Mina cupped her hands around the steering wheel and hesitated, wondering whether she should speak. She kept silent through most of the drive, through excruciating minutes, but then couldn’t wait any longer. Why was it so treacherously easy to speak to teenage girls in the car? So many indiscreet revelations she’d made to her own Jaime had come about this way.
“Madison,” Mina said. “I’m really asking, here. You can talk to me. I’m sure you’re aware of some of what’s been happening, and I’m sure you don’t want to burden your mother with anything more than she’s already got on her plate. But I’m here, too.”
Madison didn’t turn, her profile so eerily similar to her mother’s.
“That’s so sweet of you, Mina. Really. I appreciate that so much. But I’m doing fine. You know my parents—they’ve both got their moods. If I let that upset me too much, I’d never get anything done.”
Jesus. They had her trained well. Bob ought to call her into the city to deal with reporters. Better than that spike-heeled blonde he’d set up as the face of the firm for most of the year, right up until she had to step down as CFO. Mina had pored over the photos of that woman in her Forbes profile, her cleavage tipped toward the camera like a fruit basket in one of those old, jewel-toned Dutch paintings. Veritas. Were those veritas, or were veritas the paintings of skulls and watches and things? Sic transit Gloria mundi. That was something, right? Sometimes it felt like her entire education had slid from her mind in one fell swoop long ago, like the tablecloth yanked from the table in that old trick. So much for the four years of History of Art seminars, the endless slides of paintings she still, back in college, had thought she’d never get to see in person.
As for the blonde, though, Mina was probably being unfair. Tom had said all year that she’d been promoted from nowhere and then tasked with an impossible job. An impossible job for anyone, but especially for an unqualified woman they’d only wanted to lend some “diversity” to the C-suite. What, there are no qualified women? Mina had asked. He’d been lying in bed while she sat reading a book, his hand dancing up the skirt of her negligee, and he’d ignored the question.
“Well,” she said, turning off the main road onto Isabel’s private drive. A black sedan sat at the intersection, tucked down in the grass beside the tarmac. Come to think of it, they’d passed one just a few seconds ago, as well. Before the turnoff. “I just want you to know that you’ve got someone else nearby, if you ever need an afternoon away from the house. Or something.”
“You must miss Jaime so much,” Madison said, smiling. “I know Andover isn’t that far away, but still. She’s never home, right?”
“Well, yes,” Mina said. “That’s beside the point, though. I just want to make sure you know that your parents . . . it’s just a crazy time for everyone. Us too! Tom has slept in his office for, God, I don’t know. Maybe more than a week at this point.”
“Wow,” Madison said, eyebrows arching. She put one hand to the door handle, and it occurred to Mina that she was being indulged, that this girl couldn’t wait to get out of the car. “That must be awful for you. You should keep coming by to see my mom. I mean, if you get lonely, or anything. Home alone. That must be rough, Mina. I’m so sorry.”
There was no sarcasm in her voice, but it was entirely flat. There was no kindness in it, either. Then she was out of the car, shouldering her bag and loping up the driveway. And Mina sat there feeling twitchy, as though her skin wasn’t fitting properly over her own bones, just as she had when Isabel snapped at her earlier. She flipped down the driver’s-side mirror, ran her tongue over her teeth. Checked for lipstick, for streaks of makeup, for all the little flaws.
FIVE
It was an unexpectedly muggy weekend for September. Mostly, Madison lay on the floor of her bedroom conjugating French verbs, or stretched and baking on a canvas chair by the pool, her mother’s old dog-eared copy of Anna Karenina propped open on her lap. It was the third time since July she’d tried to finish it. She dozed in the waning sun on Sunday afternoon, imagining Chip strolling up to the water’s edge, dipping in a toe, coming to lean over her chair and down to her face, blocking out the sun. Of course, he didn’t call. Neither did Amanda, or anyone. It was a quiet weekend. Madison never asked Lily where her mother was. Isabel was just elsewhere.
When Madison woke up on Monday morning from a night of unrecalled and thus unshakeable dreams, the house was quiet. Downstairs, she heard Lily cooing to the boys in the kitchen, heard the scrape of forks on porcelain.
Again that knowledge on her tongue, like the warm metallic tinge of blood, the taste of something you’d soon know. She was drawn quickly toward the table in the foyer. The paper had been left, unfolded, atop the electric blue plastic sleeve in which it had been delivered.
And there was the headline, the worst conclusion of every single malicious whisper she’d overheard that summer. Her father’s bank had failed.
SIX
Amanda wasn’t at all surprised to find her parents engrossed in their laptops on Monday morning, sitting hunched at the breakfast nook that doubled as their home office.
For the entire span of Amanda’s memory thus far, her parents had lived in a perpetual state of anxiety that they might miss the next piece of breaking news. Whatever was “coming down the pike,” to borrow a phrase from her father: the latest unemployment numbers or redeployment figures or the confirmation of some previous whispering of a congressional scandal. As if they weren’t just tenured professors in rather humdrum fields of study, as if it were even possible for any one piece of the news to change their lives before the end of breakfast.
But this was probably the very thing about her father that allowed him to supplement teaching with his biweekly column at the Times, the gig that had made him famous, at least by professor standards. She sometimes thought it was that compulsive fear, that someone somewhere might know something he didn’t, that drove him. If it was his theory in the first place, his economic forecast bugled out over the twenty-four-hour news networks whose omnipresence he always ranted against, then, at least on his small square of intellectual real estate, no one could possibly know anything before he knew it.
Her mother was another story. Nineteenth-century French lit did not exactly demand a brain hardwired to be constantly refreshing the page or cruising your Twitter feed. It didn’t require, really, any awareness of the world outside your own window.