Reconstructing Amelia (5 page)

Kate

NOVEMBER 26

It was only eight thirty a.m. when Kate stepped off the elevator on her office floor. Most of the lights were off, and it was utterly still. A single overhead light shone down on top of the empty receptionist’s desk, casting an eerie spotlight on the huge vase of lilies sitting there. It was an awful joke, those flowers being the first thing Kate saw on her first day back at the office. Her mother, Gretchen—in her sole and largely token effort to be helpful—had selected lilies for Amelia’s funeral. They were lovely and tasteful. And terrible.

Looking at them, that familiar burn flared up in the back of Kate’s throat. The one that was always followed these days by a mad dash to the bathroom where Kate would spend the next ten minutes huddled over the toilet, vomiting, or, more often, dry heaving. The bouts of nausea could be triggered by almost anything, too—the sight of Amelia’s favorite cereal in the grocery store, a catalogue for field hockey gear arriving in the mail, a teenage girl’s boots. Avoiding food entirely was the only thing that seemed to help at all. In the month since Amelia had died, Kate had lost fourteen pounds. She’d taken to wearing baggy clothes to hide her skeletal frame.

“How do you manage to stay so trim, dear?” a sweet old lady had asked her the other day in Rite Aid.

Simple
, Kate had wanted to say.
I’m already dead.

Instead, she’d pressed her lips together so hard it had made her eyes water as she’d grabbed her prescriptions. The ones her therapist had assured her would help with the nausea and the insomnia. In reality, they’d done nothing except make her feel as if she were underwater. Kate kept taking them in the hope she might eventually drown.

Coming back to work had been a bad idea. At a minimum, Kate needed to get out of the vestibule and into her office. But she couldn’t tear her eyes away from the flowers. Frozen there in the elevator bank, she was glad at least that she’d decided to come in early. That way, if she vomited on the floor, there would be time to clean it up. And perhaps she wouldn’t actually have to see anyone. That had been her plan: to stay inside her office all day, comforted by the knowledge that there were people—living, breathing people—safely secured on the other side of her locked office door.

Certainly she could never have exchanged pleasantries with anyone. What would there be for them to say to her anyway? Sorry? Sorry your daughter is dead. Sorry your daughter jumped off the roof of her school when you were on your way to pick her up. Sorry you were late. Too bad you’ll be reliving that failure for the rest of your miserable life.

As much as Kate didn’t want to have small talk with anyone, surely people wanted to avoid her, too. No one wanted to talk to a mother whose only child had just killed herself. Kate could have spared everyone the discomfort by staying home for much longer.

“Take three months at least, then work a couple more from home,” Jeremy had said at the funeral. His eyes had been damp and red-rimmed, and for the first time Kate had felt sure that all of his caring overtures over the years had not been an act. No one was that good an actor. His beautiful, teary-eyed wife, Vera, and his three tall sons, all staring at their shoes, had flanked him. The sight of them together like that—handsome, well matched, complete—had almost brought Kate to her knees. “You know how much everyone at the firm loves you, Kate. But we can hold down the fort without you for as long as we need to.”

When Vera had stepped forward to hug her, Kate had clutched her back, burying her face into Vera’s long, sweet-smelling hair. It had been too much, inappropriate even, given how little the two women actually knew each other. But there was so much life around Vera. Kate had been terrified of what would happen when she let go.

Staying home ended up being easier said than done. Kate had spent the first days after Amelia’s death surrounded by her three closest friends from college. They’d swooped in and propped her upright, had seen to it that she ate and bathed and breathed. But they all had families of their own whom they’d had to return to shortly after the funeral. Even Seth—Kate’s onetime law school boyfriend, now de facto best friend, who had been so sweet and wonderful—had eventually come round less and less. Kate had insisted. Their days of comfortably impossible, pseudomarital status had long since passed. Seth had a husband now, Thomas, and a daughter of his own who needed him.

Kate’s mom and dad had been there, too. Strategically, they had arrived somewhat later, not until the eve of the funeral. Allowing, conveniently, for the messiest of Kate’s grief to subside. Her parents had always disdained big displays of any kind of emotion—anger, despair, joy, love—from anyone. But especially their only child. Kate had learned early on the value of swallowing her feelings whole. With Amelia’s death, though, her parents must have suspected that there would be no controlling anything this time, and they’d wisely waited a couple of days before arriving in Brooklyn. So they’d missed the part where Kate had scratched her arms until they bled and sobbed so hard that she had broken capillaries in her face. They had quickly departed, too, probably once it became apparent that Kate would not be pulling it together anytime soon.

After her parents had gone and her friends had all returned to their very full lives, Kate was alone. Again. As she always had been before Amelia.

For two weeks, she’d sat in her deathly quiet brownstone sheathed in her guilt and grief, feeling like her skin was being sloughed off in strips and discarded like sheets of cellophane. She’d stared at the ceiling and sobbed until her insides were a burned-out hull. She’d thought about how her life without Amelia would be nothing but an inexplicable void. Nothing but her. Alone. Forever.

Every night she actually managed to fall asleep, Kate would dream she was falling—from the roof of Grace Hall, her office window, the top of the stairs—jolting awake just before she smacked into pavement. And every morning when she awoke she’d be compelled to the top floor of her brownstone, where she’d open a window and lean out, hands pressed against the frame, staring down. Not that forcing herself to see what Amelia had in those last seconds of her life would ever be punishment enough. Nothing would ever be punishment enough.

Because it was Kate’s fault, of course, that Amelia was dead. That she had
killed
herself. It was a mother’s job to protect her child, even from herself. And Kate had failed, utterly and completely and awfully.

Kate thought often about killing herself, too. About how to do it—her many tranquilizers; where—in her bed; and when—immediately. Thinking she needed to pay for her catastrophic failings by living with her guilt was the only real reason she hadn’t gone through with it. Kate went back to work when she could no longer bear sitting there, waiting to slowly decompose.

And so there Kate stood in one of the many reception areas of the illustrious Slone, Thayer—four weeks, two days, and sixteen hours since Amelia had leaped off the roof of Grace Hall—wondering how she could have ever cared what went on there. Because she didn’t. Not anymore. Not in the least. She didn’t care about anything.

An arriving elevator chimed behind Kate, and she lurched forward down the hallway toward her office before anyone could emerge from behind the doors. She picked up the pace around the corner as a light in an office down the hall went on. She should have known there would be someone already there, no matter how early she arrived. At a place like Slone, Thayer, there always was.

“Hey!” Someone shouted just as she was about to open her door. Kate startled and dropped her keys. Daniel Moore, of all people. Kate knew it was him without looking up. He was the last person she felt like seeing at that moment. Rushing over, he grabbed her keys from the floor before she could bend to pick them up. “I didn’t mean to scare you. I was just . . . I’m surprised to see you. I thought you were going to work from home for a while.”

He sounded disappointed, but he was trying to hide it. Kate wasn’t surprised. For Daniel, one less junior partner was one less person to compete with. Not that their relationship was as simple as being fellow partners. Ever since the two had met their first week of Columbia Law School, they’d swung between distant respect, outright hostility, and something else—something substantially more humiliating—that Kate had worked hard for a long time to forget. Surprisingly, perhaps, she’d often succeeded. Right now, though, that ugly ancient history loomed over her.

“Being alone in my house day after day . . . I needed to go somewhere,” Kate said, meeting eyes with Daniel for the first time as he handed her keys back to her. He had on a tie, loosened at the neck, and a rumpled shirt. He was unshaven, and his eyes were bloodshot, as if he’d been up all night. But on Daniel, the effect was flattering. His perfectly shorn blond hair and meticulously preppy clothes had, for Kate, always been some of the least attractive things about him. But not
the
least. The least attractive thing about Daniel was his utter lack of compassion. “You look like you’ve been here all night.”

Daniel looked down at his clothes and smiled sheepishly. “This Associated thing has kind of exploded.”

His voice was trying to make that sound as if it was a bad thing, but the glint in his eye said differently. Kate’s and Daniel’s careers at Slone, Thayer had been in lockstep ever since they’d both joined the firm as summer associates. A decade and a half later, they were both well-respected litigation partners. But only Kate was one of Jeremy’s disciples, an inequity that seemed to drive Daniel to quiet, but utter, distraction. Handling Associated in her absence had been a huge opportunity for him.

Kate could tell that Daniel was desperate for her to inquire further about Associated. But she didn’t care if the big news was that the SEC had come down and subjected Victor Starke to a cavity search. Jeremy had gone to great lengths to assure her that she didn’t have to worry about Victor or Associated Mutual Bank while she was on leave, and she hadn’t. Now that she was back, she couldn’t have forced herself to care about it if she’d tried.

“Exploded.” Kate heard herself say. It was more statement than question. Still, she hated giving Daniel the satisfaction of even her perceived curiosity.

“Not in a bad way,” Daniel said eagerly. “Turns out we got the subpoena quashed after all. SEC appealed, of course.” He shrugged as if it was all in a day’s work. “Arguments are later today. I was up half the night briefing Jeremy by phone. You know him, smart enough to pull his all-nighter from home so he won’t look like crap when he gets here. Speaking of which, I should probably go shower. Jeremy said I could argue part of the brief. Don’t want to give him any reason to leave me at the courthouse door.”

“Right.” Kate tried to smile but couldn’t really. She wanted to get away from Daniel,
now
. “Don’t let me hold you up. I should probably be getting inside anyway. I’m not exactly fit for public consumption.”

“Okay,” Daniel said, narrowing his eyes slightly, as if he was contemplating saying something more but then decided not to. “It’s good to see you, Kate. I’m glad you’ve made it back. We . . . the firm missed you. Let me know if there’s anything I can do.”

Daniel was trying his best to be nice, Kate could see that. And he meant well—or at least didn’t mean terribly—even if there was nothing on earth he, of all people, could possibly do for her.

“I appreciate that, Daniel,” she said. “Now you should go. Good luck.”

“Thanks,” Daniel said, blowing some air out of his puffed-up cheeks. “I think I might need it.”

Kate closed her office door and leaned back against it for a minute before pushing herself forward and dumping her things on her desk. She made a point of not looking out her wide window at the jumbled cityscape below. Kate’s office was on the twenty-eighth floor, near the corner, so that if she leaned into her window and looked down, she could see both Forty-third Street and Seventh Avenue. But looking down from that height, imagining—as she surely would—the sensation Amelia must have felt as she was falling, would only bring the nausea right back.

Her computer hadn’t even fully started up when her office phone rang.
UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO
, the caller ID read, followed by the main campus number. Theoretically, it could be either of her parents. With many years of illustrious work in their respective fields, Gretchen Deal and Robert Baron were both professors, her mother at the medical school and her father at the business school. But Robert—the more distant but comparatively warmer of the two—never called Kate. He’d e-mail occasionally, and they had nice talks when they saw each other once a year at Christmas, but for Robert the telephone was far too intimate and much too deliberate.

Kate stared at her phone, debating whether to let the call go to voice mail. But Gretchen was relentless. If she had something she wanted Kate to hear, she would hunt her daughter down and make her listen to every last keen, insightful word. Finally, Kate took a deep breath and picked up the phone.

“Kate Baron,” she said quietly, pretending she didn’t know who was on the other end, as if that could magically make it be someone different.

“You’re there!” her mother called out cheerfully. “I was hoping you’d make it.”

Gretchen had been the biggest advocate of Kate’s returning to work as soon as possible. Immediately, preferably. Gretchen made clear this was only because she felt it was in Kate’s best interest to get out of the house, to be distracted. But Kate knew her mother better than that. In reality, Gretchen was probably more worried about Kate’s missing out on important advancement opportunities at work.

“Yes, here I am.” Kate exhaled. “I made it.”

“Really, I think that’s for the best, Katherine,” Gretchen said in her usual rapid-fire staccato, the one that always made Kate feel as if a timer was about to go off. “I’m sure they’ve missed having you there. Jeremy especially. He depends on you more than you think.”

“He works with two dozen junior partners. He depends on all of us,” Kate said flatly. She was annoyed that this was why her mother was calling her. And even more annoyed that she was annoyed. By now, Kate should have been used to her work being her mother’s focus. Gretchen had called every couple of days since Amelia’s death, and in each conversation she’d been far more concerned about the state of Kate’s career than her grief. “I’m sure he survived just fine without me.”