We should have holed up here, she thought again. We should have come here, my mother and my father and Lily and the boys and me. We should have closed ourselves off from the world until it was over, like plucky refugees from some apocalypse, trapped in our own adventure story. The kind of story that ends with survival.
She went inside, finally, when it grew too cold. She drank the bourbon. She called her boyfriend, but he didn’t pick up. She found some abandoned pasta in a high cabinet. The bourbon was working, and she imagined for herself that the pasta was a remnant. It was an uncherished artifact, the last proof: they really had locked themselves up in here, they really had kept one another alive through that first winter.
After she ate, she curled up on the couch and closed her eyes and tried to remember. What it had felt like when she had a tribe of her own, when she had taken for granted that if her parents had a flaw, it was that they cared too much about her future, her brothers’ futures. That they held their children too close, devoted too much to building them a life.
When she could have told anyone, without hesitation, what the word home really meant to her.
It never would have worked, she knew that. They couldn’t have hidden away here. The threat was never out there. There were no febrile hordes scratching at the roof, no one coming to fight them for their last resources.
We wouldn’t have been safe in here because we were the toxin. We wouldn’t have been safe in here because the epidemic would have been locked in with us. Sloughing off our skin, reddening our eyes. Turning us on one another, eventually, our little, yellowed teeth.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Thank you, thank you, thank you.
Thank you to the grad crew—Christian Caminiti, Essie Chambers, Amy Feltman, Eli Hager, Cory Leadbeater, Rachel Schwerin, and Sam Graham-Felsen. Thank you for being, by turns: drinking buddies, therapists, sounding boards, and—most of all—readers.
Thank you to Bryan Burrough, William Cohan, Steve Fishman, Michael Lewis, Nina Munk, Vicky Ward, and Andrew Ross Sorkin for their phenomenal writing about the world of Wall Street, much of which I found very helpful at the preliminary stage.
Thank you to the Edward F. Albee Foundation; to Ruthie Salvatore and everyone at the Ucross Foundation; and to Mary and Patrick Geary in Princeton, for rooms with views and blissful solitude. Ucross in particular was a haven for me during the stressful final hours, and I’ll be forever grateful.
Thank you to my teachers. Thank you to Eric Schrode and Kathleen Neumeyer, two of the first and quite possibly the toughest—you both set the standard, to this day. Thank you to John Crowley and to Traugott Lawler. Thank you to Erroll McDonald, to Deborah Eisenberg, to Donald Antrim. Thank you to Sam Lipsyte, for his devilish grin as he told me to write a better opening chapter. Thank you to Elissa Schappell, who taught me what to do with a first draft.
Thank you to Heidi Julavits, for being the sharpest and smartest cheerleader at the moment when I needed it the most.
Thank you to Darryl Pinckney, who took me to lunch when this book was a mess and asked all the right questions, for his keen insight and timely encouragement.
Thank you to Patrick Ryan, for his early support of my writing, and to John Freeman, for making me a better thinker (about this book and countless others).
Thank you to David Burr Gerrard for frequent reads and constant advice, and for enduring more than a few of my rants and raves.
Thank you to Andrew Kaufman for answering embarrassing finance questions early on, for indulging in no more than the usual amount of mockery when faced with my total ignorance, and for giving everything a close look near the end.
Thank you to Julianne Carlson, Camille Fenton, Elena Goldblatt, Mark Iscoe, Emma Ledbetter, Andrew Segal, Nikila Sri-Kumar, Lisa Sun, and Chenault Taylor—for believing I would finish, for keeping me laughing even in the darkest hours.
Thank you to the many others whose kindnesses have been essential, including: Marilyn Aitken, Deborah Antar, the Botwick boys, Caroline Bleeke, Julie Buntin, Charlie Clark, Jenny Crapser, Tamara Day, Neena Deb-Sen, the Dewhirst family, David Dunning, Peter Jackson, Abram Kaplan, Denny and Annie Kearney, the Miller family, Denise and Keith Mills (and the entire Davidson-Dennis-Parent bunch), Kate Philip, Streeter Phillips, Anna Pitoniak, Alexandra Schwartz, Michael Seidenberg, the Shabahang family, Danny Seifert, Moses Soyoola, Annie Spokes, Nathan Stevens, Timbo Shriver, and Arturo Zindel.
Thank you to Caryl Phillips, whose generosity is matched only by his brilliance and his rigor.
Thank you to everyone at Ecco and HarperCollins, especially Sonya Cheuse, Dan Halpern, Miriam Parker, and Emma Dries. But most of all, thank you to Megan Lynch, who had a vision for this book and who took the most exquisite care of it and of me. I feel unspeakably lucky that I found my way to her.
Thank you to Marya Spence, Marya of the infinite patience, un paralleled eye, and extraordinary cool. She found me and saw something where there was yet so little, and it would be impossible to overstate her role in forcing this book to exist. Every day of this process, I thanked and thanked the universe for sending me her smarts and her friendship. (And thank you to Rebecca Dinerstein, for introducing me to Marya.)
Thank you to Monsita Botwick, my godmother and role model. I’m hardly the only one in awe of her humor or her grace.
Thank you to my brother, my favorite person on the planet. If I am ever, in flashes, cool, smart, witty, or wise, it’s because I am trying to become the girl he’s believed me to be for the last twenty-six years.
Thank you to my parents, whose astonishing (and, let’s face it, foolhardy) support was a lifeline for the four years I struggled to write this book, and for the twenty-four years before I’d even begun. To my mother: the most voracious reader I know, and the toughest audience, and the most bottomless well of belief, all of which made her an invaluable resource. Thank you for putting books into my hands from the beginning. And to my father, who never once doubted me and who gave the rowdiest whoop when I told him it was really going to be a book. Every writer should be so fortunate as to have these two in her corner.
This book, like most everything worthwhile that I do, would not exist without the faith, humor, wisdom, and all around dreaminess of Connor Mills. This book is for him.