“Me, I’m there for two years, tops,” he said. “Then maybe I move to a hedge fund, PE, somewhere else. Then business school if I have a good sense of what I want, but only down the road. The guys who go straight to school, honestly—those are the pathetic guys, the ones who become lifers at these places. You don’t want to be a lifer, because unless you end up, you know, CEO, you’re sort of stranded. And especially right now. Probably you don’t know about this, but it’s a weird time to be working at a bank.”
Madison followed Hugh to the bar.
TWENTY-EIGHT
When Lily heard Isabel’s car pull into the drive, it could have been ten minutes or three hours since they’d seen Bob in the kitchen; she had no idea.
A moment later, her phone chimed. Then again, then a third time. Beneath her, Jackson opened his eyes and cocked an eyebrow.
“What’s wrong,” he said, and it was hearing his voice, slower and clogged somewhere in his throat from the bottle of wine he’d already drunk down, that did it. That and looking around them, the curtains pulled, everything about this so clearly a terrible idea. Her own worst behavior wasn’t going to jolt anyone else back into any normal degree of giving a fuck. It was just going to put her in the place of primary danger, which would only call attention to the months they’d already spent in that very spot.
She grabbed her phone; Isabel was calling, having given up on texting.
She got out of bed and slid back into her underwear, pulled on her jeans, ran into the bathroom to brush the wine sediment from her front teeth.
“The fuck?” Jackson was saying, but she was herself again, she knew what to tell him.
“I screwed up,” she said. “I saw Madison when we were by the station, I saw her getting on a train. I tried to call Isabel but then—I should have done something more. I have to go talk to her.”
“Okay,” he said, “okay, but—”
“Just stay in here,” Lily said. “Just don’t do anything. Please. Do literally nothing at all. Don’t make any noise. Don’t go outside for a cigarette. Literally nothing. Promise me.”
“Sure,” he said.
Up at the house, Isabel was standing, perplexed, in front of an open cabinet, her arms stretched out to either side, hands clasping the cabinet handles.
“Did you move things around in here, Lily?”
“Hi,” Lily said, and waited for the ignored question to snag her boss’s attention.
“I’ve been trying to reach you,” Isabel said. “It seemed odd no one was here. Where’s Madison?”
“She went over to Allie’s house,” Lily said. She noticed, with something she tried to keep from becoming smugness, that Isabel couldn’t place the name.
“But, actually, there’s something—I tried to call you earlier.”
“I haven’t been watching my phone. It was off.”
“Well, I’m a little bit worried.”
Isabel’s face shifted as Lily spoke, composing itself. Lily felt the same comforting click she’d felt back in her bedroom, climbing away from Jackson, remembering her job. She could make this sound normal, her part at least. She and Isabel could speak to each other, again, the way they had on the night Bob came home. Something had been disjointed between them ever since that night. It had really started then, not after Thanksgiving. She rewrote the history now, in her head, quickly. On the night Bob came home, she’d been too slow to respond. Her loyalty, her dependability, had stuttered. And now she was on the outside; Isabel had been keeping her at a distance. But it could stop now. Isabel could need her, again. There could have been a reason, a use, for her behavior this afternoon.
Lily told everything very clearly, in a very untruthful way.
“Are you sure it was that early?” Isabel said.
“Yes. Right when I called you.”
“So they were getting on the 3:12,” Isabel said, scrolling through train schedules on her phone.
“The other two were already on the train by the time I saw her,” Lily lied. “I just barely got a glimpse of her before she stepped off the platform.”
“So then how can you be sure?” Isabel said. Her voice was steamrolled, with little actual inquiry included in the question.
“Maybe it wasn’t her,” Lily said. “But my first thought was to call you.”
Isabel stared down at her BlackBerry’s screen.
“I only see one call,” she said after a moment, and Lily seized on that lag time, took a shot.
“Well, your phone was off,” she said, “you wouldn’t have seen the missed calls. If you turned it off after my first call, I mean.”
Isabel pressed something on her phone and lifted it to her ear, staring at Lily.
“Madison’s phone is off now,” she said. “But you didn’t try her at the time?”
“No.”
“And you called me . . . once.”
They stood in silence, because again, Lily knew it hadn’t been a question.
“We could call the school,” she said then.
“No, I don’t want to clue them in. Obviously they’re too inept to realize she didn’t attend her last class, otherwise we’d already have gotten a call.”
Isabel moved to the sink, where she’d been cutting calla lilies before Lily came in. She washed her hands slowly, reflectively, then turned and leaned back on the heels of her hands, propping herself against the counter.
“What do you want me to do,” Lily said. She was worried the wine had crept into her voice, into its volume and its cadences. But Isabel wasn’t looking at her.
“The boys,” Isabel said suddenly, pulling away from the counter with a small start. “I completely forgot.”
“They’re over at Kenny’s again.”
“Jesus, thank God. Is Bob down the hall?”
“No,” Lily said. Isabel faced away from her, looking out the window, but her body stiffened. “He’s not here.”
“Did you see him?”
Lily waited, long enough, she hoped, before she offered her reply. “No, I didn’t.”
“This wouldn’t normally matter,” Isabel said.
“Of course.”
“I just don’t want to overreact.”
“No, I understand.”
“I’ve been waiting for this,” Isabel said, her perfect Chiclet teeth chewing away at her bottom lip. “It’s been too easy, with her. I’ve tried not to bother her, to see if that might keep her from striking back. If it seemed like I was giving her some slack, some space to process all of this on her own, without me all over her.”
Bullshit, Lily thought. To attribute agency and wisdom to Isabel’s indifference toward Madison that winter was one step further than Lily could sympathize. She’d sympathized with Isabel for years. The preteen trance she always fell into around this woman, how badly Lily wanted her employers to like her, had made it easier to shrug off the things Isabel didn’t do for Madison. Lily had told herself for years that not every mother was warm, not every mother tickled and hugged. Her mother didn’t, for one. And Isabel had been smart enough, hadn’t she, to hire Lily. Lily was warm with the children, in her place, and Isabel was still a good mother, of a sort.
But that was different. That was temperament; this was neglect. Ignoring your daughter, ignoring her pain. This was how bad it had to get before Isabel did anything. Lily had to literally stop doing her job.
She tried to keep one part of her mind on Jackson, back in her bedroom. You can’t be angry right now, she told herself. You’ve squandered that.
“Bob wanted to put a car on her,” Isabel continued. “At all times. I thought that was outrageous. But if he finds out that she’s in the city by herself, refusing to talk to us, he’ll lose it, he’ll kill me.”
“He might know where she is.”
Something like a smile flitted across Isabel’s face, but she didn’t bother to respond.
“He might have an idea,” Lily said, “of what to do—if we ended up in this situation. He might have already thou
ght about this.”
Isabel ignored her a second time. She gathered the chopped flower stalks from the sink and threw them in the trash, each gesture made without urgency.
“I’ll get the security guys on the phone now. I wasn’t dealing with the new people directly at first, but I’ve spoken with them a few times now. I’ve got all the numbers.”
“Okay,” Lily said. Isabel ran a hand through her limp hair. She hadn’t ever started to dress differently, really, since all this had started, but someone who saw her as often as Lily did could see the tiny false notes. There was a coffee stain on one sleeve of her crisp white shirt, and a faded spot of something peach colored—a makeup stain?—at the collar. Her hair was still thick and something to envy in its many shades of blond, but it had lost its luster somehow, as if Isabel had styled it the day before and then partied all night, brushing it back repeatedly from her face in a film of alcohol sweat.
“I can do it,” Lily said. “I can call them.”
“No,” Isabel said, already turning to her phone, squaring her shoulders as if to hide its screen from Lily. “Here’s what you can do for me. Call Mina. She’ll be good here. Then let the guys in, when they arrive.”
“Mina?” Lily began, but Isabel left the room, the door swinging behind her as if in grief at her swift departure.
TWENTY-NINE
Madison stood beside Hugh at the bar, ignored for several moments longer than she believed it had taken him to feel her there.
“Hi,” she said. “I wanted some water, too.”
The bartender came back over and set down a shot glass. Madison drifted back slightly, conscious of the lights above the bar on her face, but the bartender didn’t seem to register her presence, her age. The bar was crammed; she’d had to all but crawl to make her way up to him.
He looked down at her.
“You want one?”
She nodded, keeping her eyes on his. He whirled a finger in the air, and the bartender brought over another before winking and gliding away. They clearly knew each other.
Madison took the shot. It was whiskey, bad whiskey. He looked at her again, his features spreading out across his face, less pinched.
“You like picklebacks?”
“Yes,” she lied. Or maybe it wasn’t even a lie, how would she know? He made another indecipherable gesture toward the bartender, who soon returned with four shot glasses, two of them filled with a murkier liquid. Madison liked the way the lights behind the bar illuminated the alcohol in the shot glasses, as if you were drinking something more special than what you could drink at home. That made sense, though. It was another reason to come to a place like this; to tell yourself that something you could find absolutely anywhere was special, worth fighting your way toward.
“Jack’s a big fan of these,” Hugh said. “He got me into them and now, like an idiot, I’m always drinking them.”
She watched and followed his lead, choking through her nose when she realized the name had been only literal; it was just a shot of pickle juice.
Hugh looked at her again. They’d performed some required ritual and now they were allowed to talk. She waited for his pupils to go soluble, for the corners of his mouth to slacken. She waited for the shift she knew so well.
“I didn’t mean to be rude,” he said. “You guys seem bright. You’re lovely. It’s just been a long day, and they should know better.”
She nodded.
“You work on the Street?”
He smiled, letting his eyes move down her body to her hands, her elbow propped on the bar, then back up to her face again.
“My father works in finance,” she said, feeling the words beneath her feet like a swaying tightrope. They were impossible not to say. It was like reciting a spell; if she mentioned it first, if she controlled their conversation, then it couldn’t go anywhere too terrible. Then he wouldn’t figure it out.
“Yes,” he said. “I work on the Street.”
“Bank? Hedge fund?”
“I work at a bank,” he said. He didn’t say which one.
“Trader, or banker?”
“Banker,” he said. “I work in fixed income, do you know what that is?”
She nodded. She thought it had something to do with bonds—her father had muttered the name of his former head of fixed income several times during their last late-night talk. Her father’s bank had been known primarily as a bond shop, at least before. She knew that part not from her father but from reading Jake’s columns.
She pushed the thoughts of Amanda from her mind. She didn’t want to think about Amanda’s opinion of any part of the afternoon thus far.
“Anyway,” he said. “I should apologize for being so rude back there. I just—it’s been a strange few months. And then, being in here, you know, it can seem like nothing’s changed. The younger people don’t really know the difference, maybe.”
He smiled down at her again and she saw his fingers reaching out to toy with one of the empty shot glasses, saw that he was longing to order another.
“We don’t have to talk about any of that,” she said. She kept her voice low, matching his, and he bent his head down toward her.
“I just wanted to explain,” he said, now almost whispering in her ear. “Because it wouldn’t normally bother me, those guys dragging me along to talk to girls like you. I wouldn’t normally see that as a burden.” He’d turned his whole body now, away from the bar, closing her off from the other men around them.
He kept talking, about the summer, the interns who had been hired before the tide had turned and washed them up at the office, potential prey instead of the predators they’d been trained to be. He talked about the weeks in September when no one had slept. When the head of his division had asked him, one night, if he thought they should bring in a doctor to make sure everyone was still physically capable of being there.
“You don’t know,” he said. “You’re too young still to have known this feeling. But by the time you’re my age, you’re just living your life, putting it together piece by piece. You don’t stop to think about it, you just do it. And nobody really—I mean, you can’t be stopping all the time to think about how every small thing you do might affect someone else far away from you. You’d go crazy, thinking like that.”
As he spoke, his voice dipping as if he were continuously suppressing a series of belches, she tried to keep nodding. It was like no one had asked him in months how he felt, if he was worried, why he’d been so quiet and withdrawn. Like he’d been waiting to meet an underage girl in his regular bar, just to have someone to tell it to. Every few seconds, often at the ends of his sentences, he’d toss his hair aside with a jerk of his head, to clear it from his eyes, and she saw that he wore it this way—brushed softly in a wave that crested back from his forehead—to cover the fact that he was losing his hair. The newly exposed skin ran back in furrows along the top of his head, like wheel ruts on a muddy road.
All she’d have to do would be to say one thing too much, one thing any girl her age—a college junior, she reminded herself—wouldn’t normally know.
She had existed, thus far, somewhere safe. Whatever happened, however repugnant the pity she could see in other people’s eyes, no one could touch her. They had all known her for almost as long as she had known herself, and they couldn’t tell her anything she didn’t already know, force her suddenly to credit their opinions. They wanted to reach out, to prod her with their fingertips, to see if she was still all there. She was sure they wanted her to cry, some of them, but they didn’t dare try it. But here, she was no one. She was exposed, alone in the rifle sight, without any thick forest all around her to ward off the first shot.
“I must be boring you,” Hugh said. He moved closer to her, put one arm to her waist. He let his head droop toward her, let his razor-burned chin graze her neck. He wasn’t even trying to kiss her, really; he was just burying his face against her.
She thought of that trader on television, on the first morning. Of his
mottled neck, of the way he’d spit her father’s name. And then, just as she’d always been led to expect, just like the shot-guzzling junior associates for whom her father had so much contempt, she felt it—a wave of nausea, beginning at her ankles and spreading steadily up through her entire body, the delayed revolt of every sip of beer and vodka and whiskey she’d chugged down against that body’s will.
“I’m sorry,” she said, and when his arm didn’t respond to her gentle pushes, she shoved him, harder, in the chest.
“What the hell?” he barked, his tender bewilderment vanishing. “What’s wrong, sweetheart?”
She didn’t say anything to him, just spun away from the bar, launched herself into the crush of bodies as if it were a rioting sea, and fumbled toward the street.
THIRTY
We’ve checked with the doorman at the apartment—both apartments,” the head of the security detail was telling Isabel. Mina liked him, his look. His name was Teddy. He had a military air to him, his head more square than ovate, cheekbones so broad and sharp they had corners. This was a man her sister Denise would go nuts for. Even if he brought bad news, it seemed safe to trust that he’d done his job.
Denise, Mina chided herself. That was what she’d intended to do tonight. She owed Denise a call. Jaime had decided not to come home for Christmas next week, and Denise was sleeping with some married guy. Gobbling up the Greenwich gossip together over the phone had been a reliable balm for them both, all month.
The married guy was in finance, but he was decidedly midcareer, and he was fearful for his job. Poor thing, Dee couldn’t even find herself a man with a glamorous other life for her to envy. What she was choosing to obsess over, then, wasn’t his wife but rather the many other women she was positive, positive, she told Mina, he was also sleeping with. She only knew about one of them, someone named Maggie. She’d seen them together once, at the bar behind the Oyster Bar, of all places. (This was a suspicious story in Mina’s mind, because why would Denise have been there in the first place?) But now she was following the woman around the city, devoting whole afternoons to this. Maggie had given Trevor some expensive bar of soap from Morocco and when Denise found it in the apartment in the city he’d told her, unapologetic, who it was from. And so Denise bought him a thick ceramic soap dish—totally the wrong style, she’d reassured Mina, for his anonymous steel-and-white-marble pad—and used the soap compulsively, whenever she spent the night. Mina thought of her sister now, expecting her call. Hunched over his sink, grinding the bar of soap between her hands, and then slapping at her cheeks, rubbing the creamy bubbles in circles into her skin.
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