Anna Pitoniak - Necessary People

After Anne had sobbed and recovered and sobbed again, and finally hung up, I lay flat on my back, looking up at the unfamiliar bedroom ceiling.

“That was my mother?” Oliver propped himself on his elbow and gazed down at me, at my naked body draped in his high-thread-count sheets.

“The poor woman,” I said.

Oliver ran his fingertips lightly across my bare stomach. He took my hand and lifted it to his lips. “Poor you, ” he said. “Poor Violet. You’re bearing the brunt of everything.”

I closed my eyes. Oliver meant well, but his sincerity could be cloying. I often worried that I’d give myself away. The mattress distended as he rolled over. When I opened my eyes, his face hovered above mine. He brushed the hair from my forehead. “You’re so pretty,” he said. “My poor, pretty Violet.”

“Oliver—”

But he leaned down and kissed me, and I felt his erection pressing against my thigh. We’d just had sex fifteen minutes earlier, but he seemed to have the pent-up energy of a teenage boy. He was a good kisser. I’d never really been kissed with that kind of affection.

This whole thing was new for me. There were a handful of guys in college and in New York, one-night stands occasionally stretching into repeat hookups. But those were expressions of the lowest kind of desire: how it felt to have a boy grab your ass on the dance floor, how it felt for him to gruntingly relieve himself inside you when he barely knew your name. I treated sex as an obligation to be dispensed with every six months, like going to the dentist. There were men happy enough to oblige me in this. I did this mostly to avoid the judgment of Stella, who talked constantly about sex.

But a man who wanted to take me out to dinner? To gaze at me and compliment me, to have me spend the night and stay for breakfast in the morning? This was a novelty.

It felt deliciously inevitable. After dinner at an Italian restaurant on the Upper East Side, we walked back to his apartment on the pretext of a drink, hand in hand, slightly tipsy. Oliver kept stopping to kiss me. We skipped the drink and went straight into the bedroom. “Why didn’t we do this sooner?” he said, afterward.

We both knew the answer to that, but it was as if there were a quota on how often we could say her name. Initially, I took pleasure in how it could trigger Oliver. Listening to him complain about Stella was as satisfying as watching a rant-filled hour of cable news that confirmed all of your biases. I had years of grievance built up, but Oliver had decades.

“You hate her even more than I do,” I said once, laughing. We were sharing a bottle of wine over dinner, and Oliver was fixated on some adolescent episode.

But then his eyes, animated with old slights in the half distance, shifted back to the present and locked onto me. “I’m joking,” I said quickly. “Just joking.”

“I don’t hate her,” he said, smoothing the tablecloth, shifting his fork and knife into parallel alignment. Then he looked up at me. “If you do, that’s unfortunate.”

“Of course not,” I said. “I’m sorry. That was a bad joke.”

After that, I was careful. I only mentioned her name enough to show that I was worried, concerned about the investigation’s lack of progress. For his part, Oliver seemed to accept the police’s prevailing narrative: that Stella had gotten mixed up in a bad crowd. That, if there was foul play, it was of her own making.

It was when we stopped talking about her that things changed for the better. The shared heat of our feelings toward Stella—our frustrations, our jealousies—descended into the unspoken and charged everything with an electric pulse. Neither of us was stupid. We both knew that, if she were here, we wouldn’t be together.

But sometimes, when Oliver and I were having sex, I’d close my eyes and think of Stella. How much she would hate this. Her words on the boat that night: leech, suck-up, fraud. And now my connection to the family was stronger than ever. Friendship has no legal status, no promise of future offspring. This did. And who knew what this was, how far this could go? A wedding announcement in the Times, a new last name, a classic six on Park Avenue. A thorough whitewashing of the past that was only achievable through marriage. If Stella weren’t dead already, the sight of me and Oliver in bed together—naked, flushed, flourishing—might have killed her.

“We have to say something,” Ginny said. “I’m getting too many questions. The media reporter from the Times has been calling every single day.”

We were gathered in the Bradley living room, a week before Christmas. I was there as Stella’s friend, but also as Oliver’s girlfriend. Anne and Thomas seemed unsurprised. These kinds of things happened, like a widow marrying her dead husband’s brother, pairings of those unmoored by loss. But when Oliver held my hand or rubbed my back, Ginny’s eyebrows arched. I could tell she doubted this performance of sadness, even though she herself was proof that grief makes strange bedfellows. Ginny and Anne had become especially close over the last month. Oliver told me they spoke on the phone multiple times a day.

Increasingly, Ginny was taking charge of the situation. She had summoned this meeting. The office had been gossiping for weeks, aided by the trail of bread crumbs that Stella herself had left. People had seen her lose her temper, or yell at Jamie. Maybe she was the type to just… snap. Or maybe it was leverage. “Her contract is up for renewal,” I overheard one assistant speculating to another. “I bet she’s trying to drive the price up.” Soon the chatter spread beyond KCN. It began on a blog that covered the TV news industry, with a blind item about negotiations for Stella Bradley’s new contract being put on hold. It was then pointed out that Stella hadn’t been seen on TV since the Danner story. Around the month mark, the rumors were boiling rapidly enough that the steam drifted up to more mainstream publications.

“I don’t need the world digging into my daughter’s business,” Thomas said.

“But it could help,” Anne said, touching her husband’s arm. “What if someone out there saw something, and that’s how we find her?”

“Shouldn’t we tell the truth?” Oliver said. “Just say exactly what happened.”

“For what it’s worth,” I said. “There are enough people out there who know that she’s missing. One of them is going to leak something, eventually.”

“A short, simple statement,” Ginny said. “No explanation. Just the facts. The family asks for respect and privacy at this time. It’s the best path forward.”

A few days later, a statement was released simultaneously to the media and to KCN employees. This was an active investigation, and any further questions should be directed to the police. The family prays for Stella’s safe return home. They love her and miss her, and they are grateful for the well wishes.

My name appeared throughout the coverage. A picture of us, scraped from social media, accompanied every story. It was strange to see myself this way, a stock player in a larger drama. Violet Trapp, friend and coworker and roommate. Violet Trapp, the last person to see her alive. After the statement, the gossip at KCN went from heated to feverish. I was bombarded with invitations to lunches and drinks from coworkers I barely knew. “In case you need someone to talk to,” they said. “I can’t even imagine how hard this is for you.” People found excuses to stop by my desk, but before long, they always changed the conversation to Stella. The boldest ones presented their own theories of what happened.

But I noticed that no one did this for Jamie. No sympathetic inquiries, no invitations to lunch. The police had interviewed him, but since then he’d been kept in the dark. I counted as family; an ex-boyfriend didn’t. Jamie was tainted, possibly dangerous. He was one degree too close to the problem.