He might be hiding out down there. There were suddenly a lot of people in the house tonight. Lena and her girls, bustling all around. Lily cooking something for three nights from now, in the kitchen. It was as if they were getting ready to host the party here, or something. Suddenly, every single one of them needed a reason to keep her hands busy.
When she heard nothing from next door, Madison turned to her mother’s vanity, to the potted creams and glass-sheathed gels and the shiny black square cases that signaled their contents as Chanel eye makeup. She picked one up and held it in the center of her palm. It was so old that the interlocking white C’s had begun to wear out in places. Her mother was always telling her how important it was to throw out your makeup every six months, buy all fresh supplies.
“Why aren’t you doing your makeup over here?” Madison asked, frowning at herself in the bottom-lit vanity mirror. “I thought the whole point was to sit at this thing, isn’t that why it’s called a vanity?”
Her mother stood back now from the cabinet mirror, as if she’d look appreciably different from two steps farther away. She cocked her head at her own reflection.
“It helps,” she said. “To get it right, you almost have to be too close to actually see it. What’s going on? Why are you in here?”
Gabe Lazarus hadn’t so much as mentioned her mother, Madison realized. This hadn’t seemed odd in the moment, in the bar, but now she thought of it. He’d talked about the jobs her father could get, the ways her father’s image could be softened. Cardiac surgeon? Electrical engineer? His voice childish with scorn, then wavering with regret for having pushed her to reveal her own embarrassment.
“Sweetheart? Why are you lurking like a ghost,” Isabel said. “What’s going on?”
Madison sat on the edge of the bathtub. She could say it, if she wanted. She was dying to kneel down under the weight and let her mother shoulder some of it, finally.
“I want to ask you about something,” she said. Her mother was bent over, swirling a thick black brush through face powder. She looked up at Madison now, her eyes such a clear blue in this light that they looked almost deadened, inanimate. Her mother must know. Shouldn’t she? That Madison’s father had confided in her, that Madison knew important things, or at least knew that there were important things unsaid. Which meant that they could discuss the business card Madison had tucked into her evening purse, as carefully as if it were parchment.
“Can it wait? Is it going to be a problem at the party, or can it wait until we’ve gotten through this?”
“It can wait,” Madison said.
Her mother blinked at herself in the mirror, then met Madison’s eye there, in the glass.
“Did your father say something to you?”
“Not really,” Madison said, truthful.
“Well, then, good,” Isabel said. “Remind me tomorrow. Let’s just get through tonight. Smile like we mean it. Right?”
Madison nodded.
“Have you checked in on the boys?”
The twins were still insisting on sleeping in bed together. Madison tried to recall any time she’d sat with her brothers in recent weeks, actually comforted or reassured them. Done anything more than pull on their earlobes or crack a few jokes that even eight-year-olds must find lame. She blinked the question away, and looked up at her mother.
“Go check on them, Madison. And get your purse together. We need to be downstairs to meet the car in ten minutes.”
FORTY-TWO
Mina stood in her strapless bra and her thigh-highs and her heels, proud of herself that after such a stressful winter she had no need for any sort of control-top anything. She looked down at the butter yellow dress laid across her divan and wondered if it was too late to choose something else, something more muted. Tom came into her closet and whistled. She pretended to ignore him, and he turned away.
“Are you ready?” she asked, following him back out into the bedroom. He flopped onto their bed, the clinking ice in the glass he held answering her question. “I’m serious, Tom. We need to be out of here by seven at the latest.”
Tom pondered this, and instead of turning on the TV, as she’d expected, or even disappearing into his own closet, where he had another TV he could have watched unharried, he stared down at his drink. Clear, so vodka rocks. Which was usually only before the nights he dreaded the most.
“You don’t think he’ll really be there, do you?”
Mina left nothing on her face. She could already feel her lipstick caking at the corners of her mouth.
“I’m sure he will,” she said. “Either he’s there or none of them are.”
He peered up at her, and she saw that this wasn’t the first vodka.
“I don’t want to see that fucking guy,” he said.
She flung down the gown she’d been scrutinizing.
“Fine,” she said. “You don’t want to go?”
“Can we have an adult conversation about this?” he said. “Or do you feel the need to be a smart-ass with me? Can I just admit to you what I’m thinking?”
She went over to him and bopped her hip repeatedly against the side of his leg until he scooted over, clearing a sliver of the bed for her to colonize. She pressed her body against his.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “Tell me what you’re thinking.”
“I’m thinking he’s either smarter than anyone’s given him credit for,” Tom said, “or he’s a total fucking idiot. They still haven’t announced whether there will be any indictments. And who knows, they might hold off on that. It’ll be another year even before the examiner releases the report on the bankruptcy. He should be doing what Jim McGinniss has done, go so far underground that no one’s even sure he’s still alive.”
“It’s just Greenwich,” Mina said. “He’s been to a million of these things. They both have.”
“But he shouldn’t be going anywhere,” Tom said. “He should be holed up in that eyesore of theirs out in Sun Valley. He shouldn’t be escorting his perfect wife, who’s done absolutely nothing to deserve this, to Suzanne Welsh’s backyard clambake like they’re in the same boat as the rest of us. What is anyone even going to talk about with him? He’s been the ghost of Christmas Past all winter. He’s been letting her run interference for him.”
Mina tried to hold on to her sympathy, her warmth. She tried to feel it within her, to sense its fragility the way she could feel her anniversary diamonds when she wore them, light beneath her fingertips but heavy, solid, across her sternum. (“Since odds are we won’t make it to our seventy-fifth,” Tom had said when he gave them to her, then insisted he’d been referring to heart disease, not divorce or infidelity, when she burst into tears.) But she couldn’t. She tried not to focus on the one small part where he’d complimented Isabel, the place where she’d felt his throat constrict beneath her. But she was out of practice, maybe, and coming unexpectedly as it did, this rage, it tingled her limbs until she had to move.
She stood up from the bed and walked away from her husband.
“Well, then we’d better get there early,” she said.
“Why?”
“He’ll need some friendly faces.”