It took a long time, years after Suzanne’s museum party, but Madison had eventually watched her father’s congressional testimony. It was available on YouTube. A lot of people still watched it in those first few years; she always kept an eye on its page views. After the documentary about the bank came out, she finally reconciled herself to watching it. And all the footage was there waiting for her, several different versions of it. Plus on the Times website, plus in CSPAN’s archives. If she wanted, she could have played three different streams of the video simultaneously. Her father jammed behind a small table, the congressmen seated above him so that he had to keep his head tilted up deferentially throughout. But the only part she played over and over again was a final interjection he made, toward the end of the first part of the hearing. “Until they put me in the ground,” he said, “I will wonder why this happened to me.” This wasn’t the father she had known; there was a touch of the poet in this man, a Shakespearean tragedian who had apparently been living beneath her father’s tough hide his entire life.
But he wasn’t anything from Shakespeare; he was a criminal. She tried to remember this when she felt all the old outrage at some new catty interview from a former colleague, some smirking report of her father’s latest attempts to get back in the game. So many people had suffered because of him. He was a criminal. It didn’t make much difference, in the end, that society had declined to slap that title on him.
Everything but jail, she thought now, crossing her arms against the cold coming up from the water. Jail would have been cleaner, maybe. All these years, she’d been hoping and waiting for the final, scalpel-sharp cut. But it wasn’t going to be like that. Not ever, she didn’t think. It was always going to be chronic pain, suspended. The chairs keeping quiet beneath their draped sheets, the windows sealed against the remote, future possibility of a storm.
No one, it turned out, ever told the truth about this kind of pain. It wasn’t a crucible; it didn’t always make you new. She thought sometimes that perhaps she was a nicer person than she would otherwise have been, but that seemed like wishful thinking when all the adults who had been there at the time, controlling her access to the information, seemed to have learned nothing at all. They had come to the brink of something, that night, definitely. They had come right to the brink of some disaster, and her mother had given the little push it needed. But they’d also been at some other brink, on the edge of learning some lesson, and they hadn’t done that, either.
Her father left the house the morning after Suzanne’s party, and she hadn’t seen him again for months. During the trial, her mother dressed them all in dark colors and made them sit directly behind the defense counsel’s table, even the twins. She kept them there, like his loyal army, until the day he was acquitted, then filed for divorce. She sold the properties and moved them to an apartment in TriBeCa, where they could live as she’d always wanted to live. A quiet life funded by her own money. No danger, but no ostentation, either.
Madison had been homeschooled for her final three semesters of high school, and they’d lied on her applications. They said it was a health scare. The family physician signed the letter.
MADISON HAD RUN INTO JAIME DAWES on the street in New York that year, sometime in the spring. Jaime was going to Oxford, and Madison remembered that her first thought, as they stood on a thronged street corner in SoHo and exchanged pleasantries, had been for Mina. Poor Mina; boarding school hadn’t been enough distance for Jaime.
“I never thought I’d see you again,” Jaime said. “It seems like our mothers have lost touch.”
“I’m sure that’s not true,” Madison said, but she knew that it was. Tom Dawes, of all those men, had gained great respect and renown in the years immediately following the Weiss failure. Had become something of a bigwig at Goldman, against all expectations. She didn’t know if that was it, why Mina and Isabel rarely spoke.
“Not Mina’s choice, believe me,” Jaime said, as if in counterargument to Madison’s silence. “I bet you don’t miss Greenwich, though.”
They’d gone, somewhat awkwardly, for a drink at a small, dark bar with a leafy backyard. Jaime pumped Madison for information. Her disgust and disinterest seemed at war with each other, and no truce had yet been declared. In the end, though, Jaime ended up saying much more about Mina than Madison said about anyone.
“You see, though, right?” Jaime said near the end, before she picked up the tab. “You see why I had to get out of there?”
Madison had just nodded. She’d put Jaime’s number in her phone, deleting it on the walk back to the subway.
She hadn’t told Jaime the things she did want to say, the things she had no one to tell. That her mother had proved herself, in the end, to be the one true mate for Bob D’Amico. That she’d followed his codes, even when she felt she was turning on him. That there had been a moment, maybe, when Madison and her mother might have teamed up, sealed the leak, kept the boat in safe waters. But they hadn’t, and she could only assume this was because her mother hadn’t wanted that.
None of this, Madison knew, looked like learning a lesson. The fact that her mother had become a recluse, that she seemed desperately to miss the Greenwich life she’d always treated with such disdain before that year, didn’t mean she’d learned a lesson. Nothing so lofty. So it was hard to fault the wider world, wasn’t it?
You don’t really learn anything so deep from embarrassment or shame, you just learn not to make all the same mistakes again. What, then, should she have learned? Weiss was treated as a bad egg, careless and cavalier. The exception that endangered the rest of the system rather than that system’s purest product. No one in the world her father had once dominated learned much of a lesson, she didn’t think. So then, what steps was she supposed to take to avoid this pain in future? She’d only ever been a cog in the system, a party to the long con. Whatever racket her father had been running hadn’t taught her anything at all when it crashed.
HE LIVED, NOW, in a fortress down in Florida. His finances were something of a mystery. She assumed the new wife had money. He still showed up in New York every now and then for speeches. He still got to be the man they’d nicknamed Silverback, sometimes. Their once or twice yearly phone calls were always at his urging, never at Madison’s. So maybe she had, in the end, chosen a side.
She sat down on a lawn chair and looked across the water to the other part of the island, even as it got dark, even as the winter chill moved in. She bundled herself up and stayed there. There was no food inside, she’d brought nothing for dinner. When she went back in, there would be only a long evening alone with Gran’s ghosts, only bourbon and the fireplace.
She’d chosen her side, and she’d stayed there. She had allowed Lily, the woman who had done so much to raise her, to be effectively cut from her life. She had never spoken to Amanda again after that night at the Welsh party. She’d followed all her mother’s cues. She’d punished her father with her own distance, because that had seemed like her only option. Because she’d probably always known who he was. She couldn’t, looking back, see that first winter as anything other than the last, grasping attempt of a child to keep her eyes closed to the sickly green sunlight her parents’ shadows had once blocked for her.
And now, here she was, alone in the only place on earth that still felt like a home to her.