Page 3

Chapter 3

Kennedy Carter

Watcha Cove, July 2015

A singular small curl formed at the base of Kennedy’s skull as she started sweating. Though the air-conditioning at Watcha Cove was always set to an optimal temperature, her frayed nerves were making her hot. This was the way it always was when she was in this house. Some part of her was always trying to rebel, and right now, that meant her hair. She leaned back in the low upholstered empire chair—a French antique certainly not made for actually working at a desk but aggressively feminine and beautifully coordinated with the other aspects of the interiors in the room, just like her mother wanted. It wasn’t comfortable or practical, but it looked great, similar to her silk press, which was coming undone.

Kennedy cracked her neck and tenderly touched the coil of her natural hair texture breaking through before reaching for a claw clip so that she could save the rest of her hair from a similar fate. She removed the headphones currently blasting her focus music as she chewed on her bottom lip and faced her computer screen. All morning Kennedy had been struggling to connect the dots of her edit. A year ago, her mother, juiced up with an impending seventieth birthday party to plan, had tasked Kennedy with assembling a tribute video that could be played at the milestone celebration. Kennedy had agreed, stunned she’d been given the job. There were several award-winning directors already on the confirmed guest list. Her mother rarely granted her an audience, let alone asked her for a favor, so Kennedy threw herself into producing the best thirteen-minute film that she could.

The project began conventionally. She contacted party guests whom her mother had placed on a specific list as “friends of the family,” which included former presidents, Fortune 500 executives, and ex-classmates of her father. They all gave gushing testimonials, an undeniable sign that none of these people would be willing to tell the truth about William Carter Jr. Quickly Kennedy grew frustrated with the project, which was shaping up to be a banal PowerPoint presentation set to music, a glorified slideshow with sound bites about what a “tenacious” and “commandeering” man her father was—a corporate way of saying “cold” and “occasionally cruel.” It’s not that she was interested in uncovering some deep truth, exactly, but she wanted to share something unique about her father, something that could show what type of filmmaker she was going to be.

She envisioned the short film as one that would accurately chronicle the life of a modern titan, from his humble beginnings in Boston to his ascent to CEO of the Carter Corporation to his legacy of philanthropy and charity. But in sorting through his early life, Kennedy ran into roadblocks almost immediately, as if her father had no history. He was a ghost, leaving no footprints. Her grandparents were long dead, not that she’d had a close relationship with them when they were alive. Her father’s only brother, older by a number of years, was in palliative care in Florida. And William Carter Jr. didn’t have friends. He had associates, business partners, colleagues ... and none of them were very forthcoming about anything that she hadn’t already read in a Forbes article. So, like any good documentarian, she embarked on her own research.

Kennedy was good at research. It was a solitary activity, which meant that she was in total control of the outcome. If the choice ever came down to a group project or independent research at school, she knew which she would choose. It wasn’t because she was antisocial. She worked hard at having relationships, at doing what people wanted, what her family wanted ... mostly. She liked research because it was a journey. She would open a door that led to another door that led to another door and then finally to what she was looking for. It was exciting, requiring nothing of her but energy and time, both of which she usually had in abundance. Her notebook was open, several stacks of Post-it notes were haphazardly stuck to her wall for reminders, and about ninety browser windows were fighting for her attention on her computer.

For this project, she began with the facts she knew: Her father had started his company fresh out of business school and made his way to New York City, where he scraped and saved in order to accumulate the assets he needed to get approved for a loan so that he could begin building his domestic real estate portfolio. That portfolio was a counterpart to the international housing company that he founded in Ghana. Then he met Kennedy’s mother and began his second lifelong pursuit of creating the “perfect” family, of which Kennedy was the youngest member. It was a neat narrative, totally without the drama she needed for the screen. Sure, there was grit, some struggle, but no conflict. It was hard to see her father as a hero with the material she had, and she’d decided it was her goal for guests to come away from her tribute thinking of William Carter Jr. as someone to admire.

That was, until her high school best friend, an unlikely source, sent her a scanned image over email. It was a Polaroid of her father as a young man, a year or two older than Kennedy was now. He was standing in a courtyard with his arm around someone she’d never seen—a tall, lanky, dark-skinned guy with a perfectly shaped Afro. Someone had written the word “Kofi” alongside her father’s name under this image. Kofi was the mystery man’s name, she presumed. Her father, similarly hued but shorter and softer, stood at the shoulder of this enigma with a self-satisfied grin. The two were radiating hope, it seemed.

It was unusual to see her typically stoic father so openly joyful. The photo became a guiding light for her film. She wanted to know that guy. She also wanted to know the guy who brought that out in her father. Maybe if she were actually working on a contracted gig, she could have just asked her subject or her client, “Hey, who’s Kofi?” But since she was working in secret, and technically against the direction of her mother, she was working on figuring it out on her own. In her introductory film class at USC, she’d been instructed to follow the money when in doubt. In this case, a financial road map was not that helpful. And this photo, showing her father in an ill-fitting suit like he was playing dress-up, didn’t quite fit with how she perceived him. And now that she knew what she knew from all her extra digging, guilt crept in about what she should do with the truth.

She had worked through the night on the video, hoping that something might spark her creativity based on what to do with the information that she had gathered so far, but nothing had come together. She couldn’t actually let the video reveal the kind of man she thought her dad might be. Instead, in the early-morning hours, she’d watched clouds roll through the private bay outside the Watcha Cove window. Heavy sheets of rain soon obscured everything beyond the glass. Kennedy began to realize that perhaps the party wasn’t going to move forward after all, that it might be okay that she had failed in making a tribute video worthy of being shown. Once again letting her family down.

Kennedy got up from her desk to source some necessary provisions, and on her way back from the kitchen, armed with enough snacks to get her through an afternoon of Final Cut, she ran into staff crying in the hallway. Her headphones still firmly over her ears, she heard their muffled, distressed voices breaking through the booming bass. Clearly something major had just happened. Seeing anyone outwardly express emotion, especially sadness, in this house was completely alien. “What’s going on?” she asked two sobbing housekeepers.

“Miss Carter, we are so sorry,” the one nearest to her said, fighting to gasp in air.

“Sorry for what?” Kennedy asked, looking around again for any clue that might tell her where this was headed.

“It’s your father,” the other housekeeper filled in. “He’s ...”

The unfinished statement remained suspended in the air until Kennedy demanded, more frantically now, “He’s what?”

“Dead,” the housekeeper finally whispered, wiping at her face with a tissue.

Dead.

The word didn’t make sense. Her father had just been grumbling about the weather when he’d passed her room on his way to the private gym. Her father, who drank alkaline water specially delivered to him because he claimed he was sensitive to whatever came out of the tap. Her father, who punished himself by eating bran cereal for breakfast and vegan cookies for dessert for the sake of “health preservation.” She knew he had a secret cigarette habit because she also had one, and they both were very bad at hiding it. She didn’t know if he loved life, but she knew that he was actively pursuing not dying (aside from the smoking). Her father was, by all measures, a healthy man about to turn seventy in front of America’s most glittering elite.

Her father was, apparently, dead.

Kennedy heard Asher’s footsteps before she saw him running up behind her, and, like avoiding a stampede or a tsunami, she started to run in the same direction. Kennedy and Asher thundered down the hallway to the master suite. As kids, they’d been strongly discouraged from running inside, told to be careful of the priceless artwork that might be ruined. This rule was enforced after they had knocked into a pedestal and smashed an original Jeff Koons balloon dog statue bought at auction for $700,000 before it was insured.

But now Kennedy fell in behind Asher as his long legs glided down the hall. Asher threw open the door to his parents’ bedroom and squeaked out, “Dad?” so distressed and pathetic that Kennedy’s heart crumbled into a dry heap of dust inside her chest. She remained silent. Before she even realized what was happening, she was crying, tears cascading down her face. There was no one to answer. There was no Dad.

Their mother sat in a chair by a large bedroom window, watching the hurricane. Her feet were curled underneath her legs. She wore a gray cashmere tracksuit. The diamonds on her fingers, ears, and neck caught the light from the ceiling and did a twitchy waltz. She didn’t turn to look at her children.

“He’s gone,” she said, her voice far away.

“No,” Kennedy whispered as she spun around to see Asher standing by their father’s bedside. The person she presumed to be William Carter Jr. lay motionless under a sheet.

Kennedy had hardly ever seen her father asleep. She was sure that he would hate anyone to see him asleep, even his children.

She had longed for intimacy with her father her whole life. They had never spent quality time together, not really, and the reality that they never would now was heavy in her heart. The video was the closest that she’d ever gotten to knowing who he really was. She had interviewed dozens of people, hoping for a clearer picture of him, but she never saw one. She wondered if that was due to the veneer he had begun to erect to keep everyone out decades before. She herself was guilty of upholding it. She’d filmed herself retelling her favorite story about her father, something not too private that painted him favorably.

When Kennedy was nine, her father had organized a private shopping day at FAO Schwarz, shutting the famed toy store down for just them. He told her she could get whatever she wanted, and she spent precious time debating what that would be, covering the shelves with her fingerprints, her light-up sneakers squeaking in the deserted aisles. She knew it was important for her to make the right selection, that her father wanted her to remember that day for some reason, and she did remember it, but the version of this story that she told on camera for William Carter Jr.’s birthday tribute wasn’t entirely true. She’d watched the playback of it that morning. The footage showed Kennedy, bright-eyed, looking straight into the lens, fondly recalling the excursion.

“My father wanted to spoil me rotten. We were in there for hours, just the two of us, searching. The whole store was closed, and I tore through there because that was every kid’s wildest dream. When we checked out, we had four people carrying the bags behind us. I think most of that stuff ended up donated, but it was the best day of my life.” She’d even let a deceptive girlish giggle escape. She’d been telling that story for so many years, she almost believed it herself. It wasn’t until she saw the cocreator of that story lying lifeless in his bed that the truth broke free in her mind.

When they’d gone to the register, William Carter Jr. looked down at the single toy Kennedy had selected. “That’s really all you want?” he asked. Kennedy knew then that she’d made a mistake. She nodded dejectedly. Her father, now ready to do his part and pay, had been on the phone the whole time they were in the store. They certainly hadn’t been there for hours. Her father would never have wasted so much time in a toy store, and he’d instructed her she had one hour to make her selection. He hadn’t roamed around with her, helpfully looking for the toy that would speak to her. He’d barely made eye contact with her, her excitement and anticipation gradually giving way to panic as she watched his first assistant hover in the background, reminding Kennedy of an invisible countdown ticking by with every minute. In her mind, she was doing the calculations. They had eight minutes left. Two minutes left. She wanted to pick the right toy. She wanted to impress William Carter Jr. She had to.

Kennedy had ended up selecting a LEGO set, a simple house. She’d always been enchanted with the conventional, romanticizing how other people in happy, normal families might live. She always drew her family pictures in front of a house, a house modeled after that LEGO set. She hated that she’d lied for the film, but that was part of being a Carter.

Looking at her lifeless father, she remembered how the drawings didn’t depict the penthouse that she had grown up in, and that artistic liberty had apparently concerned her mother enough that she sought out a professional opinion. “We have a penthouse , honey,” her mother would say slowly and assertively as a reaction to her drawings, confused as to why Kennedy was not trying to capture the view from their sprawling duplex in crayon. Kennedy, she seemed to believe, was fetishizing poverty, a mental illness, surely. A child psychologist told her parents it was something that Kennedy would grow out of—that all kids had fantasies, and art is often simply an outlet for expression. Kennedy had pressed her ear to the door of her parents’ bedroom suite the night after her first therapy session, feeling like something was wrong with her. “Why does she need a fantasy?” her dad asked. “Look at her life.”

And now, yes, look at her life.

“How?” Kennedy said, her voice barely audible over the wind outside.

“What do you mean, how, Kennedy?” Asher said with the full strength of his voice, still staring down at the corpse of their father. “You know exactly what you did.”