Hearing him somehow made Amanda feel more frantic; it wasn’t enough to be controlling her own emotions if Bob D’Amico couldn’t control his. He had the power to change everything about the room, right now, but she didn’t think he understood that. He didn’t look like he understood anything now; he looked like a snarling dog, held back by a choke chain. Even though Isabel wasn’t so much as touching him.
Amanda tried to remember everything her father had written about this woman. Her name was Erica Leary. Geary? No, Leary. The one they fired along with Jim, trying to stanch the bleeding—her dad’s words—last summer. Maybe the only person in the world Amanda’s father had less regard for than either Jim or Bob.
It was suddenly inconceivable to Amanda that she’d never Googled this woman, that she hadn’t put together the scrubbed, drawn face she saw on Lexington that day with the woman from Weiss.
Like every other reminder that year of her previous ignorance, her careless inattention to the things that dictated the course of her own life, it made Amanda want to look away. But of course it was too late now; she was in the room with the entire lineup. She couldn’t look away. The D’Amicos might feel that they had that luxury, but Amanda knew better.
“Madison, go back upstairs,” Isabel said. She kept her eyes on her husband.
Erica Leary hadn’t spoken a word. She was moving, one mincing step at a time, backward. She was trying to get to the staircase so she could leave the room.
“No,” Madison said again.
“Enough.” Isabel finally touched her husband’s arm. “Jim, this isn’t the place. If you’d like to discuss something, I suggest you call our lawyers. I know you have all the relevant information. You can set up a meeting in the city. I don’t want you in our home.”
“Of course not,” Jim said. “Of course you don’t, Mrs. D.”
“Enough,” Isabel repeated. We’re all repeating ourselves too much, Amanda thought.
“You fucking show up to ambush me like this,” Bob repeated, spitting his consonants as if from behind his molars.
“Ambush,” Erica said finally. “Ambush, Bob? Really?”
And then Isabel turned, and Amanda could see her face in the mirror. She gave the woman a look that split the room in two. Something very delicate had been resting on this, the woman’s silence, Isabel’s refusal to acknowledge her. Amanda shuddered.
“You knew they were going to be here,” Isabel said to her husband. It wasn’t a question. Her voice slashed the air like a sharpened knife through delicate fabric, left a gash when it was through. No one should respond to that voice, Amanda thought, no one should ever want to speak next.
And Bob knew that voice well enough that he didn’t even make the attempt.
“I thought that if we got the principals together in one room,” Erica said, but she’d used up all the nerve she had to spare, Amanda could see. Isabel had cut her down.
And then the door behind them made a sucking sound, and someone pulled it open.
“Amanda, what in God’s name,” Jake said.
MADISON DIDN’T TURN TO ACKNOWLEDGE Jake Levins. Her mother had turned away from the blond woman, back to Jim. Why was her father even down here? How could Jim possibly be worth his time?
“Girls, let’s go,” Jake was saying. Madison could not reconcile anything in this room to the world they’d left outside, up the stairs.
“Jake, this is none of your fucking business,” her father said.
“Happy to leave. Amanda, now.”
“Dad,” Madison said. “What’s going on.”
She willed him to look at her, only at her. She tried to imagine him reaching for her, beckoning her to his chest. If she imagined it, then it could happen. It was like that first morning, watching the news. When she’d felt the certainty that she could call her father home to her. If she could just turn her thoughts to him strongly enough, he’d know what to do, he’d come home. We need you at home. We want to flinch here, Daddy.
“Bob,” Isabel said. “This is outrageous. Let’s go.”
“You don’t know why he hasn’t left yet?”
Isabel drew herself up and turned to face Jim, gave him a bland smile. She held a hand out to Bob, but kept her gaze on Jim, her back straight. She looked at once wild and contained, a series of small explosions within a thin-necked glass bottle.
Jim waved his thumb in Erica’s general direction.
“What does he tell you, he’s helping her prep her testimony? Does he tell you it’s business? They’re fucking, Isabel. They were fucking last spring, they are fucking now. Past tense, present tense. Come on, Mrs. D. If I figured it out, so did you.”
Madison could feel Amanda’s twitching eye on her, but she still didn’t want to look at anyone but her parents.
There was suddenly a lot of noise in the room, but the effort now required just to stand there, not to shake, meant that Madison couldn’t quite focus on anyone else, on all the other bodies around hers.
Somewhere near where she stood, her father tried to lunge at Jim. Amanda’s father intervened, just in time to keep them apart. Jake backed Bob up toward the wall and held him there. He whispered something in a low voice.
Jim tumbled away from them and bent over, his hands on his knees. He was wheezing, even though no one had actually touched him.
“Give it a rest,” he hacked, his breath rushing and receding. “We all trusted you. Everybody trusted you, and look at us now.” He waved a hand toward the mirrored wall, as if talking about their own astonished reflections rather than the actual people outside, the rest of the world.
“We thought you knew what you were—”
“We all did!” Bob screamed. “I did, too! We all did.”
He was so loud, and Madison could see something inside him slipping off a ledge, a fragile statue you touched with a fingertip, touched again, pushed and pushed and pushed until it toppled.
“Dad,” she said again, her voice softer even though she’d tried to keep it hard. “Look at me.”
He looked up, obedient. Jake let go of him.
“You promised me,” Madison said. Her father said nothing, and her mother was looking up to one corner of the ceiling. As if this were a scuffle between strangers, something that didn’t involve her in the slightest.
“Madison.” There was no warmth at all in her father’s tone, only warning.
She knew she couldn’t go any further, couldn’t actually beg him to repeat the things he’d said to her, alone. She couldn’t beseech him any more than this. I shouldn’t have to do this at all, she thought. He shouldn’t be making me beg him for anything. I asked him the exact question, and he told me: I’ve done nothing wrong.
“Would I lie to you?” Madison asked, mimicking his cadence from that first night in the kitchen.
Her father looked down, away from her. Like she was embarrassing him.