“Um,” I say, slipping my hands under my thighs. I’ve mentioned that I have a daughter, and I don’t want him to see my unadorned finger and know I’m not married. I need to be regarded as an upstanding and dependable member of the community, and people have their notions about unwed mothers. Not that I’ve had much free time over the years to worry about how it looks that I have a child but not a husband. It was what it was, until the show came along and made single motherhood this very deliberate and punk-rock choice. The show. Will it survive this? Do I want it to survive this? Yes, desperately, I realize, the thought producing an echo of shame.
“Everyone knew that Vince wasn’t faithful to Steph,” I say, my posture attentive and ladylike, the posture of a woman you would be inclined to believe. “And I think Steph always knew but looked the other way until recently, when she just decided she had had enough.”
“Had something happened recently to set her off?”
Yes, Officer, but you can’t prove it given the fact that Jesse’s phone conveniently ended up at the bottom of the pool in the mad dash to get out of Stephanie’s path. We are the only ones who watched it, Jesse said to me, quietly, while the rest of the crew and cast huddled together in mini support groups, comforting each other and waiting for the ambulances and the Coast Guard to arrive. A man attacked a woman and she drove into the ocean trying to escape him! Jesse told the emergency dispatcher, after dialing 911 from my phone. It was one way of looking at it, but it seemed rash to write history with one person’s clearly biased interpretation. I was still bouncing all the possible scenarios around in my head, trying to decide what I thought had happened. Was Stephanie just trying to get away from all of us and she became disoriented in the struggle? Was she intending to kill herself in a blaze of glory and Vince just happened to get in the way? Or, I considered with a shudder, had she come here with the intent to take all of us with her?
I couldn’t look. I stayed back, with Jesse. Lauren and Jen had wandered over to the edge of the property, along with a few members of the crew. Lauren had dropped to her knees with a wail when she saw the wreckage. Jen had actually shushed her. Marc was the one to go and comfort Lauren, moaning in agony himself, which, shell-shocked as I was, seemed strange. He hadn’t been particularly close to Stephanie or Vince, who I had no doubt were dead, shark food along with Stephanie’s phone, with the GoPro app that contained evidence of Brett’s affair with Vince. Do you want people to know that Brett isn’t gay? Jesse asked, privately on her lawn, and I shook my head, speechless, in shock. I knew Stephanie was unraveling, I didn’t realize she had come so perilously undone. So just say it was a tape of the two of them having an affair if it comes up, Jesse said. I looked at her sharply. A tape of Brett and Stephanie having an affair, she clarified, though I had understood. I cut Stephanie off before she could say what was on the tape. It’s not on camera. Don’t you think Brett would rather have people think she had an affair with Stephanie than with Vince? She would have been single when it happened. Technically, she did nothing wrong. No! Don’t text her! Jesse snatched my phone out of my hand. Nothing in writing. They might subpoena your phone. So I called Brett instead. Going on thirty times now and she still hasn’t picked up. She’s pissed at me. This is payback for the way I toyed with her during the Mrs. game.
I do not know if I will be able to tell a bald-faced lie to a police officer, and I’m praying he does not specifically ask if Brett was having an affair with anyone. “Stephanie was definitely reeling from what had happened with her book,” I say vaguely, in answer to his question.
The officer screws up his face. “Her book? She wrote a book?”
“She’s Stephanie Simmons,” I say, but he shows no sense of recognition. “She’s a very successful author.” I sit up straighter, taking umbrage on Stephanie’s behalf. She’s dead. She was maybe trying to kill you. She maybe tried to kill Layla in Morocco!
“She wrote a memoir about her childhood,” I continue. “Recently. It was a bestseller. People loved it. But then it came out just a few weeks ago that she lied about a lot of her life. She lost everything—her publisher, her fans, Vince.”
“Vince left her?”
Again, the ludicrous urge to defend Stephanie’s honor. “She left him. She kicked him out. She was serving him divorce papers, last I heard.”
The officer writes something down. He hasn’t written anything down since he brought me in here, just relied on the recorder. “Did your sister come up in the argument at all?”
My throat constricts. We can pull this off, Jesse had said, as the sirens neared and I started to waver. I know the police chief. I will make sure you and Brett are protected. “My sister did come up,” I say, delicately. “Vince made the comment that Brett was threatened by him. That she was jealous Stephanie had someone in her life, and that she wanted Stephanie to be alone just like her.”
“Wasn’t your sister engaged, though?”
“She’s engaged now. But he was talking about before, when she was—” I stop, abruptly. Wasn’t your sister engaged, though? Why is he speaking about my sister in the past tense?
“Do you think you could check again?” I ask him. “On Brett? I’ve been trying to get through to her, but I’m wondering if maybe I just have bad service in here. I really want her to hear about this from us, not the news. Do you know if it’s made the news?” I swipe left to check my Apple-curated Top Stories for the umpteenth time but it’s exclusively headlines about Hurricane Harvey. I make a mental note to talk to Brett about doing a ride to raise money for Houston when we get home.
The officer clears his throat with a fist at his lips. “As soon as we are finished here I will check.” His thumb twiddles his silicone wedding band. “Tell me how Stephanie and Vince ended up in Jennifer Greenberg’s vehicle.”
I nod, cooperatively. Of course. Of course he has to ask this question. “Stephanie was sort of disgusted by the conversation and the way he was speaking about my sister. He called her fat too, which, you just don’t do that—ever—but particularly in front of a table full of women. She just wanted to get away from him. I don’t think she was thinking clearly. She got up from the table and he followed her. He put his hands on her.”
“So it got physical?”
I nod, emphatically, relieved I don’t have to lie about this.
“Did anyone try to stop it?”
“Of course we tried to stop him!” Him, not it. Why are men so obtuse when it comes to the violence they inflict against women? “We yelled at him to let her go, and we all started to get up, and so he did. Let go, that is. And when he did that, she ran for the car, and he ran after her and he, like, threw himself into the passenger seat.” I demonstrate with flying Superman arms. “Like that. Stomach down, stretched out across both seats. And Stephanie started driving. His door was still open, and I think she thought she could maybe, like, throw him out of the car. But he had his hands on the wheel.” I demonstrate again. “And they were driving right at us. It looked like they were fighting for control of the wheel.”