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7
Then
THE FIRST PEOPLE SHE SET EYES ON AFTER RETURNINGfrom the morgue were Kyle and his wife, Jackie. Emma had wanted to avoid seeing them for a while, at least until her brother, Griffin, arrived, but she sensed that the longer she put them off, the bigger an issue it would be. So, finally, she’d called Kyle back and said they should come to the house as soon they were up for it.
They arrived around two o’clock, tall and slim Jackie teetering in heels and toting a cloth bag from a gourmet food store, and Kyle following behind her, looking shell-shocked. In her mind, he’d always been a bit of a bulldozer, a “let me talk to the manager” kind of guy, and she’d expected that after the initial shock of the news wore off, he’d go on a tear about police incompetence or New York City going to hell. That was part of the reason she hadn’t wanted to break the news to him herself.
But she heard nothing like that as he sat in her living room. Though she’d always suspected that he and Derrick spent time together mainly out of a WASP-y sense of duty rather than a deep love for each other, Kyle seemed truly broken by his brother’s death, subdued that afternoon into long stretches of silence.
“I feel so fucking guilty,” he finally managed to say. His pale brown eyes, the exact color Derrick’s had been, found hers for the first time that day, and she did her best not to look away. “I was sitting in our den last night, eating a pizza and drinking a Heineken, congratulating myself on how sweet my life was, and some maniac was killing my brother.”
“Kyle, you can’t possibly blame yourself in any way,” Emma said.
He ran his hands through his hair for the umpteenth time. “Have you heard anything else?”
“No, though I’m supposed to talk to the police again tomorrow.”
“Christ, I should have listened to my gut. As I told them, Derrick sounded off when I spoke to him on Friday morning. Did he say anything to you? Anything at all?”
Hehadseemed grouchy to her that morning, guzzling an espresso before grunting a goodbye, but by then, what else was new? And she certainly wasn’t going to tell anyone about it.
“No, nothing.”
Later, once the three of them had picked at the poached salmon and salad Jackie had laid out, Kyle seemed a bit more collected, and Emma broached the subject of the funeral. She’d known from Derrick that Kyle, the oldest, had been theone who’d orchestrated family events when his mother and father were alive, took care of the parents’ property during their frequent travels abroad, and arrangedtheirfuneral service and burial, and though she generally bristled at his need to take charge, she was hoping for that now. He told her he’d be glad to set everything in motion with the funeral home he’d dealt with before.
“We want to help as much as possible,” Jackie said, without a hint of her usual arrogance. “Just tell us what you need.”
She’d never been close to Jackie, who still called herself a stay-at-home mom though her son, Ben, was now fifteen. And Emma didn’t get the marriage. In her own case, she’d allowed herself to be blind to Derrick’s flaws, but she sensed Jackie had always seen Kyle for who he was, and she accepted it all in exchange for a big house, a luxurious lifestyle, and plenty of designer clothes.
“Thank you, Jackie, I will,” Emma said, though she couldn’t imagine anything more she would ask of them.
“And I’m sorry I made it all about me earlier,” Kyle said. “We know how devastating this must be for you.”
Emma had wept before they arrived, spent from stress, and she was relieved that she must look distraught to them.
“Yes, I—I still can’t believe Derrick’s really not here anymore. That he’s never coming home.”
“Sorry if this is too painful a question, Emma, but I don’t think I ever knew, how did you two meet?” Jackie asked, her mouth turned down.
Emma shook her head. “I’m fine talking about it. We met at a party.”
It was a holiday gathering on the Upper West Side ofManhattan, given by a business school pal of Derrick’s who she knew from her ad agency days. Derrick had seemed as instantly enamored of her as she was with him, and she wasn’t surprised when he wasted no time calling her. He was smart, attractive in a kind of straight-arrow way—short brown hair, cleanshaven—and though he could act uptight in public, their time alone together was for the most part pleasantly laid-back.
For her birthday a few months later, he gave her a stunning bracelet from David Yurman, the first of several over the next months. It seemed to be a sign that he was viewing things fairly seriously, more seriously than she’d realized. She knew that on paper he was the kind of man her parents would have envisioned for her and that she’d even envisioned at times for herself, but was there anything wrong with that? She liked him, loved him really, sensed that they could have a fulfilling life together, and she couldn’t help but be moved by what he’d gone through, losing both parents several years before they met. When he proposed, it seemed like the right next step.
There were tiny red flags, though, even then. Emma’s work never seemed to hold much interest for him, and his questions about her weekday life were perfunctory, but she told herself that data could make the best people’s eyes glaze over if they didn’t have an instinctive love for it as she did.
Derrick also tended to get sulky, and he snapped at her occasionally, what she might have once defined as biting her head off, but she chalked up those conflicts as the kind of rough spots all couples experienced. And she knew that hertendency to get a little manic or fretful at times—about her fledgling company, about life in general—worked on his nerves, and it was something she wanted to tame.
It wasn’t until a few months after Derrick finished his MBA, and shortly before their wedding, that his behavior turned ugly at times. He’d gone to work at Alta by then and though he’d been so eager for the job, the pace was apparently much faster than what he’d experienced in the packaged food industry and the demands greater, which left him in a constant state of agitation. His boss, he ranted to Emma, was both gutless and overbearing, and some of his colleagues were untrustworthy. From what she could tell, he kept up a good front at work and handled office politics adroitly, but he began to bring his stress home every night and dump it at her feet as if she was somehow to blame. He barked at her more and more and seemed to find endless things to be annoyed about.
She felt like a traveler who starts off to explore a foreign city, game for adventure and a look at the unknown, and accidentally ends up in a forbidding neighborhood, one ripe with a sense of imminent danger.
A couple of times Emma considered calling off the wedding, but her parents had already dropped a bundle on the reception and booked their flights from London, and Derrick’s sister was flying in from Melbourne with her husband and young children. So she convinced herself that things would get better once he felt more secure at work and they weren’t caught up in planning a big reception and honeymoon.
And Emma did what she could to improve the dynamic,expressing to Derrick how upsetting his behavior could be. For a while at least, he’d make a point of apologizing, and life would return to normal.
But after the wedding, he seemed to find endless things to criticize—her choice of outfit, the way she used her hands when she told a story, and, once, the fact that she’d managed to catch a cold the week he had an important meeting—and he would sometimes go for days without speaking to her because of some infraction on her part that he’d be unable to fully explain.
