Our Little Racket

by Angelica Baker

  And he’d spent the first months afterward, this crucial period, twiddling his clumsy fucking thumbs. Stashing folders in locked drawers, and confiding in his child, and screwing a woman who’d failed even worse than he had.

  Isabel thought about making some more coffee, waiting for the boys to come rioting down the stairs. But she was suddenly blurry with exhaustion; it began to leave smeared trails across her vision, her thoughts. Lifting her hand to her face was an effort. She thought of the pills from Mina. There were still some left. She’d put them aside, months ago, because after that one time she’d sensed something just beyond what she’d be able to control if she didn’t. But this was surely an exception. This was an evening like no other, wasn’t it?

  She stacked the papers in one tidy pile and left them on the counter, near the sink. Before she left the room, she strained to see if she could hear her husband moving at all.

  It’s their future, she thought. And what he’s given them, now, is a future with his fingerprints all the fuck over it. There’s no life for her that won’t be defined by him. She’s too old to forget any of this. He can’t survive that, unscathed. It wouldn’t be fair.

  He’s so worried about his own personal lifeboat, fine. But then he doesn’t get to assume he can stay on ours.

  She told herself she would deal with the papers in the morning. She told herself Lily wouldn’t do anything without asking first. Lily, who clearly thought she’d kept that wannabe muckraker boyfriend a secret all these years. Lily, who must have discovered how good it feels to brag about your own virtue inside your head, the only place where you can glorify it to your heart’s desire.

  Maybe Lily would leave the folders on the counter, right where they sat. Maybe she would wait to be told. Probably.

  But now, tonight, Isabel needed to go upstairs. She’d had about all she could take, for now. She turned off the lights in her kitchen. Outside the house, she could hear the leaves rustling and the crickets, the sounds her daughter loved so much.

  Isabel D’Amico would sleep on it. She would sleep on all of it.

  EPILOGUE

  Madison had always loved the trip out to Shelter. They would usually stop in Greenport for dinner, catching a late ferry. Her brothers would jockey for seats in the small vestibule and her parents would stand, her father’s arms ringing her mother’s waist, at the metal railing.

  But when you came in by day, you could see the island begin to appear, a dark pile rising out of the slate water. As you got closer, it defined itself for you, yielded up the details of its coast. The disintegrating gray wood pilings, the granular strip of public beach, the thick trees mounded up on the hills like the looping borders of a child’s cloud drawing. And when you were close enough, there it was: Gran’s place, with the poplars at the edge of the property. There had been more of them, once, a whole line guarding the house, but now only two remained.

  During Madison’s sophomore year of college, Hurricane Sandy had eaten away at the private beach just below the lawn, and the house now seemed so much more perilous in its situation. The ocean was closer to the glassed-in porch than it used to be, and somehow Madison was always grateful that Gran was gone by the time that happened. The house looked like a monument to hubris, now. It looked like someone had just walked out to the tip of that particular finger of the island and, preposterously, decided to build a house there. When that couldn’t be further from the truth, from the story of Madison’s family on this island. But then, what did that matter? All that people had to go on, at this point, was the way it looked.

  She remembered Antoinette calling her to tell her about the hurricane damage. She hadn’t known that Antoinette even had her cell number and she’d almost ignored the call when she saw the New York state area code. But she answered, and then she’d been in a women’s restroom on the third floor of the Humanities building, crying into the mirror.

  It was the second time that year that she’d found herself crying in a bathroom on campus, the first having come when she ran into the freshman girl whose father was the district attorney for the Southern District of New York. Most people on campus, thankfully, weren’t able to put the pieces together—Madison had changed her last name before enrolling—but this girl sure as hell knew who Madison was.

  Once she’d gathered herself on the phone, Madison had asked Antoinette how she’d found her number. And Antoinette had paused, then said, “Oh, honey, Lily gave it to me a few years ago. She wanted me to have it, if I ever wanted to call you directly. Without, you know, having to go through your mom.”

  Do you know where she is now, Madison had almost said to Antoinette, do you know what she does now. But the truth was that Lily wasn’t family anymore; that was painful enough in itself, even if it had always been true, at base. What good would it do to have an image of her, living another life as a person independent of the twins, of Madison?

  Isabel had taken her time, after Gabriel Scott Lazarus published the e-mails. She’d kept Lily on for almost another year, and at the time Madison had thought that this was her mother’s reluctance to punish Lily for something she’d all but told Lily to do. One thing Madison had never doubted: that if her mother didn’t shred those folders that night, it was because she wanted Lily to do something with them. She outsourced it, Madison thought now, smiling in spite of herself.

  Lily moved her things out one day while Madison was at school. There had been no warning before she came home. No announcement, no tear-stained letter, just the absence of Lily. Upstairs, on Madison’s bed, Lily had left the silver claddagh ring she’d worn every single day Madison had known her, a ring that had always entranced Madison when she was small. Lily had explained, once, what it meant to turn the ring, that it mattered which way the heart faced.

  It had been a gift from Lily’s mother on the night she got into Columbia. It had been in her family. Looking back on it now, it seemed such a pedestrian, girlish thing for Madison to have coveted—so simple, neither special nor rare. But this one had been in Lily’s family.

  Madison kept it, but she’d never worn it.

  She didn’t know if she still believed that Lily had been left dangling for so long out of ambivalence on Isabel’s part. She didn’t know if the boyfriend had still been in the picture by then. All she knew was that, once Isabel made up her mind, Lily was gone.

  When the ferry docked, Madison shouldered her bag—she’d brought only essentials, clean underwear and makeup and the bourbon she’d bought in Greenport, not certain how long she’d be staying—and walked up the hill toward the house. It was only the third house from the dock, always so easy to find. She let herself in through the garage, with the code from Antoinette’s e-mail, and retrieved the key from the butter dish in the outside fridge. And then she was there, again, for the first time in so long.

  IT WAS A FEW DAYS to Christmas and she knew, if she was honest, that she’d go home before Christmas Eve. The twins were high school seniors now, and it was only fair to them. Last year Madison had stayed in California until just after Christmas, arriving at the apartment in TriBeCa to find it shut up like some Dickensian haunted house: curtains drawn, fires banked, the boys hiding from each other and from Isabel, who rarely left her bedroom. Madison couldn’t do that to them again.

  She’d need a plan, for after the holiday. She hadn’t told her mother she was taking a leave of absence from grad school, and she didn’t want to have to discuss it just yet. She’d have to put something together, some story, eventually.

  She poured herself a glass from the tap and walked to the big window to look out over the water. The furniture in the living room was still covered with sheets. This year’s renters had been gone for two months, and the new people wouldn’t arrive until the early spring. The draped chairs all looked somehow cowed, as if they were crouched and waiting for some further debasement.

  If only we’d stayed here, Madison thought. It was a childish fantasy, but she couldn’t help remembering that week out here, the five
of them. Right before it all began. She knew that had been so late in the game, really. But it just seemed like if they could have stayed out here together. Spoken to one another, and only to one another. Locked themselves away and stored up food and boarded the windows. It really seemed like everyone would still be here, like they might be celebrating Christmas out here, as a family, if only they’d stayed inside Gran’s house for a while longer.

  But these honeyed false memories, the way it might have been, did her no good. She’d been better, in recent years, at telling the truth, to herself, in her own mind. At clinging to the facts, rather than to their ever-alluring shadows.

  Such as: Everything that had happened with her father probably would have happened anyway. Her mother did not turn him over to the authorities in some fit of rebellion. She didn’t take back control of anything. All she did was let the nanny embarrass him in the slyest possible way, and if she was in a fit of anything, it was jealousy and petty fury.

  The e-mails would always have been discovered, sometime later that year, during the bankruptcy-court investigation. All that would have been spared were those first months of gossip, of lascivious media coverage. The whole situation was still so raw, that spring. Madoff was recent news, it still seemed entirely possible Bob D’Amico would go to jail. People ate it up, the e-mail proof that her father had been fully aware of the shady accounting tricks that kept the firm’s insolvency under wraps for so long.

  And then the speculation about his affair with Erica. If Isabel had wanted to, surely she could have gone into overdrive. She could have kept that out of the papers. It might have remained, then, a Greenwich-specific scandal. But she’d done nothing.

  In the ensuing years, everyone seemed to have decided that there was nothing much actually going on between Bob and Erica, that their clandestine meetings that year had been more concerned with fraud and illegality. Everyone waited just long enough for the idea of the affair to cement its place in the collective memory of that year, then shrugged and said it was probably nothing. But Madison knew better. She could see how it would have appealed to her father, the mixture of contempt and gallantry. The woman had fucked up, yes, but now she was in worse trouble than he was, and he could be her protector. He could be the defendant, take the fall for her, and for all the others. For the bank, his truest family.

  That had been the worst sting of all, reading the e-mail from one top executive that described the questionable accounting tactic of choice as “anothr drug we r on, guys.” These guys, Madison remembered thinking. These were the guys my father chose to be loyal to, in the end? These guys and Erica?

  Everyone said that the DA was foolish to pursue the case. That he’d never be able to prove conscious wrongdoing, not even with all the embarrassing swagger captured in those e-mails. And he hadn’t. He’d apparently been quite haunted by that failure, by the fact that Madison’s father protected his people, walked free, granted his wife full custody and then moved down to Florida with the new wife. Madison knew this, how the DA had been tortured by Bob D’Amico’s cavalier renaissance, because the man’s daughter had told her all about it in a public restroom on campus.

  She hadn’t understood, that day, what that girl wanted from her. She understood the girl’s anger, her disgust, but she didn’t know what she could do about it. She couldn’t very well say so, but the girl wasn’t spitting anything at her that Madison didn’t already feel on the nights she lay awake. Yes, exactly, she wanted to say. Agreed. Tell me how to fix it.

  Believe me, I understand the banality of my own pain. I understand so much better than you could ever force me to understand. I am unhappy for the least interesting reasons in the world. I thought it was something unique, something of tragic proportions. Malevolent forces from the outside. But my unhappiness didn’t come from outside at all. It was my parents, their willingness to gamble away the things they always told me were so important, so essential to our family’s character. And you can’t tell me any better than I already know it myself, that this is the least special unhappiness in the world.

  She hadn’t said any of this that day at school; she’d just let the girl shriek at her until it was over.

  SHE SLID OPEN THE DOOR to the sunporch, her hand coming away gritty and dusty, and walked out onto the grass. There, across the water, was the big estate that had so vexed Gran; God only knew who lived over there now.

  It took a long time, years after Suzanne’s museum party, but Madison had eventually watched her father’s congressional testimony. It was available on YouTube. A lot of people still watched it in those first few years; she always kept an eye on its page views. After the documentary about the bank came out, she finally reconciled herself to watching it. And all the footage was there waiting for her, several different versions of it. Plus on the Times website, plus in CSPAN’s archives. If she wanted, she could have played three different streams of the video simultaneously. Her father jammed behind a small table, the congressmen seated above him so that he had to keep his head tilted up deferentially throughout. But the only part she played over and over again was a final interjection he made, toward the end of the first part of the hearing. “Until they put me in the ground,” he said, “I will wonder why this happened to me.” This wasn’t the father she had known; there was a touch of the poet in this man, a Shakespearean tragedian who had apparently been living beneath her father’s tough hide his entire life.

  But he wasn’t anything from Shakespeare; he was a criminal. She tried to remember this when she felt all the old outrage at some new catty interview from a former colleague, some smirking report of her father’s latest attempts to get back in the game. So many people had suffered because of him. He was a criminal. It didn’t make much difference, in the end, that society had declined to slap that title on him.

  Everything but jail, she thought now, crossing her arms against the cold coming up from the water. Jail would have been cleaner, maybe. All these years, she’d been hoping and waiting for the final, scalpel-sharp cut. But it wasn’t going to be like that. Not ever, she didn’t think. It was always going to be chronic pain, suspended. The chairs keeping quiet beneath their draped sheets, the windows sealed against the remote, future possibility of a storm.

  No one, it turned out, ever told the truth about this kind of pain. It wasn’t a crucible; it didn’t always make you new. She thought sometimes that perhaps she was a nicer person than she would otherwise have been, but that seemed like wishful thinking when all the adults who had been there at the time, controlling her access to the information, seemed to have learned nothing at all. They had come to the brink of something, that night, definitely. They had come right to the brink of some disaster, and her mother had given the little push it needed. But they’d also been at some other brink, on the edge of learning some lesson, and they hadn’t done that, either.

  Her father left the house the morning after Suzanne’s party, and she hadn’t seen him again for months. During the trial, her mother dressed them all in dark colors and made them sit directly behind the defense counsel’s table, even the twins. She kept them there, like his loyal army, until the day he was acquitted, then filed for divorce. She sold the properties and moved them to an apartment in TriBeCa, where they could live as she’d always wanted to live. A quiet life funded by her own money. No danger, but no ostentation, either.

  Madison had been homeschooled for her final three semesters of high school, and they’d lied on her applications. They said it was a health scare. The family physician signed the letter.

  MADISON HAD RUN INTO JAIME DAWES on the street in New York that year, sometime in the spring. Jaime was going to Oxford, and Madison remembered that her first thought, as they stood on a thronged street corner in SoHo and exchanged pleasantries, had been for Mina. Poor Mina; boarding school hadn’t been enough distance for Jaime.

  “I never thought I’d see you again,” Jaime said. “It seems like our mothers have lost touch.”

  “I’m sure that
’s not true,” Madison said, but she knew that it was. Tom Dawes, of all those men, had gained great respect and renown in the years immediately following the Weiss failure. Had become something of a bigwig at Goldman, against all expectations. She didn’t know if that was it, why Mina and Isabel rarely spoke.

  “Not Mina’s choice, believe me,” Jaime said, as if in counterargument to Madison’s silence. “I bet you don’t miss Greenwich, though.”

  They’d gone, somewhat awkwardly, for a drink at a small, dark bar with a leafy backyard. Jaime pumped Madison for information. Her disgust and disinterest seemed at war with each other, and no truce had yet been declared. In the end, though, Jaime ended up saying much more about Mina than Madison said about anyone.

  “You see, though, right?” Jaime said near the end, before she picked up the tab. “You see why I had to get out of there?”

  Madison had just nodded. She’d put Jaime’s number in her phone, deleting it on the walk back to the subway.

  She hadn’t told Jaime the things she did want to say, the things she had no one to tell. That her mother had proved herself, in the end, to be the one true mate for Bob D’Amico. That she’d followed his codes, even when she felt she was turning on him. That there had been a moment, maybe, when Madison and her mother might have teamed up, sealed the leak, kept the boat in safe waters. But they hadn’t, and she could only assume this was because her mother hadn’t wanted that.

  None of this, Madison knew, looked like learning a lesson. The fact that her mother had become a recluse, that she seemed desperately to miss the Greenwich life she’d always treated with such disdain before that year, didn’t mean she’d learned a lesson. Nothing so lofty. So it was hard to fault the wider world, wasn’t it?