by Noah Hawley
Bill picks up on the tension between mother and daughter. He looks at Doug, who raises his half-drunk beer as if in a toast.
“Good, right?” he says, oblivious.
“What?” says Bill, who has clearly decided Doug is some kind of hipster douchebag.
“The beer.”
Bill ignores him, reaches over and ruffles the boy’s hair. Four hours ago he stood in Don Liebling’s office and faced down Gus Franklin from the NTSB and representatives of the Justice Department. They said they wanted to know where he got O’Brien’s memo.
I bet you do, he told them, thumbing his suspenders.
Don Liebling straightened his tie and told the government shock troops that of course their sources were confidential.
Not good enough, said the attorney from Justice.
The black guy, Franklin, seemed to have his own theory.
Did O’Brien give it to you? Because of what happened?
Bill shrugged.
It didn’t just fall out of the sky, he said. That much we know. But I’ve been to court before, defending a source, and I’m happy to go again. I hear they validate your parking now.
After the agents stormed out, Liebling closed the door and put himself in front of it.
Tell me, he said.
On the sofa, Bill spread his legs wide. He’d been raised without a dad by a weak woman who clung to shitbird men like she was drowning. She used to lock Bill in his room at night and go paint the town red with menstrual blood. And look at him now, a multimillionaire who tells half the planet what to think and when. The fuck if some silver spoon, Ivy League lawyer was going to shake him in his shoes. No way was he going to out Namor. This was about David. About his mentor. His friend. And okay, maybe they didn’t get along that well at the end, but that man was his brother, and he will get to the truth here, no matter what the cost.
Like the spook said, he told Don, it was the FBI man. They kicked him off the team and he was pissed.
Liebling stared at him, wheels turning in his head.
If I find out, he started.
Gimme a break, said Bill, standing, then walked to the door, step by step, putting himself in the lawyer’s face. Forget you’re in an office, he said with his body. Forget hierarchy and the laws of social behavior. This is a warrior you’re facing, king stud on the open savanna, poised and ready to rip off your face, so either lower your horns or get the fuck out of my way.
He could smell the salami on Liebling’s breath, saw him blink, off balance, unprepared for the old bear versus bear, the dirt-pit cockfight. For thirty seconds, Bill hate-fucked him with his eyes. Then Don stepped aside and Bill sauntered out.
Now, in the kitchen, he decides to take the high ground.
“Just a friendly visit,” he says. “These are difficult times and you—well, to me you’re family—you were family to David and that makes us—so I want you to know I’m looking out for you. Uncle Bill is looking out—watching over.”
“Thank you,” says Eleanor. “But I think we’re going to be fine.”
He smiles generously.
“I’m sure. The money will help.”
There’s something in his tone, a bite that belies the sympathy on his face.
“We’re thinking of moving into the town house in the city,” says Doug.
“Doug,” Eleanor snaps.
“What? We are.”
“It’s a beautiful place,” says Bill, thumbs hooking into his suspenders. “A lot of memories.”
“I don’t mean to be rude,” says Eleanor coldly, “but I need to feed JJ.”
“Of course,” says Bill. “You’re the—I mean, a boy this age still needs mothering, especially after—so don’t feel you have to—”
Eleanor turns away from him, seals the ziplock with the turkey in it, puts it in the fridge. Behind her, she hears Bill stand. He’s not used to being dismissed.
“Well,” he says, “I should go.”
Doug stands.
“I’ll walk you out.”
“Thanks, but there’s—I can find it.”
Eleanor brings JJ his plate.
“Here you go,” she says. “There’s more pickles if you want them.”
Behind her, Bill walks to the kitchen door, stops.
“Have you spoken to Scott?” he asks.
At the name, the boy looks up from his meal. Eleanor follows his eyes to Bill.
“Why?”
“No reason,” says Bill, “just, if you’re not watching the news then maybe you haven’t heard the questions.”
“What questions?” asks Doug.
Bill sighs, as if this is hard for him.
“There’s just—people are wondering, you know. He was the last one on the plane, and—what was his connection to your sister, really? And then, have you heard about his paintings?”
“We don’t need to talk about this now,” says Eleanor.
“No,” says Doug, “I wanna know. He calls, you know. In the middle of the night.”
Doug looks at his wife.
“You think I don’t know, but I do.”
“Doug,” says Eleanor. “That’s not his business.”
Bill thumbs his suspenders, bites his lower lip.
“So you are talking to him,” Bill says. “That’s—I mean, just—be careful, you know? He’s—look, it’s just questions right now, and this is America. I’ll fight to the death before I let this administration take away our right to due process. But it’s early days, and these are real questions. And I just—I worry about—you’ve been hurt so much—already. And who knows how bad this’ll get? So, my question is, do you need him?”
“That’s what I said,” says Doug. “I mean, we’re grateful. What he did for JJ.”
Bill makes a face.
“Of course, if you—I mean, a who-knows-how-long swim in the middle of the night. And with a busted arm, dragging a little boy.”
“Stop,” says Eleanor.
“You’re saying,” says Doug, picking up the idea like a germ—that the hero maybe isn’t that much of a hero after all—“hold on. Are you saying—?”
Bill shrugs, looks at Eleanor, his face softening.
“Doug,” says Bill, “come on. Eleanor’s right. This isn’t—”
He leans right, trying to see JJ around Eleanor’s blocking body, then keeps bending “comically” until the boy looks at him. Bill smiles.
“You be a good boy,” he tells him. “We’ll talk soon. If you need anything, tell your—tell Eleanor to call me. Maybe we’ll go see the Mets sometime. You like baseball?”
The boy shrugs.
“Or the Yankees. I’ve got a box.”
“We’ll call you,” says Eleanor.
Bill nods.
“Anytime,” he says.
* * *
Later, Doug wants to talk, but Eleanor tells him she’s going to take JJ to the playground. She feels as if she’s being squeezed inside a huge fist. At the playground she forces herself to be fun. She slides with the boy and bounces on the seesaw. Trucks in the sand, digging it, piling it, watching it fall. It’s a hot day and she tries to keep them in the shade, but the boy just wants to run, so she feeds him water to keep him hydrated. A thousand thoughts are going in her head, colliding, each new idea interrupting the last.
Part of her is trying to put together why Bill came. Another part is parsing through what he said, specifically about Scott. What is she supposed to think, that the man who saved her nephew actually crashed the plane somehow and then faked his heroic swim? Every idea in that sentence is absurd in its own right. How does a painter crash a plane? And why? And what did he mean about Scott’s relationship with Maggie? Was he saying there was an affair? And why drive out to the house to tell her this?
The boy taps her arm and points to his pants.
“You have to go potty?” she asks.
He nods, and she picks him up and carries him to the public bathroom. As she helps him with his pants, it hits her with a
sway of vertigo that given his youth there is little chance he will remember his real parents when he’s an adult. She will be the mother he thinks of the second Sunday of every May. Not her sister. But, she thinks, does that mean that Doug will be his father? The thought of it sickens her a little. Not for the first time she curses herself for the weakness of her youth, this need for constant companionship like an elderly widow who leaves the TV on and gets a dog.
But then she thinks maybe all Doug needs is a chance. Maybe inheriting a four-year-old boy will motivate him, turn him into a family man. Then again, isn’t thinking a child can save your marriage the classic delusion? They’ve had JJ with them for two weeks now, and Doug isn’t drinking any less, hasn’t changed his comings and goings, hasn’t treated her any better. Her sister is dead and the boy is now an orphan, but What about Doug’s needs? he says with every thoughtless comment. What about how this affects him?
She helps JJ get his pants up and wash his hands. Uncertainty is making her light-headed. Maybe she’s not being fair. Maybe she’s still upset about meeting the estate attorneys and business managers, the finality of the thing. And maybe Doug’s right. Maybe they should move into the house in the city, give JJ a sense of continuity—use the money to re-create the luxury he knows? But her instinct is that that would only confuse him. Everything has changed. To pretend otherwise feels like fraud.
“Ice cream?” she asks him as they walk back outside and the full heat of the day hits him. He nods. She smiles and takes his hand, leading him to the car. Tonight she will talk to Doug, lay it all out, how she’s feeling, what she thinks the boy needs. They will sell the real estate and put the money into the trust. They will give themselves a monthly stipend that’s big enough to cover any additional expenses the boy brings, but not enough to allow them to quit their jobs or become people of luxury. Doug won’t like it, she knows, but what can he say?
The decision is hers.
Chapter 25
Rachel Bateman
July 9, 2006–August 23, 2015
She remembered none of it. What details she knew had been told to her, except for the image of a rocking chair in a bald, bare attic, rocking back and forth on its own. She saw that chair from time to time in her mind, mostly in the ether on the verge of sleep, an old wicker rocker creaking toward and away, toward and away, as if to soothe a ghost, dog-tired and cross.
Her parents named her Rachel after Maggie’s grandmother. When she was really little (she was nine now) Rachel decided she was a cat. She studied their cat Peaches, trying to move like it. She would sit at the breakfast table and lick the back of her hand, wiping her face with it after. Her parents put up with it until she told them she was going to sleep during the day and roam the house at night. Maggie, her mother, said, “Babe, I just don’t have the energy to stay up.”
Rachel was the reason they had bodyguards, the reason men with Israeli accents and shoulder holsters followed them everywhere. There were three normally. In the lingo of the business, Gil, the first, was a body man—paid to stay in direct physical proximity to the principal. In addition, there was an advance team, usually rotating, of four to six men who watched them from farther away. Rachel knew they were here because of her, because of what had happened, though her father denied it. Threats, he said vaguely, implying that running a TV news network was somehow more relevant to their daily threat level than the fact that his daughter had been kidnapped in her youth, and that quite possibly one or more of the kidnappers were still out there.
At least those were the facts in her head. Her parents had assured her, as had men from the FBI (as a favor to her father last year) and a high-paid child psychiatrist, that the kidnapping had been the work of a single, deranged man (Wayne R. Macy, thirty-six), and that Macy had been killed (shot through the right eye) during the ransom exchange by a lawman in a flak jacket, but not before Macy had shot and killed a second lawman in the opening salvo of a fleeting firefight. The dead lawman was Mick Daniels, forty-four, a former FBI agent and veteran of the First Gulf War.
All she remembered was a chair.
* * *
She was supposed to feel things. She knew that. A nine-year-old girl in summer, on the verge of her teen years. She had been out on the Vineyard with her mother and brother for the last two weeks, lying about. As a child of great wealth there were countless options available to her—tennis lessons, sailing lessons, golf lessons, horseback riding, whatever—but she didn’t feel like being trained. She had studied piano for two years, but ultimately wondered to what end and moved on. She liked being home with her mom and her brother. That was basically it. She felt useful there—a four-year-old boy is more than a handful, her mother would say—and so Rachel played with JJ. She fixed him lunch and changed his pants when he had an accident.
Her mother told her she didn’t have to do it, that she should go out, enjoy the day, but it was hard to do with a large Israeli man (three sometimes) following your every move. Not that she could argue the need for it. Wasn’t she herself proof that you can’t be too careful?
So she stayed home, lying on the porch or the back lawn, staring at the ocean—blinded by it sometimes, that diamond sparkle. She liked to read books about wayward girls, girls who fit in nowhere, then discovered they had magic powers. Hermione, Katniss Everdeen. She’d read Harriet the Spy when she was seven and Pippi Longstocking, and they were competent, but in the end simply human. As she grew, Rachel felt she needed more from her heroines, more teeth, more fight, more power. She liked the thrill of danger they faced, but didn’t want to have to actually worry about them. It made her too anxious.
Whenever she reached a particularly distressing section (Hermione versus the troll in Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, for example), she would walk the book inside and hand it to her mother.
“What’s this?”
“Just tell me—does she make it?”
“Does who make what?”
“Hermione. A troll escaped, a giant—and she’s—can you—just read it and tell me she’s okay.”
And her mother, who knew her well enough not to push, would stop whatever she was doing and sit, reading as many pages as it took to get the answer. Then she would hand the book back, her thumb marking a new spot.
“Start here,” she’d say. “She didn’t have to fight it. She just yelled at it that it was in the girls’ bathroom and should go away.”
They had a giggle about that, yelling at a troll, and then Rachel went back outside to read.
* * *
It started with the nanny. They didn’t realize it, though, at the time. Her name was Francesca Butler, but everyone called her Frankie. This was when the family summered on Long Island, at Montauk Point, before private planes and helicopters, when they would just pile in the car and drive out on a Friday night, battling the shifting bulge, like the LIE was just a giant anaconda that had swallowed a traffic jam, the clot of snarled cars shifting downward in surges.
Her brother wasn’t even an idea yet. It was just David and Maggie and toddler Rachel, sleeping in her car seat. The news channel was six years old and already a profit- and controversy-generating machine, but her father liked to say, I’m just a figurehead. A general in a back room. Nobody knows me from Adam.
The kidnapping would change that.
That was the summer of the Montauk Monster, which washed up on shore on July 12, 2008. A local woman, Jenna Hewitt, and three of her friends were walking on Ditch Plains Beach and found the creature.
“We were looking for a place to sit,” she was later quoted saying, “when we saw some people looking at something…We didn’t know what it was…We joked that maybe it was something from Plum Island.”
Described by some as a “rodent-like creature with a dinosaur beak,” the monster was about the size of a small dog and mostly hairless. The body was stocky and the limbs slender. It had two front paws with elongated, pale claws. Its tail was slim and approximately equal in length to the head and neck comb
ined. It was short-faced, wearing an expression of agony or dismay; the postorbital part of the skull appeared long and stout. It had no teeth visible in the upper jaw, instead showing what could be described as a hooked beak of bone. The lower jaw contained a large pointed canine and four post-canines with tall, conical cusps.
Was it a raccoon, as some suggested, that had decomposed in the ocean? A sea turtle whose shell had been removed? A dog?
For weeks, photos of the bloated, distended corpse appeared in tabloids and online. Speculation increased that it was something cooked up in a lab at the Plum Island Animal Disease Center, a mile or so offshore. The Real Island of Dr. Moreau, they started calling it. But eventually, as with all things, a lack of answers led to a lack of interest, and the world moved on.
But when David and Maggie arrived in Montauk that weekend, monster fever was full-blown. Roadside T-shirt kiosks had sprung up. For five dollars you could see the spot where the monster was found, now just an anonymous patch of sand.
The Batemans were renting a house on Tuthill Road. It was a two-story white clapboard across the road from a small lagoon. Mostly secluded, the house was directly parallel to a stalled modern remodel, sheet plastic flapping over a gaping wound to the living room. In years prior, Rachel’s family had rented a house farther north, on Pinetree Drive, but that one had sold to a hedge-fund billionaire in January.
Their new clapboard home (Maggie would stay out there with Rachel through Labor Day weekend, and David would drive out on Fridays and take off the last week of August) was cozy and quaint. It had a large farmhouse kitchen and a sloped and creaky porch. The bedrooms were on the second floor, Mom and Dad facing the ocean. Rachel’s room (complete with a Victorian-era crib) faced the lagoon. They brought Frankie (the nanny) with them, a third pair of hands, as Maggie liked to say. Frankie sat in the back of the Audi with Rachel, engaged in a road-trip-long game of pick up Rachel’s pacifier, wipe it off, and hand it back. Frankie was a night-school nursing student at Fordham who helped take care of Rachel three days a week. She was twenty-two, an émigré from the wilds of Michigan who moved to New York with a boyfriend after college, only to have him leave her for the bass player in a Japanese surf-punk band.