Page 36 of The Better Sister

Two hours in, she was speaking to Nicky when the office door opened. It was Guidry. “Can you all step outside into the living room again?”

It happened fast, as if they had choreographed each movement. The uniformed officers quickly formed a wall to separate Ethan from the rest of us. A set of handcuffs appeared at Bowen’s side from nowhere.

Ethan’s eyes darted between me and Nicky, imploring us to protect him. The scream that came from my throat was more pained than when I had found Adam’s blood-soaked body. Nicky shouted “No!” and ran for him, provoking two uniformed officers to push her against the wall by force.

“He’s a minor,” Olivia bellowed over the chaos in the room. “He’s represented by counsel. He’s invoking all applicable rights, including the rights to silence and a lawyer.”

I saw a sudden focus in Ethan’s face. “I’m not talking without my lawyer.” His voice was quiet but assured. My kid was so brave.

And he was under arrest for the murder of Adam Macintosh.

22

She had to have a swimming pool.

As a starting prosecutor at the Cuyahoga County District Attorney’s Office, Adam made a decent salary, at least compared to what either his parents or mine ever made. And he’d gone to both college and law school on full academic rides, so he wasn’t saddled with debt the way a lot of attorneys are. But he worked for the government, not the private sector, and his wife was an ex-waitress who was supposedly planning to start college.

Yet when it was time to rent a house, Nicky insisted on having a swimming pool. She said that water calmed her, and that she knew she would study harder for the SATs if she could sit with her books by the pool when it was warm out. She claimed that having her own pool had always been her dream, even though I hadn’t heard her mention it since she was fifteen years old and Mom and Dad took us to Niagara Falls and she was floating on her back in the indoor pool of the Holiday Inn, saying that when she grew up she wanted to be rich and have a swimming pool where she could lie out and tan and have drinks with paper umbrellas in them. Dad had responded by telling her that if she wanted to be rich, she should be more like me when it came to her schoolwork.

Somehow she and Adam had managed to find a place they could afford that had an in-ground swimming pool in the backyard. It even had a hot tub on the deck for the colder months—not one of the fancy ones, but those clunky plug-ins you can buy at Home Depot. The landlord had given them a break on the rent because he was so certain that a young assistant district attorney and his new bride would be perfect tenants. Adam, always a Dudley Do-Right when it came to ethics, went so far as to confirm with his office that there was nothing unethical about the situation before signing the lease.

Nicky, to her credit, did love that pool once she had it, but there was definitely no studying going on there. She would lie for hours in the sun, listening to music, painting her nails, flipping through gossip magazines. She had this prenatal aqua workout she claimed she was doing every single day. But once the baby was born, and old Nicky was back with a vengeance, she’d drink for hours, leaving her chaise only when the baby monitor alerted her that Ethan required attention.

I only went home to visit one or two times a year. Maybe that’s why I could see the change in my sister more than my parents did. The proud girlfriend who had doted on Adam during law school was nowhere to be found. She’d day-drink and then try to hide it from Adam when he came home from work. She’d snap at him for the smallest questions—like whether she’d gone to the grocery store that day or what they were having for dinner. I’d tell her that I thought we should engage the baby with his blocks and other brain-building toys, but she’d leave him for hours in front of the television as long as he didn’t cry. Before Adam, she used to drink a lot, but she was (usually) a fun drunk, more likely to make out with a dude in the bathroom than sulk in her bedroom or scream about old perceived slights from our childhood. But something about her had changed. She was thirty years old and seemed to have given up on her life. I wondered if there was more than alcohol at work.

I tried intervening once, about a year before it all blew up. It was probably the third or fourth time Adam had called me since the baby was born. I was her sister. He thought I might have some magic formula that would exorcise this new Nicky, who was actually more like the old Nicky, yet still different. But because I never did know what made Nicky tick, the phone calls would turn more into venting sessions where he would tell me how worried he was about her, and I would try to hold my tongue about how I always thought she was in over her head doing the wife and mother thing.

I called Nicky and warned her she was going to lose Adam if she didn’t get her shit together. “Perfect Adam isn’t going anywhere,” she told me. “He loves the baby too much.” It was so telling that she didn’t say he lovedher. He lovedthe baby. She was willing to use Ethan to keep Adam glued to her for life.

My parents, of course, took her side. They said that Adam was too “rigid” and didn’t understand that “for better or worse” meant exactly that. That was choice, coming from my parents. My father had been a completely different person before he stopped drinking, and my mother paid the price for it. Why couldn’t they see that Nicky was doing the same thing to Adam? Meanwhile, Adam’s calls to me increased, but, as Nicky predicted, he loved the baby too much to leave.

The pattern finally stopped the night I was at the Met Gala with Catherine.

It was the fucking swimming pool.

He had come home from work but still had prep to do for a trial the next day. It was a beautiful May night, and Nicky wanted to have dinner outside. They grilled quesadillas and corn. When Adam was done eating, he went inside to go over his opening statement again. He got so engrossed in his work that he didn’t realize nearly two hours had gone by without a peep from either Nicky or Ethan.

He found Nicky half floating in the pool, her shoulders against the steps, as if she’d been sitting there and then slithered down into the shallow end. The baby was in her arms, near her lap. Only the top of his head was visible.

Adam pulled Ethan out first and turned his head to the side in an attempt to drain the water from his nose and mouth, but Ethan wasn’t responding. Adam did CPR, but does anyone really know how to do it until they have to? And Ethan was only two and a half years old. Adam didn’t know whether to do mouth-to-mouth or to cover Ethan’s entire mouth and nose, like he remembered learning for babies. And how hard could he press a little toddler’s chest without crushing him?

Adam never stopped having nightmares about those uncounted minutes that passed before Ethan finally spat out a stream of chlorinated water and then coughed. Once he knew Ethan was breathing, Adam pulled Nicky out, too. He didn’t tell me until after we were married that he actually thought about leaving her in the water.

By the time Adam called me, Nicky was at the Cleveland Clinic. The hospital would be checking, but he was certain she had to have drugs in her system.

“Just tell me, Adam. Tell me why you’re really calling.”

“I need your help.”

He was trying to put her on a psych hold, and my parents were contesting it. “I can’t take another chance, not with Ethan. Every day when I go to work, I wonder if she’s going to leave the stove on or drop him or forget about him in the car. I don’t know how she got this bad, but it has to stop. She needs to get help. The lawyer who handles civil commitments for our office says that if it’s just this one incident, Nicky will probably get released tonight, and then it’ll be my word against hers, plus your parents, in family court about what happens to Ethan. But if she’s put on a psych hold tonight, I’d go into family court with a head start toward custody. Hopefully that will be the wake-up call for her to get some help, because she’s certainly not listening to me.”

He was right. There was no other way. Nicky wasn’t the kind of person who cared about consequences until they actually happened. She was going to have to lose Adam and Ethan if she had any chance of getting her life back on track.

“And what do you need for a psych hold?” I asked, pressing a finger against my ear to block out the sound of the gala. By then Catherine was out of the ladies’ room, glaring at me, wondering why I was on the phone when I was supposed to be soaking in every second of the experience she had bestowed on me.

“It would help if there was someone else asking for it, other than a spouse.”

Someone like her only sibling.

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