“Madison,” Mina said. “I’m really asking, here. You can talk to me. I’m sure you’re aware of some of what’s been happening, and I’m sure you don’t want to burden your mother with anything more than she’s already got on her plate. But I’m here, too.”
Madison didn’t turn, her profile so eerily similar to her mother’s.
“That’s so sweet of you, Mina. Really. I appreciate that so much. But I’m doing fine. You know my parents—they’ve both got their moods. If I let that upset me too much, I’d never get anything done.”
Jesus. They had her trained well. Bob ought to call her into the city to deal with reporters. Better than that spike-heeled blonde he’d set up as the face of the firm for most of the year, right up until she had to step down as CFO. Mina had pored over the photos of that woman in her Forbes profile, her cleavage tipped toward the camera like a fruit basket in one of those old, jewel-toned Dutch paintings. Veritas. Were those veritas, or were veritas the paintings of skulls and watches and things? Sic transit Gloria mundi. That was something, right? Sometimes it felt like her entire education had slid from her mind in one fell swoop long ago, like the tablecloth yanked from the table in that old trick. So much for the four years of History of Art seminars, the endless slides of paintings she still, back in college, had thought she’d never get to see in person.
As for the blonde, though, Mina was probably being unfair. Tom had said all year that she’d been promoted from nowhere and then tasked with an impossible job. An impossible job for anyone, but especially for an unqualified woman they’d only wanted to lend some “diversity” to the C-suite. What, there are no qualified women? Mina had asked. He’d been lying in bed while she sat reading a book, his hand dancing up the skirt of her negligee, and he’d ignored the question.
“Well,” she said, turning off the main road onto Isabel’s private drive. A black sedan sat at the intersection, tucked down in the grass beside the tarmac. Come to think of it, they’d passed one just a few seconds ago, as well. Before the turnoff. “I just want you to know that you’ve got someone else nearby, if you ever need an afternoon away from the house. Or something.”
“You must miss Jaime so much,” Madison said, smiling. “I know Andover isn’t that far away, but still. She’s never home, right?”
“Well, yes,” Mina said. “That’s beside the point, though. I just want to make sure you know that your parents . . . it’s just a crazy time for everyone. Us too! Tom has slept in his office for, God, I don’t know. Maybe more than a week at this point.”
“Wow,” Madison said, eyebrows arching. She put one hand to the door handle, and it occurred to Mina that she was being indulged, that this girl couldn’t wait to get out of the car. “That must be awful for you. You should keep coming by to see my mom. I mean, if you get lonely, or anything. Home alone. That must be rough, Mina. I’m so sorry.”
There was no sarcasm in her voice, but it was entirely flat. There was no kindness in it, either. Then she was out of the car, shouldering her bag and loping up the driveway. And Mina sat there feeling twitchy, as though her skin wasn’t fitting properly over her own bones, just as she had when Isabel snapped at her earlier. She flipped down the driver’s-side mirror, ran her tongue over her teeth. Checked for lipstick, for streaks of makeup, for all the little flaws.
FIVE
It was an unexpectedly muggy weekend for September. Mostly, Madison lay on the floor of her bedroom conjugating French verbs, or stretched and baking on a canvas chair by the pool, her mother’s old dog-eared copy of Anna Karenina propped open on her lap. It was the third time since July she’d tried to finish it. She dozed in the waning sun on Sunday afternoon, imagining Chip strolling up to the water’s edge, dipping in a toe, coming to lean over her chair and down to her face, blocking out the sun. Of course, he didn’t call. Neither did Amanda, or anyone. It was a quiet weekend. Madison never asked Lily where her mother was. Isabel was just elsewhere.
When Madison woke up on Monday morning from a night of unrecalled and thus unshakeable dreams, the house was quiet. Downstairs, she heard Lily cooing to the boys in the kitchen, heard the scrape of forks on porcelain.
Again that knowledge on her tongue, like the warm metallic tinge of blood, the taste of something you’d soon know. She was drawn quickly toward the table in the foyer. The paper had been left, unfolded, atop the electric blue plastic sleeve in which it had been delivered.
And there was the headline, the worst conclusion of every single malicious whisper she’d overheard that summer. Her father’s bank had failed.
SIX
Amanda wasn’t at all surprised to find her parents engrossed in their laptops on Monday morning, sitting hunched at the breakfast nook that doubled as their home office.
For the entire span of Amanda’s memory thus far, her parents had lived in a perpetual state of anxiety that they might miss the next piece of breaking news. Whatever was “coming down the pike,” to borrow a phrase from her father: the latest unemployment numbers or redeployment figures or the confirmation of some previous whispering of a congressional scandal. As if they weren’t just tenured professors in rather humdrum fields of study, as if it were even possible for any one piece of the news to change their lives before the end of breakfast.
But this was probably the very thing about her father that allowed him to supplement teaching with his biweekly column at the Times, the gig that had made him famous, at least by professor standards. She sometimes thought it was that compulsive fear, that someone somewhere might know something he didn’t, that drove him. If it was his theory in the first place, his economic forecast bugled out over the twenty-four-hour news networks whose omnipresence he always ranted against, then, at least on his small square of intellectual real estate, no one could possibly know anything before he knew it.
Her mother was another story. Nineteenth-century French lit did not exactly demand a brain hardwired to be constantly refreshing the page or cruising your Twitter feed. It didn’t require, really, any awareness of the world outside your own window.
In any case, they remained engrossed on this particular morning even after Amanda came downstairs. This was new. On any given day, Amanda would have said that she’d kill to enter a room of the house and have no one notice her presence. The youngest of three, with two older brothers and excessively attentive parents, she was used to being poked and tickled and yanked and sneezed on from the moment she crossed the threshold. Every floorboard in their house groaned, protesting years of abuse beneath the tyrant energies of adolescent male feet and hands and elbows.
“Hi,” she said. No one replied. She slid across the floor on her socked feet and twirled her hand through the air, performing a sloppy curtsy. The image of Isabel came into her head, unbidden—that carefully measured enthusiasm, the way Madison’s mother always greeted a crowd. Charity auctions or teenage girls or Bob’s colleagues; she treated everyone with the same warmth at a distance. Watching her move through a crowd felt like watching some electric-hued, exotic fish cut a swath through a school of minnows.
Amanda pasted a grotesque beauty-queen smile on her face and waved to her parents, assuming they’d get the joke. No one loved to analyze the D’Amicos like they did.
But all she got was a blurry look from her father, who raised his head at half speed, as if he’d sunk far underwater and then been warned not to resurface too quickly.
“Hi, monkey,” he said. “Sit with us for a minute. Let’s all talk before you take off for the day.”
Sometimes, Amanda came home from school to find her father standing just at the edge of the swimming pool, motionless, his head tilted back as if a necessary theorem, or perhaps his next column, might be written in the treetops.
“I’ll guess,” she said, sliding into a chair across from them. “You’re going to say . . . that we’re moving! Finally. You’ve been listening to my misery all these years, and we’re leaving Ye Olde Greenwich behind. Pedal to the metal, gone for good. You’
re giving me a chance to maybe one day spot another teenage brunette out there. I am so on board.”
“Amanda,” her mother began.
“Or, a black person,” Amanda said. “It might be nice, you know, to occasionally sit in class with a black person.”
“There are black people in Greenwich,” her father began, and Amanda threw herself down across the table, miming the trauma of being struck down by his comment.
“Da-ha-ad. Let’s not start telling straight-up lies.”
“Amanda,” her mother said again, sharper. “This isn’t a joke. We need to talk to you.”
Her father put one hand to his bald pate and cradled it for a few seconds. He took off his glasses and rubbed vigorously at his right eye.
“Amanda, we are all aware, I trust, that I’m no fan of Bob D’Amico. I’ve always believed the man to be just one step shy of a riverboat gambler. But there’s been—he’s going to come under quite a bit of scrutiny. And it won’t just affect him, or Weiss. It’s going to affect, you know, everyone.”
Amanda stared at her bowl of dry cereal. Sometimes, when her parents took her into the city, she’d run down into a subway station and feel certain that she’d just missed a train. She’d hear nothing, none of the clanks and thuds of the departing trains, but the air would tingle with the sudden absence of motion, the new void, and you’d just know.
“I’m sorry, but I think you’ve buried the lede. What are we talking about?”
“I want to go over this before you leave for school,” he said, shaking off her mother’s hand on his wrist. “Lori, just give me a second. Let’s get granular here.”
Amanda busied herself with the toddler-simple task of pouring milk into her cereal. One of the intractable conditions of having a Yale economist for a father was the constant demand for not merely awareness, but interest, not only conversational trivia, but actual understanding. She’d acquired a certain amount of skill that allowed her to manage this aspect of her father’s parenting style; after all, she was an athlete living alone with two professors, so she either had to fob him off in an inoffensive way or else make a good-faith effort actually to understand what he did for a living. Why some people—who had presumably never seen him sit down on, and crush, the pair of glasses he’d spent an hour searching for—thought he was so brilliant.
But it was childish of her, she knew it was. Like she was too good to try to understand any of this? Madison had been her best friend for years.
The summer before this last one, she and Madison kept going to see the two Judd Apatow movies at the Twin Cinemas, sometimes paying to see the same movie three or four times in a month because they were seemingly the only girls in Greenwich with strict parents, and couldn’t go to a party unless adults were present. That movie theater was closed, now.
All those hours she’d spent with Madison, and Amanda sometimes worried that her favorite thing about her friend was the way it felt to be around her parents. The way you felt both accepted and absolved, somehow. Amanda had been both grateful for and fascinated by the kind of rich people they were, that Isabel and Bob never acknowledged their ungodly amounts of money, never tried to remind anyone about it. Just kept buying house after apartment after house but otherwise didn’t discuss it at all. So that Amanda was excused, when she spent time there, from acknowledging the colossal disparity between her life and Madison’s. Their house had sometimes felt like the only place in Greenwich where she wasn’t being asked, commanded, to display all the ways her life was different from Zoë Barker’s, or Wyatt Welsh’s, or even Chip Abbott’s. They had a lot of flaws, Isabel and Bob, sure, but this was one thing they gave to her. And her own father had never, ever been able to accept that.
Now she did her best to drift somewhere beyond the outer borders of her father’s voice, until the moment he said that his next column would be focused on Bob.
“No,” she said. “No, you can’t do that.” She swallowed back the unpleasant bile taste of Madison walking down the hallway that past Friday, alone, her ponytail swinging through the air just behind her. The stale caramel smell of their lockers and textbooks mixed with disinfectant and air freshener.
“Amanda, I’m not asking.”
“Why? So you can kick them while they’re down?”
“Sweetheart,” her mother interjected, but her father erupted immediately, coming down over Lori’s voice and drowning her out altogether.
“Yes,” he said. “Yes. Is that so hard to understand? They deserve to be kicked while they’re down!”
“Why?” Amanda was sputtering. “Who will that help?”
“Us! The rest of us! It will help the rest of us to see them suffer.”
“Guys,” Lori was saying, “I don’t see how this is a productive form for this conversation to take, and if we’d just—”
Amanda realized she’d been leaning back on her chair’s rear legs, and now she let the chair fall forward with a clatter. Her knees smacked the edge of the breakfast table. She thought distractedly that the punch of the cold water would hit those spots first, those barely-bruises, when she slid into the pool later today, at practice. She left the kitchen.
LATER, DOWNSTAIRS, her father caught her by the arm just as she’d opened the front door.
“He’ll land on his feet, Amanda,” Jake said. “These guys always do. And then who’ll speak up for the lives he’s ruined? Who’ll make him answer?”
“Okay,” she said. “Enjoy your fucking witch hunt.”
“No,” he said. “I know you know better than that. People trusted him, Amanda. With their livelihoods. They gave him the freedom to make their decisions for them. They’re the tragedy, not him.”
She focused on the clouded copper umbrella stand by their front door, the one that held mildewing umbrellas and single gloves divorced from their erstwhile partners, and a golf club that had almost certainly been placed there in error during one of her father’s fugue states.
“While you’re doing this to him,” she said, “I have to keep living here. I have to keep going to school with Madison. She’s—”
Her sense of her own moral rectitude wavered, for a moment, but then her father didn’t know, surely had not noticed, that she had been a terrible friend to Madison all summer. That she’d been moving on, sort of, until this started to happen.
“She’s my best friend,” she continued. “You’re making a choice, and you didn’t even ask me first.”
“It isn’t a choice,” he said. “There is quite literally no explanation I can think of whereby he hasn’t committed some sort of crime. They told their investors the firm was solid, sweetheart. They announced earnings in June that can’t possibly have been real numbers. I know that’s not—maybe I should be explaining this differently—”
She was looking, still, at the umbrellas. Small things, the sorts of things you cast off as soon as you came into a room, had always accumulated in the corners of this house. Those small things—that was what they had to show for their life, here. They left traces of themselves all over this house to prove how different they were from the antiseptic, tidy, public families all around them, even though these ephemera were still chosen quite carefully. Bric-a-brac from Ios, from Budapest, from Oslo. So her parents could tell stories about their semesters as guest lecturers, visiting scholars. So everyone would know they were in demand. All these seemingly offhand treasures left lying around, but anything actually embarrassing, actually unsightly, was packed away in a dusty shoe box under a bed somewhere. These damp umbrellas didn’t fit the narrative. They might be the only truly unglamorous things on display in this house.
“I don’t think I’m wrong here, Amanda. Do you think I’d put you through this otherwise?”
But she knew, more every time he opened his mouth, that her father wasn’t interested in her answers to his questions.
“You know how this works,” she told him, and left the house.
AT SCHOOL, SHE WAS FAMOUS. It made her ill. Never in all her tim
e at Greenwich Prep had she been approached, in one month even, by half as many people as were clamoring to get close to her today. The worst were the girls, girls she was certain had never known her name until now, had known her only by sight as someone who was always standing next to Bob D’Amico’s daughter. These same girls were jealous now—of Amanda Levins!—because they believed that she was playing a series of exciting, demanding roles: confidante, nurse, enforcer, publicist. They assumed she had access, above all else. And wasn’t that really, in the end, what everyone at Greenwich Prep wanted? To be the right kind of insider? That was why every one of these girls’ parents had moved here, had followed one another from their starter apartments to their classic sixes uptown to, finally, “the country,” their movements and decisions so thoroughly scripted by the migrations of the previous generations.
She probably shouldn’t hate her classmates, then. For seizing the chance, on this juiciest day, to follow every code they’d been taught. None of them were actually so pathetic or misguided as to want to be Madison right now. Or at least they were smart enough not to cop to those longings in front of Amanda, an unfriendly observer. But they wanted desperately to brush themselves against the scandal. To know something the rest of the school didn’t. To be needed.
That was maybe the first thing she understood that morning, each time an unfamiliar, manicured hand clutched at her elbow. Teenage girls were so desperate to be needed. None of them actually wanted boyfriends, or high drama, or true pain. They just wanted to feel essential, exposed in some crucial way to the vicissitudes of the world. And so they did things like give blow jobs in movie theaters, cry in public when something tragic happened to strangers across the country, throw themselves into her path in the hallway to ask her how Madison was feeling today. How she was managing. Did Amanda know anything. They just wanted the communal energy of crisis, the sense that they had to yank their best selves from somewhere deep within. They wanted, so very badly, to rise to the occasion.
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