But as soon as Nonna took the lid off the saucepan, Madison was always ravenous, even though the kitchen was the only part of that house that smelled good. She always held her breath in the hallways and the bathroom to avoid the smell of a house decaying around its longtime inhabitant, mixed with the nostril-invading musk of her grandmother’s air freshener. The house was perfectly clean, of course—Bob D’Amico might not have been able to convince his mother to move into a luxury high-rise, but he wouldn’t have let her live in actual squalor—and yet Madison didn’t like to touch the surfaces, the lace doilies on the countertops, the butter left in a dish on the counter rather than sensibly in the refrigerator.
The trader was still being interviewed on the news.
They don’t want him there at the office? Madison thought. Fine. We want him here. The too-loud rumbling of his voice off the marble floors in the foyer. All the noise, just from him being in the house. All the sounds that make us flinch. We want to flinch here, Daddy.
She closed her eyes. Just go downstairs, walk outside, and get in the cab. Just come home.
She had done this once before, and it had worked. Not right away, but it had worked. When the firm had evacuated on September 11. When her father walked up the West Side Highway and rented a suite of rooms at the Sheraton in midtown, sent one guy back downtown to slip between the barricades and retrieve the servers from the cordoned-off building that had once been their office. She’d read all of that years later, online. Back then she was still small, and she’d left her mother and Lily sitting in tears in the kitchen watching the small TV, a bottle of wine on the table between them, their fingers intertwined.
Madison had come in here to his study, curled up on his sofa, and whispered the same words to herself until she could sleep: Just come home. Just come home.
Now, something hit the thick double doors with a thud. Madison sprang up from the sofa, the remote control slipping from her fingertips and hitting the parquet floor with a dull shriek. Lily was yelling her name. She closed her eyes. When she opened them again, nothing had disappeared.
She unlocked and opened the doors, which forced her to make an elegant, swooping motion with both arms, as though welcoming Lily to some sort of morbid, empty party. Vampire’s Ball—she’d heard her father and his friends say that, to describe the nights when they went out with the men who were about to be fired, who already knew they were goners. He thought she didn’t listen, when his friends came over. But she listened to everything. Or she used to. Somewhere, at some point in the past year, she’d dropped the thread. All summer, waking up to her parents’ voices cutting each other off, like poorly trained backup singers: she knew that this had unnerved her at the time, but all she could think now was that she hadn’t been nearly unnerved enough. That she’d listened for months without hearing a single word.
And now she was being punished for it.
“Honestly, Madison,” Lily said, her hands clenched into small, scrappy fists. “I’ve been yelling your name all over this house.”
The fists were angry, but Lily’s face was soft, malleable, as though she might be the one to cry. Madison returned to the sofa, to the television. The same blond reporter was now stressing that there were unconfirmed reports that Bob D’Amico had wanted to come down to the trading floor but had been dissuaded by senior management fearful that there might be an outbreak of actual physical violence. It wasn’t yet clear, the woman continued, whether any Weiss executives would be subject to criminal investigation.
“Come on,” Lily said. “Give me the remote. Don’t do this. Don’t watch.” Madison pointed to the floor, to the bits of shattered plastic and the exposed batteries. Lily marched over to the television and turned it off at the source.
“Why do they say something and then remind you that it’s unconfirmed?” Madison said. “Why say it at all, then?”
“Madison, come on. Come eat something. I know the boys would love to see you. They’re nervous. They’re little boys, not idiots. They know something’s wrong.”
“Well, isn’t it your job to take care of them?”
Lily inhaled slowly, as though counting the length of her breaths, as though Madison was a frustrating challenge and she was going to meditate herself out of the room.
“Yes, but you’re their sister, and I think having you in there would make them feel better.”
Madison didn’t say anything. Her father told her once that, in a negotiation, you just sat in silence until the other guy began to jabber. Until he’d reached the point where he’d offer anything, absolutely anything, just to hear your voice.
Lily started to talk.
“Look, Madison, I don’t know. Is that what you want me to say? Because fine, I don’t know. Soon, if your mother doesn’t come downstairs, I’m going to have to say something. But they haven’t seen the paper, and even if they did—your dad’s work isn’t really my business. My business is taking care of you three.”
Madison could feel Lily trembling beside her, her coiled energy, like a hunted animal.
“Well, the boys should stay home. We all should. We shouldn’t go to school.”
“Absolutely not.”
“I’m not afraid, Lily, I’m just trying to be realistic. You know what it’s like here. Do you remember after Jim McGinniss, over the summer? You remember when we saw Kiki at Starbucks?”
A part of her, at the time, had thought that Jim’s wife deserved it all—the gravid silence that seeped to the very edges of the store, the way she’d had to keep her sunglasses on the whole time, as if she didn’t know every woman in line behind her. Kiki didn’t even live around here; it had been a stupid, splashy gesture, to show up one afternoon at a Greenwich Starbucks. Madison had felt a chill, watching Kiki’s shoulders draw closer and closer in on themselves. But Isabel had always said she was a foolish woman, and it had been foolish, parading herself around the same week Jim announced his resignation from the bank.
“Yes,” Lily said, “I remember Kiki. I’m not sure that’s a comparison that really makes any—”
“You think everyone won’t jump on this immediately, that my father fired his best friend in July, and everyone said Jim was the problem, my dad had the solution, and two months later some idiot trader is trashing them both, together, on the morning news? We just have to give it a few days. It’ll blow over and people will lose interest and then the boys can go to school and Isabel can order her own soy lattes in peace and it’ll just, it won’t be just that my father—”
She felt a keen awareness of the shape of the words, of the effort it took to move her teeth and tongue and lips in just the right ways to say what she really meant. That my father, what? That my father failed. That his bank will not exist anymore. That my father lost his job. That my father lost everyone else’s job.
“It’s not just Mr. McGinniss,” she said. “Right? The news—they’re talking about this like someone’s going to go to jail.”
“That’s absurd, you must know that’s absurd,” Lily said. “But no, I don’t think it will blow over. Not yet.”
Madison nodded.
“Listen to me,” Lily said. “There’s no point in worrying now. Your father will be home soon, and your mother will be up, and you’ll all talk about it then. But for now, you need to go to school. Think about everything else. Anything else at all.”
Madison turned to look at her, but Lily was staring straight ahead, out the window, beyond the pool to the trees. Her jaw was clenched so tight that it looked like her face had been carved from stone. She looked like a woman who should appear on a gold coin, on the bas-relief facade of one of those towering granite buildings in Manhattan, the ones that blocked out the sunlight.
“Where’s Isabel?”
“I don’t know, sweetie. I haven’t seen her. Mina came over this morning. They’ve been upstairs ever since.”
Madison laughed. She couldn’t control it; the sound poured out of her in light trills, as though she were an adult, a few
drinks too deep at a cocktail party.
“That’s nice,” she said. “The important thing is that she comfort Mina right now. Let’s all remember that.”
“Madison,” Lily began. She was clearly hesitant and also, Madison could see with something like wonder, afraid. “I grew up, with my parents, in a certain—I never had a problem with the way I grew up. But then I got to college, and I was surrounded by all these other girls who had such, such different backgrounds. I wasn’t embarrassed, because of my parents, but, you know. I mean, they became a different thing for me. Not, like, a liability, but—”
“Lil,” Madison said, distaste on her tongue. “It’s fine.”
“No, I just want you to know. Obviously, I’ve never been through anything like whatever this is. Of course not. But I know that parents can be complicated. You know, your parents make decisions that affect you, but you don’t get to have a say, really, and I know that’s so hard. And in my family, really, we’ve had difficult things happen. And the important thing always in those situations is that you can all pull together, regardless.”
“Okay, that’s enough,” Madison said. This was beneath Lily; this would be blush worthy when Lily thought about it tomorrow. That she’d chosen this pep talk to offer, at this moment.
“All I meant is that there are much worse problems in the world. And your dad loves you.”
“Super,” Madison said. “Thanks very much.”
She could see Lily twitching, swallowing the admonishment, and she began to feel the new freedom, the bad behavior this might allow. No one, she realized, would deny her for a few days. She would become, for the adults in her life, evidence of all the potential damage still to come. Whatever she did, short of actual violence, would be considered “handling it so well.” She felt this awareness spreading through her, loosening the knotted muscles at her neck, cracking at her knuckles.
“Your father will be home soon,” Lily repeated, “and until then nothing is certain. Right?”
“He won’t be home.”
“Excuse me?”
“He’s not coming home. Not for a while. Don’t you remember September eleventh? He didn’t come home for days.”
“This is different.”
“Sure. Now he has a reason to feel ashamed.”
“Stop it, Madison.”
“I’m sorry, what? Are you going to defend him?”
“Mad, I know you’re upset, but pushing me to insult your father is not the way to go.”
“Sure,” Madison said, and she could feel the words gaining steam, sliding from their rails. She could feel herself approaching something she wouldn’t be able to retract. “I guess I just have to wait it out. It won’t be so hard, I would imagine, to get you to insult him down the road.”
Even through her clenched jaw, Lily smiled in amusement.
“Yeah? What’s down the road?”
“Well, you know. I’m sure he’s going to start firing people. My father doesn’t trust any of you anyway. He’s not going to want a bunch of random employees in and out of the house, leaking things to the city papers, whatever. And if he wants to fire you without paying you severance . . .”
“Stop it, Madison.”
“I think we both know he’ll find a way. So I mean, it’s not like you’ll have wasted these past eight years, really, but I’m sure it’ll feel sort of—”
The slap was so quick, so unexpected, that the sting on her cheek almost felt as if it had come from within, as if something inside Madison’s mouth had pierced right through her cheek. She put one hand to the spot on her face. When she looked up, Lily sat thrown back against the opposite arm of the couch as though she’d been the one slapped, one hand covering her mouth. Madison saw the tears welling at the corners of Lily’s eyes and felt a sudden and roiling disgust, the way she had for the trader on the news. If she wasn’t crying, daughter of the downfall, then surely the rest of them could hold it together.
“Stop,” she said, and Lily looked up at her in horror.
“Excuse me?”
“Just, stop. Please don’t cry. This day is going to be hard enough.”
Lily looked around the room, as though there might be someone else on the receiving end of Madison’s reproach, and then laughed, once. She put both hands to her cheeks and swept the tears from her face.
“All right.” Her voice was testy, long-suffering, and yet it was cool again, deferential. They’d both slid back into place. Madison moved closer to her on the sofa.
“Other girls would try to get you fired for that,” she said.
Lily inhaled long and hard, so Madison could hear her breath skittering around inside her chest.
“Yeah,” she said. “Be that as it may, listen to me, Madison. You don’t know what happened, and you don’t know what your father did or didn’t do. But you are his family, and once you turn on him, that’s it. You have to believe him even when no one else does. Are you listening to me? You have to tell the same stories, even when everyone questions them.”
Madison curled her feet beneath her on the sofa cushion. The actual pain in Lily’s voice, the foundation of anger beneath it, had bent Madison’s rage back on itself. She knew, the way she’d sometimes see that her father’s associates knew, even in the midst of having tied one on in a bad, bad way. She could feel the next wave of sick remorse that awaited her. She knew that the panic would recede, and that she’d feel terrible for having spoken this way to Lily. But it was too late, she thought. Lily’s seen, now, that I have these thoughts somewhere in my brain.
She’d never thought of herself as someone who would be a brat in a crisis. She’d always imagined she’d be a rock, in a crisis, be like her mother. But apparently that wasn’t the case.
“Everyone’s going to take their cues from you. You walk through school like it’s any other day, your father comes home tonight like he does every Monday. They won’t be getting any blood when they bite, and they’ll move on. Maybe the whole thing itself won’t blow over, but they’ll stay away from you. This isn’t any more familiar to them than it is to us.”
Madison wondered, with a pop of clarity like a camera’s flash, whether Chip had seen the news.
“I’m fine,” she said. “I’ll go sit with the boys, but I don’t want to eat.”
Lily nodded, and they stood up.
“I guarantee you,” Lily said. “Everyone at school is still going to be watching to see what you do first.”
LATER, WHEN LILY LINED THEM UP by the front door for inspection, she grabbed Madison’s wrist. For such a small woman, Lily was possessed of surprising strength, her fingers like wire around Madison’s bony forearms. Madison let her body go limp; she’s forgiving me, she thought, and waited for Lily’s mouth pressed to her temple, her hands on her hair, for the wordless clemency of a kiss. They didn’t hug each other as often as they had when Madison was younger, but Lily still always knew when it was the right moment for it.
But Lily held her there, for a moment, and did not embrace her. Finally she took two fingers and pinched a strand of Madison’s hair.
“You had something,” she said. “A crumb, or a leaf or something.”
They both shook themselves away from each other, the same way they’d brush rain from wet clothes, and followed the boys out to the car.
EIGHT
Well, you know, he hasn’t even come home yet.” Mina wedged her BlackBerry between her shoulder and her ear. She finished potting the basil plant she’d bought that morning and carried it into her office off the kitchen, the room with the best light.
“He hasn’t been home yet, and it’s been three days. And I will tell you, because I can’t tell anyone else—she’s been a wreck, Dee. An absolute wreck.”
Her sister Denise had met Isabel only once, when she’d spent the day in Greenwich and Isabel had stopped by to loan Mina an evening gown, but she’d been hearing about the woman for years.
“Well fine, tell me more. When you say wreck, we’re talking .
. . crying? Broken glass? Or just staying in bed all day? This is great! Keep going.”
Mina sat down at the kitchen table. This was only her sister. Dee would tell her friends over white wine at her divorcée book club out on Long Island and none of them would have more than a vague idea who she was even talking about. It would never make its way back to Isabel, Mina told herself. It was only betrayal to say something to someone out here, in all the places she passed through each day. It was only betrayal if you got caught.
Besides, it was too irresistible, the way Denise would hear this. The most dramatic thing happening in the country this week, and Mina was in charge.
“This isn’t gossip for me, Dee. This is her whole life. I mean, he may never work again. You know when he started at that firm? The seventies. Only place he’s ever been, and now the name won’t even exist. It’s, I mean. It’s a tragedy, really.”
“Sure,” Denise muttered, and Mina could hear her attention begin to wander, her voice pointed now toward the wet nail polish she’d be applying to her toenails, or the dried bits of tomato sauce she’d be scraping from the oven walls. Denise, the baby of the family, almost the wrong side of forty and back living with their mother, in the house on Long Island where they’d grown up. She’d come to Greenwich a few times, early on, when they’d first bought out here. But now she hadn’t been out to visit for even an afternoon in more than a year, and neither sister ever said out loud that this was because Tom spent the entirety of her last visit darting around the house, wincing at their braying laughter, addressing Denise with the same absent censure he’d once used on Jaime.
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