St. Helena, Napa County, California
October–November 1999
I FELT EMILIA’S ABSENCE like a wound in the weeks, and then month, after she left, but I threw myself into work at the winery in an effort to stop thinking about her. I still didn’t know what to do about David. His indiscretion had become the one thing we didn’t talk about anymore, and the more we avoided the topic, the bigger it became. I spent long hours outside, grateful that there was always something to do in the vineyard. As the temperature sank, I relished the cooler evenings, and on one of the few days when the sky graced us with a rainstorm, I stood with my arms outstretched, letting the drops spackle my face and clothes.
A week after Emilia left, I cried when Camille went home to Santa Barbara, even as she promised to come and visit again soon. She was holding back her own tears too. Kieran was down for a nap. She’d said goodbye to him already, a private moment I hadn’t witnessed. He was far too young to understand what was happening, but when he woke up later and I picked him up from his crib, his eyes darted around, as if he sensed I wasn’t the person he wanted to see.
Josh and Michelle continued at a steady equilibrium. When she came over, she was polite if a bit reserved, and from the outside, Josh was a doting boyfriend. I started to question my earlier doubts and tried to see him like Camille and David did. As a teenager, one with a good head on his shoulders, who was making the best choices he could. Rodney’s words at the grocery store evaporated in my mind: he was an overprotective father and probably didn’t want to let go of his little girl.
Whenever I wanted to pick up the phone and call Emilia—and I did want to, often, to recapture how I’d felt around her—I called a different number instead. Andrew, at the dorms. He seemed solid, and like he was happy with his fresh start. Either he was a master at avoiding the truth, like David and I were, or he really had moved on.
“How are you doing, Mom?” he asked one night, two weeks before he was due to come home for Thanksgiving.
“I’m—I’m fine,” I said, clutching the phone tightly. “Why? How are you?”
He shrugged. “I guess I’m a bit nervous.”
Tension coiled around my shoulders. “About what?”
“Coming home. It’s just different now.” His words were heavy with hesitation.
“It’s not that different,” I said weakly.
“I’m nervous to see Josh.”
Josh rarely came up during our calls.
“He’s your brother,” I started. I didn’t know how to finish. I couldn’t force myself to lie.
“I didn’t do what he said I did, Mom,” Andrew said.
I wanted so badly to take sides. The two words would have been so easy to choke out: I know. But that was admitting to myself that the truly guilty person was Josh, and the only proof I had was my own suspicion.
“Let’s move past it,” I said, attempting to smooth things over. “You’re doing so well, and it’s Thanksgiving coming up, and we have a lot to be thankful for.”
He paused. “I just need you to know that I’m not capable of doing what everyone thinks I did. Sharing that photo. I didn’t even know it existed.”
I nodded, my way of agreeing without saying a word. I pictured him on the other end, drumming his fingers on his denim-clad knee. Andrew fidgeted when he was nervous.
“You’re not,” I blurted out, because I had been silent long enough. “You aren’t capable of something like that. You care about people. You’re amazing, Andrew.”
He didn’t speak. He wasn’t expecting me to say it, but the truth we were both skipping around hung heavily between us. If Andrew wasn’t capable, that meant Josh was.
“Then why am I here?” he said in a small voice, suddenly sounding half his age.
I forced my sob back. I wasn’t allowed to cry, not when Andrew was holding it together, in a new place, uprooted from his entire life.
“You’ll have so many more opportunities there,” I said, recycling the same lie David and I had used so many times.
David insisted on driving to the Dunn campus to pick Andrew up. I would stay home with Kieran, who had started hating his car seat the same week he learned how to walk, a milestone I felt guilty Camille wasn’t around to see. He screamed every time I tried to strap him in, red blotches appearing on his cheeks. Somehow, when I wasn’t looking, my baby was becoming more and more like a toddler, just two months away from his first birthday. I had wanted him to grow up, but I missed the baby he had been the second he wasn’t there anymore. Only motherhood offered the unique pain of mourning someone right in front of you.
I changed my outfit three times, parted my hair in the center, then threw it back up in a ponytail. My breast-milk supply was almost depleted, and the more Kieran relied on solid foods, the less he fed from me, which was both a relief and a disappointment.
When David pulled up and Andrew emerged from the back seat, I was struck not by how he’d changed but how he hadn’t. I had expected that he would look different, transformed by his time at the Dunn School in ways I wouldn’t recognize. But he looked the same. He looked identical to the boy we had brought to the campus three months ago. He looked identical to his brother. His brother, who remained upstairs, with his bedroom door pulled tight, rock music throbbing from the walls.
“Mom,” Andrew said, wrapping me in his arms. Both of my teenage sons had outgrown me years ago. They both used to tuck their heads into the crook of my hip when they got scared, when I dropped them off at preschool and they didn’t want to be separated from me. David had called them my “barnacles,” once upon a time, with affection. Now, my head could rest comfortably on their shoulders.
“I missed you so much,” I said, my voice thick with emotion. I wanted the week to be perfect.
“I missed you too,” he said.
It had always been Josh who took up more space, Josh who lifted weights and spent time in the home gym David had installed in our basement. But I realized that Andrew wasn’t the same. He had changed. He’d been working out. He looked more like his brother than ever.
On Wednesday night, after I’d made his favorite dinner—beef stroganoff, which he barely touched—Andrew surprised me by saying he was going to meet up with a couple of his friends.
“I can drive you,” I offered. “Just let me pack up Kieran—”
“Thanks, Mom, but I can walk,” he said. “I could use the fresh air.”
When he was gone, I knocked on Josh’s door to bring him a plate of food—he hadn’t come down for dinner, insisting that he had too much homework to catch up on, which I knew was a weak excuse to avoid sitting across the table from Andrew. I found him lying on his bed, staring at the ceiling with headphones on.
“Where’s Michelle tonight?” I asked gently. She’d been spending time at the house more often than not, so her absences didn’t go unnoticed.
I could tell I’d struck a nerve by the way his body tensed up, the mechanical way he removed his headphones. “Home, I guess. She had a tennis thing and wanted to go to bed early.”
“It’s good for you to have your own lives.” It was the wrong thing to say. Josh sucked in a breath.
“I know that,” he said. “I do have a life.”
“Have you spoken to your brother yet? You can’t avoid him forever.”
He put his headphones back on. “Have you ever considered it’s him who’s avoiding me?”
After I left his room, I shrugged into my jean jacket and wandered outside to the vineyard. I’d been taking long walks at night as a way to distract myself from thinking about Emilia. In the company of the vines—now all but empty of their grapes, a leafy-green gold during the day, blackened and spindly at night—I let myself obsess over where she was and what she might be doing and who she might be meeting, my gut twisting from the absolute lack of control I had over anything.
As I passed the barn near the edge of the property, the tall wooden structure where the boys sometimes hung out with friends on weekend nights, I heard sounds, low and murmured. A series of breathy sighs; an occasional hushed laugh. Muted orange light dappled the grass, coming from somewhere inside the barn. I realized it was the flickering of candlelight.
I held my breath in my chest like a bubble. David was supposed to be in town for a meeting. He’d told me not to wait up. I’d believed him, but clearly, I’d been wrong to. Kicking him out changed nothing, and our tenuous peace—the way we carefully tiptoed around the affair, the small ways we had been trying to reconnect—was part of a carefully constructed front. He was still cheating on me, and I was about to catch him in the act.
My footfalls were quiet as I approached. I thought about making my presence known, throwing all of David’s lies in his face like scalding water. That was what I wanted to do, but the closer I got, the more it felt like I was walking in on something forbidden. Like I was the intruder.
I stood at the broken barn door, hovering in the dark as I peered through a missing slat of wood. That was when I realized I was wrong. It wasn’t David inside. It was Josh and Michelle, in a nest of blankets on the ground, candles surrounding them. He was poised on top of her, kissing her forehead tenderly, her arms wrapped around him, his back milk white in the moonlight.
I had long known Josh was sexually active. I’d found an opened box of condoms in his nightstand the year before, its number of foil-wrapped packets dwindling. But I had never been confronted with the physical proof of it.
Michelle moaned lightly. “Josh,” she whispered, and I squeezed my eyes shut, not wanting to see or hear any more. There was nothing I could do that wouldn’t totally humiliate everyone involved. I fixed my gaze on the ground as I quietly sidestepped away, trying not to alert them to my presence. I heard rustling and murmured words, and only as I shuffled back toward the house did the truth of it finally hit me.
I’d just spoken to Josh. He was upstairs in his room.
Which meant Andrew was the one in the barn with Michelle.
My limbs became rubber. My brain tried to manufacture an excuse. Josh could have lied about seeing Michelle tonight, then slipped out here. When I returned to the house, I’d see his empty bed and know he had somehow gotten out the door and into the barn without my noticing.
I needed it to make sense. Because if it didn’t make sense, it meant Andrew had lied about meeting up with friends and had impersonated his brother in order to have sex with his brother’s girlfriend, and that was a thought too sickening to fathom. Andrew wasn’t capable of that deceit, of tricking Michelle like that. It would eat him alive.
But we had sent him away to Dunn. We had chosen to believe Josh’s side of the story. That Andrew was jealous and troubled, and had lied about the photo of Abby. That he had intentionally circulated it to ruin something Josh had that he wanted. Was Josh’s version the truth? Andrew had seemed so calm, so at peace, every time I talked to him on the phone. But maybe he wasn’t moving on. Maybe he was biding his time.
When I got back to the front porch, my brain felt disconnected from my body. I almost didn’t want to go inside, because once I did, I would have to acknowledge what I already knew to be true.
Josh was sitting on the sofa, watching TV, his socked feet drumming on the coffee table.
“Hey, Mom.” His gaze was fixed on the screen as a laugh track blared out. “Don’t give me a lecture—I’ve done all my homework for the break already.”
“I wasn’t going to,” I said. My voice sounded tinny and unnatural, but he didn’t seem to notice.
So I said nothing. Above all, it might have been an act of defense. I was worried about what he would do to his brother if he knew what Andrew had done, just like I worried about what he might have done had Andrew not left for the Dunn School.
In the end, it was all the things unsaid that ended up mattering most.