“I’m not sucking up to you,” he said. “I think we can help each other, but that’s the operative phrase. Each other. I’m not interested in exploiting you or your family, the situation itself. I just think there are questions that aren’t being asked. What’s the real use of vilifying your father? That’s not what the country needs, at this point.”
When she said nothing, he sighed. “Just take this, all right? Keep my card somewhere and please think about using it if you ever want to talk to someone. I promise you that anything you’d want to discuss is of interest. I think you’re valuable, Madison. I think you and your brothers are your father’s most valuable assets right now. Soon, he’ll realize that.”
Somewhere around the word “assets,” she finally pushed past him. When she got back to the last car of the train, Allie and Zoë were both asleep. She stood as they pulled into Greenwich, and did not deny herself the small pleasure of barking their names.
They hobbled onto the platform like cruise passengers sent to shore. Zoë threw her heels down on the ground, stepped into them, and stalked away. Allie began to follow her, then faltered and looked back at Madison.
“She’s totally fine to drive,” she said, her head nodding furiously in response to a question no one had asked.
“I’m okay,” Madison said. “I’ll call for a ride.”
“Bye,” Allie said, already turning away to run after Zoë.
The air was clear and unobtrusive, one of those nights when it was every bit as cold as snow but somehow didn’t chill you to the bone.
Madison stood still for a moment, watched her breath unfurl into the air just in front of her face. It was a few moments more before she turned to leave the station and saw Mina, sitting on a bench, watching her.
THIRTY-TWO
Mina had forgotten that they kicked you out of the station lobby at eight o’clock, when they locked everything up for the night. It had been so long since she’d waited for a train. But by then, she’d made such a fuss about coming here, doing this, that she couldn’t see how she could possibly return to that house without good news.
After another frozen hour, closer to two, Madison disembarked from the train.
She walked slowly along the platform, as if unsure of where she should go next. Her shoulders were small. She had applied lipstick with the excessive care and unsteady hand of a teenager, so that her lips were dark and imprecise, as if imagined onto her face. When she raised her head, she saw Mina.
Mina waited for Madison to cross the remaining space between them. She let the silence sit, for a painful moment, before speaking.
“Alexandra Barker could have called the cops,” she said. Madison still refused to speak.
“Your father’s name would have come into it, and you know that’s the last thing he needs right now. Someone might have seen you in the city, Madison. Someone could see who you are and do something terrible.”
“I know,” Madison said, finally. “I didn’t think.”
“Well, no.”
“I’m fine, Mina,” Madison said, her voice weary. “It was stupid, I thought it would be fun.”
“What do we do now?” Mina said, but she already knew.
She could bring Madison home without waking Isabel, who had gone to bed. She could prod the security guys to reveal to Madison one thing they’d learned, that Zoë Barker was cruising around Connecticut without a driver’s license. As a warning, of sorts. For Madison’s own good.
She could put Madison to bed. She could draw a bath, nice and bubbly and fragrant, something to sweat the alcohol out of Madison’s body. She could fetch a glass of ice water and a small bottle of Advil from the kitchen, maybe a little saucer with cheddar cheese and a sprig of grapes and a filigree of crackers at the rim. Something to settle the stomach.
Mina could do all of this, she knew she could. She could paper over everything else in that house tonight—whatever Lily’s offenses had been, Isabel’s molten fury, Bob’s howling absence.
Madison shrugged.
“Trust me,” Mina said. “This isn’t the smart way to punish your parents. Take it from me, I have a daughter who punishes me all the time. Find a way to do it without putting the whole team at risk. Not to mention yourself.”
She desperately wanted Madison to respond, to tell her where she’d been that night, what was going on in that house. She needed Madison to meet her halfway, if she was really going to help. But Madison said nothing. She just stood up and walked toward the parking lot without waiting for Mina to follow.
THIRTY-THREE
Madison woke in the middle of the night, hours after Mina had tucked her into bed. For once, Mina’s desperation to be included, central, hadn’t bothered Madison. It had just been what was needed. But now her mouth felt dry, wrong, it was sticking to itself like Scotch tape.
She went downstairs for more water; she needed ice from the freezer.
As soon as she reached the base of the staircase, she heard the murmur coming from her father’s study, saw the wedge of light coming from the open door. He’s waiting for me, she thought. He left the door open on purpose.
A cigar smoldered in a cut-glass ashtray on the coffee table, which was otherwise covered with piles of paper of varying heights, each stack pinned in place by a book, plaque, cigar box, or some other improvised paperweight drawn from the room’s furnishings. Her father sat on his couch, his weight forward and his elbows on his knees, taking notes on a legal pad. The television had been brought out from its cabinet again, and these were the voices she’d heard; a black-and-white movie was flashing on the screen. She couldn’t identify the film itself, but she recognized the woman’s thin slash of a mouth. Katharine Hepburn.
Her father looked up, ripping off his glasses as if he needed urgently to distance himself from whatever he was doing.
“I thought I heard you.”
“What are you doing?” she asked. His eyes scanned the coffee table as if he, too, had only just now come in to discover the piles.
“Nothing much,” he said. “Reviewing some documents. Just looking a few things over.” He began hastily to wed the piles together, creating a precarious stack of papers.
“You don’t need to move them,” Madison said cautiously. “I’m not going to sit on the coffee table.”
“Will you come sit here, then? With me?”
She sat, curling her legs beneath her and leaning back against the sofa’s arm so that she faced her father. He reached to the table beside the couch, and when he turned back to her he had a drink in his hand. She cut a quick look at the bar, but nothing was out of place, it wasn’t clear even what he’d been drinking. The bottles were all in their usual tidy rows, like cadets awaiting their orders.
“What’ve you been doing,” her father began, keeping his eyes on the screen.
“Which movie is this?”
“You break my heart, kiddo. Adam’s Rib. It’s a classic.” His voice was almost wistful. Madison twisted her rings on her fingers. Could they begin where they’d left off the first time, the night of Halloween? She hadn’t seen him this open, unguarded, since that night. They’d talked since then, but not in the same way. He never seemed to be talking to her, really, never cared that he was using terminology she could grasp at only vaguely, with frantic hands.
“I saw a movie the other night,” she volunteered.
“Oh, did you?”
“It wasn’t very good.”
“Oh?”
“Slumdog Millionaire,” she said. Her father still seemed as attentive to the movie as he was to her. Had she been wrong to come in here? It had never in all her life been difficult to tell when her father wanted to be left alone. She couldn’t accept, couldn’t believe, that he might be so exhausted by the events of the past few months that he might have lost the will to castigate his children. To bark her out of an off-limits room.
“I thought it was silly,” her father said. “Frivolous.”
Madison hadn’t paid that much attention, since she
’d been at the movies with Chip, but she remembered enough to frown at this.
“Frivolous?”
“Poverty isn’t a learning experience,” her father said. “Being broke isn’t noble. I worked my ass off and paid my own way through business school at night during my first few years at Weiss.”
He hadn’t, that she could remember, said the actual name before, not any of the times they’d talked at night like this. Not since September.
“You didn’t really grow up in poverty, though,” she said. “Grandpa and Nonna Connie did, but you didn’t.”
Her father smiled.
“Compared to you, kiddo, yes I did.”
She felt annoyance rising in her throat, the troubling arrival of tears. She could not cry in front of her father, and certainly not if she couldn’t explain to him why it was happening.
“Compared to me, everyone’s growing up poor,” she said. “Right?”
Her father looked at her, the spell of Hepburn and Tracy finally broken.
“I was just teasing,” he said. “Pay me no mind.”
And then another question, the one she should have asked first, surfaced.
“When did you go see a movie?”
Her father had looked away again, stealing glances at the piles of paper as if ruing the decision to toss them all together into one unruly group.
“I went on my own,” he said. “I go to the movies, sometimes.”
Madison felt a brief panic, first that her father might have seen her with Chip one of these nights, then that anyone else might have seen her father.
“Here?”
“God, no. You have to ask? I go into the city.”
This did not seem an appreciably better state of affairs.
“When?”
“I don’t know, I go into the city sometimes. When I need an afternoon off. Listen,” he said, grabbing the remote from the floor beneath the table and extinguishing the movie with one swipe of his thumb. “I know I’ve probably been confusing you, a little bit. Our talks. I know it can be a lot of information all at once.”
Madison felt her breath catch in her chest with the weight of an actual physical obstruction, as if it had snagged on something sharp she hadn’t realized she had in there.
“No,” she said. “Not too much information. Almost no information, actually.”
“That’s what I’m saying,” he said. “I owe you an explanation.”
“Dad—”
“Madison, please. All I’m saying is that I know it. And there is one coming, I promise. I’ve been going over and over some of this, figuring it all out. Everyone else seems to think they know what happened, but I’m finally getting to the bottom of it. It’s all here,” he said, waving his hand over the papers as if absolving them of their sins. “And it’s important that other people know this, but I have to find the best way to communicate it to them. To everyone, really.”
Her father was speaking in clipped sentences, his voice lowered to almost a whisper. She couldn’t help but feel that he was enlisting her as a conspirator, but while he seemed to have a quite clear sense of his own conspiracy, she still couldn’t tell what, if anything, he’d told her. He seemed wholly in control of his own faculties. But then it seemed like he’d been drinking tonight, too.
She considered, for the first time since her childhood, that she might not know the contours of her father’s drunkenness as well as she’d always thought she did. And maybe it was this threat, the possibility that one of the threads that tied her and no one else to her father might have frayed, that edged her closer to him on the couch, prompting him to continue.
“What do you mean, the best way?”
Her father looked down again, lifting his cigar from its ashtray He looked at her before releasing the smoke, and she closed her eyes for a moment. This smell had always, always meant her father, meant that he was telling her things she needed to know.
“The truth,” he said. “The truth is important. If you can just give everyone the whole truth about that final weekend, then show them where to look, everyone will know. We did everything—everything we could. No matter what, we couldn’t have withstood the people who were out to get us. But we were—”
She watched his face. He wasn’t looking at her anymore. He was looking into the middle distance, toward the pool, the woods, the world outside.
“An example,” he said, looking back at her wildly. “A classic trick. You want to short a stock, you spread the rumor on a Friday. Late on a Friday. Nobody can actually do anything, but then it spreads all weekend, like a virus. No, like an epidemic. And then, Monday, if you were the people who heard that rumor, what would you do? Of course you’d eliminate your exposure. Who wouldn’t? And then, the drop begins. The bottom falls out.”
“It sounds like my life,” she said.
Her father looked in her direction again. “What did you say?”
She’d spoken without thinking, but now he was focused on her.
“It just sounds like rumors,” she said. “At school.”
He only smiled. She had wanted him to laugh at the absurdity of what she’d said. It could not possibly be the case that her father’s life was like hers, that he could worry about the nattering and ill wishes of people who behaved like Wyatt Welsh or Zoë Barker. She refused to believe it.
“We were different,” he said. “That’s why they’re out to get us. We were as good as they were, but we were different. Do you remember Max Schaefer?”
She shook her head.
“Doesn’t matter. He was good, but no one special. But the point is, he called me, the other afternoon. He just wanted to say—he told me that I was the only man in any business, anywhere, he’d ever seen leave a meeting, no matter with who, no matter which client, just because my wife was on the phone. He’d never seen it anywhere. Because it wasn’t anywhere. There was no place else like us. Do you see what I’m saying?”
She could tell how desperate he was for her to agree with him. She nodded.
“And you have to ask,” he said. “When you’re calling for a head—I still owned ten million shares, Madison. I never so much as considered getting rid of it, any of it. I’ll never be made whole. That’s what it meant to me.”
She swallowed hard before speaking. “Who—what do you mean, calling for a head?”
Her father was staring down at the carpet now. He waited a long time to reply, but eventually a snowflake of cigar ash on the knee of his chinos brought him back.
“Nothing, sweetheart. It’s just words.”
What did that mean? It was all just words, she thought. He said that as if he hadn’t always known how precarious words were, as if his entire reputation didn’t rest on his propensity for silence and reticence punctuated by vivid, memorable outbursts of rage. If it’s all just words, she thought, then what the fuck did it mean every time he told me a story about himself?
“You’re talking about jail, aren’t you.”
Her father did not reply at first. He stood, crossed to the bar, and returned with a bottle of scotch and another glass, one she now knew would be for her.
“No,” he said. “Listen to me, Madison. No. Over my dead body. That’s what I’m saying. Over my dead fucking body.”
He looked up at her and held out the glass of scotch. She wanted to ask for an ice cube, but she couldn’t look away from her father’s face.
“Why don’t you just go out there, then,” she said. “Why don’t you just go out there and explain what everyone else has misunderstood?”
“It’s not the right time, Madison.”
She laughed, unable to help herself. “What are you waiting for?”
“Princess, you know I wouldn’t lie to you, but not yet. It wouldn’t be wise now.”
“Okay,” she said.
“How are you,” he said, looking down at his drink.
“I got into trouble tonight,” she said. “Or at least I assume I did. Mom didn’t stay up long enough to get me
in trouble.”
“She outsourced it,” her father said. “Efficient lady.”
Was it possible he’d been in the house when everyone was here? That didn’t make any sense. Shouldn’t he be curious, then, about what had happened?
She moved closer to her father on the couch, and let him talk for a few minutes longer. Eventually, she curled into her favorite place under his arm, letting her head fall to his shoulder, hearing his voice moving through his chest and throat. Sometime later, she felt him carefully prying her fingers from her abandoned glass, and the movie was on, again.
She closed her eyes again, maybe slept some more, and her head was leaning against the leather and not against her father. She opened her eyes and saw him carefully stacking accordion folders, one on top of another. He placed them in the bottom drawer of his desk, carefully, as if they were porcelain rather than paper, then locked the drawer. She watched as he stood, letting his eyes range over his bookshelves, and then moved forward to take a picture of the twins, tackling each other in the pool at Shelter, and taped the key to the back of the picture frame. He replaced the photo.
The sounds from the television circled her ears, as unknown to her as other languages, and she knew she was falling back to sleep. She wanted to make a joke, ask her father why he’d chosen a picture of the boys instead of one of the many pictures of her. There was a gloaming in the room, the gray of unconsciousness already fuzzing the picture, but she knew it was real, she wasn’t asleep yet.
He returned to the sofa and took her by the hand and shoulder, sliding himself back beneath her.
The next morning, she woke up in her own bed. The golden clock said it was almost 10 A.M., but no one had come in to wake her.
III
Sunday evening, evening gray. All day the storm did not quite storm. Clouds closed in, sulked, spat. We put off swimming. Took in the chairs. Finally (about seven) a rumbling high up. A wind went round the trees tossing each once and releasing arbitrary rivulets of cool air downward, this wind which came apart, the parts swaying out, descending, bumping around the yard awhile not quite on the count then a single chord ran drenched across the roof, the porch and stopped. We all breathed. Maybe that’s it, maybe it’s over, the weatherman is often wrong these days, we can still go swimming (roll call? glimpse of sun?) when all at once the sluices opened, broke a knot and smashed the sky to bits, which fell and keep falling even now as dark comes on and fabled night is managing its manes and the birds, I can hear from their little racket, the birds are burning up and down like holy fools somewhere inside it—far in where they keep the victim, smeared, stinking, hence the pageantry, hence the pitchy cries, don’t keep saying you don’t hear it too.
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