Before We Were Innocent, page 25
* * *
—
My conversation with Steven that day was the last time anyone in my family would address Evangeline’s death outright. It was as much my fault as it was theirs—I knew that I could never reveal all the horrors I’d learned about the world when they weren’t there to protect me, so, instead, we skated around the topic with the grace of a corps de ballet. Evangeline’s death became “the accident,” and the media train wreck that followed just “what happened to me.” My incarceration was often defined as “when you were away,” and the entire sorry affair was summed up simply by the term “in Greece.” It was a shorthand that we would all have adopted seamlessly by the end of the year, until we stopped referencing it altogether. The atmosphere in our house became heavy with the weight of everything left unsaid, my parents circling me uneasily as Steven spent less and less time at home, often staying with a friend or girlfriend for days at a time to avoid being anywhere near me.
Outside the house was a different story. Everywhere I went, someone wanted to talk to me about what had happened. My dad’s lawyer friend had advised us to get out and about as soon as possible in an attempt to defuse the interest, but I still felt exposed, like I had been stripped down naked for strangers to scratch their opinions onto my bare skin. Each whisper, each frown, each polite smile offered up like a compromise in exchange for their judgment of me felt like a direct indictment of my lifestyle. I wondered if the checkout girl at Macy’s who avoided meeting my eye had memorized the evidence against me—the guys I’d fucked or hurt, the callous things I’d said—or if she too had just been offended by my general demeanor: the ruthlessness in my eyes or the set of my unsmiling mouth.
The news articles and TV reports kept coming, often oscillating wildly between sympathy and suspicion even within a single segment or piece. The author would express a basement-level display of compassion that we had been falsely accused, but the rest of the piece would still pit us against Evangeline, would still be dripping with the implication that we had brought it on ourselves by behaving so badly. As the guy delivering my Chinese takeout put it: “Damn. You’re either the luckiest or the unluckiest girl in the world, right?” I wanted to tell him that I was neither. That it could happen to him too, when he least expected it, and that I doubted his slate would be entirely clean when it did—that he’d never written a text that could be misinterpreted, or wounded someone who had liked him, or captioned a photo with song lyrics that might come back to haunt him. Instead, I gave him a five-dollar tip and closed the door.
My parents went back to work part-time, but when they were home they continued to wait on me like I was fragile and in need of extra care, while Steven carried on with his junior year of high school. I tried to venture out like I was told, but I grew to despise leaving the gates of my estate. Instead, I would walk around the neighborhood at night, all too aware that any person I met, even looked at, could fixate on something seemingly innocuous about our interaction to fit their own narrative instead of the truth, whatever that was. I had no control over what other people believed about me, and I barely even knew who I was anymore. As a result, I mainly stayed locked up in the house, a feeling of pure, icy terror gripping hold of me whenever I thought about starting at NYU the following fall.
Joni was, of course, the opposite. Within three weeks of being home, she had somehow secured an internship in New York at Dollface, a burgeoning website and monthly zine known for its razor-sharp wit and feminist politics. Joni informed me that she planned to move to the city for the five months before she was due to start at Berkeley, in a vigorously breezy manner that implied she knew I would take it as a blow, since I was the one who was supposed to be in New York, and she was supposed to be the one staying in California.
“But you hate New York,” I said. “You’re always bitching about the East Coast.”
“Plans change, Bess,” Joni said, as if I hadn’t already discovered this when I was staring at the peeling white bricks of a prison cell instead of walking through Washington Square Park with a cup of coffee and a Meg Wolitzer book tucked under my arm. “Why don’t you come with me?”
“I can’t,” I said, and by that point I could barely muster up the energy to care about anything for too long. Everything seemed deeply and unsettlingly insignificant compared to the fact that Evangeline was dead, and my secrets would never be my own again.
By all accounts, Joni thrived in her new city, the city that was once supposed to be mine. She still got tailed by the paparazzi occasionally, but I could see in the defiant way she dressed (ripped jean shorts and cutoff vintage tees, crystal headbands and cowboy boots), and the way that she glared into the camera one day and grinned the next, that it didn’t bother her. She called me every week to beg me to come and stay with her, but I always found a reason not to. Then, in her second month at Dollface, Joni was given a fifteen-minute weekly segment on their radio show, doling out friendship and life advice to callers, somewhat ironically at first and then more earnestly as she grew in confidence. She used to send me clips of her favorite episodes, and it frustrated me that she didn’t know she was being used—that the only reason she was getting all of these opportunities was because of the publicity having Joni Bonnier attached would generate.
“I’m going to change my name for the radio stuff,” she told me one day as she walked to her favorite East Village spot, Cafe Mogador. I held the phone slightly away from my ear so that I wouldn’t have to hear the new composure in her voice, the aura of confidence she’d somehow spun out of dirt. “What do you think of Joni Le Bon? It still feels like me, but also an upgrade. Like I’m simultaneously putting on a pair of couture wings and also giving a giant ‘fuck you’ to my dad, which I obviously don’t hate.”
I thought it sounded like pretentious bullshit, but I didn’t comment.
“Does anyone ever mention what happened to us?” I asked softly instead, and I could hear Joni suck on her rolled-up cigarette (another new habit she’d cheerfully adopted). “In New York, I mean.”
“I don’t let them,” she said. “Because I always mention it first. I don’t want anyone feeling sorry for us. That would be the worst thing of all.”
I thought about how the list of everyone I’d ever hooked up with was emblazoned across the internet for anyone to read, and how most of the world knew the color of my first vibrator. I thought about the website I’d stumbled upon the other day: BessandJoni AreGuilty.com, which detailed every piece of circumstantial evidence against us, every single accusation and judgment ever made by either someone we knew or a random journalist with no skin in the game other than to sell copies or ad space so that they could make some rich asshole even richer and they could keep their own kids in private school and the newest Jeremy Scott shoes, and how the website also had a forum, where people could share their own theories about what happened that night, and people still wrote in to drag us even now, nearly nine months after it happened.
So no, people feeling sorry for us wasn’t the worst thing of all. Not by any stretch.
Where did you go, Joni? I thought as we hung up.
FORTY-SEVEN
2018
TEN YEARS,” JONI SAYS, staring into her wineglass when we’re halfway through dinner, a couple of weeks later. “In six weeks, it will be ten whole years she’s been gone.”
For the first time, I don’t feel panicked when she says the words.
“Do you think we should do something?” Joni asks. “Nothing big. Just me and you, honoring her in some way.”
“Maybe,” I say, thinking about what that would look like. For some reason, I’m imagining us aboard a small boat in the Pacific, struggling to keep a candle alight in the wind, like Ev was fucking Princess Diana, and the image makes me smile. Maybe it would be okay to remember Evangeline as she was, now that the dust has settled.
When the doorbell rings, Joni and I look questioningly at one another before smiling again in quiet recognition. Of course neither of us invited anyone over. We don’t have any other friends, and even the most dogged reporters packed up and left weeks ago, turning their feverish attention to a teenage boy who poisoned his family in San Pedro.
“Possibly a delivery,” Joni says, when I’m already pushing my chair back from the table. “Would you mind?”
I open the door a few inches and my breath dies instantly.
Theo Aetos is standing on the doorstep.
* * *
—
“Bess,” Theo says evenly, and I turn around to look for Joni to ground me, but she seems as lost as I feel. I stumble backward, and in doing so implicitly invite Theo inside. As the door closes behind him, I spot the black Tesla parked across Joni’s driveway.
“I saw you on the security footage outside my mom’s house,” Theo says, his eyes flashing with something I can’t identify.
“And you’ve been following us since then?” Joni asks, her eyes narrowed.
“I haven’t had much luck getting hold of either of you,” Theo says, his voice rougher than I remembered.
I walk numbly back to my seat and Theo follows, sitting in between us, at the head of the table. I try not to think how the last time we were in the same room was at the police station in Mykonos days after Evangeline died, when I thought he might split open from grief and confusion. I wonder if Theo remembers that too, or if the faces and memories became hazy and blurred in the weeks after Evangeline’s death. If I became interchangeable. I look down at my ripped jeans and hoodie and think that this is how Theo will remember me forever now, replacing the golden eighteen-year-old with lemon-bleached hair and a Sharpie heart drawn on her foot.
Joni recovers first, offering Theo a choice of drink. As she’s reeling off expensive whisky and mescal brands, he listens in a way that only reminds me of Ev, before asking for a glass of water. While he’s interacting with Joni, I allow myself to study him, even though doing so feels almost bone-shatteringly painful because Theo looks even better than he did ten years ago, his face weathered in a way that implies a life filled with wholesome outdoor pursuits like kitesurfing and camping, as opposed to other markers of aging that come from overindulgence or extended periods of depression. His eyes are still a piercing green, and he has filled out somewhat, but overall he wears the past decade well, the only signs of tragedy being an intensity where there was once a boyish levity, as if he were somehow in on the joke of his own appeal.
While Joni is pouring the drinks, I feel Theo’s eyes on me in return. I wonder what he sees, whether he feels embarrassed for me and the ways I’ve changed, or whether he still sees the same catlike eyes, the same sharp teeth set within a mouth he once deemed attractive enough to kiss. I smooth my jeans, and when Joni hands him his drink, I’m the first to look away.
“Thanks,” Theo says as Joni takes her seat, opposite me.
“I’ve tried to get in touch with you,” he says to me. “Did you get my emails?”
I just stare helplessly at Joni until she swoops in to rescue me.
“We’re sorry we went to your mom’s house,” she says. “With everything that had been happening with Willa, and the anniversary of losing Ev coming up, we just wanted to remind ourselves of better times, but we weren’t thinking straight. We shouldn’t have gone there.”
“No,” Theo says. “You shouldn’t.”
“It’s been a strange time,” Joni says, studying Theo quickly. “I’m sure you’ll understand.”
“I heard about your fiancée,” Theo says stiffly. “I’m sorry for your loss.”
“Thank you,” Joni says, after a moment in which we’re all at pains to be quiet, paying our respects to the dead sisters and fiancées and child beauty queens. Then: “Fucking men.”
Theo only shrugs in response in a way that feels unfamiliar, even though this shouldn’t surprise me as I know nothing about him as he is now—this new version of Theo with a rose gold wedding band resting against his tanned knuckles, whose eyes I can barely bring myself to meet. He takes a sip of water as I search for the warmth, the compassion I remember from that summer.
“What exactly . . .” Joni starts. “Can we do for you?”
“I want to know—” Theo says. “I need you to explain why you never got in touch.”
For just a moment, my heart is suspended in the air, waiting for him to reach out and grab. But then he frowns and starts again, and this time I can hear the bitterness simmering beneath everything he says. “You were with her when she died, and you never for one moment thought I might have some questions. Instead, you come back to LA, and you pretend like nothing happened. You pretend like I didn’t lose the single most important person to me and that I might want to, you know, hear about her last days, or moments, or even talk about why the rest of the world was so happy to believe you killed her.”
I stare down at my hands, unable to look at him.
“Theo,” Joni says. “I understand that you’re angry about what happened, but there is no happy ending to this story. There’s no meaning, there’s no closure that we, or anyone, can ever give you. She’s just gone.”
“You,” Theo says, turning his focus on her. “You have built a career on my family name, and still you never think to check in on us? What happened to radical honesty? To healing past wounds? To open communication? Where the fuck do I fit into all of that?”
Joni sits back in her chair, stunned, and I try to absorb it all, the rawness of his grief. I remember now that Evangeline may have hero-worshipped Theo, but, in return, she was both his anchor and his safety net. As well as the sheer, unimaginable grief, the loss of his opposing force must have left Theo so stunningly unbalanced that it would have been impossible for him to continue along the path he’d once assumed was set in stone. I feel a sudden crushing sadness for him and everything he lost that night too.
“What is it that you want to know?” I ask, surprising both myself and Joni, who shoots a furious look at me. Theo takes a deep breath.
“Everything,” he says. “For you, Evangeline is just one chapter among many more, but for her? The three of us? We were it. We were the whole book for Ev.”
Joni stands to get a bottle of wine, and I slowly lift my eyes to meet Theo’s.
You can do this, I tell myself. It’s time to remember.
* * *
—
Tentatively, we land on the good stories first—memories that capture Ev’s humanity, her innate hatred of cruelty and injustice, because these are the qualities we’ve internalized despite our best efforts, the ones we made ourselves remember because only the good die young. Then, little by little, as the wine bottles empty and Theo softens slightly, we open it up wider, inviting in the half stories, the ones without a perfect arc or lesson learned, the forgotten one-liners that captured Ev’s immaturity or snobbery, and others that showcased her surprising sense of humor.
Once the stories have dried up and my face hurts both from smiling and trying not to cry, Theo drains the last drop of wine from his glass in a decisive manner that makes me think the night is over and somehow we have all survived it. I wait for him to stand up and leave for another lifetime, but instead he leans in toward me, so close that I can see the cabernet stains in the grooves of his lips.
“And the end?” Theo asks then, his green eyes landing on mine. I try to catch my breath, but I am frozen, blindsided even though of course this was coming, of course we couldn’t distract him only with shiny stories about when Ev was breathing and fallible, ignoring the moments before her young bones shattered on the rocks.
I meet Joni’s eyes, and, almost imperceptibly, she shakes her head.
“I wish there was more to tell you about that night, but it just happened,” Joni says. “There was nothing remotely special about it, other than that was the night we lost her. It doesn’t help to try to give it some profound meaning now, Theo. Believe me, I’ve tried.”
“You know, I think a lot about the last time I saw her. That last night in Tinos,” Theo says then, his eyes still on me. “Bardo said she cried. Were we cruel to have left her?”
I feel a wet trickle of shame down the back of my neck.
“She seemed really happy,” Joni says after a moment. “In Mykonos . . . You know that Ev was too good, too happy to hold on to anything dark for long.”
After a moment, I nod my agreement.
“She was happy,” I say quietly. “I remember her being happy.”
Theo swipes at a tear, and we sit in miserable silence until he regains his composure.
“I should get going,” he says, pushing his chair back. “I’m staying at my mom’s for the week. Not that she’ll notice if I’m not there.”
“Of course,” Joni says, the relief on her face enough to make me wince.
“Is it okay if I leave my car in your garage tonight?” Theo asks, and when he stretches, I can see a line of his bare stomach, softer and hairier than it had been ten years ago. I look away quickly so that he doesn’t catch me comparing him to a boy, really, who doesn’t exist anymore.
“How will you get back?” Joni asks, a note of irritability in her tone.
Theo looks down at his phone. “Embarrassingly, my mom’s driver is always on call. In case she runs out of anything, I guess . . .”
He doesn’t say what “anything” is, but we all know that he’s talking about whatever it is that wraps her in a cloud of numbness, whatever it is that cut the cord between her and the rest of the world. Whatever it is that made him and Evangeline cling to each other like orphans when they were kids.
“You didn’t drink that much, did you?” Joni says, even as she eyes the empty bottles of wine on the table, the telltale deep red rings of our glasses sinking into the wood. I shoot her a look to tell her that she’s being rude, that if Theo wants to leave his car in her garage, she should let him, and not because it means I might get to glimpse him one final time tomorrow but because it’s the least we can do for him.
