AMANDA HAD LEFT THE BALLROOM right after Madison, had followed her across the lawn as they both angled their bodies away from the party, but they were almost at the side garden before she caught up to her.
“Madison,” she tried, but Madison immediately spun back on her.
“You want to know what you can do to help? You can make sure your father doesn’t write about this. That’s the only way you can be useful to me at all.”
Amanda tried to control the convulsive sighs and gulps, her attempts not to burst into tears. How many times had she said something to Madison, since that day in October, how many times had she made the decision to lie? She knew exactly which moments Madison would be thinking of: I’m here for you, what do you think, what do you need. Let me help you. The only reason she hadn’t lied to Madison more often was that Madison had stopped speaking to her, had robbed her of that choice.
When they turned into the garden, Madison stopped short. Chip was standing there, smoking a cigarette.
Amanda could see her friend’s face, could see the unshackled feeling as it spread across Madison’s features. That same way she’d looked at him back in the fall, as if he were dangling something in front of her, something essential.
“You’re not at your table,” he observed.
Madison shook her head and took another step forward.
“I didn’t know you smoked.”
He shrugged. “Whatever. It’s off-season, I’m allowed.”
“Is your car here?”
“Yeah,” he said, “but Suzanne made me park it down the hill so it wouldn’t be in the way. I was over here earlier, I left it down the street.”
He said nothing to Amanda.
“Can we go somewhere,” Madison said.
“Look, D’Amico,” he said. “I don’t know what you’re really looking for, but I just don’t think you and me are—”
“Can you just help me leave this party,” Madison interrupted him. “I don’t care if you talk to me or not. Can you just do me a favor? I just want to be somewhere else for a few hours.”
Chip blinked at her, then took another cigarette from his pack. She put out her hand.
“Just do me a favor?” she repeated.
He stepped close to her, so close that their arms were touching, and put the cigarette in her mouth. When he went to light it he hunched his shoulders over the cigarette. He obviously only did it to keep any winds from snuffing it out, but Amanda could see Madison curl into him, shelter herself beneath his shoulders. She could see that Madison wanted to believe he’d done it for her, that he wanted to protect her.
“Madison,” Amanda said, almost comically out of place, standing a few feet away from them. They were practically making out, at this point, and still she couldn’t move.
Madison stepped away from Chip, the cigarette in her hand.
“I told you how you can help me.”
“You can’t just leave,” Amanda said. “That’s a terrible idea.”
“Why?”
She had no answer.
“You shouldn’t call him, though.”
“Who’s him?” Chip said. He blew a smoke ring.
“I’m serious,” Amanda said. “Don’t even look at the business card. This isn’t—this isn’t what we were thinking when we talked about it. This is private family stuff.”
Madison laughed, then dipped her head to Chip’s chest and let her hair fall across her cheek.
“Can we leave?” she asked him.
“Do you need to tell someone?”
“Can we please leave,” she repeated. Her voice was frantic, but when they walked away from Amanda, toward the front courtyard, Madison was the one leading the way.
Amanda stood in the garden, waiting for something that had already failed to occur, and then went back to the party to find her father.
FORTY-FIVE
Mina sighed and watched the dark roads outside their tinted windows. She’d closed the divider that separated them from the driver, but still the strains of his music filtered through. Otis Redding, it sounded like. She smiled. Not her father’s music, to be sure, and not her husband’s, either. Why have I always surrounded myself, she thought, with men who don’t listen to good music?
It hadn’t been ideal, having to wait out front in this car until Isabel appeared, but there had been no alternative. And really, it was too late to avoid how things looked. Their table was sitting empty in the middle of the whole fucking party. Tom was waiting at the house’s main entrance, waiting for the second car she’d called for him as a quick fix. Who knew where Bob had gone, how Jim and Erica had made their escape. She wondered if they’d even bought a table.
“It’s not Jim’s fault,” Isabel said, suddenly, from her side of the car. She had her hand to her face, her knuckles pressed to her white mouth. Mina scooted closer to her.
“Well, he shouldn’t have been there to begin with.”
“No, I just mean he’s only saying what he thinks we should all hear. He’s trying to purge. It’s not his fault. He’s being honest.”
“Well, honest doesn’t mean it’s right to say it out loud. And the fact that he thinks he’s being honest doesn’t mean he’s telling the truth.”
Isabel shook her head in frustration. Mina tried again, played every remaining card she had.
“They took risks, Isabel, and they bet wrong. That’s not a crime. No one did anything wrong. Mistakes like theirs happen all the time. It could have happened to anyone.”
“And yet,” Isabel said. “And yet, it didn’t. It could have happened to anyone means exactly shit, Mina. It fixes none of it.”
Mina didn’t know what to say to this; there was no counterargument there. Her own husband had pointed this out many times: it happened to them. They had to have done something wrong, those guys.
“You don’t—you don’t understand how they operate, Mina. You can’t. I know you try, but you can’t. Jim’s just sticking to his own team,” Isabel said. “Everyone’s going to stick with their team from now on. You’ll see it.”
Mina’s skin felt suddenly cool. She felt sure that if she put her fingertips to her forehead, she’d find beads of sweat.
“There are no teams,” she tried, but even she could hear that it sounded more like a question than anything else.
“Well, there should have been. We should have known better,” Isabel said, and Mina knew without asking who she meant by “we.”
“They didn’t want us to. They never go into specifics, you know that.”
“It doesn’t matter. They’re our kids. Our daughters. What are we actually teaching them? Every good thing they know is just the absence of actual wrongdoing. We don’t improve any lives, not even theirs. We don’t work off our debt.”
Mina closed her eyes, felt in her stomach the shifts and turns of the vehicle beneath her. It seemed unfair, she felt. What had been asked of her this year seemed unfair. She was constantly being asked to present the most palatable version of reality to everyone around her, all these different, conflicting palates. And then, when she did, she was told she was naive, clueless, on the outside. Her husband slavered over her friend and then told her she was the disrespectful one. Her friend wallowed in her own performed grief, as if she hadn’t signed up for exactly this sort of humiliation. As if it hadn’t been pure luck that Isabel hadn’t experienced this sooner. So he sleeps around, Mina thought. This isn’t actual suffering. It might be, down the line, but this isn’t actual suffering.
And she knew what they’d all say, if she tried to express any of this to any one of them. You’re so off base, Mina. You don’t understand how it works. You weren’t there, you don’t know, you haven’t been through this. You don’t know as well as you think you do. You’re on the outside of this, even if you think you’re here with us.
Well, fine, Mina thought. Fine Tom, fine Isabel, fine Lily and Bob and anyone else who wants to take a potshot. So then who’s on the inside?
Who the fuck i
s on the inside, now? she thought.
FORTY-SIX
Lily sat at the kitchen table, waiting for whoever would make it home next. Her competing terrors worked in shifts. Every few minutes she’d feel somewhat pleased with herself, pleased that she’d gotten Madison out of harm’s way for a while and kept the secret. Then she’d remember that she didn’t actually know where Madison was. That there was a contradiction: Madison couldn’t possibly be young enough to need to be sheltered, away from whatever was going on in this house tonight, but at the same time old enough to be wise about all the other places that were unsafe for her.
But as her mind wandered these same spirals, again and again, Lily hit up against one idea. That it was still better. Better than Madison being here, seeing her father like this, hearing her mother talk about what had happened at the party. Maybe she’ll leave for good, Lily thought wistfully. She entertained fantastical images of Madison and this kid buying a car together, with cash of course, and hitting the road. Driving out to the other coast, parking on the sand. Leaving all of this behind them.
But none of them, not even Madison, were going anywhere yet. We’re all stuck in this house, Lily thought. We have to play our hands through. If we weren’t going to do that, then we should have folded sooner.
She sat at the kitchen table, the thick stack of paper arranged neatly in front of her. She’d heard him come home while she was putting the twins to bed, making all the usual noises: throwing his keys on the front table, lumbering down the hall to his study. She couldn’t believe it, so she’d come down, on tiptoe, to check. Until the very last second, when she saw him snoring on his couch, she refused to believe that he really would have come back into this house without asking where his children were, if they were all here and accounted for.
So she was especially pleased with herself for having thought to go into his study as soon as she got home, before he got there.
Now, the boys were in bed, there was an empty bottle propped against the door to Bob’s study so that she’d hear him if he tried to come out into the house—another brainstorm—and Lily was in the kitchen with these accordion folders.
She hadn’t read through their contents yet, because she wasn’t sure how involved she wanted to be in whatever was there. She knew what Madison thought; she knew what Jackson would say if he were here. But she didn’t exactly want to take them on her own shoulders, not tonight. She just wanted to make sure they were no longer squarely on Madison’s. She wanted Madison to know that at least one adult was involved and on her side.
She was reminding herself of that, of her role as the twins’ protector and as Madison’s advocate, when Isabel and Mina came into the kitchen.
“What’s wrong,” Mina said immediately. Lily looked to Isabel. They couldn’t talk about this in front of Mina; surely, even if she didn’t know what was on Lily’s mind, Isabel would intuit this.
“Is he here?” Isabel asked.
“He’s down the hall,” Lily said. “I don’t know how he got home, but he’s in there sleeping it off.”
“He went to sleep,” Isabel echoed. Lily nodded, and Isabel laughed. She crossed to the sink and poured herself a glass of water. “Good for him.”
Lily looked pointedly at Mina, who was awkwardly attempting to remove the pins from her updo. She’d already taken off her earrings, as if this were her bedside and the night were already over. She froze and looked from Lily to Isabel, again.
“I can stay,” Mina said.
Isabel fixed her eyes on Lily for a moment and gave her a gesture almost too brief to count as a nod. She turned, then, back to Mina.
“No,” Isabel said. “You should go home. Get some rest.”
“I can sleep in the den,” Mina insisted. “I can make up something to tell Tom.”
“No,” Isabel said. “Thank you. For everything, truly. I think we all need to sleep this off. Including you. Tell Tom I’m so sorry for all the hassle. I’ll send him a bottle of scotch.”
Mina gathered her earrings in one hand, holding the train of her dress with the other. She looked back only once before she left the kitchen. Lily could feel the woman’s plea, her anxiety, but she refused to look up and make eye contact. The fact that we both hate Bob right now doesn’t make you family, she thought. Your part of the evening is over.
“You should call the police,” Mina said finally. “Or at least have Teddy call them. You should do something so that later it at least looks, to her, like you were all frantically looking for her.”
Isabel crossed the kitchen and walked into the pantry. Mina scoffed, and looked to Lily, her eagerness to recapture their earlier frankness written naked across her face. But Lily said nothing, and Mina turned to go. Isabel did not emerge until the front door had slammed.
She looked, for a moment, at the space where Mina had stood. Then she turned back to the table.
“So,” she said.
“These are some papers he locked in a drawer,” Lily said. “Madison saw him hide the key. A while ago.”
“And you knew where to look?”
“She told me about them,” Lily said. “Not at first. But I saw her—she snuck into the city last week, again. To meet with a journalist. I don’t know—”
She caught her voice before it faltered, reminded herself that some secrets were still secrets.
“I don’t know how she initially made contact with him, and she said she didn’t tell him anything. But she’s been thinking about giving him this stuff, because she thinks it’s the proof that he didn’t do anything wrong. Bob. I think she thinks these will—clear his name, or something. Wrap it all up.”
Isabel laughed.
“Do you think she really believes that?”
“I don’t know,” Lily said. “I don’t know what he’s been telling her. I think he’s probably talked about some of it with her.”
Isabel waited for a moment. She stood up, got a bottle of wine from the pantry, and brought it back to the table.
“Why are you showing them to me?” she said. Lily bit the inside of one cheek before answering.
“I heard,” she said. “About tonight. Mina told me, when I picked up the boys.”
“Superb,” Isabel said.
“I guess I don’t think it should be Madison’s problem,” Lily said. “I don’t think Madison should have to be the one to decide what to do with them. That doesn’t seem, I don’t know. That seems unfair to me.”
Isabel poured them each a glass of wine. They had done this only twice before, together. The first time had been after the towers, when for all they knew Bob was gone. They sat here, and split a bottle of wine, and waited to hear from him. Lily had been new to the family then, well-liked but not yet trusted.
“My daughter is no fool,” Isabel said. “She must know that, if he could save his own skin, or prove that he was right, lord it over everyone, then he would have done it by now.”
Lily said nothing. Isabel sighed.
“Do you know where she went?”
Lily shook her head.
“I spoke with Teddy already,” Isabel told her. “He called both apartments in the city. She’s not there, but we’ve got people watching both anyway. She left her phone at the party, I have it. So now, I guess, we wait for her.”
They waited there for three hours. They drank the wine in silence, and after the first hour or so, Lily made coffee. She could see Isabel’s fear, her exhaustion. The woman wasn’t a robot; she was afraid for her daughter. But Lily could see, too, that they both felt the same way, that a part of each of them dreaded Madison’s return. That this vigil was their penance for having failed to uphold some agreement, for having failed to render some service Madison should have been owed.
But never once did Lily think that she should tell Isabel she’d seen Madison.
“What makes you think she’ll come home tonight?” she said, after untold minutes had passed. Isabel didn’t reply for so long, Lily had allowed her thoughts to move on. But then
Isabel spoke.
“I don’t know if she wants to put herself in real danger,” she said. “I don’t know if she wants to actually go find out what other people, outside her little world, think of her. I think she just wants me to know that she could. I think she wants to see what I’ll do.”
“She wants you to protect her,” Lily said.
Isabel smiled, but Lily didn’t know if that meant they were in agreement or not.
“Maybe,” Isabel said. “Maybe she wants to force my hand.”
An hour after that, the phone rang, and Isabel answered it. She spoke to someone for a few seconds, then hung up.
“They’re at the gate,” she said.
FORTY-SEVEN
Isabel knew that if she was wrong, then yes, later, she’d look like a monster. But she was doing the best she could with the information she had. People assumed that because she did not smother her daughter, they were not close. But she knew her daughter pretty damn well. And she felt certain that Madison would come home that night.
The impossible thought, that she might not, burned like a flame in the back of her mind, kept Isabel’s white fury stoked and searching. Because if Madison didn’t come back, it was because of Bob. Proximate cause, ultimate cause. Every kind of cause there was. If anything went any more wrong tonight, it was her husband’s fault, and Isabel couldn’t look directly at whatever that meant. She couldn’t look directly at what she’d do to him.
She’d seen Madison’s face, in that ballroom. As she heard that woman, Jim’s lewd insinuations. Madison’s face had crumpled just the way it used to when she was an infant, her beautiful, untrammeled skin wrinkling in on itself like the stone of a peach. She’d been ugly, exposed, in that moment. She was still, in so many ways, exactly like her father.
It all happens so slowly, Isabel thought. Every individual step is so insignificant as it happens. All the times her husband had told her what their life would be like, and she’d taken a stand. Or she thought she had. Balanced what she thought were gracious concessions with what she knew were principled refusals. When he told her they weren’t going to be like anyone else on the Street. That the men who worked for him would be held to different standards.
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