Chapter 5
Pierce
A Year Later: London
Ienvy dead men their silence. Adam crashes his Audi into a lamppost in Forest Hills, and an hour later, my phone rings from my bedside table, killing my only hour of honest sleep this week.
The first voice is a cop’s, nasal and overeager, with the accent of someone who hasn’t left Queens in twenty years.
Adam’s gone, it chirrups. “You’re his brother?
” Yes, I say, and the officer explains the logistics of collecting what remains. It floats over me like weather.
I don’t move for a long time after the call.
Light from the Thames stutters across the ceiling, a slow, sick pulse.
My apartment is a shoebox with a panoramic misery: cheap modern lines, all hard surfaces and sleek indifference, the kind of place designed to erase its tenants.
I lounge in my own debris—unpaid bills, yesterday’s mug with the scum ringed like a birthmark, a pair of Adam’s sneakers that never made it to Goodwill.
The espresso machine clicks on by itself, old wiring or a ghost. The city outside is still black and wet. Nobody mourns before sunrise.
My coffee tastes like burnt teeth. I sit at the window, feet propped on the radiator, and watch the first boats move through thin fog.
The news scrolls across my phone in discrete, pious rectangles: Adam Landon, 26, of Manhattan, lost control at high speed.
The photograph beside the obituary is from a sailing regatta our father forced us into the summer before the accident.
Adam’s hair is sun-bleached and coarse, his smile a little too broad.
I throw the phone into the couch cushions, then immediately retrieve it.
My hand is shaking. I Google his name again and again for the rest of the morning, looking for any evidence that his life was not, as I suspect, a slow-motion rehearsal for this very exit.
At half seven, I call my boss at the firm and say, “family emergency.” He sucks his teeth and says he’s sorry, but I can taste his relief echo. I am a terrible associate; they only hired me because my grandfather once played tennis with the founding partner.
After I pack, I write an email to Laura and then delete it.
It’s almost Christmas, her favorite time of year, and it doesn’t seem inappropriate to reach out to wish her well.
Or maybe it does. I write another with the three words I want to say most–I love you.
But I don’t send that one either. The only letter I manage to finish was to the property manager, letting her know I’ve set the thermostat to turn off in three days and will not be returning until further notice or further death.
The airport is a hive of bleakness and fluorescent apology.
Heathrow is running on time, but I am not.
Security waves me through with zero resistance.
At the lounge bar, I swallow whiskey after whiskey, fueled only by the adolescent suspicion that this is how a man faces ruin.
The strangers around me are gaunt and glancing at each other, all of them pretending not to be running from something while they push each other aside in search of their destination.
The holidays always bring out the worst in people, and travelers are the nastiest of all.
I take the window seat and press my cheek to the brittle plastic.
We ascend through the clouds, and the world shrinks to mist and the howl of jet engines.
I loved my brother, but I can’t find the slot in me where the sorrow goes.
I try to conjure a memory of his laugh, the way he’d drag out a joke like it was a hostage negotiation.
Instead, I remember the phone call five years ago when Dominic Stasio’s men told me to get out or watch Adam lose his skin in ribbons.
I remember Adam’s voice, wrecked with terror: “Please, bro.” I left so quickly, I don’t even remember packing.
I order another whiskey. For most of the flight, I sleep in chemical intervals, cold and sweating, and wake each time with the conviction that I’ve missed something important.
The plane lands in New York at 1:24, local time.
I shuffle out into the blast of JFK’s arrivals hall, which smells of wet newsprint and frayed humanity.
There’s a sign with my name on it, held by the family’s lawyer, who is seven years younger than me and dresses like an obituary. She hugs me stiffly.
“I’m so sorry, Pierce,” she says, and hands me an envelope thick with instructions. “I’ll take you uptown.”
Her name is Vicky. In the car, she tells me about arrangements, the exact time of the closed-casket wake, and the names of every family member who’s expected to show.
I listen for several blocks, and then tune her out.
Outside the window, the city is nothing but gray, noise, and vertigo.
Every other block is barbed with some artifact of our childhood: the deli where Adam first got arrested for shoplifting, the corner where our mother gathered with the other socialites to judge whomever they’d banished from their circle.
“The body’s at St. Luke’s,” Vicky says.
“It’s fine,” I say. “That’s fine.”
Her eyes flick to me and away. “You don’t have to go alone if you don’t want to.”
I open my mouth to answer, but no sound emerges.
When we park in Lenox Hill, the doorman recognizes me instantly but looks embarrassed to admit it.
The building’s lobby smells like expensive soap and the boiling discomfort of people who have never encountered ugliness until the elevator ride up.
Vicky steers me through, her hand at my back, gentle as a warning shot.
Our grandparents’ apartment hasn’t changed since Adam moved in last year.
The wallpaper is a nauseous green, the couch too large for human scale, the air still thick with the ghosts of discreet, WASPy violence.
I unlace my shoes and drop them by the door.
The first thing I notice is Adam’s phone on the coffee table, screen blown open to a text thread with a girl named Simone. Her last message: u coming tonight?
I unlock the phone with his birthday and scroll, but there’s nothing I didn’t already know. Adam’s final text is to me. I never answered it. Are you alive over there?
Vicky says, “Funeral’s Friday. Wake’s tomorrow night.” I nod.
“If you want to see him, I can call ahead.” She stands, smooths her skirt, and does not look at me.
“Did you know him well?” I ask.
Her face detonates with nervousness. “I drafted Adam’s will. We spoke. I liked him.”
“I’m glad someone did.” I pour a glass of water, and nearly spill it. My hand is still trembling, worse than this morning.
Vicky sees and steps forward. “Can I—?”
I’m not sure what she means, but the answer is no. “Thank you, but no.” I gesture at the door. “Get some rest. I’ll handle it from here.” She hesitates, then leaves.
For an hour, I walk in tight circles, touching Adam’s books, his bottles of pills, his pile of dry-cleaning that he never wore because he never had a job.
I find a shoebox in his closet filled with birthday cards, old watches, and a lambswool scarf our mother knitted before she went off the Tappan Zee.
The scarf is still bright, clownish in the sepulcher of his closet.
There is a photo of the two of us on the Amalfi Coast, the last time we saw our father upright and unsedated. I shove it in my pocket.
Instead of crying, I drink Adam’s vodka and watch the sky bruise through the window.
Sometime after midnight, I open the laptop and type Laura’s name into the search bar.
There are only two results—her private Instagram and a New York Post article with a photograph of her father leaving the King County Courthouse after beating another conviction.
Laura is positioned by his side, looking more sad than proud.
The picture shows Laura in a gray suit, her hair pulled back, her mouth set in a line capable of injury.
She looks older than I remember, but also less alive.
I stare at the photo until the screen blurs, then shut the laptop violently.
The urge to call her is so strong I have to sit on my hands to stop myself.
In the morning, I wake in Adam’s bed, fully clothed, my teeth furry and my mouth tasting of funeral flowers.
The phone is ringing again. This time it’s a cousin, or a family friend, or a reporter desperate for comment.
I unplug it and go to the window, which faces the river.
I imagine Adam’s body floating in slow increments, whole and unmarred, just drifting, and wonder if that isn’t the most peaceful he’s ever been.
The wake is a parade of strangers in suits who all say the same thing: “He was a great kid.” Most want to talk about his potential, as if that’s the only thing that matters. I let them. I shake hands with our father’s former associates, who smell like mothballs and scotch.
After the last guest leaves, I sit in the empty living room and stare at Adam’s urn. The compulsion to confess—to someone, to anyone—is overwhelming. I toy with the lock screen on my own phone, then open a new message and type Laura’s number from memory.
I delete it. I try again and delete that too.
It is easier to believe that she never searched for me, that her life went on uninterrupted.
That she’s not reading the news right now and remembering anything at all.
I picture her in the old limestone townhouse with her feet up on the windowsill, hair loose, drinking something bitter with the lights off. I picture her, and then I don’t.
In the dark, in Adam’s old bed, I listen to the noise of the city moving and moaning around me.
I trace the outline of the scar on my left wrist, the one Adam gave me when we were children, sword fighting with broken rulers.
I allow myself one memory, then another, and then the night is full of them, a thousand little deaths in the spaces where people used to be.
People who are no longer here.