Page 56 of The Better Sister

“So how often was Adam like that?” she asked.

With my eyes closed and seat reclined, all I wanted was to float away until I never had to answer another question about Adam again. “Never. Not for the first ten years he was here, at least.”

I tilted my head and could see Nicky running the numbers. “So the last two years?”

“Not even. And then it wasn’t all the time. One or two blowups at first, and then more, and worse. It was this slow-building burn.”

I had no way of knowing whether the incident on Olivia’s laptop was the only time Ethan had seen his father that out of control, but the fact that he’d recorded the incident suggested that it was not. According to Olivia, Nunzio claimed not to have disclosed the video earlier because it wasn’t relevant until I testified that Adam and Ethan were close and had a normal father-son relationship. Judge Rivera had lectured Nunzio for playing games with discovery, but she would nevertheless allow him to show the jury the video in the morning.

In it, Adam was even worse than he’d been when he found the bag of pot. Worse, even, than after the gun fiasco. Not as mean as he’d been with me at times, but much crueler and more heartless than I ever could have imagined him being with Ethan.

Nunzio had provided a transcript, the pages he’d begun to read from when questioning me.

Ethan:Oh my god, Dad. You just sent me to my room and then you come in here to keep yelling at me.

Adam:Because your room is your fucking sanctuary. Your room is where you can throw your three-hundred-dollar sweaters on the floor, pull on your thousand-dollar headphones, and disappear onto a computer that lets you ignore the real world.

Ethan:What exactly do you want from me right now? To clean my room? Fine, I’ll clean my room.

Adam:I want you to get your act together. You’re walking through life like nothing matters. You don’t focus on school. You don’t have hobbies. Chloe put you in that school full of spoiled brats so you’d have all the contacts to open all the doors she thinks matter, and you don’t have a single friend there.

Ethan:That’s not true—

Adam:Instead, you hang out with losers who have you selling drugs. You’re carrying around a gun.

Ethan:Jesus, Dad, I told you a million times. It wasn’t my pot, and I was just, I don’t know with the gun. Like, trying to get attention or something.

Adam:Well, you’ve got mine, that’s for sure. I don’t know when you got like this, son.

Ethan:Like what?

Adam:You’re a loser, a druggie zombie. Don’t you even see that you’re losing your mind, just like your mother? Is that what you want? To be a dysfunctional invalid?

Even the harshness of the transcript wasn’t as blistering as the actual video, where Adam was screaming, waving his arms around, his face red, as Ethan sat on the bed, his knees pulled to his chest. I knew what it was like to be him in that moment—to be willing to do anything,anything, to make the shouting stop.

I pictured Ethan walking home from the beach, stoned from hanging out with Kevin, and encountering Adam when he thought the house would be empty. If Adam had laid into him? If Ethan was maybe carrying a knife to be cool, the way he’d shown off that gun? Could the bad, dark side of Adam have brought out a bad, dark side of his son?

I had no idea how to explain to Nicky how it had all started. “I never should have pushed Adam to go to the law firm. He was so resentful. I think he felt pressured to do it because I was earning more—like, alotmore—and he felt like he had to keep up. Every single day, the hatred for that job kept building. And he was drinking. A lot.”

“That doesn’t excuse him for being a fucking asshole.”

No, it didn’t, and that’s why I had felt entitled to start what I had with Jake. “I swear, the only time I saw him act that way with Ethan was once when he found pot, and once with the gun. And under the circumstances, I couldn’t say he was completely wrong either time.”

“That wasn’t easy for me to watch, Chloe. Is that what you guys told Ethan about me all these years? That I was a druggie and an invalid?”

“No, of course not.” We never used those words, but of course Ethan knew that Nicky’s problems had led to his moving to New York with only his father.

“Because that’s exactly how Adam used to talk to me,” she said. “When no one was around. He’d seem like perfect, sweet Adam one minute, and then I’d make too much noise cleaning the kitchen while he was studying and suddenly he’d be screaming at me, telling me I had no idea the pressure he was under because I hadn’t even gone to college. He’d belittle me and make me feel worthless. If I tried to argue with him or walk away, he’d grab me so hard, I’d see those little oval bruises on my arms for days. And then for a while, everything was fine again after I got pregnant, but once the baby was born, I just couldn’t be who he needed me to be. It took me forever to realize it was probably normal postpartum, but I was inhaling booze, antidepressants, sleeping pills—anything to make it feel okay for just a little while, day by day. I remember him screaming at me like that. Telling me I was a ‘loser’ and didn’t deserve him or the baby. He’d do these little slaps on my face”—her fingertips of one hand whipped across her cheekbone—“telling me that I wasn’t listening to him.”

I shook my head. “You never said anything,” I muttered.

“I did. Yes, I did! When the two of you had me committed after what happened in the pool, I tried to explain.”

But by then, I didn’t believe her. I thought she was blaming Adam for her problems, just like she had always blamed our father. Even after I saw how Adam had changed over the last year, I never connected his anger—not once—to what had happened between him and Nicky. Maybe I just didn’t want to think of myself as being like Nicky.

“Why didn’t you say anything while it was actually happening?” The tone of my voice made it clear that I wasn’t blaming her. I believed her and was trying to understand.

Her knuckles were tight around the steering wheel. She was quiet when she finally answered. “Because I loved him. And I felt lucky to have him. I told myself he was under a lot of pressure and I wasn’t doing a good enough job. Do you know what I used to do to try to make him happy? I’d ask myself, ‘What would Chloe do?’”

---