CHAPTER 23
Kelly: The Interview Present day
I have been reinstated at SPOKE, promoted to vice president. The board immediately revoked the decision to remove me after Brett died. It would have been too much upheaval for the company to survive, and in the aftermath of Brett’s death, women flocked to SPOKE and FLOW, specifically asking for me. For Layla. The demand has been so great that we are going nationwide in 2018, opening studios in Miami, DC, and L.A. Rihanna’s number is in my phone. The Oscar-Nominated Female Director sent me flowers. I wonder if this is how Donatella Versace felt.
Lisa steps into the shot, conferring with Jesse for a moment, their heads tilted together. Layla and I both watch on the monitor from Jesse’s guest bedroom. For “confessional” type interviews, only the DP, the EP, an audio mixer, and the talent are in the room. Everyone else is sequestered away, to minimize distraction and ambient sound.
Layla has stuffed her feet into Brett’s furry Gucci slides, which are a size too small for her, but she insisted on wearing something of Brett’s for her interview. “Layls,” I whisper. There isn’t much privacy in Jesse’s cramped, expensive apartment, especially not with eight members of the crew milling about, plus hair and makeup and Jesse’s two personal assistants. “Just checking in that you still want to do this. You’re allowed to change your mind at any time. Even in the middle of the interview, if that’s when you decide you don’t want to do this.”
“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.
“Stephanie?” Jesse says, eyebrows in the middle of her forehead, although Layla told her in advance she wanted to say this. Layla feels an impassioned obligation to take up for Stephanie, the woman she doesn’t know tried to hurt her in Morocco, the woman she doesn’t know succeeded in killing her aunt. My stomach burbles. This is the part of the day that I have been dreading most, and there was already so much to dread. Why, why does Layla always have to do the right thing?
“I know Stephanie messed up by lying in her book,” Layla says. “But I think that was her way of reaching out for help. We know now that Vince was hurting her, but she was too afraid or embarrassed to say that, so she made up this other abusive relationship in her book. And I don’t want people to forget her, and all she’s done for women.”
This is indefensible, what I can’t stop my daughter from doing: unwittingly pardoning my sister’s murderer.
But Layla was insistent. If she was doing this interview, then she was defending Stephanie, especially once it came out that Stephanie had changed her will right before she died, leaving all her worldly possessions to End It!, the national organization devoted to providing women of color with the financial means to leave their abusers. To me, this just read like an ironic punctuation point at the end of her original plan, which was to kill as many of us as possible before she killed herself. Violence against women by a woman who left the entirety of her estate to an organization dedicated to fighting violence against women. The depravity is enough to make your head spin.
A renowned intimate violence expert that Jesse interviewed on Facebook Live said it was possible that Stephanie anticipated the worst when she ended the relationship with Vince. And so, as though signing the divorce papers were akin to signing her own death warrant, Stephanie changed her will just in case Vince came after her. If she was going to become another statistic, at least some good would come out of it. Other women in her same position could be helped.
And it made sense, the expert added, that Vince would go after Brett too. Perpetrators of intimate partner suicide-murder tend to be overwhelmingly white and male, and tend to blame others for their feelings of powerlessness in a romantic relationship. It is never the man’s fault that his partner has abandoned him, it is always the doing of somebody else. He likely laid the entirety of the responsibility for the dissolution of his marriage at Brett’s feet, the expert neatly concluded.
Then there were all the cell phone videos of Brett and Stephanie, dancing at Talkhouse the night before they died, having the time of their lives celebrating Stephanie’s emancipation from Vince. Only a man would see this pure and unadulterated adoration these two women had for each other as a threat, Yvette had said in Brett’s homily. Only a man would feel compelled to snuff out these two beautiful lights. Naysayers have long disparaged what I do and what I stand for. Women have all the same rights as men—what am I shrieking on about? I shriek on until women have more than equal rights. I shriek on until women’s lives have equal value. Overnight, an Etsy merchant designed T-shirts silk-screened Shriek on that sold out in less than forty-eight hours. I don’t know where the proceeds went.
There were others who came forward, who told stories that cast suspicion on Stephanie, like the cabbie who drove the two home from Talkhouse and the high school senior, just eighteen(!), who Stephanie deflowered in the back alley of the bar. The detectives assigned to Brett’s case kept me apprised of each development, but they didn’t wander too far down any roads that didn’t have large yellow Vince as hater and killer of strong beautiful women theories staked at every turn.
There was also the question—that if it had been Stephanie who killed Brett, how did she manage to get my sister’s body into the trunk all by herself? Vince would have been the only one with the strength to do that, the detectives assured me. I had a simple workaround to that conjecture—adrenaline—but I didn’t bother to float it, the same way I didn’t tell them the other way Vince’s handprints could have ended up on the trunk of Jen’s car. What would be the point when I would then have to explain that I thought Stephanie did it, and what her motive was? I needed my sister to be remembered as a martyr for the resistance, not as her best friend’s husband’s mistress. Tribalism trumped truth, in the end.
I sometimes wonder what Jesse has offered Jen and Lauren to keep their silence. Surely they suspect Stephanie too. Their contracts have been renewed for a fifth season, as has mine, but that would seem to be the bare minimum. Even if it had gone down the way we said it had, it would be in poor taste for the show to come back without its surviving members.
“Stephanie was as much a victim as Brett was,” Jesse says, spelling it out clearly for everyone at home in case Layla hasn’t stated it plainly enough. “And the network plans to honor her legacy by matching Stephanie’s estate and donating that amount to End It!” Jesse meets Camera A’s glass eye. “And if you’re sitting at home and wondering how you can help, you can donate to End It! by visiting the link at the corner of your screen.” She addresses Layla again. “I know you have plans to help too. Tell me about those, Layla.”
“My mom and me”—the awkward phrasing plays a string in my heart. She’s still just a kid in so many ways—“are going to Morocco next month with more e-bikes. And we’re opening a store in Union Square that sells rugs and blankets made by the women we’ve met through SPOKE.”
“And we will be there to document your latest endeavors. Stay tuned after the hour for a special preview of Still SPOKE, which will follow Layla and Kelly as they work to keep Brett’s mission alive.” I didn’t understand the name of our spinoff. Jesse’s assistant had to explain to me that it was a play on the word “woke,” and then she had to explain to me what that meant. It means, like, being aware, she told me, rolling her eyes. But being aware of what? I asked. Social stuff, she answered after a hefty pause.
Jesse smiles at Layla with unreserved adulation. “Layla, Little Big C, I can’t thank you enough for being here. I think I speak for every woman watching when I say thank you for all you do.” She points her finger at the ceiling. It’s coated in flour. “We miss you, sister.”
Layla holds stock still, smiling a stiff smile, until the sound producer declares, “Got it!”
“Phew,” Jesse says, fanning her face with her hand. “That was tough, huh?” She holds up her phone. “Why don’t we take a selfie?”
A gaffer opens the door to the guest bedroom. It will take a while to pack up the equipment and clear out, and it’s been a long day. I let everyone go in front of me so they can get to it. As I’m walking out last, I run into Marc in the doorway, walking into the guest bedroom.
“Oops,” I say, stepping aside to let him through. “Sorry.”
But Marc just stands there. He glances over his shoulder, and when he’s sure no one is watching, he presses something small and plastic into my hand. “Take this,” he says.
I look down. I’m holding a black USB flash drive.
“I’ll do whatever you want to do with it. You know I loved her.” He wipes his eyes. “Ah, shit. I don’t want to cry in front of you. It must be so much worse for you.”
I close my fingers around the flash drive weakly, dreading its contents. I am so tired of having to make difficult decisions. “What’s on here?” I ask him.
“That weekend in the Hamptons, when Lauren went upstairs after the game? She passed out with her mic still on. I’m the only one who’s heard this.” Marc motions for me to pocket the device, which I do, reluctantly. “It’s something you should have. I can’t . . . it can’t be up to me what to do.” He plugs a runny nostril with a knuckle. “You’re her sister.” He means it wholeheartedly, but with his finger in his nose like that, the statement comes out nasally, girlishly aping. A PA approaches, and Marc clears his throat and finds a manlier voice. “Listen to it alone,” he tells me before doing an abrupt about-face.