Mother of All Secrets(76)

After I’ve wrangled her, she sits on the bathroom floor and plays with my makeup brushes, one of her favorite activities, while I put on some eyeliner and mascara and my gold hoops. When she’s bored of the makeup brushes, she moves on to the roll of toilet paper, unraveling the whole thing, and then finds a box of Band-Aids under the sink and dumps it on the floor. I smile wryly at her path of destruction and pat on some lip gloss to finish up. I am significantly more made up than I normally would be on a Saturday; these days, weekends are strictly reserved for leggings and sneakers and no makeup and the playground. But today is different. Today the moms’ group is reuniting for the first time since—well. Since all of it.

I haven’t seen Isabel much this year. I gather she’s spent some time in Tarrytown, at her mom’s place. I’ve run into Kira and Selena at the playground a handful of times, and it’s surprisingly easy between us, though we never actually make plans to see each other. We speak through the babies: “Clara, go say hi to your friend Miles! Do you guys want to go on the seesaw together? Hold on tight!” And they toddle or crawl around in each other’s vicinity, a one-year-old’s version of friendship, while we make the smallest of small talk: weather, work, which Netflix shows we’re watching. Usually, the presence of other adults in our conversations helps us maintain these barriers we’ve set for ourselves. We’ve pretty much never spoken out loud of that night with each other, except in an unavoidable “neighborhood gossip” kind of way, when we’ve been forced to endure being pumped for information by acquaintances in the park: Didn’t you know her? What is she like? How’s she doing? Did you ever meet the husband? But we’ve never actually spoken about that night. It’s an unspoken concession we allow each other, not forcing each other to revisit it.

I know today will change that.

We all know the official story, of course, as does everyone else on the Upper West Side. Vanessa broke into the town house and killed Connor to avenge her sister, not realizing that Louise was in the house. Louise’s story was that she’d been retrieving some clothes for Isabel, who was staying at her house with the baby while she recuperated from her recent ordeal. When it got late, Louise had decided to stay the night at Isabel and Connor’s town house and return to Tarrytown in the morning. She’d woken up to the sound of fighting and was scared. She knew Isabel and Connor kept a gun, for protection, high up in their bedroom closet. She acted out of fear and instinct and immediately called the police after it was done, which helped her case immensely. (She’d actually waited about thirty minutes, to allow Isabel to return to Tarrytown in a taxi she paid for with cash, so that she’d be there when police arrived at the town house and called her back to the city, already showered and changed and at the home of her aunt Joan, who was like a second mother to her.) Besides, Louise was a white grandma, which, as I’d overheard a few women at the park pointing out, made her any lawyer’s ideal client. The “facts” presented themselves in a surprisingly clean fashion, given that they weren’t the real facts at all: Vanessa had intruded into their home and killed Connor. Louise interrupted them, too late to save Connor but with no choice but to kill Vanessa in self-defense, after what she had witnessed. It was completely unpremeditated. It was a legal, registered firearm. (I could only guess at the various ways Connor had used the presence of the gun to frighten and manipulate Isabel.)

Of course, the detectives talked to us during their investigation, but any traces of us in the town house could be easily explained away by our meeting earlier that day—as we’d planned, in the plan we thought we were agreeing to—so we weren’t suspected of anything. If there were multiple prints on the murder weapon, the police never mentioned it to us. We claimed ignorance on nearly all fronts: we had no idea Vanessa was connected in any way to Connor; we had no idea about her sister; we’d only been meeting for a bit more than a month and didn’t really know her that well at all, in fact. The last part, as it turned out, was completely true. We never really knew her.

It was all over the news. Every part of the story was salacious. The hedge fund exec by day / sexual predator by night, the marital abuse, the (alleged) suicide of a young DC mother, the sister’s quest for revenge, the hero grandma. It was irresistible to journalists and consumers alike and resulted in headlines like:

GRANDMA INTERRUPTS UWS MURDER—TOO LATE TO SAVE PHILANDERING SON-IN-LAW

KILLER GRANDMA SLAYS SON-IN-LAW’S MISTRESS

Of course, Vanessa had never been anything close to Connor’s “mistress,” and what a word, truly, but it was a much easier headline if she was, and the Post usually went for ease.

HEDGE FUND MILLIONAIRE KILLED IN QUEST FOR REVENGE

PREDATOR INVESTOR BLUDGEONED TO DEATH: AND, AFTER LEARNING THE TRUTH, IS ANYONE SURPRISED?

WOMAN VOWS REVENGE ON DEAD SISTER’S BABY’S FATHER (YES, YOU READ THAT RIGHT): UWS MURDERS ENSUE

The headlines varied widely depending on who they’d decided was the most interesting player: The quick-thinking grandma? The rich, abusive husband? The vengeful, beautiful doctor? The traumatized, entrapped wife? But all of them got it at least partly wrong because none of them ever found out what only we knew: that Vanessa had killed her sister, that she wasn’t really the honor-seeking avenger that even she thought she was, in her twisted logic. But in spite of myself, in spite of everything she’d put us through, I felt sorry for her. She’d experienced so much loss in her life, and her way of dealing with it was to be ruthless. To condemn and destroy any shred of perceived weakness in herself and in those she loved. Although I could never condone or even understand the things she’d done, I could also imagine the depths of her pain after losing her mother as a child, and her baby as an adult.