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.