Chapter 7 - The Depositions on Elmwood
The house on Elmwood Avenue was a four-bedroom colonial built in nineteen twenty-two, with a cedar-shake roof, copper gutters that had turned a delicate verdigris green, and two massive red oaks that shaded a stone terrace overlooking the Skaneateles country club fairways.
It was the house Lena had pinned to six different vision boards on Pinterest before Caleb had even asked for her ring size.
On Friday afternoon, eight days after the wedding that wasn't, the driveway was filled with four cars: Caleb’s dark gray Volvo wagon, a black Lincoln town car belonging to his family’s estate attorney, my father’s dented sedan, and a white Dodge Durango that belonged to our uncle, Jerry Vale, who had driven four hours from Scranton because our mother had told him that "the girls were being torn apart by a Yankee lawyer."
I sat in the passenger seat of Caleb’s Volvo, the passenger window cracked two inches to let in the smell of the damp autumn lawn.
My surgery had been completed thirty-six hours ago.
My right shoulder was now encased in an enormous, fiberglass-reinforced brace that locked the limb into a rigid thirty-degree abduction, the joint wrapped in a continuous-flow cryotherapy sleeve that hummed with a low, mechanical drone from a small plastic cooler sitting on the floorboards between my feet. Every twenty minutes, a peristaltic pump inside the cooler pushed ice-cold distilled water through the blue neoprene channels, a freezing, numbing pressure that was the only thing standing between me and the screaming fire of four titanium bone screws.
Through the tall divided-light windows of the formal living room, I could see the scene unfolding around the ten-foot mahogany dining table.
Caleb’s lawyer was a man named Arthur Vance—a second cousin of Caleb’s father who had spent forty years handling partnership disputes for private equity groups in Manhattan. He was seventy, wore an expensive tweed jacket with leather elbow patches, and had laid three thick, black leather-bound binders squarely in the center of the table between the salt cellars.
Across from him sat my father, my mother, and Lena.
Lena was wearing a cream-colored cashmere sweater that I had bought her for her twenty-seventh birthday—the one from the boutique on Armory Square that had cost me half a week’s salary. Her hair was pulled back into a severe, sleek bun; she was wearing no jewelry except for a tiny gold chain around her left wrist that our grandmother had given her for her high school graduation.
Beside her, our father was leaning forward on his elbows, his face red, his finger jabbing into the air toward the black binders.
I didn't need an intercom to know what he was saying.
He was using the freight-dock cadence.
He was telling Arthur Vance that this was a private domestic dispute that had been blown out of proportion by an unstable, jealous older sister who had a history of psychiatric fragility. He was telling him that the twenty-four-thousand-dollar catering and floral deposits were non-refundable under Section 4 of the venue agreement, and that if Caleb’s family attempted to reverse the credit card authorizations, he would file a complaint with the state attorney general’s bureau of consumer frauds.
And then Caleb stood up.
I saw him rise from the chair at the end of the table—the chair that had been intended for the master of the house.
He did not shout. He did not point his finger.
He reached into his breast pocket, pulled out a thumb drive, and set it on top of the black binders.
Then he reached down, took the framed eight-by-ten engagement portrait that sat on the credenza behind him—the one taken on the dock at Keuka Lake, where Lena was looking up at him with her arms around his neck, laughing into the wind—and dropped it directly into the brass wastepaper basket beside his feet.
The sound of the glass shattering against the brass did not carry through the double-paned storm windows of the Volvo, but I saw the vibration through the floorboards.
I saw my mother’s hands fly to her mouth.
I saw my father’s finger freeze mid-air, his jaw dropping an inch, his eyes darting toward the front hall as if he were looking for an exit that didn't involve a public highway.
And then Lena looked toward the window.
She looked through the glass, through the bare branches of the hydrangeas, straight at the passenger side of the gray Volvo where I sat with my cryotherapy pump humming between my ankles.
Her face did not hold anger.
It held that cold, blank, terrifying vacuum that I had seen when she was twelve years old and had dropped our neighbor’s cat into the rain barrel to see if it could swim with its front paws tied together.
She stood up from the mahogany table.
She walked out of the room, her boots clicking sharp and dry on the antique heart-pine floorboards, through the foyer, and pushed through the heavy oak front door onto the gravel drive.
She didn't stop until she was twelve inches from my cracked window.
The smell of her perfume—the expensive French tuberose that Caleb had bought her for their anniversary—cut through the damp scent of the falling leaves.
"You think you won," Lena said.
Her voice was low, flat, devoid of the theatrical tremolo she had used in the hotel room.
I didn't turn my head. I looked straight ahead through the windshield at the red oaks along the fairway, the ice water pulsing through the blue neoprene against my clavicle with a steady, throbbing thump-thump-thump.
"Nobody won, Lena," I said through the two-inch gap in the glass. "You’re standing in the driveway of an empty house, and I have four screws in my shoulder."
"They’re going to audit Dad," she said.
The sentence fell between us like an iron bolt onto concrete.
"What?"
"Caleb’s lawyer," she whispered, her fingers curling around the top edge of the window glass, her knuckles turning white against the tinted edge. "He’s a partner at Skadden. He called the regional compliance officer for the freight company yesterday morning. He told them Dad has been using the corporate account to clear personal checks for the wedding deposits since March."
I turned my head then, the movement slow, the muscles in my neck screaming against the nylon straps.
"Did he?" I asked.
Lena let out a short, wet gasp that sounded like an animal caught under a gate.
"Dad doesn't have sixty thousand dollars, Tessa! He hasn't had sixty thousand dollars since the logistics merger in twenty-twenty! He took the money from the equipment maintenance escrow! He told them it was for a cross-docking terminal in Cortland!"
She leaned her face closer to the gap, her breath fogging the glass in small, irregular circles.
"They’re going to take his pension," she said. "The company lawyer is meeting him at the terminal on Monday morning with an investigator from the state police. If he can't replace the sixty thousand by five o'clock, they’re filing a criminal referral with the grand jury."
I sat in the quiet of the Volvo, listening to the pump hum, watching the leaves drift down from the oaks onto the hood of my father’s car.
"Why are you telling me this, Lena?"
"Because you have the forty thousand from Grandma’s estate," she sobbed, her fingers slipping from the glass, her forehead coming down against the painted steel of the door frame with a dull, hollow thud. "The money she left you in the credit union. The money Dad couldn't touch because you were the named beneficiary. You have to give it to him, Tessa. If you don't give it to him, he’s going to jail. At sixty-six years old. In an orange jumpsuit. In Auburn."
I looked at my sister.
I looked at the part in her hair, where the roots were slightly dark, showing the natural brown that she had spent seven hundred dollars every six weeks to hide with platinum toner. I looked at her small, perfect hands—hands that had never carried a laundry basket, never scrubbed a floor, never held an ice pack against another human being’s skin.
"Grandma gave me that money to put a down payment on a house, Lena," I said softly.
"You don't need a house!" she shrieked, her voice finally breaking, the neighbors three doors down pausing on their raking to look toward the driveway. "You’re single! You live alone! You have an apartment with a doorman and a gym! Dad needs his life!"
The front door of the colonial opened with a heavy, brassy creak.
Arthur Vance stepped onto the porch, his black leather binder tucked under his arm, his camel-hair coat draped over his shoulders against the afternoon chill.
Behind him came Caleb.
Caleb didn't look at Lena. He walked straight to the driver’s side of the Volvo, opened the door, and slid behind the wheel, the smell of leather and cedar smoke following him into the cabin.
"Get off the car, Lena," Caleb said through his open window, his voice as level as an iron rule.
She didn't move. She stayed pressed against my door, her eyes wild, her face smeared with tears and black mascara tracks.
"Tessa!" she screamed. "Tell him! Tell him you’ll write the check!"
I reached out with my left hand, found the toggle switch on the armrest, and pressed the button.
The heavy tinted glass rose with a smooth, electric hum, sliding past her fingers, closing the two-inch gap until the rubber seal met the top frame with an airtight, soundproof click.
May you like
Caleb turned the key.
The engine rumbled to life, the reverse lights casting a clean white glow across the shale driveway, and we pulled away from the house on Elmwood Avenue, leaving my sister standing alone between the hydrangeas and the empty chairs, her hands clawing at the cold autumn air like a child who had reached for a balloon and watched it drift straight into the power lines.
