St. Helena, Napa County, California
November–December 1999
MICHELLE YOUNG’S DEATH WAS ruled an accidental drowning. It was the water that had killed her, the drowning that was her official cause of death. But the rocky ledge she’d hit her head on had been what made her drown in the first place. The autopsy showed a high alcohol level in her bloodstream. It all culminated in a tragic but predictable story. She had gotten drunk at the party, tripped, and smacked her head on the ledge, then passed out, sinking under without so much as a scream.
I wanted to believe it, but I couldn’t stop wondering about the puka shell necklace hidden in my jeans pocket. I had known it was only a matter of time until Michelle found out what happened in the barn. Andrew must have known that too. Had Michelle mentioned the barn to Josh, the time she believed they’d spent there? My brain spun with theories I tried to expunge. I wanted to think the same thing David did: that Josh was innocent of any wrongdoing.
I watched Josh closely in the days that followed, wishing a puka shell necklace would materialize around his neck and put to rest my suspicion that the necklace in my pocket was his. I couldn’t quite remember—had he been wearing it recently? He was always losing things, leaving them at school or around the house. Had he lost it by the pond weeks ago?
David and I were supposed to take Andrew back to Dunn, but I didn’t want to let him go. I was suddenly terrified of what would happen with either of my sons out of my sight.
I cried on the phone to Camille, who had been visiting friends in Maine for Thanksgiving. But even though I was used to telling her everything, I left out the part where Michelle had wanted to talk to me that night, and that I never heard what she was going to say. I left out the puka shell necklace. I left out a lot. I knew Camille would just find a way to defend the boys anyway.
The Golden Grape closed to the public until we could figure out a reopening strategy. We were warned that there would be a lawsuit: Rodney was suing us for accidental death and underage drinking on our property. We hired a lawyer, at first unsure if Rodney had grounds for a real case. But he did. We would have to pay, although we weren’t sure how much. David wanted to fight it—to protect us and our winery at all costs—but I had no fight left. I couldn’t put a price on Michelle’s life.
Five days after the party, Rodney Young turned up on our property, ranting and red-faced, spittle flying from his mouth. “Your son killed our daughter,” he shouted. “I know he did it. I told him to stay away. I knew he was bad for her.”
All I could do was cry.
“We are so devastated over Michelle’s death. But this was a tragic accident,” David said, cool and collected as ever, as I stood useless in the background, tears dripping down my cheeks. He spoke to Rodney not like a friend, a friend he’d gotten drunk and shared meals with, but like a pacifying father figure.
“This isn’t over,” Rodney said, putting his hands on David and pushing him backward. “Maybe you should ask your boy what happened to Michelle. Better yet, send him out here. I’ll get him to talk.”
In the end, Rodney finally got back in his car, his tires spitting up gravel as he sped out of the parking lot. Jen was waiting in the passenger seat. She wouldn’t even look at me. Sylvie hadn’t come by. I’d had flowers and a card delivered to her house. She never responded, and I didn’t expect her to. The flowers had probably been tossed promptly into the garbage.
We deserved Jen’s avoidance, Sylvie’s silence. We deserved Rodney’s wrath. Michelle had died on our watch. I walked around with the same nausea I’d had in my early pregnancy with the twins. Back then, I had ignored it because it was inconvenient, the same way I had ignored the warning signs as the boys grew up. Josh loved to win; Andrew was his built-in competitor. I should have stepped in more often. I should have disciplined Josh and defended Andrew, instead of telling myself they’d figure it out. Josh would mellow with age, and Andrew would grow more of a backbone.
Josh and Andrew had already given their version of events from the party to the detectives, glassy-eyed and shell-shocked as they made their statements. Andrew had left the party early and gone up to his room, a story David and I corroborated. People had seen Michelle upset, but nobody knew what was bothering her. Josh said he was busy putting out the bonfire and thought she’d gotten a ride home with a friend.
Neither of them mentioned the barn and what had transpired there. It would have given them both a motive to want Michelle gone.
As the days stacked up after Michelle’s death, I avoided my sons. I could barely look at them, and our conversations were formal and stilted. Michelle hung heavily in every room, making it hard to take a breath. Whenever I brought her up, the boys both went quiet.
“I don’t want to think about her like that,” Josh told me. “Like she isn’t here anymore. It hurts too much.”
I could tell he was holding back tears. I let myself believe that the tears were of sadness, not guilt.
Josh and Andrew weren’t speaking, but they weren’t arguing either. If Josh knew about what had happened in the barn, like I suspected he did, I would have expected him to treat Andrew terribly. But instead, the boys completely ignored each other in the days that followed Michelle’s death. It was like each was already dead to the other.
I needed to talk to someone, but David felt unavailable, the same way he had felt after Abby. He had gone on autopilot, compartmentalizing Michelle’s death as a tragic accident. I needed someone more removed from the situation—someone who wasn’t afraid to be honest.
I didn’t expect Emilia to answer. I had no idea where she was—New York, Naples, or somewhere else, maybe at a lush green winery on the other side of the world, tipping a dark-cherry Chianti into her mouth and giving a throaty laugh. But she answered on the first ring, her voice hoarse with sleep. “Bev Jamieson. I was just thinking about you.”
“Why do you keep calling me Bev Jamieson? I’m Bev Kelly now.”
I heard the smile her face was making. “Because you’ll always be Bev Jamieson to me. The girl I met the first week of college, with the shearling coat and the adorable Midwest accent you tried so hard to hide. No matter how much you change.”
I paused. “Did I wake you up? I wasn’t sure where you were.”
“I’m in Puglia. And it’s like I knew you were going to call. I was at a winery today that has this red wine you’d be obsessed with. I was thinking about you and how much you’d love it.”
“You could have called me,” I said quietly.
“You know why I didn’t,” she said. We both knew. It was the same reason she had never placed a wine order from the Golden Grape. She was keeping her distance.
I sank onto the sofa and tucked my legs beneath my robe, her voice untethering me from my dark reality. “Something happened,” I said, and I told her everything about that night, leaving out only the details about Andrew and Michelle in the barn and finding the necklace at the pond. I would carry my doubts to the grave.
“Oh my god,” she said. “I’m so sorry, Bev. That’s terrible. I don’t even know what to say, except that I know you’re blaming yourself—I can hear the guilt in your voice. And this was not your fault.” I could practically feel her fingertips on my face, her silken touch.
“But if the boys …,” I started, unsure of how far I should go. “If she drowned because of something they did … I told you about Andrew being away at boarding school, and the week he came home … this happened.” I tiptoed closer to the truth without bringing up the evidence. “I should have done something. If I’d been a better mother …”
“You’re a good mother,” she said. “I know how much you care about them. But your sons are their own people. You can’t influence everything they do.”
She didn’t understand. She wasn’t a mother and never would be. Emilia was free to live for herself, but it was because she didn’t know the sacrifices demanded by motherhood. The gap between us had never felt wider.
“Do you want me to come over?” she said quietly.
“You’re halfway around the world,” I said, her soft words curdling the longer they sat in my ear. It was that easy for her to hop on a plane and make a change.
“Just say the word, and I don’t have to be.”
“No,” I said, the syllable coming out more harshly than I’d meant it to. It wasn’t Emilia’s fault that she couldn’t understand what I was going through. And it no longer felt like just me and Emilia. David was home, and we were getting back to normal.
“We can just sit like this,” she said. “It’s the next best thing to actually being together.”
So we did. We sat in silence, and eventually, I was hushed to sleep by the faint sounds of her breath.
More than once after Michelle’s death, David found Rodney Young creeping around the vineyard, half-drunk and ranting that the police had missed something. David walked him off the property, trying to calm him down, offering him coffee, asking him if he wanted Jen to pick him up. The final time, Rodney spat in his face and told him he would make sure the Golden Grape was razed to the ground one day.
“The police missed something,” he yelled. “But my lawyers won’t. And I won’t. I’ll never stop looking.”
He wasn’t wrong. The police had missed something. The puka shell necklace was hidden under our mattress. When I was certain nobody was around, I would bury it deep in the garden.
Even though I had disagreed with David about virtually everything since the incident with Abby, I began to understand, in my panicked fugue, his approach. He had believed his son, and did everything he could to protect him. He believed the best of those he loved. And we didn’t have any concrete proof that Josh had been involved, just like we had no proof now. I told myself the police would have found out if something was awry, and they had cleared both my sons of wrongdoing.
The more I thought about it, the more I questioned myself. If the necklace was Josh’s, it could have fallen off at any point in time. Lots of boys at St. Helena wore puka shell necklaces. Andrew had one too—I’d just never seen it around his neck. Had he taken it to Dunn with him and left it there? When the boys were out of the house, I searched their bedrooms, opening desk drawers and digging through piles of clothes, but found nothing. The question of whose necklace was under my mattress would be another one for which there was no answer.
If Michelle had been upset after finding out about Andrew, it made sense that she might have had way too much to drink, trying to numb herself. If she had been disoriented, she could have stumbled to the pond and fallen in, hitting her head in the process. The chain of events made sense when I thought about it like that—as a chain, one link leading to the next. But in my head, it was looped and knotted. I was haunted not by certainty, but by the possibility that my sons could have been involved.
Still—what was the alternative? If I voiced my suspicions, I’d be irreparably breaking our family apart. Our family, which was already hanging by a thread.
“Our business is tanking,” David said that night, pulling on his pajama pants in a frustrated huff. “My great-grandfather named this place, built it from nothing. It survived phylloxera because of him. And my grandpa kept it out of bankruptcy during Prohibition and the Great Depression. They never gave up, and I won’t either. We can’t let this ruin our legacy.” His head was in his hands. I’d seen David cry only twice—when his father died, and then when his mother went shortly after. Family meant everything to him.
“A girl is dead, David,” I said, my throat closing around that word: dead. Not just any girl—Michelle, a girl who’d had her whole life ahead of her. I didn’t see how we, or the Golden Grape, could move forward.
“I understand that. And it’s a terrible tragedy—I haven’t stopped thinking about it. But Rodney isn’t going to let this rest. He’s out for blood, Bev.” His forehead was creased, his undereyes pouchy. I knew how much David was dealing with: the phone calls, the threats, the ugly things he was trying to shield us from.
“We’ll be okay,” I said. I wanted to believe it.
His body shifted, and he took my hands in his. His eyes were wild in a way I rarely saw, and I willed him to give me more of that wildness, more of his anger and fear. “Bev, I don’t know—”
He was interrupted by a crashing sound from down the hall. I threw my robe on and followed David toward the source of the noise. When we got to Josh’s room, Josh was on top of Andrew, his fist midswing. But no—it was the other way around, Andrew throwing the punches, Josh on the ground, his arms up in defense.
“You’re a fucking liar,” Andrew shouted, spit flying from his lips. “Did you kill her?”
“I didn’t touch her,” Josh said, his palms raised, his voice calm. “Just like I didn’t touch you. I don’t know what you’re taking out on me, but my girlfriend is the one who died.”
Andrew lunged again.
“Stop,” I screamed, helping David hold Andrew back from his brother. “Stop, please!”
His fist whirled around with his body, and I didn’t move out of the way in time. The blow grazed my jaw, landing there with a thud before sending me reeling backward.
“Mom,” he said, the intensity leaving his features. “Mom, I didn’t mean to—”
“This is unacceptable,” David said, jerking on Andrew’s arm. “Apologize to your mother, right this instant.”
“Mom, I’m so sorry,” he sobbed, his face crumpling. “I didn’t mean to hurt you. But I think he brought her back to the pond … I saw them together …”
Josh pulled himself up and sat beside his bed with his sleeve obscuring a bloody nose. “Why don’t you tell them what you did, Andrew? Why don’t you tell them what you did to Michelle? You’re sick. You’re a mental case.”
It was the most the boys had interacted in almost six months. I’d thought I wanted their anger out in the open so that they could deal with it. But I realized it was too big, too uncontrollable. There was no way to fix what was shattered beyond repair.
“Look at your brother’s face,” David said, rounding on Andrew. “You’re lucky his nose isn’t broken.”
“I’m sorry …,” Andrew said, his voice quiet.
David went to speak, but I cut him off, knowing that if I didn’t say something now, I never would.
“Were you involved? Did you do something?” I didn’t address one boy or the other, leaving the question in the air for both of them to answer. David stared at me, his lips tightly pursed. He would have preferred I said nothing.
Andrew spoke first. “I didn’t have anything to do with it.”
“Well, neither did I,” Josh said.
I glanced back and forth between the boys who had grown inside me, curled around each other like shrimp, kicking each other in utero, vying for the same source of nutrients. They had turned on each other. But I wouldn’t turn on them. How could I condemn my sons without proof? They both denied it, so I would do the same.
“This is a difficult time,” David said. “We’re all struggling. But we need to get through this as a family. All of us together.” He put his arm around my shoulders.
When we were alone in our room again, my body still quivering, David turned to face me in bed, his hand finding mine. “We don’t want Andrew to fall behind this semester. I think it’s time we bring him back to Dunn. It’ll be good for him.”
I knew what he meant. It would be good for all of us to get back into a normal routine. For the boys to have some space from each other.
David curved his body around mine, the same way he used to in my tiny dorm room bed. I sank into him. This was us: our most worn-in embrace, and we had found our way back to each other.
“They’ll get past this, Bev. We raised them well.”
It was easy for him to believe that, but I was having a harder time. Maybe that was every mother’s fatal flaw. They never wanted to think a person they created could be capable of something terrible. Maybe there were nightmares, playing out occasionally behind their closed eyes, images easy to blink past and wake up from. But when they did wake up, they’d be able to shrug off the chill and move on, the bad dream forgotten.
David started snoring gently, his arms still tight around me. I couldn’t sleep, instead torturing myself with what-ifs. What if I had defended Andrew, instead of agreeing to send him away? What if I had called Josh out on the way he treated his brother? What if I’d doted on them more as babies, instead of always wanting to be somewhere else? What if I’d played with them more as kids, instead of checking off their needs like another to-do list?
Maybe none of it would have made a difference, but maybe it would have changed everything.