“I know, Mom,” Layla groans. She is furious with me that Brett is dead. Only temporary, the grief counselor has assured me.
Even though we are filming my interview with Jesse and Layla’s interview with Jesse on the same day, they will air months apart. My interview will run after the season premiere of the show—soon, in three weeks—and Layla’s after the finale in a few months. It can’t look like we packed it into the same day, so Jesse has changed into a cashmere hoodie and has moved from her living room, where we conducted our more formal sit-down, to her kitchen, to cook and have a “casual” conversation with Layla about what she’s been up to since the unthinkable happened.
“Little Big C,” Jesse says into the monitor, her nickname for Layla. She’s the littlest Courtney, as in the youngest, but she’s also the tallest. You’re not a real member of her tribe until you have your nickname. I realize with a greedy thump of my heart that I don’t have one and probably never will. “We’re ready for you.”
“Just stop,” Layla mutters to me as she hops off the bed, heading for the kitchen, even though I haven’t said anything. Layla turned thirteen three weeks ago. Is it crazy that I’m already counting down the days until the next barbaric year of her teens? Her disposition is too wizened for that of a three-week-old teenager, but at least I can officially blame her precociousness on her teenageness. I’m wary of viewer criticism that I’m forcing her to grow up too fast. Or is it that I am forcing her to grow up too fast? I can’t tell anymore.
I watch Layla join Jesse on the monitor. Lisa and a PA lay out the tools and ingredients needed to make chebakia: the food processor and the already toasted sesame seeds and the orange water and the baking sheets. Finally, at the marble island set, everyone takes their places and Lisa cues them to start the scene. “Hi, Layla,” Jesse says. “It’s so good to see you.”
Layla’s smile is embarrassed and cute. “Thank you.”
“What are we making here today?”
“Chebakia,” Layla says. “It’s a Moroccan cookie that’s shaped into a flower and fried and coated in honey. It was Brett’s favorite.” She stares at the ingredients on the counter, unmoving.
“Tell me what I can start on,” Jesse prods.
“You can crack the egg,” Layla says, and Jesse grins.
“I think I can manage that.”
“So this was Aunt Brett’s favorite?” Jesse asks, as she splits an egg on the stainless steel edge of a mixing bowl.
“Brett’s favorite. I didn’t call her my aunt. She was my best friend.”
Jesse picks up a whisk. “You two had an unbreakable bond.”
Layla nods, adding the sesame seeds and other dry ingredients to the food processor.
“What do you miss most about her?”
“She bought me the best clothes and bags, even before she could afford to buy herself that stuff. Brett worked really hard to be successful but it wasn’t for her, it was so she could help other people.”
“She was truly one of a kind,” Jesse says, graciously. “I know it must be difficult to talk about her, but it means a lot that you are willing to share your memories of your aunt with her fans.” Jesse blankets her heart, as if to say count me among them. But if Jesse is a fan of anyone’s it is Layla. It’s like how single men joke about “borrowing” their married friend’s baby to pick up women, knowing women are attracted to hard men with soft babies. Likewise, Jesse is hoping the viewer takes to her, with her tattoos and collection of fierce leather jackets, baking cookies with a sad thirteen-year-old.
Layla’s hands are coated in flour, and she scratches an itch on her cheek by lifting her shoulder. “It’s not difficult for me to talk about her. I don’t want to ever stop talking about Brett.”
The network sprung for Layla and I to meet with a media consultant before this interview, and she was the one who supplied that line—I don’t want to ever stop talking about Brett. It positions the interview as a cathartic exercise for Layla, rather than an exploitative one. In truth, it is both. So many things are both.
There are two versions of what happened the day Stephanie drove Jen’s Tesla off Jesse’s cliff. The real version and the TV version. Already, in my mind, the TV version is threatening to replace the one that happened. That’s how it goes with the show too, you say something enough times and it buries the real. It doesn’t erase it entirely, but it makes it very, very faint, like in the movies when the bad guy takes down a message on a pad of paper, and the good guy comes and shades the page with a pencil to reveal the time and location that the bomb will detonate. An impression of the truth. That’s what you’re left with.
This is the story that has dried in the closed police file: Vince showed up at Jen’s house in the early morning hours of August 27, after seeing the video of Stephanie disparaging him on TMZ. Brett is the first person Vince encountered when he entered the house, the person who absorbed the full weight of his rage. She had been making a pizza after coming in for the night—it was found overcooked in the oven. There was a struggle; Brett ended up on the floor of the kitchen. The coroner flagged a series of bloody bald patches on the top of Brett’s head, evidence that Vince had her by the hair when he slammed her head into the ground. He scalped her, a feminist gasped on Twitter, linking to the coroner’s report. Vince’s handprints were also found on the trunk of Jen’s car. (I can see him in my mind’s eye, leaning against the Tesla’s back bumper while we debated how to get to Jesse’s house. You look like you could use some AC, he told Lauren with that signature Vince smirk.)
The autopsy, performed nineteen hours after Brett expired, determined that her blood alcohol content was .088, which means it was even higher at the time of her death. She was at a disadvantage to defend herself, the detective told me, but that also means she probably didn’t feel much pain or realize what was going on. He was trying to make me feel better, but I cried harder that day than any day since Brett died. It was all so base. My sister made some mistakes in her life, but she did a lot of good in this world, and she would have walked across fire for Layla. And yet she died drunk, in a sloppy barroom fight over a man. It was about so much more than that, of course—about power, about survival—but the public would have reduced it to its Jerry Springer bones. Her death was beneath her, and maybe that’s why I’d prefer her TV one.
The next morning, the police and the public believe, Vince insisted on coming with us to Jesse’s house, perhaps because he panicked when he realized we were driving the car that contained Brett’s body. Perhaps he wanted to monitor the situation, be sure that Stephanie didn’t trash his name on camera now that they were getting a divorce. It is impossible to tell exactly what he was thinking, if he was planning on doing what he was doing, or if it just happened in a moment of passion. The police asked for footage of the day, which Jesse turned over only after the producers cobbled together enough Frankenbites to fit her account. Jesse made a large donation to the Montauk Playhouse and offered the police chief’s niece an internship at Saluté, and no one ever specified that it was the unedited film they needed.
“Talk to me about how you plan to honor your aunt’s legacy,” Jesse says, tapping the whisk against the side of the mixing bowl before dropping it in the sink.
“I will,” Layla says, “but I want to say something else first. About Stephanie.” She turns the food processor off.