Tom’s face set and he was still for so long that she really did believe, for a second, that he might hit her for the first time in their marriage. Wasn’t this a crisis, wasn’t everyone saying that their lives would never be the same? That this was the kind of meltdown that might come once in a generation? And that was them. They were this generation; she’d married into it. If their lives were never to be the same, what better way to usher in their impending doom than a short, sharp shock of violence to punish them both? What better way to say good-bye to the life they’d made than to realize that they barely knew themselves, in the end. That they could apply pressure to their own fragile bonds and learn that, rather than cracking them, it might turn them instead into completely different people?
“Get in the fucking car,” he said. “I don’t have to speak to you at all, Mina. Have it your way.”
She knew it wasn’t victory, not really. But she got in the car. The click of her seat belt across her chest, discomfort from an outside source, came as sweet relief.
LATER, SHE LAY IN BED waiting for him. When he emerged from his shower in a fresh white undershirt and a clean pair of silk boxers, the sleep outfit she’d packed for him, he did not look at her. She turned out the light, then waited before reaching over to him where he sat up against the headboard and lunging awkwardly to put her arm around him. He let his head fall to her shoulder.
He didn’t open his eyes, didn’t lift his head. He was stiff at first, his shoulders beneath her arms. He had corners, like a box, like a briefcase. But slowly, as she had so many times, she felt him ease into her body, lose his edges. His body was warm from the shower, though he’d dried his hair before coming to bed. He hated a wet pillow.
“I’m sorry I yelled,” he said.
“I know.” She ran her fingers along his skin, tracing the hairs on his forearms in little whorls.
“All I meant, when I said you must be glad not to be her. I just mean—I can’t imagine him doing that to her. To those kids.”
She made a soft sound in the back of her throat, a sound she knew Tom would interpret as gratitude, agreement. But she meant everything she’d said to him tonight. She believed, as strongly as anything else about this, that Bob had not done anything truly wrong. Because the man had his flaws, he was immature, he had an anger problem. But he wouldn’t put Isabel in danger. He might make her look foolish, but not craven, not vile.
Mina believed that more than she believed anything about her own marriage; this was what she couldn’t say.
“I just can’t see it,” Tom said. “Putting your wife through that. A real man doesn’t do that. Can you imagine what that girl’s been going through at the high school?”
“Oh, honey, they’re just teenagers.”
He didn’t answer. When Jaime had insisted that they let her apply to boarding schools, she’d given them dozens of reasons. More challenging academics. Learning to live away from home. Meeting people from other parts of the country. They’d known, all three of them, what the problem was. Jaime was frizzy haired and stocky limbed and hated makeup, hated group sports, described herself without bitterness or recrimination as someone who needed only one or two friends. She’d wanted out of Greenwich Prep, out of the home Tom had built for her. He’d never used the words betrayal, or rejection, but Mina knew how he felt.
“I could never put my girls through that,” Tom said again, his face buried in Mina’s shoulder.
“We know that,” she said, her lips brushing his ear. She had no certainty that Jaime did know that, but speaking up for herself was a privilege their daughter had relinquished when she left home at age fourteen, wasn’t it?
“Would you really have left me alone in here?” came her husband’s voice, small, sounding much farther away from her than he was. “Would you really have gotten another room?”
“I don’t know.”
Tom’s shoulders shook, and she realized that he was about to cry. She circled him tighter in her arms and braced herself against his sobs, flooded with gratitude, with a silly, swelled gratitude, for the man she’d just realized he wasn’t going to become.
“We’re all right, Tom. We’re okay. You said it yourself. It’s not over yet, but we’re okay.”
“You were right,” he whispered. His lips were so close to her ear that the sound of his voice tickled. He was smearing his tears across their cheeks, dampening the hair at her temple. “You were right. I’m sorry I screamed.”
He kept breathing beneath her arm, his body expanding and then receding, reliably, like an ocean tide coming close and then moving away. He was here.
“I was thinking today,” he said. “After you called. About the house. How we were thinking, maybe, we’d buy a house up here, even if we only meant to use it two or three times a year.”
She put her lips to his forehead again, thankful that he’d said “we,” thankful that they’d both been thinking of the same thing all afternoon.
“I’m sure all Bob can think of right now is how unfair, that this has happened to him and only to him. But it’s happening to all of us. We won’t be allowed to say any of the things we want out loud, not anymore.”
“You can say them to me,” Mina said.
“But I’m serious, Min. We have to be careful, for a while now. We’re okay, but we have to act as if we’ve lost something. They’re going to want us to decide that our life, our whole life, has been wrong.”
“You can say them to me,” she said again. His hand made its clumsy way across the comforter until it found hers, consumed it. His thick fingers dug into her palm, moving in such steady circles that she could tell he was unaware of the motion.
“I don’t understand what will happen,” he said. “If he belongs behind bars, I don’t know where they draw the line. We’ve all done exactly what we’re trained to do.”
“Stop.”
“It’s dumb luck, Mina. It was a flood that came and he was on the ground floor, and I just happened to be a few floors above him. If it comes back again and goes any higher, that could be us.”
“No,” she said. She heard her voice coming from deep in her chest, low and calm. “No, it couldn’t.”
Later, when his breathing had slowed, when she’d brought him first a glass of water and then a nip bottle of vodka, they shut off the lamp and turned to each other like children, wrapped tightly beneath the comforter. They clutched at each other’s shoulders, as if the bed were a swimming pool and they did not know how to swim, were afraid of drowning.
THIRTEEN
I don’t care,” Madison said. “I don’t care what we get. If it’s your treat, then that means you decide.”
The late-afternoon sunlight came angling through the Starbucks windows, hitting the scummy floor. It was amazing, she thought, how very much the same every single Starbucks was, no matter where you were. The women who streamed in and out of here all day buying their six-descriptor drinks wouldn’t be caught dead in any other place this haphazardly cleaned, this likely to be breeding a whole host of health violations. And yet here they were, lulled by the sameness and the acoustic guitar music. And, of course, the convenient location on its corner just across from the town hall, a corner every Greenwich mother passed by at least twice during her day.
Madison hated this Starbucks; she hated the way it always smelled, like burnt coffee beans and old egg sandwiches and baby wipes and air freshener. They shouldn’t use air freshener in places that served food. It was distasteful to her; she didn’t want to be here.
She kept her gaze squarely on Amanda. She even tried not to let her eyes catch on anyone else in the room.
“I don’t know,” Amanda said. “I feel like, it’s too muggy still for hot chocolate, but it’s October now and that’s what I want.”
“No one’s stopping you.”
Madison had avoided her best friend with dedication and precision for nearly three weeks now. But when school broke that Friday afternoon, Amanda cornered her at the lockers with such fe
rocious single-mindedness that Madison knew it would be easier to give in than to resist.
Amanda squinted at the menu as if they didn’t order the same exact thing every time they stopped here after school. My treat, she kept repeating, as though Madison could no longer afford to buy her own coffee. She knew this wasn’t what Amanda meant, but still. It was insulting that her best friend, after months of seeming like she’d wanted slowly to extract herself from Madison’s clutches so that she’d be gone before Madison noticed, thought that a free cup of coffee would be an enticing lure. That Madison would so easily be tricked into baring her soul over Frappuccinos. When she knew that all Amanda really cared about was cementing her own role in this drama, establishing herself as the keeper of the information. Because at the moment, like it or not, Madison had information that Amanda didn’t.
They drifted over to the counter to wait for their frothy iced drinks—no one, in the end, had been bold enough to order hot chocolate. When they were finally seated at a small, grimy table, Madison felt a pang for her friend’s open, unguarded expression, for the wholly unnatural cheer with which Amanda seemed to feel it was best to treat the whole situation.
“I just feel like we haven’t gotten much time to talk,” Amanda said. “Not for, like, two weeks. And I do want to be here for you. And I actually went into the city last Friday, and—”
“That’s really sweet of you,” Madison interrupted, “but I don’t really feel like I need someone to, you know, ‘be there’ for me right now. Things are fine.”
“Really? How’s Isabel?”
“She’s fine. You know her.”
“And how are the boys?”
“They’re fine, Amanda. They’re not worried. Things can be stressful for my father at work without it being this tragic drama everyone seems to want it to be.”
“Good,” Amanda said. “I actually have something I want to talk to you about. And I’m so glad everyone’s doing well. I just don’t want the other things going on to get in the way of us, you know—”
“Whatever do you mean?”
“Mad,” Amanda began. “Whatever else happens, I’m here. You know that, right?”
“Oh, of course. You’re the only one I can trust, right? You and”—and here she couldn’t deny it, even to herself, it was pleasant knowing what was about to come out of her mouth—“you and your parents, right? The Levins family.”
Amanda was staring down at the table, folding her straw wrapper into smaller and smaller rectangles. “Okay, just, logically. When has my father ever consulted me about one of his columns?”
“Am I supposed to be grateful that you didn’t specifically request that your father go after my family for no reason?”
“Madison—I mean, yes, my father has his flaws, you know that I’m well aware of them, but at least—”
“But at least his flaws only hurt you? Right?”
Amanda looked up, finally, and fixed her eyes on Madison’s face.
“Why are you doing this to me?”
“To you? To you?”
“Yeah, Madison, I am experiencing you being a cold bitch to me right now as something that’s happening to me. Is that allowed?”
Madison laughed.
“Well,” she said. “None of it’s really surprising. Like father, like daughter.”
Amanda gazed up at her, her lips parted. This was not, Madison realized, the conversation her friend had expected.
Madison felt sympathy for the hurt she was causing, but no real regret. One thing her father’s world had taught her was this. If there was some future point at which people might need you, might need even just a moment of your attention, your gaze, then you could offend them with impunity. The wounds would heal, however superficially. There was a reason, beyond just gruff, performed affection, that his lieutenants called him Silverback, after all.
“It’s not my fault,” Amanda said.
“It’s funny how much everyone’s loving saying that,” Madison returned. “There’s only one person at fault, right?”
Amanda was actually sputtering now.
“What was I supposed to do?”
“Probably nothing. But is it so impossible for you to understand the fact that I, just. You are literally the last person I want to talk to about this. I’m sorry. But this is how I feel.”
What Madison had learned, in the space of three short weeks, was that there were as many strains of sympathy as there were of the more celebrated emotions, love or hatred or longing. Everyone’s sympathy hit her in a different spot, from a different direction, some strains closer to condescending pity and others smelling like selfish fear. When you became untouchable, you were radioactive. Your presence called up the memories of ways they’d wronged you in the past, or the ways you might have wronged them, the recalled injustices transmitted to them as if through your skin. She knew Amanda would be so much less showy now with her support if it hadn’t been months, really, since they’d been close, comfortable with each other.
Amanda began vigorously to slide her green straw into and out of its slot in the plastic cup, producing a squeak that scratched the back of Madison’s neck.
“You didn’t seem all that worried about being there for me over the summer,” Madison said. “Now that my problems are suddenly famous, you want to be best friends again? You want to know all my secrets?”
“I don’t believe that’s actually what you think of me. Not really.”
“You can believe whatever you want, Amanda.”
Then they both stopped talking for a while.
“You know you can call me at any time,” Amanda said eventually. “My house is always open to you. Three o’clock in the morning or not.”
“Amanda,” Madison said, thinking of the way her mother would admonish her when she reached for a second éclair from the Payard box Mina Dawes had brought back from the city, the perfect Isabel blend of disinterest and authority, “I can’t go over there right now. I need to be with my family, and your father doesn’t approve of us. We’re evil, right? We’re oblivious?”
Amanda stood, shouldered her bag, and left her Frappuccino sitting on the table. She seemed to be weighing some invisible options before she finally spoke again.
“Why don’t you just ask your father,” she said, finally, with such steel in her voice that Madison couldn’t help but be impressed. “If he’s such a martyr, if it’s so unfair that everyone’s blaming him, why don’t you just ask him to explain?”
Madison kept her gaze neutral, careful not to glare.
“Oh,” Amanda said, “let me guess. He still hasn’t come home. He still hasn’t even thought to check in with his children.”
“No, not everyone can be as hands on as your father, Amanda.”
“Fine. So why don’t you go find him? You’re not kept on lockdown, Mad. Why don’t you take the train in and ask him?”
“Amanda,” Madison said, digging her fingernails into the skin of her upper thigh, ready to tear right through her jeans, “do you think that if I went to go talk to my father, it would be because of your advice? Do you think I need your advice?”
“Nope,” Amanda said, “wrong. It’s because you’re afraid of what you’ll find. So if I were you, I’d wait, Madison. I’d wait before I started calling everyone else a coward.”
MADISON REMAINED AT THE TABLE after Amanda left; she wasn’t sure how conspicuous she’d become to the other Starbucks patrons. Surely if she lifted her head, if she looked away from her fingernails and her drink, she’d see the telltale signs. The nervous eyes hastily averted, the mothers’ hands firm on the backs of necks to make sure no one turned around, craned to get a better look. She’d been that child. It had been her neck, Isabel’s hand.
And then he slid into the chair across from her.
“Hey,” Chip said. He twirled a set of keys on his left index finger. She looked at his finger, watched the tendons in his hand jump each time the keys whirled through the air.
“Hi,
” she said.
“Just drove over from the senior parking lot,” he said.
“Juniors are allowed to park there?”
“Yeah, well, I know a guy.” He brushed his thumb to his chin and looked away, looked back at her and grinned. “But you’re not asking the right questions, Madison.” He jiggled the keys in the air in front of her, like a pet owner trying to coax a trick from a distracted puppy.
“Where, you should be asking, did these come from? Come outside.”
He stood and left without looking back to see if she’d followed, leaving her to bundle her things together, endure an excruciating moment of uncertainty about whether or not to bring her unrequested Frappuccino. She left it. When she emerged onto the Avenue, he was waiting, shielding his face from the sun with one hand.
“Anytime, I don’t mind waiting out here,” he said. Then he clicked something on his key chain and a car behind him beeped its reply.
“You got your license,” she said.
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Well. Congratulations? Enjoy.”
“Enjoy . . . what? Your jealousy?” He tipped his head to one side like he was trying to listen to something she couldn’t hear and she felt that gesture settle in her chest, heavy at first but then settling down like a light dust over everything, like she wouldn’t be able to have a single thought anymore that wouldn’t carry with it a trace of that gesture.
“So here’s the thing,” he said. “I know you and Amanda are usually, like, attached at the hip after school, but I saw her drive off, and I wonder if I can snag you today.”
“Schedule’s wide open,” she said. She liked that reply. It was encouraging but not desperate, which had begun to feel like an impossible note to strike.
“I just wanna drive,” he said. “I just wanna cruise around, you know?”
“Yes. Yeah. Sounds good.”
“It’s the black Mercedes over there. Usually, you’d find it in spot 220. If you’re ever looking for it.”
He drove up into Cos Cob, the windows down. He seemed focused on driving, his hands at the ten and the two, his shoulders squared. She didn’t know how much to talk. He put her in charge of the radio and she hunched awkwardly forward in her seat, her finger pressed to the dial, and couldn’t decide on a station.
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