Chapter 2
Bex
“Take the Xanax, Rebecca,” says Jill. “We’ve got everything covered.”
Xanax? Everything is already too surreal as it is—I pinch my thigh, half certain this is a nightmare. Apparently it’s not.
The press reports on the train crash as if it’s a miracle. Only thirty-one people, three percent of the train’s passengers, died. Of a thousand passengers, my family made up ten percent of the fatalities.
It really happened, Bex. I pinch myself again. It’s not a nightmare.
I slip the Xanax into my pocket when her head turns.
Today, of all days, I don’t want to embarrass my family.
Their funerals—three at once, the height of efficiency—should be the rare occasion when I don’t shame them.
If there’s a heaven, I want them to be sitting there thinking, Oh thank god, she’s not making an ass of herself for once.
I also don’t trust Jessie’s sisters. There’s nothing especially alarming about any of them, but there wasn’t anything especially alarming about Jessie either, and I still had to tread carefully.
“This belonged to our mother,” says Jenny, holding up some vase on the mantel. If she had a purse big enough, I suspect she’d slide that vase right in.
Maybe that’s why I don’t trust them—because they’re circling ever closer, like hyenas nearing a carcass.
They shed tears for Jessie and Bronwyn at first, but I’ve sensed self-preservation stealing over all three of them for the last day or so, ever since the will was read and they discovered everything is going to me.
They now want to run through the house like game show contestants, grabbing every valuable they see.
Joanna emerges from the powder room a moment later, frowning at me in the exact way Jessie used to. None of the sisters care for me, and this week has made that worse.
They don’t understand why I’m not crying.
I haven’t cried once in the week since the accident, but it’s not that I’m not sad.
It’s that I can’t grasp that it’s happened.
I’m underwater, pressed deep by its weight.
The sounds that reach my ears don’t make sense—everything I look at is dark and slightly blurry.
What I’d really like to do is sleep. I just want to sleep for a very long time.
And not allow these vultures to steal all my family’s shit while I do so.
Jill looks at her watch. “We should go.” She holds out her hand for the house key, as if I’m a child playing with a valuable. “Head to the car and I’ll lock up.”
“I’ve got it,” I say staunchly.
They glance at one another with a look I’ve seen several times this week.
There she goes again, being a pain in the ass.
Jessie warned us. Maybe I am being a pain in the ass.
Or maybe there’s something Jill wants to snatch once I’m out of the house.
Given how annoyed she is, my money is on option two.
I lock the door and stumble to the waiting car, flanked by three women who dislike me.
I shouldn’t be going through this with them. I shouldn’t be alone. I shouldn’t be here at all.
I’m still alive because I got drunk the night before my flight and arrived at an airport too late. I’m still alive because I didn’t care enough to arrive on time, because my family was filming a show intended to save my dad’s business, and I basically blew it off.
The limo heads toward a church I dislike, at the wrong end of town.
After the burials, there will be a reception at the country club my dad and Jessie joined a few years ago—one of those places that takes pride in the way it hasn’t moved forward with the times.
Cell phones and denim are forbidden. Women aren’t allowed on the golf course before one p.m.
It annoyed me that Jessie wanted to join, that she was so enamored of the club’s prestige that she was willing to overlook the way it marginalizes pretty much everyone who isn’t a balding Caucasian male.
And you’re here resenting a woman on the day you’re burying her, Bex. So which of you is worse?
We arrive in the church’s parking lot forty minutes early.
Everyone watches as I climb from the car.
A heavyset man with gray hair practically radiates disdain for me—the Henchman, perhaps, here to ensure I’m appropriately dressed and not carrying a flask.
If so, the joke’s on him: I’m not wearing panties, and the flask is in my purse.
Sure, I don’t want to shame my family, but emergencies happen.
Linda, my dad’s longtime assistant, walks over while the aunts bicker about what we should do next and pulls me toward her. “Oh Bex,” she whispers, choking on tears. “I’m so sorry.”
I want to cry with her. I don’t know why I’m so numb, why I can’t seem to feel anything. I want to promise her she’ll always have a job, but I don’t know what happens to the company now, without the show.
“You need to stand by the door,” says Joanna, placing her hands on my shoulders and pushing me in the church’s direction, “so you can thank people for coming.”
I turn to stare at her. There’s been a lot of this over the course of the week. A lot of you need to…
You need to host an event after the funeral.
You need to write the death notice.
You need to call people.
I don’t understand why we expect a person who’s experienced a devastating loss to…
perform. To offer a eulogy. To choose between an open bar or beer and wine only and to decide if finger sandwiches are really worth three grand.
I don’t understand why we expect a grieving person to design in memoriam handouts and drive to Staples at rush hour to pick them up, to accept the hugs of strangers for hours on end and thank them for telling you how sad they are.
Jesus fucking Christ. I already need the flask.
“Rebecca, let’s go,” says Jenny.
“No,” I whisper. “I’m not doing that. I’m not greeting people.”
I can’t. I can’t. Not when every one of them is wishing I’d died instead of Bronwyn. I don’t fault them. I’m wishing it too.
“Rebecca,” Jenny hisses, and I hear a hint of Jessie in the tightness of her tone, which has tears springing to my eyes. I don’t know if my tears are from rage or grief, but I do what I’ve often done when Jessie’s hurt me: I flee.
I fled all the way to California once, but today I only make it as far as the fields behind the church.
Away from the prying eyes of the funeral-goers, yes, but inside the cemetery, where a man stands with his back to me, facing three pits, three identical piles of dirt behind them.
My insides hollow, my stomach locks…but my feet continue forward—frost-covered grass crunching underfoot, my breath fogging the air.
Some voice in my head screams at me to turn around but I can’t stop moving toward it.
I step up beside the man. He’s tall and older than me but not old. Too well-dressed to be here from the funeral home. A young professor of Bronwyn’s perhaps, or one of those Wall Street douches she dated.
And then I force my eyes to the holes that have been dug, to the dirt. Waiting to close my family in, waiting to hold them deep in the earth and never give them back to me.
This can’t be happening. I’m not going to allow it to happen. I can make this stop. I can do anything I want.
“Do you smoke?” I ask, glancing up at him for the first time. He has a perfect nose, a perfect face. Dark hair, bright blue eyes. Not someone Bronwyn dated, then. She was more attracted to intellect and power than actual attractiveness.
He looks over, startled. “No.”
“Me neither,” I whisper. “Can we start? Is it too late?”
His eyes widen. “I don’t think it’s ever too late, but my father died of lung cancer. Sort of a bad look for me.”
He has a British accent. I don’t know a ton about British accents, but I’m guessing his would be deemed posh. Plus there’s the expensive coat and the exquisite face. Looks like that mostly come from centuries of rich men marrying really hot women.
“What are your feelings about heroin then?”
His mouth curves up, only on one side. It’s there and gone in less than a second, but it’s enough. Bronwyn would forgive him for being so handsome. “I avoid it on an empty stomach.”
I sigh. “A British accent and you’re responsible too. My sister’s going to be so pissed that she missed this.”
I say these words aloud, more to myself than him, and then I choke on them. I don’t know where it’s come from, but suddenly I’m crying so hard I think I’m going to be sick.
Bronwyn can’t be dead. She can’t be. She has too much to offer, too much ahead of her, too much currently at play.
She’s got a semester left of law school.
For some reason this thought makes me cry even harder because I’m already wondering if they’ll let her defer until next year, when she’s back, and my god… that isn’t how it works.
Arms wrap around me in a tight embrace. Posh overcoat guy. Holding me steady. “I’ll take up smoking if it means that much to you,” he says.
I laugh and sob into his chest. Are they going to bury Bronwyn in the middle? Will she be flanked by my dad and Jessie, protected? Oh god. God. I don’t know if I asked.
I pull his face down to mine and kiss him.
I don’t even think before I do it. I just grab him.
He makes this noise—surprise, maybe—but he doesn’t stop me and for one long second I can feel him giving way and, yes, this is what I want.
I’m going to strip him out of that coat and that suit, and this is how I will pass the time until someone fixes everything for me.
There’s no way any of this is happening and—
“Hey,” he says, breaking the kiss. His breathing is erratic. “Hey, this is a bad idea.”
Oh my god. What the hell am I doing? Did I really just kiss him? I did. And yet…I look at three identical pits. I can’t go through with this.
I nod at his crotch. “Part of you”—I’m crying so hard I can barely speak—“seems to think it’s an excellent idea.” I have no idea what I’m doing, what I’m saying. Did I tell them to bury Bronwyn in the center? How could I have forgotten?
The world begins to tilt and his hand shoots out to steady me. “You’re…really upset. I’m not sure you’re thinking clearly.” His voice is gentle. “A friend of Bronwyn’s, I presume?”
I press my face to my hands. “Sorry. I’m so sorry. I’m…” I wipe my face on the inside of my coat but it doesn’t make the tears stop. I’m crying so hard that I’m choking as I speak. “I can’t do this.” I clutch at my throat. “I don’t think I can watch this.”
God. I just grabbed a stranger and kissed him at my family’s funeral. I’ve done a lot of crazy shit, but this is really one for the record books.
He hands me a tissue. “Let me walk you back to the church and get you some water.”
He’s so responsible. So British and hot. So perfect for Bronwyn, despite the hotness. I dig my nails into my palms to keep myself from crying harder and allow him to gently turn me toward the church with his hand on my elbow.
“She’s my stepsister,” I whisper, as we walk. “Bronwyn. You asked if I was her friend. I’m her stepsister.”
He freezes. “What?”
I turn back to where he still stands, staring at me with horror in his eyes. Probably wondering why I just molested him graveside, under the circumstances. I can’t explain it myself.
“My father married her mom when we were small,” I whisper, my voice breaking again.
My father, who will go into the ground beside her.
“Rebecca,” he says hoarsely. He’s suddenly pale beneath his tan. “I’m Theo Porter. Your father’s partner.”
Some bizarre noise hurls its way out of my lungs. A laugh, a sob, a gasp—some combination of the three. “Bullshit.”
The Henchman is supposed to be old. Older, anyway.
Sure, I’ve never seen him but I’ve imagined him for years.
He’s supposed to be smaller, slightly effeminate, uptight.
Benedict Cumberbatch without the height.
Hugh Grant playing someone who has a stick up his ass and never smiles.
Not square jawed and slightly rugged. Not graced with the kind of broad shoulders that could hoist a girl high overhead without effort.
His voice isn’t right either. The Henchman, when we spoke, was all polite disdain, clipped and disappointed. This guy’s voice is low and a little rough, as if his words have traveled deep from the center of his chest before exiting.
“You don’t look like Hugh Grant.”
He blinks. “Excuse me?”
“You don’t look like Hugh Grant or Benedict Cumberbatch.”
He frowns. “Someone suggested I did?”
“Or Michael Caine. Or Tom Hiddleston.”
“You’re just naming British actors.”
Oh god, Bex. You kissed the Henchman. What the hell were you thinking?
I stare at my boots, now coated in frost. “You’re just not what I thought,” I tell him. “But I tried to get you to smoke, among other things, so I guess I’m exactly what you thought.”
I kissed him. Fuck. It’s going to make things really awkward when he marries Bronwyn. I’ll probably get drunk and make an inappropriate joke about his erection during my toast.
I cover my face and start to cry again.
His hand moves to my shoulder. “You need to get back. It’s going to be okay. Just get through the day.”
I nod and allow myself to be led to the church’s entrance in silence. For every terrible thing Theo Porter ever believed about me…I just proved myself a thousand times worse.
“For God’s sake, Rebecca,” says Jill when we reach the aunts. “Just get inside. I can’t believe you ran off like that.”
I can’t quite meet Theo’s eye as I climb the stairs alone. I’ve got the rest of my life to be ashamed of the way I just behaved with him. It can wait.
There are other things to deal with today—worse things.
Someone holds the heavy door open and I step inside the church’s musty foyer, my boots echoing against the marble floor. In the distance, three coffins wait beside the altar. I turn away, not ready, and face the family photo propped on an easel.
My dad and Jessie and Bronwyn, blond and pink-cheeked, looking as if they belong together, while I stand out like a sore thumb, entirely different from all of them. Bronwyn spent her entire life saying my looks were a curse because they made life too easy for me.
She didn’t realize I’d have given it all up to fit in, to feel like I belonged.
They’ve left me behind, but who could blame them?
Look at how I turned out.