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.