Unfortunately for Suzanne Welsh, Isabel had spent her junior year in Tuscany, and she was rarely if ever looking for an extra window to open, for anything that might let one of these women further in. People always talked about Isabel like she was so icy, so remote, but she wasn’t at all. She’s always been warm to me, Amanda thought. She just doesn’t devote her energy to putting people at ease when she has no respect for them. We should all be a little more like her, actually. It would cost us so much less if we could all agree to do it.
And whether Isabel cooked or not, at least her kitchen didn’t feel like this place: a gaudy, well-lit rehearsal for a life.
For a moment, before she went back to the living room, Amanda thought of her father, of the proud way he’d practically puffed out his chest when he’d said that: “speaking truth to power.” She knew, though, what he’d really been saying. It was, in the end, his answer for everything. How seductive this approach could be. Surrounding yourself with all the people you know you’re better than. Then sinking into the contempt the way you’d sink into a bubble bath, just on the edge of too hot, after a grueling game of tennis.
It wasn’t fair that in Bob D’Amico she saw it as evidence of his essential mettle, his intrinsic worth, where in her own father she just saw it as preening. She knew it wasn’t fair.
WHEN SHE CAME BACK into the living room, Zoë was holding Madison’s wrist high in the air, waving it around and calling back toward the boys’ corner. A door slammed in some other part of the house.
“You guys,” she said, “doesn’t Madison have the world’s tiniest wrists? Like a baby’s! Look!”
Wyatt came back in, and then Chip was shambling into the room.
“Who’s got tiny wrists?” He bent down to kiss both Zoë and Allie, each on the cheek, and nodded toward Amanda.
“I do,” Madison said. “Haven’t you noticed?”
“I guess I’m not usually paying attention to your wrists,” he said, already looking over toward Callan and the other two. “That isn’t where guys are looking. Just a pro tip for you ladies.”
He crossed the room then, to high-five Callan. He was wearing a suit jacket two sizes too small for him, the sleeves stretched across his upper forearms, and beneath it a T-shirt with the Superman logo peeking out.
“Fuck you, Abbott,” Wyatt said, and Chip pulled him into a headlock.
“No thank you, Wyatt, but I’m happy to just be friends.”
“Wyatt, kiddo, can we perhaps get you something to chill you the fuck out?” Zoë called over her shoulder. “Does anyone have a joint for our gracious host?”
“Try does anyone have six Xanax,” Callan snorted.
Amanda saw Madison’s spine straighten, as though someone had jerked it on a string.
“Oh,” Madison said in response to some gesture, some clue from Zoë. Amanda had missed it, whatever it was. “How long has that been going on?”
“Just sometimes,” Allie clarified. “Like, really not often. Every few weeks. If she’s bored. Right?”
“If I’m bored,” Zoë said. “Yeah, we hook up. I mean that’s Wyatt’s best use, to be honest. I’m not going to tell him my hopes and dreams. Not a candidate for best friend.”
“Or romance, I would imagine,” Amanda contributed.
“I like those shoes,” Zoë said, done with Wyatt as a topic. “What are those, Prada? I think I almost bought those. But not that color.”
“Probably not,” Madison said. “These aren’t recent. They’re my mother’s.”
“That’s sweet,” Allie said.
“What, is she cleaning out her closet?” Zoë said.
“No,” Madison said.
They all sipped their drinks.
“Here’s the thing,” Zoë said, sliding lower on the couch so that her head tilted toward Allie’s. “We could use a little something stronger, couldn’t we? I’m already bored.”
“Oh,” Allie said, slouching down alongside her. “I’ve already taken care of it. Jared said he could get some. He said he’d get extra and we could buy it off him.”
“For what? Fifty?”
“He said seventy-five, which I think is bullshit, but I’m just going to leave it alone.”
“That seems like a lot.”
Allie’s hand danced in the air for a moment, then touched her hair, gently, as if to make sure it was still there. “I can get it this time,” she said. “Whatever. He shouldn’t even be making us pay.”
“Madison,” Zoë said, sitting up straight again. “You’re going to love this. This is going to be dynamite.”
The doorbell rang.
“Perfect. What do you want to bet that’s Jared?”
“It had better be,” Wyatt said, loping past them to head back out to the foyer.
“I think it’s hilarious,” Madison said, “that he’s actually dressed as the guy from Wall Street. I think that’s so—it’s just so, so Wyatt.”
She sounded, Amanda thought, exactly like Zoë.
“I thought it was supposed to be American Psycho, that movie from when we were kids,” Allie said.
Zoë raised her eyebrows and grinned at Madison. “What’s the difference? Right, Madison?”
WHEN THE OTHER GIRLS both left the room to follow Wyatt, Amanda knew that this might be the one time, all night, when she and Madison spoke only to each other. That certainty rushed to fill the empty, expectant places that had foreseen an evening that would end the way it was supposed to, with Madison needing Amanda.
“You’re kidding, right?” she said. Somehow it came out hostile. “You’re going to do that with them?”
“Amanda,” Madison said, “I don’t even know why you came.”
“I came to see you,” Amanda said, but all these thoughts were sliding from her brain, unruly, they were wrinkled and in the wrong order by the time she said them out loud. She sounded sad, when she said that, but all she wanted was for Madison to get it, to get how much more egregious any single person in this room was than anything Amanda had ever done.
Madison crossed her arms, pulling her knees in toward her chest.
“Do you want to talk about this now?” she said. “Then fine, let’s go. I’m listening.” And then, to Amanda’s silence: “That’s what I figured. So then why are you here?”
Madison stood up and went over to talk to Chip. Amanda felt an actual twisted pride, watching her do that. She walked all the way across the room, in front of those boys, and started talking to this guy she worshipped. She could do that now, when before—only a few months ago—she couldn’t. Whatever was happening, had been happening, it was at least making her different, somehow. She was learning something.
Amanda waited for Zoë and Allie to come back with that senior, Jared Rodrick, and then slipped out the front door. Wyatt, thankfully, didn’t seem to have set any alarm. She called her father on his home office line and waited by the fountain outside for what felt like hours, until she saw his car crest the hill.
SEVENTEEN
Mina was trying to remember, in chronological order, every single one of Jaime’s Halloween costumes. She knew the first one had been a teapot, when Jaime was not even three months old. Mina had been frantic to find a costume that wouldn’t broadcast to the entire party, a Manhattan event thrown by one of the older wives at the bank, how long it was taking her to lose the baby weight.
She’d been younger, then; she hadn’t yet discovered her panoply of options, the mixing and matching of the other wives’ weekly fitness regimens.
In the end she’d had a yellow dress made, cut low to expose her breast-feeding cleavage and with a high-waisted ball-gown skirt to cover her tummy. It seemed so perfect, for the bank, Beauty and the Beast, and a little teapot in tow. But of course it ended up being one of those things where kids had only been invited in spirit, and the “nursery” was the apartment’s abandoned third story and a housekeeper who had clearly been asked last minute to work overtime, and Mina had been one of only two or three clueless
women who’d shown up with a kid. And Tom seemed more embarrassed by her idea of a little joke, painting his nose black and putting a fake lion’s mane over his suit, than she’d expected.
She trotted into the foyer now to fetch the giant plastic pumpkin filled with miniature Vosges boxes, their purple edges protruding from the pumpkin’s maw like facets from a geode. It was so typical, that she’d been trying to remember her daughter’s cutest looks and had instead wandered into a memory of recrimination and pain. She had to get a better handle on that. She knew why it was happening—any holiday was a spotlight shone on Jaime’s absence, and Tom was stewing in the den tonight, annoyed that they had to deal with trick-or-treaters. It was all right to feel a bit off. But this constant wallowing—enough was enough.
“Oh my goodness,” she cooed at the door, dropping a box of chocolates into the bejeweled handbag of a small girl who couldn’t be much older than ten. She was wearing a face full of makeup and a dazzling outfit, one of the ones where flesh-colored nylon is sewed in place to make a young child look like she’s baring skin, wearing something risqué. It had to be that she was dressed up as a pop star, or something, God knows it went right over Mina’s head. The older your kids got, the less you were expected to keep up with whatever celebrity had them in raptures. And when your kid decamped for boarding school, you were almost completely off the hook.
She hovered in the kitchen for a few minutes after the latest batch of kids wandered back down the driveway—one reason Tom hated this process was that it required them to leave the front gate open, trusting that no one would trespass without candy-seeking kids in tow—before deciding that they might be reaching the dregs of the evening, that it might be late enough to call it a night.
Tom had been the sort of dad who cashes in on his daughter’s Halloween haul. He had always tried to bargain with Jaime for her Snickers. I’ll drive you to school, he’d say, and she’d squeal with laughter. I’ll buy you some dinner. I’ll take you into the city to see the whale on the ceiling at the museum. When we visit your Grandma Gennaro out on Long Island, I’ll let you pile your food on my plate and if she asks, I’ll say I took seconds, because it’s not your fault you got the one Italian grandma who’s a terrible cook. I’ll do it for you! I’ll do anything, anything. Just give me those Snickers bars.
They were all things he already did for her, things any daughter could expect from her father. They were the wages of love as they already existed, the parameters of Jaime’s relationship with him as she’d been taught to understand it. That was the joke; he was offering her nothing at all. And their daughter had laughed and laughed, her giggles accelerating into near hyperventilation, her hands at her little protruding stomach, as if to hold her together so she didn’t shatter from the hilarity.
That was another Halloween memory.
Mina topped off her glass of wine and poured a fresh scotch for Tom and carried both glasses into the den. He was in his chair, a CIA mystery propped open on his knees. He read paperbacks when they traveled, for the convenience, but at home he always preferred hardcovers from the library. He wasn’t looking down at the book, or at the NBA season opener he had playing, muted, on the television. He was looking out the French windows, toward the swimming pool that would be visible if it weren’t already dark.
“Honey?” she said.
He snapped to attention and considered her for a moment before closing the book and patting the wide wooden arm of his chair. She tiptoed across the room to curl up beside him. She caught his head in her arm and guided it toward her chest, and they both cradled their drinks in their free hands.
“Do you think she really won’t come home for Thanksgiving?” Mina asked quietly.
“It’s a long trip,” he said.
“I’d go to pick her up,” she said. “She knows that.”
“It’s good that she’s made friends, Min. You’d hate thinking of her up there, alone in the room after that dingbat roommate left school. No one to talk to. You’d be so miserable if you thought that was the case. You were so worried about her, back in October. And it’s nice that she’ll have a family Thanksgiving.”
“It’s not her family.”
“Sure,” he said. “But it’ll work.”
Mina lifted her glass, but she realized that what she wanted wasn’t really a drink, it was some Halloween candy. And not what they had in the hall; real candy bars. She wanted KitKats. She should have gotten Tom some Snickers bars, brought them in to him without warning. But then if he hadn’t remembered, she’d have felt guilty for implying that he should remember.
“We could go away,” he said now. “We could close up the house for the winter and go somewhere warm.”
“No,” she said. “She’ll still come for Christmas, come on. And you need to be here.”
“I’m sick of it,” he said. “When I get out of the car in the morning, and see the building, I can’t stand the sight of it. I don’t want to walk in. I don’t want to get into the elevator.”
“Sweetheart,” Mina said, lowering her face to his, brushing his temple with her lips. She felt him shudder, involuntary. “We don’t have that luxury.”
“He gets to just disappear,” Tom murmured. “They should make him show up in my place every day, and explain to my team what’s going on. That should be his penance. He should go from firm to firm.”
She imagined them, her husband’s hands tensed like claws and Bob’s crisp white shirt wilted into his lower back with anxious sweat. Bob’s head lowered in docile acceptance, letting her husband hurl everything at him, every piece of fear sharpened into fury, like shards of glass. She couldn’t picture it; she couldn’t imagine Bob, even now, so broken.
She knew Isabel was still waiting for it, because she was still waiting, too. For the last piece of information to fall into place, for the final card to land without the house falling. The proof, for every prying eye, that Bob had done his best, had really tried.
She said none of it out loud, of course, and they sat in silence. She could feel Tom shifting toward her, and she knew that in a few minutes they’d go upstairs, that her husband wanted to have sex with her. But in the meantime, they sat together and didn’t drink their drinks, and looked out at the pool they couldn’t see.
AFTER HE’D FALLEN ASLEEP, she decided to call her daughter. She could hear him even from their sitting room, his rasping punctured only every few minutes by a violent attempt to snore. She knew he had that apnea problem, he should probably be one of those men wearing a mask to sleep, but she couldn’t even get him to go in for a consult to discuss it.
It would make more sense to go downstairs, where there was no chance he’d hear her, and where beyond that she had some tidying to do. The house still had to be closed down, everything turned off, darkened. But he’d been so sweet to her all night, so unlike the barking, quivering man he’d been all month, and now she didn’t want to leave him, even his unaware sleeping body. She wanted to stay where she could see him, listen to his fragile breath, think about the nice evening they’d had together.
Jaime’s cell phone, as it almost always did, went straight to voice mail.
“Honey,” Mina whispered into the phone, craning her neck to peer out at the back lawn and at the distant lights from next door, where there appeared to be a party of some sort. There were orange lanterns strung through the trees back beyond Mina’s tennis court. “Jaime, babe, it’s me. I’m sure you’re out or something, I just called to see what your costume was. I was thinking of that year you were Dorothy, do you remember? And Isabel had all the kids over to their house, and as soon as we got there, I realized you weren’t just in a bad mood, you were running a fever.”
It had been another brutal Halloween, with Isabel insisting that they didn’t have to leave, Jaime could just lie down in one of the guest bedrooms, don’t worry, Lily had every possible fever reducer and homeopathic remedy on hand. Just let her sleep there until you want to go home, Isabel had repeated, over and over. But
Jaime had refused to be shunted quietly into some abandoned corner upstairs, and she had cried in big gulping sobs as Mina tried to explain that she couldn’t bob for apples with everyone else, that she would contaminate the water.
“Anyway,” she said into the phone, putting some sort of faith in the fact that her daughter would listen to this message, “you know how I love Halloween. I was just wondering what you dressed as tonight. You would have thought it might be quieter here, this year, but actually we had more kids come up to the house than usual. And the costumes—just as bad as ever. There was a little girl dressed as Britney Spears, or something. You would have been horrified, babe.”
She rambled into the phone for a few more minutes before hanging up, feeling—as ever—that she’d been vaguely traitorous to her husband, her daughter, her sister, and her town, all at once, equally.
EIGHTEEN
The second Welsh gate had already shuddered behind her when the car’s headlights slid across her body, and Madison recognized Jake Levins’s Volkswagen. She could see his face, his body hunched like a turtle over the steering wheel, and that was how she knew that he surely had seen her standing there.
What possible reason could he have for being here?
“Jake!” she yelled, cupping her hands to her mouth. “Jake! Stop!”
The car pulled away from the house, disappeared smoothly down the drive.
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