I waited until the following day, after Ethan left for a bowling party one of the kids from Casden was having for his birthday. I was surprised Ethan was on the invitation list, and even more surprised that he had accepted.
I unplugged the burner phone that was still charging in my bedroom, pulled the envelope from the Cuyahoga County Clerk of Courts, and made my way down the hall to Nicky’s room. She told me to come in after a quick tap on the door. She was carrying a bundle of clothes from the window bench. “Sorry, I was just straightening up.”
“Nicky, you don’t need to clean your room for me. It’s your room.”
“I’m cleaning for myself. I’ll never be as OCD as you, but I’m not a total pig.” She dropped the items on top of her dresser. “What’s up?” she said, gesturing to the envelope in my hand as she took a seat on the edge of her bed. She must have sensed from my expression that I wanted to talk to her about something.
I flipped open the phone and read the number I had already pulled up on the screen. It was stored under “N.” A 440 area code. I thought nothing of it when I first found the burner in Ethan’s backpack—just another one of Ethan’s friends he didn’t want us to know about, I assumed. Cleveland had been 216 when I lived there. Apparently 440 had been added after I left.
I had already tried calling the number the night before. The woman who answered told me she’d only had the number for a month.
Nicky’s brow furrowed, and she bit her lip.
“He was calling you a lot,” I said. “For months.” He had started to tell me when he finally opened up about what happened the night Adam was killed, but I had cut him off, assuring him that the tensions between Nicky and me were in the past.
I had expected her to lie, because in my mind, Nicky always lied when backed into a corner. Instead, she admitted it. “He started reaching out to me about a year ago, saying he wanted to know me better. I’m the one who told him to get a burner phone, and I did the same. I was terrified that you and Adam would see he was calling me, and find a way to cut me out even more than you already had.”
It wasn’t an irrational fear. Adam had had their custody agreement written with ironclad provisions that punished Nicky for any type of unauthorized contact with Ethan.
I remembered Ethan coming into the living room and showing us the Post article about his bringing a gun to Casden. “A gun?” Nicky had said. “You never told me about this.”
Her comment seemed strange at the time. I never told her anything about Ethan, because we hardly ever spoke. But the comment hadn’t been directed at me. It was for Ethan. Whatever information he was sharing with her, he hadn’t told her everything.
“He talked to you about us?” I asked, sitting next to her on the bed.
“Not initially. Honestly, I don’t think he knew at first what to say to me, but I could tell he wanted a connection. So I’d just talk about my life instead. The jewelry I make. The tomatoes I was trying to grow, even though it was obvious I was never going to make it work. I told him funny memories of you growing up. Old Tessa next door became a bit of a character in the stories—the way I’d always find her going through neighborhood trash, searching for hidden treasure.” My parents’ neighbor Tessa had been the local crazy old lady even when I was little. She had probably only been my age at the time. “Over time, he opened up. It was clear he was having problems with Adam.”
I shook my head. “I don’t understand why you didn’t tell me.”
“And I didn’t understand why you weren’t telling me. We’re obviously in a different place now. I figured Ethan was almost an adult and could start making his own choices about what role I’d play in his life. He slowly started sharing more about what was going on—Adam struggling for power, trying to control everyone and everything. It brought back all those old memories. He said ever since Adam found out about the pot, he’d been spot-checking Ethan’s room. Treating him like a criminal. I believe him about not selling, by the way, but he was smoking—a lot. Too much. It sounded so much like me before I got sober. He swore he wasn’t addicted, but said it made him feel better. And then Adam would try to tell Ethan that he’d done all these bad things when he was high.”
“What do you mean, ‘bad things’?”
“So I guess if he smokes too much, he crashes. Like a sleep you can’t wake up from.” I thought of all the times Ethan had come up and fallen into a coma on the sofa. I didn’t even realize he was high. “Adam would go yell at him and try to wake him up, and Ethan would be out cold. And then Adam would tell him later that Ethan had screamed at him for coming into his room. And then he told him that he had nearly hurt Panda, throwing him off his bed.”
“Adam never told me any of this.”
“Exactly. It was always when you weren’t home, apparently. After the thing with Panda, Ethan started wondering if Adam was just making it all up.”
“But why?”
“To make him feel bad. To control him. That’s what abusers do, Chloe. They gaslight their victims. Adam was telling Ethan that he was starting to go crazy like his mother—just like in that video. And that was why Ethan had the webcam set up in his room—he wanted to know if those things were true. He didn’t think so, but he didn’t understand why Adam would lie to him.”
“And what were you doing in response to all this?”
“Just listening to him. He needed someone to talk to.”
I started to say that he should have come to me, but obviously he didn’t think he could. If I couldn’t stand up for myself, how was I going to protect him?
“Did he tell you what Adam was doing to me?” I still couldn’t bring myself to say the words. I would never think of myself that way.
“Yes. And it was killing me to know that he was hurting you. I thought so many times about calling you, but I didn’t want to betray Ethan’s trust. And I was scared it would backfire on me if you guys knew I was talking to him. And then one day—sometime in April, I think—he suddenly throws it out there that Adam could have lied about what happened at the pool when Ethan was little. I mean, I don’t remember anything from that night. I just assumed Adam was telling the truth. I was horrified. I was certain there was no way I was actually trying to hurt Ethan, but I took the basic facts as a given. But the reality is: Adam could have just pushed me into the water and dragged me back out. I never would have known.”
I finally pulled the documents from the mailing envelope on my lap. “The blood tests at the hospital put you at a point-one-eight BAC, mixed with flu-ox-e-tine—” I sounded out the syllables.
“Prozac,” she said. “It does a body good, but not with all the booze in the house.”
“Plus zolpidem.”
“Ambien.”
“That much, Adam told me. But the records also show that you had contusions on your arms. Adam said it must have happened when he was pulling you from the water. When you came to, he said you started resisting him, trying to go back in.” Adam was one of the most admired young prosecutors at the county DA’s office. No one would have questioned his version of events. He was the heroic dad who had saved his baby from a disturbed wife.
“Maybe. Like I said, I don’t remember anything. Or maybe it happened because he threw me in while I was passed out. Honestly, I want to believe that’s what occurred, but I can’t know for sure. But Ethan was really starting to question whether Adam lied about what went down that night. He accused him during an argument, and that’s when Adam started talking about sending him to military school.”
“Except I think maybe there is a way to know, Nicky.” I handed her a page of the police report from the night Adam rescued Ethan from the swimming pool. I had already highlighted the paragraph I wanted her to read.
Macintosh says wife appeared to be unconscious. As he tried to pull her out of the water, she began to resist him. She kept saying “I’ll be an angel over Wallace Lake.” Per Macintosh, it’s a memory from wife’s childhood. He explained it’s a reference to family version of the prayer, “Now I lay me down to sleep.” He took it to be an expression of his wife’s desire to end her life.
“You never saw this before?” I asked.
She shook her head. “It doesn’t make any sense. I never told him about that. And that’s not even the right line. It was ‘I’ll wait for you at Shadow Lake.’ We were talking about that right when the trial started, remember?”
And then she made the connection. She remembered the actual phrase, but I hadn’t. I had changed it in my head over the years. And during one of those phone calls Adam made to tell me how worried he was about Nicky, I had told him what a good big sister she used to be to me when I was little. I told him how I used to get scared when saying my prayers, and she made up a version about us being angels together. And then I told him my altered version, including the name of the wrong lake.
“He was lying, Nicky. You weren’t trying to kill yourself.”
“Which means I wasn’t trying to hurt Ethan.”
“You didn’t hurt Ethan. He couldn’t even talk then. He was breathing perfectly fine by the time paramedics arrived. Adam made the whole thing up—so he could leave you and take Ethan.”
“When did you get these?” she asked.
“Yesterday. Ethan ordered them back in April. It must have taken this long for the clerk to get around to the archive search.”
She reached over and took the rest of the documents from me and began flipping through them.
“Is that why you killed Adam?” I finally asked. “Because he stole Ethan? You wanted custody again?”
She shook her head. I’d spent my whole life thinking she was a liar, and this time, I really wanted to believe her denial.
But she wasn’t denying it, at least not the part about killing Adam. “It was because Adam was starting to hurt you, and I could see how it was destroying Ethan. He was breaking that sweet little boy. Sending him away? Throwing him out like that? Take a look at the newspapers, filled with headlines about monstrous men who were once boys unloved by their fathers.”
Just as I had asked: What if we had been boys?
“It’s not what I wanted, Chloe, but Ethan called me Thursday night—it was after you won that First Amendment prize. He said he spent the whole time scared shitless that Adam wouldn’t show up and that it was going to set him off if you got upset about it. I guess it all worked out that night, but I could tell Ethan felt like he was living in a tinderbox. He said you were heading to East Hampton for the weekend, and he was going to spend the night with his friend so he wouldn’t have to deal with Adam. So I jumped in the car first thing the next morning and was, like, fuck it, I’m going to call Adam out on this myself if I have to. Then I got to your house and had no idea what to do next. I actually saw you leave for your party. You looked so pretty.”
I let her keep talking. There was nothing for me to say.
“Then I just waited, and Adam came home. I finally got up the nerve to knock on the door. He let me in.” That had to have been when the alarm was turned off. “I told him Ethan saw through him better than I ever could, and that I wasn’t going to let him do to him what he’d done to me. I wasn’t going to let him break our son. And then that dark side came out, and I felt so powerless again. I have worked so hard to improve myself. To be a different person. And in a matter of minutes, it was all gone. I felt small. Meek. And then, I wasn’t.”
“Were you defending yourself? Did he try to hurt you?”
She shook her head. “I could say that, but it wouldn’t be true. I remember his face when he realized what I had done. He was so shocked. And he looked at me, like, Oh, you are going to regret this. But then I pulled the knife out and did it again.” I knew she had stabbed him a total of five times. “I’m so sorry, Chloe. I know you loved him.”
“Your cell phone. You knew to leave it in Cleveland. And the knife. We weren’t missing one.”
“I still carry Dad’s old Buck knife everywhere I go—or at least I did until that night.” He had loved that thing. I had tried buying him fancier ones over the years, but he remained loyal to that twenty-five-dollar blade. “And I left my phone at home because I was terrified that he was going to haul me into court for showing up at the house unannounced. I figured I’d just lie and deny, deny, deny, and then produce my phone records showing I was getting a signal in good ol’ Cleveland all weekend.”
She had been planning to gaslight the gaslighter, but had ended up killing him instead.
“You’re going to turn me in, aren’t you? At this point, I don’t even care what happens to me anymore. I wanted Ethan to be okay, and I know he’s going to be all right with you—now that Adam is gone.”
I wasn’t going to turn her in. It would destroy my son—our son.
“Do you still have the knife?”
She said she had it hidden at the house in Cleveland.
“Well, I think it’s about time you moved some more of your things to New York.”