“Enough, enough,” he said finally. “When you start driving you’ll see how annoying that is, the music constantly changing.” She froze in her seat, still holding her body awkwardly forward, afraid to move and resettle. But then he started humming along to “Fortunate Son” and she realized the word annoying had meant nothing at all.
“My dad loves these guys,” he said, and she swallowed, caught herself before the knee-jerk response of, “Mine too.”
It had rained that afternoon, perhaps the last of the late-summer sudden flashes of rain, and everything was unbearably green. The houses were all tucked up behind the trees, only their wrought-iron gates visible from the road, which curved and weaved its way up farther and farther from the train line down below.
Chip was a smooth driver, braking into the curves, accelerating out of them—he’d explained to her that this was one of the things you learned before you took the test—and she felt almost soothed, as though she could fall asleep in the seat beside him and he’d just keep driving her around. Her mother had once told her that she’d had a rough spell, as a baby, couldn’t sleep through the night, and had only quieted down when Isabel walked her down Park Avenue to Grand Central, then back up almost to Seventy-Second Street, the wide avenue silent, nothing but them and the flowers planted in the middle of the street and the doormen winking at them from beneath forest green awnings.
Probably no one’s going to teach me to drive this year, she thought. He always said he would, but now he won’t have time.
She observed the idea as it visited her, passed her by. It had been almost three weeks, and he still hadn’t come home.
“You haven’t come to any more games,” Chip said finally. Every part of her body felt lighter than it should be in an unpleasant way, like she hadn’t eaten for days, but it also felt as though she’d been grinding her teeth for two weeks and had only just realized she’d stopped.
She cupped her hand around her seat belt and ran it back and forth. She wanted to hold Chip’s hand, but he was driving, and besides that would be a bizarre thing to do down here in the real, non-dreaming world.
“I know,” she said, “I’ve wanted to. I’ve been busy, after school.”
He managed to look toward her without taking his eyes from the road, just inclining his head in her direction, really.
“Can’t, or would rather not?”
She peered up at the leaves above her window, sunlight streaming through them and creating patterns like lace on her skin. Something about her bare legs in the seat, so close to him, felt too exposed. It was so much easier than it usually would have been for him to touch the skin on her upper thighs.
“I’ve been busy,” she repeated.
“Look,” he said, “Wyatt and those guys are assholes. I don’t know if you know this, but people have spent way more time talking about what an asshole Wyatt is than about, you know, any other part of it.”
“I don’t care about those guys,” she said, and it was only hearing this sentence out loud that made her realize it was true. Her father was her father. As soon as he came home, as soon as his presence reoriented the house. His thunderclap hands on her shoulders while she ate breakfast, surprising her, kneading the muscles between her neck and spine. That was her father. The men who worked for him called him Silverback, and to his face, so you knew it was admiring and not bitter or sniping. What did she care what Wyatt Welsh, of all the voice-cracking boys she knew, said about him? This was what they’d been for, all the little pieces of her father’s advice. He’d given them to her like poker chips, trusting her to know when it was smart to cash them in.
“I don’t care what Wyatt says, really.”
“I know you don’t,” Chip said. “I know you’re, you know. You don’t seem like you give a shit, honestly. But just in case he’s been bothering you.”
Every few seconds Chip leaned forward to gaze up through the windshield, some unconscious part of him expecting things to come flying down at them through the trees, danger without warning.
She wanted to reply but she didn’t know how petty she could be in front of Chip, how much of his sense of who she was relied on the fact that she was always terrified and mute in his presence.
“Actually, he’s been texting me. To apologize. The texts are so weird, it’s so obvious that Suzanne types them out for him. Like, so eager for me not to hold a grudge. It’s actually sort of . . . I don’t know. Funny? Pathetic? Something.”
Chip smiled. “That sounds like Suzanne. She wouldn’t, you know—she wouldn’t want your mom hating her, or hating Wyatt. She’s careful like that.”
She felt something rising in her throat, something so stifling that she opened her mouth to speak but waited a few extra seconds, knowing that her voice would betray her with its thickness, its soft whisper. Not tears, not sadness or embarrassment, but anticipation. She knew the perfect thing to say, she only wished Wyatt Welsh could be here to hear it.
“I don’t talk about Wyatt with my mother,” she said. “That would never cross my mind.”
They were stopped at a red light. Chip was driving back toward school, toward her house, civilization. No one but Chip knew where she was right now.
“We should drive into the city sometime,” she said. She didn’t look over to see if he nodded. She took her hand from her lap and put it over his hand on the gear shift. Chip’s hand hovered there at intervals, as if the car were untrustworthy and might shift into a different gear without his permission.
She left her hand there, curling her fingers around his knuckles, and waited for him to turn to her. This had to be it, without question. He was going to kiss her. They were in a car, weren’t they?
“Yeah,” he said. “We should do that sometime.”
They both smiled, but not at each other. She kept her hand on his until the light changed, until he had to drive again, and he didn’t so much as glance over at her side of the car. She knew that if his hands were free he’d brush his chin with his thumb, and the victory felt just the same—better, even—than if he’d leaned across the car to kiss her.
FOURTEEN
Lily stood with Jackson at the counter, trying not to wince each time the man sweating next to her knocked his elbow into hers or slurped unceremoniously at his giant bowl of ramen. It seemed like it could only be a matter of minutes before he started just dunking his head down directly to the soup’s rim.
“Isn’t this kind of rich for October?” she asked Jackson, no less skeptical than she’d been when he demanded she meet him here. “Isn’t ramen, like, a winter lunch?”
“I’m telling you, everyone can’t shut up about this place,” he replied, sliding his arm around her waist and resting his chin on her shoulder, reading the menu along with her.
One thing she knew about her boyfriend: he couldn’t resist a buzz. If his writer friends were talking about a new place, he had to have eaten there. He’d sometimes bluff his way through happy hour small talk and pretend he had been there, though he always waited until she had a night off to come into the city before trying the places out for himself. She’d once thought this was because he wanted to wait for her company, but his habit of jumping up to head to the bathroom right around the time the check hit the table had eventually disabused her of this dreamy notion.
“Which one are we supposed to get?”
“Either. One is vegetarian, though, and if you ask me, ramen without pork is just soup. And honestly, fifteen bucks isn’t half bad for a huge bowl of ramen.”
“Sure,” she said. It hadn’t occurred to her that a trendy new ramen counter on Kenmare would be quite literally a counter. That she’d have nowhere to sit.
Their orders decided, he began trying to coax her to talk, punctuating his words with the kisses he knew she loved, along the side of her neck and her earlobe.
“I haven’t seen you in way, way too long,” he started, wisely. She shrugged.
“You’re the one who wanted to eat a big heavy meal. I vote
d we go straight home.”
“I still can’t believe you’ve got to go back before dinner,” he said, ignoring her innuendo. “It’s Sunday! You haven’t seen the guys in forever, we could have met up with them later.”
“Gonna grab my baby, gonna hold her tight,” Lily sang. “My boyfriend would rather eat noodles first.”
“I thought you’d need something fun!” he said, laughing when she raised an eyebrow. “I mean something sort of fun before the important fun. I just thought it would be nice for you to get to take a breath, finally.”
“It hasn’t been that bad.”
“Bullshit,” he said, signaling to their waiter. They ordered. Within seconds, several tiny ramekins of various pickled, neon vegetables were placed in front of them. Here, Lily couldn’t help but think, was a meal Bob D’Amico would hate. Cramped, DIY, no pampering, peasant food. Checks all the trend boxes in all the wrong ways.
“Bullshit,” Jackson picked up where he’d left off. “I’m sure it’s been a zoo. I just hope you’re taking notes.”
“Please,” she said, “please don’t start that.”
“Lil, come on. I’m just saying. If you’re going to do this for a decade of your working life, at least be smart about it. You remember that girl the year ahead of me at J school?”
“How could I forget,” she said, and began mouthing the words to the story even as he launched into it once more.
“She was always threatening to transfer to Fiction, which was a joke because it wasn’t even the same school. Like she just knew she could have applied to the Arts school and gotten in? Anyway, we all thought she would probably write a novel after we left. She was such a babe, every professor was always falling all over himself to help her out, take her around and introduce her.”
“I would love, just once, to hear about this girl without hearing about how hot she was.”
He nuzzled closer to her, partly in reassurance and partly because another couple had been jammed in beside them at the counter.
“Be that as it may, she didn’t really seem to have the stomach to report anything, anyway. But then she sort of gives us all this big fuck you after graduation, when we’re all basically interviewing for the same web jobs, some of which aren’t even paid, and she takes this job working as the assistant to this Medusa publishing woman who’s married to a big-time lawyer. Takes care of her kids.”
“Yes,” Lily said. “I remember.”
“Well, she sold the memoir last month,” Jackson interrupted. “Supposedly more than a million. So you never listen to me, but I’m always looking out for you, baby.”
“I listen to you.”
“Okay, but let’s focus. What have you been thinking, in terms of once the worst part passes,” he said. He’d unwrapped his chopsticks and started rubbing them together.
“What do you mean?” Their ramen arrived, and she looked down at the murk, the slab of pork floating somewhere just below the scallions, the noodles coiled around it. It looked like a cross section of human organs.
“I know you love the kids, so you’ve got to see them through this part,” Jackson said. He started to attack his noodles. “But what about, like, say, January?”
It dawned on her. “In January?”
He pushed his bowl toward the edge of the counter and turned, wedging himself against their neighbors so he could look at her face.
“Please tell me you aren’t going to stay at this job,” he said.
“Why would I leave? Because of Bob?”
“Lily,” he said. “Lily, come on. What do you think is going to happen when he comes home? It’s going to be, you’re going to be living under siege. The Post has been running pictures of him practically every day. Coming out of the lobby. The building’s on Park, right? The apartment?”
She remembered one of the first headlines, the one Jackson had sent her the day after it happened: “DAMN IT, D’AMICO.” She knew it had been a real crowd pleaser, not least with her boyfriend.
But that had seemed like it might be all. She’d been bracing the kids, that first morning—the morning she hated to think about—for some cataclysmic shift in their daily routines. Homeschooling, a more secluded house somewhere in another state, whatever it would take. But nothing had happened. She’d prepared herself for flashbulbs when she walked up to the house in the morning, reporters’ stubby fingers reaching out toward Madison every time they walked through the streets of Greenwich. She’d imagined herself shepherding the children through their days like an underqualified bodyguard. But none of this had come to pass, and her initial bewilderment had given way to genuine awe when she considered how much Bob must be paying to make sure this didn’t happen. The black sedans must be everywhere in their neighborhood, their drivers the human equivalents of an electric fence, heading the intrepid truth seekers off at the pass.
“I can’t leave,” she said. “It hasn’t been as bad as I thought it would be, but there’s a lot going on. They think someone tried to break into the place on Park. And she gets hate mail, you know. Isabel. She’s in her office on the phone with their lawyers all day, because apparently he refuses to meet with anyone yet. And she’s got to gather the hate mail every day, which means some of these people actually have access to their home address.”
“So he’s waiting and maneuvering. He’s figuring out his best bet. You could learn something, Lil. You’re the one always telling me you’re watching him to learn more about how he got where he is, aren’t you?”
“He’s a pretty employable guy, Jacks. I’m guessing he’ll be able to find another job.”
“Well,” he said, “no, maybe not. I mean, you should hear how the DealBook guys are talking about this. People are talking about actual prosecution, Lily. If you wait too long, you won’t even be able to get another nanny job out there on the Gold Coast. Nobody’s going to want to touch anyone near that name.”
“Don’t be a drama queen,” she said.
Jackson raised his eyebrows in dismay, but he’d resumed slurping his noodles, and she took advantage of his full mouth.
“He did the best he could with the information they had at the time,” she said. “Everyone loves risk takers when they’re right. And everyone loves Monday-morning quarterbacking, especially when it’s a rich guy they’re second-guessing. But one man doesn’t create a tsunami. People are just obsessed right now because it’s a good story. It’s just rumors. It’s going to blow over.”
“Jesus,” he said through the food. “Listen to you.”
“In some ways, I mean, he’s suffering more than anyone else. His long-term financial interests, if you look at it that way, they’re completely aligned with all the other shareholders. No one wanted that bank to succeed more than he did. If he’s such a villain, why didn’t he sell off his stock? He still owned millions of shares, millions, when they had to file. He’s got to be in as much pain as anyone.”
Her boyfriend stared at her. He had stopped chewing.
“Lily, come on.”
“He must know it could get worse,” she mumbled. “You think he’s not in pain? Trust me, he loves those kids. He’s in pain.”
“How would you know?” Jackson croaked, having finally swallowed his food. He was still watching her, his face slack with amazement. “You haven’t even seen him yet.”
“You don’t understand,” Lily said. She dipped her spoon just below the surface of the soup, then spun it around and brought it back up for air. “He was a lifer there. It was the only place he ever worked. He was a lifer.”
“Who gives a shit,” Jackson barked. “You don’t owe this man anything. You’ve already proved your loyalty, trust me. You don’t have to be a lifer, Lil.”
“I’m not there because of what he can do for me,” she said, but even as she spoke she could hear how thin her voice sounded.
“Okay,” he said, “we can stick to the party line. But I know you, and you aren’t stupid. You know as well as I do what a reference from him will do f
or you, down the line.”
They ate the remainder of the ramen in silence, constantly jostling their neighbors to hold on to their counter space. When the cashier left an oil-stained scrap of paper by their place mats, the receipt, Jackson slid his arm back into position around her waist. It was that wheedling sort of affection, the kind you both use to stave off the explosions you know are waiting for you in just a few hours, or even minutes.
“You’ve got this, right?” he asked her, and she took out her wallet.
THAT NIGHT SHE HAD HER HANDS in the sink, submerged nearly to the elbows in the soapy, scalding water. There was something satisfying about this feeling, satisfying in a way that weighted you to the ground. Knowing that your hands would be chapped and abrased when you drew them back, that you were aging them with every moment you let them float in the harsh water without the thick rubber gloves Isabel was always urging you to use.
She knew the gloves would help, knew it was silly to refuse them—they were hardly an extravagance by the standards of this house. But when Isabel had first waved them at her, Lily had been able to think only of her own mother. Of the fragile lines that arced from her nostrils to the corners of her mouth when worry cinched her features together. Her mother had always tried to get her to wear gloves like that while she did chores, and Lily had always refused. She couldn’t refuse her own mother and not Isabel. There was no logic to this argument, but it was what Lily thought when she looked at them.
She lifted one hand from the sink and was examining her own knuckles, red and angry, when Isabel came into the kitchen. Or, to be precise, when Lily glanced up to see Isabel’s reflection in the dark window, leaning against the kitchen door frame with performed ease, propping the swinging door open with one foot. Lily yelped and dropped the glass she was holding. A plastic one the boys used, thank God, but still. She hadn’t seen Isabel for days and she didn’t like it that, when they were finally in the same room again, her boss had caught her in the midst of incompetence.
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