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.