The Nest

by Cynthia D'Aprix Sweeney

  “Me neither. We’re divorced.”

  “I’m sorry,” she said, not sounding the tiniest bit sorry.

  “Don’t be.”

  She looked back out at the water and he waited. “Are you off to work right now?” she asked.

  “Nope,” Leo said. “There’s nothing going on at work today that needs my attention.”

  “Want to get some coffee? Breakfast? There’s a good place nearby. I just have to drop the dog off at home.”

  “I could do that,” Leo said.

  “Excellent.” She smiled at him and then looked down at the dog. “C’mon, Rupert,” she said. “Let’s show our friend where you live.” As they turned to leave, she stopped and pointed to Bea’s leather satchel sitting on the bench. “Is that yours?” she asked.

  Leo looked at the brown leather case. He remembered buying it, how proud he’d been when he bargained the seller in London down to less than half the listed price. When he got the thing home, he decided it was a little on the twee side, a little too uptown, so he’d given it to Bea. “That is definitely not mine,” he said, relieved to note his ebbing anxiety, his elevated mood. He probably shouldn’t leave the case sitting there. But then he saw Paul Underwood approaching from less than a block away, right on schedule, set to arrive at the bench precisely at 8:55 A.M., as he did every weekday. Leo dropped his cigarette and ground it beneath his heel. He was doing everyone a favor by getting out of town, he thought. People abandoned one another constantly without performing the courtesy of actually disappearing. They left but they didn’t, lurking about, a constant reminder of what could or should or might have been. Not him.

  “You think it’s okay to just leave it there?” she asked.

  Leo looked at the satchel again and then back at Paul, who’d seen him and raised a hand in recognition. “Sure,” Leo said. “If it’s important, whoever left it will come back. Okay, Rupert,” he said to the dog, clapping his hands. “Lead the way.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  Let me do the talking,” Vinnie said, sitting at Matilda’s kitchen table and paging through her contacts, looking for Leo’s name.

  “It’ll go straight to voice mail,” she said. “I’m telling you.”

  If it was possible, Vinnie was even more pissed to learn that Matilda had called Leo Plumb after the night he’d brought over the mirror, after they’d argued. “I thought about what you said,” she told him. “I decided maybe you were right.” She had dialed Leo’s number a few times, she finally confessed to Vinnie, but it always went straight to voice mail and she didn’t want to leave a message.

  “We’ll dial all night if we have to.” He touched the screen and put the phone on speaker and, as Matilda predicted, the computer-generated voice mail came on. Vinnie disconnected and hit redial. This time, after only two rings, someone answered. A woman. Vinnie and Matilda were momentarily stunned.

  “Hello,” they both said at once.

  “Hello?” the woman said.

  Vinnie held a hand up, signaling for Matilda to be quiet. She shook her head and pointed to herself. She could do this. Vinnie nodded at her. Go, he mouthed.

  “My name is Matilda Rodriguez.” Silence. She cleared her throat and leaned closer to the phone sitting on the table to make sure her voice could be heard. “And I would like to speak to Leo Plumb.”

  “That makes two of us,” Stephanie said.

  CHAPTER THIRTY–ONE

  Melody’s birthday was usually a grim-weather affair occurring when it did, in the waning days of February. New York in February was still weeks away from any sustained sun or morning birdsong or tender plant shoots breaking through the mottled dirt. The holidays and New Year celebrations were already a distant memory, as diminished as the lingering, soot-covered curbside snowpack that would finally melt under a gloomy March rain only to expose neat little piles of desiccated dog shit.

  But every so often, like the day of her fortieth birthday, the weather gods would smile upon Melody and lift the hem of the jet stream just far enough north to create a brilliant preview of spring, embryonically warm and inviting. It was the kind of day that can fool the crocuses into blooming too soon and the twentysomething denizens of New York into baring their winter-white legs and walking down the recently salted pavement in arch-destroying flip-flops, dirtying the bottoms of their feet still tender and pink from months of being coddled by socks and boots and sheepskin slippers.

  Heading south on the Taconic, a furious Walt was driving exactly four miles above the speed limit; the mood in the car was tense. After Melody’s absurd counteroffer and her subsequent refusal to budge, the two potential buyers for their house became impatient and moved on. When Walter discovered her deception, he was more dumbfounded than enraged. He was about to call Vivienne Rubin to reopen negotiations when the promising e-mail from Leo had arrived. Melody managed to convince him to wait until after her birthday dinner.

  Melody knew Walt was also annoyed at how giddy she was being about the birthday celebration. Easy for him to say, he had forty-five years of wonderful birthdays behind him. Easy for him to be all blasé and world-weary, but she was turning forty and this was the first real birthday celebration she’d had, well, pretty much ever.

  Melody’s first and last birthday party happened the year she’d turned twelve, a rare capitulation on Francie’s part. Walking home from school that day with her three closest friends, Melody could barely contain her excitement—while repressing the distant drumbeat of concern. She’d asked her mother to buy a variety of foods, to set the table, to organize games. Francie had waved off her instructions, saying “I think I know how to keep people entertained.”

  But the only party Melody remembered having taken place at the Plumb house was a birthday party for Francie the previous summer that had become so raucous and gone on so late that the neighbors had complained to the police. The cops, all friends of Leonard and Francie, joined the festivities and sat in the back sipping beer. Melody watched from the upstairs bathroom window as her mother gently bounced on the lap of the policeman who showed up at her school every year to talk to them about stranger danger; he called himself “Officer Friendly.” Officer Friendly’s hands rested easily on either side of Francie’s waist, right above the swell of her hips. “Hands up!” he kept saying and Francie would raise her arms high above her head and laugh as his open palms slid up her torso, stopping when his fingers grazed the underside of her breasts. Melody was certain there hadn’t been any games at that party. Or gift bags. Just a cake and music and lots of cigarettes and cocktails.

  Francie greeted Melody and her school friends at the door wearing a silk kimono and holding a martini. Melody’s heart sank. The robe this early in the day was a very bad sign. As was the cocktail.

  “Welcome, ladies, welcome.” Francie waved the group through the front door. Melody could see the girls looking around the Plumb house and then eyeing each other, warily but with interest. The Tudor house was stately from the outside, but the inside was worn and neglected, chaotic. The foyer where the girls stood in their winter coats was a muddle of outerwear from all seasons. Coats were piled on a bench, hats and mittens spilled out of baskets on the floor, there were shoes everywhere—broken flip-flops, evening sandals, insulated boots, snowshoes.

  “You’re right on time,” Francie said. “I admire punctuality in guests.”

  “We came straight from school,” Melody’s friend Kate said. “It’s a quick walk.”

  “So you did. So you did,” Francie said, focusing on Kate, looking her over. “Are you the logical one, the A student?”

  “Mom,” Melody said. She wanted her mother to stop talking to her friends. She especially wanted to stop this line of inquiry, one of Francie’s favorite gambits, assigning people a descriptor based on her first—often uncanny—impression. Melody wanted Francie to go upstairs and put on a pair of pants and a sweater and pull her hair back with a black velvet headband like Kate’s mother, or to carry cookies and hot cocoa out
on a tray like Beth’s mother and ask about their homework, or to burst through the door after a day spent working at an office in the city like Leah’s mother and hustle straight to the kitchen saying, in her thrilling Irish timbre, “Supper soon, loves. You must be starved!”

  “Logic is an underrated attribute,” Francie said, continuing to address Kate. “Logic goes a long way in life, longer than lots of other things.” She turned to the other two girls and squinted a little as if bringing them into clearer focus, plucking a cocktail onion from her martini. “You’re the pretty one,” she said, pointing a gin-dampened finger at Beth who was, in fact, the prettiest girl at school; Melody had been quietly thrilled when Beth started chatting with her after French class one day, telling Melody what products to use to get her bangs to stick up higher and sharing her glitter mascara.

  “And you,” Francie said, eyeing Leah, who took a step backward and clenched her fists, almost as if she knew to brace herself for Francie’s reductive assessment, “must be the lesbian.”

  “Mom!”

  “What’s a lesbian?” said Kate.

  “Never mind,” Melody said, grabbing Leah by the arm and motioning for the other two to follow her. “She’s kidding. It’s a family joke. I’ll explain later.”

  It was a kind of family joke, although not one Melody could explain. Leah was Melody’s oldest friend, a nondescript blurry kind of girl whose most noticeable feature was a persistently runny nose from year-round hay fever. Leah tended to moon a little while following Melody around school, sniffling and sneezing.

  “How’s your lesbian lover?” Bea would ask Melody, referring to Leah. “You guys going steady yet?”

  “Shut up,” Melody would say. She didn’t even know at first what lesbian meant. She sneaked into Leonard’s study one day to look it up in the dictionary and then had to look up homosexual and although she knew right away that the word didn’t describe her, she knew who it did describe: Jack. She pictured Jack and his friends sitting in the summer sun, lounging by the pool at the club, rubbing baby oil on each other’s shoulders. Homosexuals, she thought, slamming the book closed.

  Melody had led everyone to the kitchen at the back of the first floor. There were no streamers, no balloons, no festive paper plates and matching cups or shiny cardboard letters spelling out Happy Birthday strung above the breakfast nook, but there was a cake box. Melody was hugely relieved to see that there would, at the very least, be cake.

  “Where’s the party?” Kate said, staring at the kitchen sink full of dirty dishes and the table scattered with catalogs and empty grocery bags.

  “The party is wherever you make it, ladies.” Francie had followed the girls to the kitchen to refill her glass, the martini shaker glistening on the butter-and-crumb-streaked counter. “Party is an attitude, not a destination.”

  The girls looked at her, confused. Even though it was February, Francie marched the girls outside to the lawn beyond the patio, which was devoid of snow but still frozen and bare, and led an anemic game of Pin the Tail on the Donkey. “For God’s sake,” Francie yelled, standing on the patio in a fur coat, smoking, as the girls walked gingerly forward, mittened hands stretched out in front of them, “how hard can it be to locate an enormous tree trunk?”

  The Pin the Tail game was old, had been sitting in the storage area under the stairs for years. Melody frantically tried to remember what else was housed in that space overloaded with broken toys and old board games. How could she fake a party for two whole hours?

  “I think you girls have the hang of it,” Francie said after bringing them back inside and handing Leah a key chain with a tiny dangling Rubik’s cube from the junk drawer as a prize for pinning her tail closest to the donkey’s ass. “I’ll check back with you in a little bit.”

  Melody started sifting through the boxes under the stairs, wondering if she could salvage enough Monopoly money to keep a game going. “I have Twister,” she said to her friends. “The spinner is broken, but we can close our eyes and point to a color and play that way. It works just as well.”

  “Maybe I should just call my mom,” Beth said. All the girls were still wearing their coats.

  “I’m thirsty,” said Leah.

  “We could have cake?” Kate suggested. The other two girls nodded eagerly.

  Melody knew that cake was the last thing to happen at a birthday party. After all the games and snacks, the birthday cake was cut and everyone grabbed their gift bag and went home. Melody did not want to cut the cake. As she stood there with the broken Twister spinner in her hand, trying not to surrender to the tears that had been threatening to spill forth with humiliating force since her mother had greeted them, the front door opened. Leo.

  Leo had taken pity on Melody that day. He made huge bowls of buttered popcorn for the girls. He went up to his room and brought back a deck of cards and taught them how to play blackjack with pennies; he played the dealer. He brought down the vinyl records he kept under lock and key in his room and let them dance and lip-synch behind his air guitar version of “Start Me Up.” Just when things were looking up, Francie reappeared, ushering the girls—sweaty and breathless and all a little in love with Leo—into the living room for cake, a cake she’d clearly forgotten to order in advance. “Congratulations, Betty!” the cake said, with a little frosting stork underneath, carrying a folded diaper in its beak.

  “Who’s Betty?” Beth asked.

  “That’s another family joke,” Melody said, enjoying the versatility of this new excuse, tucking it away for future use. The cake tasted delicious, though, and the girls all took huge pieces and moved to the sofa, where Francie made them sit and listen to her play Harold Arlen songs on the piano. At first it was fun and watching her mother’s fingers almost dance above the keyboard, Melody thought that if the party ended right then, right after the rousing version of “If I Only Had a Brain,” everything would be fine. The party would be dubbed a success the next day at school. Her reputation saved.

  But then Francie started singing “Over the Rainbow” and only a few verses in she started to weep. “Mom?” Melody said, weakly.

  “It’s just so, so sad,” Francie said. She turned to them. “The studios killed Judy Garland. They killed her. That voice and what a tragedy. They made her and then they killed her.” The girls were sitting quietly, nervously giggling. “Uppers to work all day. Downers to sleep at night. She was just a kid.” Francie stood now, facing them, her robe gaping a little in front. “I wanted to be an actress. I could have gone to Hollywood.”

  “You could have been a real contender, Fran,” Leo said, leaning against the doorjamb, amused.

  “Why didn’t you?” Beth said, brightening a little. She wanted to go to Hollywood, talked about it all the time. Her parents had taken her on a family trip to Universal Studios the previous summer and she’d loved every minute of it, talked about the studio tour like she’d flown to Los Angeles for a screen test.

  “My father wouldn’t let me.” Francie sat on a large enormous club chair across from the girls. “He thought it was unseemly. He insisted I go to college, stay home. Then I met Leonard and got knocked up and that was that.”

  “Mom!”

  Francie scowled at Melody and waved her hand like she was waving away tiny gnats. “Oh, relax, Emily Post.” She closed her eyes and put her feet up on an ottoman and started to nod off. From across the room, Leo shrugged at Melody. The shrug was more resigned than sympathetic. See? the shrug said. Remember this the next time you want to invite friends over.

  When Beth’s mother arrived to take the girls home, she surveyed the scene—the baby-shower cake, Francie lightly snoring in a robe, the empty martini glass on the piano—and quietly closed the pocket doors between the living room and the front hall. As she helped the girls button their coats and locate mittens, Melody heard Beth tell her mother, “She said I was the pretty one. Why did she say Leah was a lesbian?”

  Melody had been scared to show up at school the next day, worried ab
out what her friends would say about her weepy, inebriated, odd mother. But all they talked about was the extremely cool birthday party where Leo Plumb, a high school senior, had sung and danced with them and taught them how to gamble.

  “Hey, Betty!” the three girls would say—with affection, not mockery—when they saw Melody in the hall. She’d never been happier than those weeks and months at the end of sixth grade.

  So Melody had been stunned—and thrilled—when Jack and Walker offered to host a fortieth birthday dinner in her honor. Every year she told Walt that all she wanted was a quiet birthday celebration at home with her family and she was always, always disappointed when he believed her.

  “I really think Leo is going to come through tonight,” she said, flipping down the sun visor and applying lipstick in the tiny mirror. “I think he’s going to surprise everyone with good news.”

  “That certainly would be a surprise.”

  “I don’t know why, but something about birthdays brings out the best in Leo. Really.”

  “If you say so.”

  “I do!” Melody turned the radio up and hummed along with a song she sort of knew. Leo’s e-mail had been vague, true, but it was also encouraging. She’d nearly memorized the long paragraph, something about an exciting project for Nathan that was coming together “very quickly,” how he’d left town to meet with some investors and would be out of touch but back with a progress report in time for her birthday dinner. “I’m very optimistic,” he’d written.

  Walter raised his voice a little to be heard above the radio. “What I really think,” he said, “is the sooner everyone lets go of Leo as their personal savior, the better off everyone will be. Including you. Including us.”

  Melody turned the radio volume higher. She didn’t want him to ruin her hopeful mood. He’d never believed in The Nest and sometimes she thought he was almost enjoying being right. She believed Leo was going to come through tonight. On her birthday! She’d spent the entire day as if she were preparing for a date. Bought a new dress (on the secret card, that’s how sure she felt), got her nails done, had dug out the pretty dangly (faux) diamond earrings Walt had bought for her after the girls were born. She checked herself in the mirror again. Maybe the earrings were too much. She shouldn’t have used so much hair stuff. She started playing with her bangs. Melody always felt wrong around her siblings, just a little off. She could see them assessing her clothing, judging Walt. (How dare they! They wouldn’t know a kind, good, capable person if—well, if their sister married one.) She shook her head. Tonight was going to be different. It was.