Madison nodded. “It was my grandparents’ house. I thought it would be fun to go, even if the weather stays like this. It’s fun to kind of hole up there.”
“I’m sure your mom will be happy to have you all around the house for a little while,” Lacey said. “So, are you in Chip’s class? You’re a year below him, aren’t you?”
“I’m a sophomore,” Madison said, “yeah.”
“Well, let me tell you, enjoy it while you can. I know girls are different from boys, but this year has been a constant struggle getting Chip to stay on top of all the different SAT dates, the ACT dates, his AP tests coming up soon. Everyone warns you about junior year—and we went through it already with his brothers! But I think it’s even worse, for you guys. It gets worse every year.”
Madison nodded.
“Madison,” Lacey began, “I know we don’t know each other, and if I’m offending you in any way I hope you’ll stop me. But I just wanted to let you know how much I’ve always liked your parents. My husband and I are, a little bit—”
She paused and fiddled with a few buttons on the dashboard, cursing softly under her breath when the windshield defogger didn’t at first turn on.
“Anyway, Chip’s dad and I are a little bit removed from a lot of the other families at your school, you know? We just have a little bit of a different life. And I don’t mind that; we moved here because I didn’t want to raise the boys in the city, not because I wanted to pretend my husband worked at a hedge fund. And we moved here a long time ago, Chip is our youngest. And it’s changed a lot. But my point is just that your mother has always been so sweet to me, and she has no real reason to be sweet. The only reason is that she’s just a classy person.”
“Oh,” Madison said, “I’ll tell her.”
They were stopped at a light, and Lacey reached over to touch Madison’s knee, just for a second.
“No,” she said, “you don’t have to. I’m just telling you, for you. I think it’s important to remember that who your mother is doesn’t change just because of what other people might say.”
“Thank you.”
“That said,” Lacey continued, “I don’t know if you and Chip spending time together is such a good idea right now.”
Madison wrapped her hand around her door handle, though they were still minutes away from her house, from the chance to launch herself from this car.
“Really,” she said.
“I’m sure you understand. This is an important year for him, and for you, too—in a different way! It’s just really best that you spend some time with your parents over this break. I’m sure they’d like to have you around. And of course if you need anything at all, you and Chip are friends. We’d be happy to help. I told you how much I’ve always liked your mom. But she must have her hands full, dealing with all these women. Such gossips. I’m sure I don’t have to tell you.”
“I can hop out here,” Madison said. They were at her gate; she didn’t want Lacey to notice the black sedan parked across the street. “Thanks for the ride.”
Lacey, perhaps seized by a spasm of compunction, reached out to clutch Madison’s arm. “Oh, honey, I hope I haven’t said too much. It just struck me that you could probably handle it, were I to be blunt. But I don’t mean any of this to seem like a judgment on you, Madison! Of course not, that would be absurd. But things must be quite—difficult, right now, waiting to see what’s going to happen. And I think it’s best if you don’t involve Chip.”
“Oh,” Madison said, “I always involve boys from school in my most intimate family problems. Why wouldn’t I?”
Lacey smiled, her face vacant, clearly not sure what to make of this, yet.
“Thanks so much for not being just another gossip,” Madison said, and she got out of the car. “Thank you so much, Mrs. Abbott,” and she slammed the door.
THIRTY-SEVEN
That Sunday the boys had a tee-ball game at the fields, their fourth game of the season. Lily had taken them to each game so far without any input from Isabel, who was usually still upstairs at that time of morning. Lily had never suggested to anyone that she found this odd.
This was only one part of her recent campaign—begun sometime after that night Jackson had been at the house—to try not to see things. Not to notice when and if Isabel neglected the kids or ignored their reasonable questions, whether spoken or implied. Not to think about how she herself would have done things differently, since Bob’s initial return but especially since Christmas, since the turning of the seasons. This meant she didn’t clock it when Madison lied about where she’d be, didn’t point anyone else toward these lies. On that day in December, it felt, Lily had made some calculation. She’d allowed herself to step outside the house, all the way out. To watch these people through different eyes, the eyes of someone else, not the grateful girl applying for her first job out of school. And she’d been surprised at herself, at the bitterness that rose up in her like mercury on a thermometer. She was afraid of what she’d do if she indulged it too often, if she lifted the foot she still had on their side of the line and brought it to rest elsewhere.
But this morning, by the time Lily herded the boys into the kitchen for breakfast, Isabel was already there.
“I thought I’d come see the game today! Morning, sluggers.”
She’d dressed carefully, Lily could see: dark jeans, a cashmere pullover that matched her eyes to an uncanny degree, a Barbour jacket. Her brown leather Ferragamo boots, with the thick heel. She’d dressed for the fields, for muddy grasses and climbing up to sit on chilled metal bleachers. She really was going to the game.
The boys stopped short just inside the kitchen door when they saw her. They wore their baseball uniforms, their jerseys thick and boxy on their wiry frames. Their backpacks hung from their hands, dragging on the floor.
“You’re wearing Gran’s jacket,” Matteo said, walking to his mother, fingering the large golden ring hanging from the tip of its zipper.
“That’s right,” Isabel said, carrying the fruit bowls over to the table and pointing the boys toward the banquette. “Gran always wore this jacket. She got a new one about once per decade, but this was her last one, and she gave it to me.”
“And you’ll give it to us,” Matteo intoned, tucking his feet up under him and digging into the food.
Lily remained in the doorway. Was she supposed to leave them here, alone with their mother?
“Well, this one’s too big for you, bub.” Isabel sat down with them.
“Why are you awake?” Matteo demanded, artless as ever. Lily felt some pride at this, the way these boys were so aware of everything going on, and showed such little inclination for concealing their confusion, even their distaste. She felt an ownership of their honesty.
“Do you still want me to drive them?” she said finally. Isabel didn’t respond.
“All right!” Luke cheered, suddenly, the events of the morning just now catching up to him. “Is Dad coming, too?”
“That’s a good question,” Isabel said, then turned to Lily. “I was thinking we could all drive in together. Madison, too.”
“I’m going to go ask him,” Luke said, officious and determined. He climbed down from the breakfast bench and disappeared.
“Is Madison awake?” Lily said after a silence, but then Luke was already back.
“Dad said he’ll meet us at the door,” he said. “When we leave.”
“Luke,” Lily said, “go ask him if he’ll drive you boys right now. Then I can wait, and help your mom get Madison ready.”
Isabel quite pointedly watched Matteo eat, fondled his earlobes and fluffed his hair, and did not look in Lily’s direction until Bob’s voice rumbled in from the foyer and Matteo bolted from his chair.
“Play ball!” they heard Bob growl, and the boys erupted into peals of manic laughter, and then the door slammed. Neither twin had really eaten breakfast. Isabel left the kitchen without saying anything, and Lily followed.
Upstairs, Madison
seemed to have been marshaling her resistance even before she was awake or apprised of what was going on.
“I just don’t understand what I’m going to get for doing this,” Madison said. They hadn’t had to build their way up to this; her voice had pitched itself at its shrill peak almost as soon as Isabel went into the room. Lily lingered in the hallway just beyond the door, watching them.
“Excuse me?”
“You said you want us all to do something together, fine, but that doesn’t sound like something that does me any good. It sounds like I’m doing you a favor. So what am I going to get in return?”
“When did you start talking like this?” Isabel said, almost laughing in disbelief. “This is the third or fourth time you’ve done that now, these words like ‘favors’ and ‘what do I get.’ This isn’t a negotiation, Madison.”
But apparently, when met with her daughter’s silence, Isabel had to concede that it was.
“What do you get?” she spat. “How about this extravagant roof over your head and your food to eat, and designer jeans, and your grandmother’s jewelry. How does that sound?”
Madison rolled her eyes and almost actually stamped her foot, and Lily saw that Isabel couldn’t look away. She was literally riveted by her daughter. What did she think would happen? Lily thought. She hasn’t been cultivating her, she hasn’t been doing anything to keep her calm. This is what other people mean when they talk about the nightmare of raising a teenager. They’d all practically had to implode to draw it out of Madison, but here it was. She was finally playing along.
“Madison,” Isabel began, the words emerging from between her clenched teeth, “I am asking you to do something very small for me. You are already awake; it’s quite clear to us both that you aren’t going back to sleep. All you need to do is ride in the car with me and sit in the bleachers at this game for an hour. You can bring homework, if that’s what you’re worried about. And actually—no, I’m not asking. I won’t ask again. Be downstairs in ten minutes.”
No, Lily thought. Just touch her. Just put your arms around her and wait for her to buckle. She’ll tell you what’s happening, she just needs you to give her any small sign of encouragement.
She wanted to reach out to them, to move their limbs like dolls she could control. Or, really, she wanted to step forward and hug Madison herself. It’s what she would have done, when they had an argument, even just months ago. It had usually been her role.
“Madison,” Lily said, finally, softly. “Just get dressed. You know you don’t have a choice here. You’re just delaying the inevitable.”
Madison stood in silence, her body still angled at her mother like a cannon about to go off, her head turned to glare at Lily.
“You’re both unbelievable,” she said finally, her emphasis somehow making it clear how deeply and in what different ways they had both offended her.
“I have a lot going on in my life,” she said. “But no one seems to care about that. If you all want me to just show up and act like your performing monkey, then all of a sudden you care where I am or what I’m doing. No one has cared for months, not until now, but fine. As long as I don’t tell anyone anything they don’t already know about us.”
She got dressed, of course, and later the three of them sat in the car near the fields. Lily hovered in the backseat, watching mother and daughter volley back and forth. She couldn’t see what the urgency was, why Isabel cared so much that they be here, that her daughter walk out onto those bleachers.
Isabel hadn’t reacted, back in the bedroom, when Madison spoke. She’d shown no alarm, asked no questions at all: anything who doesn’t already know, what, why would you phrase it just that way.
“I’ve done everything you’ve asked me to do,” Madison said to her mother. “You have no idea what it’s like.”
She was pressed toward the passenger door as if her mother’s brief silence had been a bulky object that might displace her from her seat. She gripped her door handle with her right hand; her knuckles were white. She wanted Isabel to know that she was hurt. She wanted to prove, with her every tensed muscle, that she could not bear to spend even one excess second in close proximity to her torturers. Anger could be discounted, made to seem petty or small, misconstrued as a tantrum or ascribed to Madison’s status as a teenager. But Madison wanted it to be clear that she was not merely angry. She wants us to know, Lily thought. Or she wants her mother to know. She might not even care, at this point, that I’m here.
Lily watched Madison so carefully, the teenage face trying so hard to remain composed, and when Madison’s lip quivered then Lily, too, felt a stinging behind her eyes. I’m here, Mad, she thought, chewing her inner cheek with the effort to get Madison to look back at her. I’m here.
“There’s no chance you’ll do this for me, just because I’ve asked?” Isabel said finally.
Madison sat in silence, her back still pressed to the window.
“Okay,” Isabel said. “I don’t owe you this explanation, but I understand that you’re frustrated by the fact that I haven’t talked to you much about what’s been going on with your father.”
“I’ll go find the boys,” Lily murmured, knowing full well that Isabel would, without looking away from Madison, hold up one finger to keep Lily in her seat. They were all in this car, under the same spell, and Isabel no more wanted it broken than Lily wanted to be the one to break it.
“It wasn’t his fault,” Madison said suddenly.
“Of course it wasn’t entirely his fault—”
“No, I’m not saying this in some pathetic, no one person was responsible, whatever, way. I’m saying that there were other forces at work. People who had it out for him. There are things people don’t know yet.”
These were so clearly not phrases of Madison’s own imagining that Lily felt a chill in her chest, felt something contract and squeeze for a second too long before relaxing. Isabel must hear this, too. Was she going to file it away? Was she going to deal with it?
“I just need you to come sit out there with me,” Isabel repeated.
Madison turned again to her mother, her cheeks still streaked with tears, her face red and swollen. “This is such a fucking joke.”
“Madison,” Isabel said, “what’s going on? Is something else going on?”
And then she was out of the car, tumbling from it at high velocity, like a hostage with just enough coiled energy left to orchestrate her own escape. She slammed the door behind her, of course, pellets of mud and grass arcing through the air around her ankles as she stormed toward the bleachers.
Lily held herself still, wondering if she had been truly forgotten, but then Isabel spoke.
“She wouldn’t have left the house if you hadn’t intervened,” she said quietly, staring ahead.
“I doubt that’s true,” Lily said. “Besides, we could always have called Mina for help.”
Isabel didn’t take the bait.
“You could have just explained it to her,” Lily said. “Whatever has you so hell-bent on trotting her out to watch the game. You could have been honest with her. She’s not a baby.”
Still Isabel said nothing, and Lily turned toward the field. Her eye sought out Matteo and Luke, standing—as always—somewhat apart from the others, their little robber-baron stances. Sometimes, waiting for them at the school gates, she caught sight of them walking toward her before her brain recognized them as her own charges, these little boys and no other. That oscillation between disinterested observation and ferocious recognition, the recognition of your own kin.
But they weren’t. They weren’t her kin, not at all.
“Look at her,” Isabel said. Madison was climbing the bleachers now, shouldering the Vineyard Vines bag she’d brought along. It was stuffed so full that it sagged theatrically on her shoulder. “I forget that she’s half D’Amico. Look at her, she looks like some Neapolitan washerwoman who’s never had a day’s rest in her whole life. That’s pure Nonna martyrdom.”
Whe
n Madison reached the bleachers a few rows up, where the mothers were clustered, she kept climbing. They watched her as she climbed to the very top row and then edged her way along one bleacher to the far corner, where one man sat alone, folded over himself, a Brooklyn Dodgers cap jammed low on his head.
“He’s lost weight, hasn’t he,” Isabel said.
“Well, he was never overweight.”
“No, that’s what I mean. He’s just missing, you know. His bulk.”
And she was right. He was missing muscle, health, the occupied space of a man who had once successfully asserted himself in the world of his choosing.
Isabel watched her daughter, and Lily watched them both. Madison came to stand beside Bob, and after a few seconds he looked up. She sat down beside him.
“Are you going to ask her, later, what she meant by that?” Lily said.
“Which part?” Isabel said.
“I think you know which part,” Lily said. “She’s talking about it like she knows secrets that other people don’t. That doesn’t worry you?”
Isabel squinted at the field, still not turning back to face Lily. “Lily, you’ve seen him yourself. He’s haunting the halls. He hasn’t spoken to anyone in months; you think he’s debriefing his teenage daughter on his company’s bankruptcy?”
“Are you going to ask her what she meant?”
Isabel sprang forward, clicking out of her seat belt and slamming the driver’s-side door without saying a word. Lily locked the car and followed.
“The boys look good,” someone said as they took their seats. Everyone said hello, and Lily saw that no one would mention Isabel’s husband, sitting alone up in his corner. As they sat down, Isabel put her hand to Lily’s, touched the knuckles.
“Thank you for being here,” she said quietly, during a home run that elicited noisy outbursts from the other mothers.
Lily put two fingers to her mouth and whistled, quite aware that several of the women sitting in front of her winced noticeably, before she replied.
“You pay me more money than my own father makes, pay for my health insurance, and fly me around the world with you twice a year. To be here.”
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