a glimpse of it in his bag. It wasn’t even loaded.

Had it been a public school, the hardline zero-tolerance policies would have meant certain expulsion. But I told the private school that in the shuffle of the city/East Hampton commute, the gun had ended up in Ethan’s bag, and he in turn had carried the bag to school without knowledge of its contents. I hinted at a lawsuit if they didn’t have grounds for rejecting our explanation. The way I saw it, if Adam hadn’t gotten all macho and bought a gun, none of it would have happened in the first place. Once classes ended, I used a bandanna to tie the stupid thing to a rock and sent it out to sea on my inaugural summer kayaking trip. Adam was furious when he found out, but I did what I needed to protect Ethan. Once a kid is labeled as trouble, it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Ethan’s phone buzzed in my hand. It was a text from “K.”

Dude, why aren’t you calling me back? Cops were here again. I had to tell them that you

I felt the phone being pulled away, and then Ethan quickly stashed it in the back pocket of his jeans.

“This isn’t the time to start keeping secrets from me,” I said, thinking about the flip phone I had locked in my office desk the previous day. I wondered if whoever had texted him had tried to call the burner phone first.Cops were here again.The contact was simply “K.” Kevin Dunham, the friend he was with Friday night. “Was that from Kevin? What’s he saying?”

Ethan crossed his arms and set his lips in a straight line. It was the same expression I’d seen when he would butt heads with Adam. For a second, I understood the absolute fury Adam displayed in those moments, the recognition that the little boy who was your everything now believed that he knew the world better than you.

I was struggling for the words that might convince him to trust me when I registered movement in my right periphery. Nicky was out of her seat. Ethan tried retreating toward his bedroom, but she herded him like a border collie toward the living room wall and snatched the device from his back pocket. He reached for it, but her stiff arm and stern glance subdued him in a way I had never seen before.

She read the text aloud. “‘Dude, why aren’t you calling me back? Cops were here again. I had to tell them that you broke off on Friday.’”

Nicky paused her reading to make eye contact with me, and I knew that something worse was coming. “‘I know you didn’t hurt your dad, but you might want to dump your bob. Sorry.’”

At that point, I didn’t need to ask Ethan for an explanation. Context was everything. I remembered the half-pound bag of pot Adam had found in Ethan’s room and how certain he was that Ethan was selling it. I was the one who wanted to believe him when he said it belonged to a friend.

“He’s covering his own ass, Mom.” I noticed Nicky look away when he called me Mom. “I’m not a dealer, okay? The whole idea of it’s totally ludicrous.”

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