The air had changed, and Amanda saw from her friend something she hadn’t seen from her before, the ability to tug on the taut wire between her body and Chip’s, an awareness of how this worked.
Chip was laughing, Madison had made some joke Amanda had missed.
“All right, Madison, take it easy. You walking upstairs?”
Madison nodded. She was doing it again—staring at the thing in front of her as though it held the key to the only language that could teach her anything. As though this boy could keep her alive.
Madison turned back, pressing her face to Amanda’s ear.
“Don’t worry,” she said. “I’m totally fine. Who cares about Wyatt Welsh, forget it. I don’t know anything else yet. But my dad will be home soon, and besides, it can’t be worse than it’s been today, right?”
Amanda watched them walk together down the hallway, toward the glass doors, their bodies becoming silhouettes against the late sunlight. She saw them stop and stand there, despite the swarms of people crowding the hallway, and she saw him pick at something on the sleeve of Madison’s shirt, saw Madison tip the upper half of her body toward him as he did this.
A few days later, Amanda would take a shortcut to class, the one that cut along the leafy path just below the library, and she would see that someone had Wyatt Welsh pushed up against the side of the building. She would imagine the cottage-cheese surface of the wall scraping against the back of Wyatt’s neck. Then Chip would shove Wyatt once more, his hands at Wyatt’s collar, before walking away, and Wyatt would kick the ground a few times and then gather his things. He was a senior, a year older than Chip, even a bit bigger.
Now, Chip looked back, once, over his shoulder. Not at Amanda, but just to be looking away from Madison. Then he brushed his thumb against his chin, smiled, and turned back to her. They still were just standing there. Their feet were rooted on the ground, not coming any closer to each other, but their bodies swayed and curved, like the stems of a plant yearning toward sunlight.
Amanda knew, and tried to tell herself it had just now occurred to her, that she hadn’t told Madison about the column, about next week’s paper.
Madison and Chip started walking again, moving in tandem side by side, and their silhouettes merged. As Chip reached to open the door, Madison stepped in front of him, and then you couldn’t see her at all anymore; he’d swallowed her up.
SEVEN
On that first morning, Madison didn’t go into the kitchen. She didn’t act like a sister, find her brothers to kiss the tops of their heads and preemptively explain that Isabel wasn’t feeling well. She didn’t act like a daughter, knock on her mother’s door to ask how she could help. She didn’t look for any of them. She did not want anyone to touch her, comfort her. She did not want to find out whether her mother would simply ignore the knock.
She went, finally, to her father’s study. A television. A thick door to muffle the sounds from the foyer, from the kitchen and her brothers, their small voices.
She turned on the television, found the morning news, and what she noticed was that they were treating this as news of a crime. This wasn’t a natural disaster; there was none of the patronizing sympathy, the eagerness to exploit, that you saw when the news covered a hurricane or a fire. They were scanning their spotlight over everything and looking for the culprit. All summer, each time she’d seen her father’s name in the Times, each time she’d stood at the end of her parents’ hallway and listened to her mother’s low, urgent tones, to her father’s quick, hissed replies—to the way his voice layered over hers until hers finally fell silent—Madison had not understood this. That there was a crime somewhere beneath everyone’s anxiety, like the invisible letters on a piece of paper that reveal themselves only when you sketch over them with a pencil. That it was more than misfortune.
Now, a blond reporter was interviewing some guy on the sidewalk in front of the Weiss building near Times Square. The reporter looked like the woman who used to work at Weiss. She’d been forced to step down at the beginning of the summer, at the start of that period of time during which Madison saw her father rarely if at all. The same small features, the same frozen helmet bob of ice-blond hair. Amanda’s father had written something about that woman, but she couldn’t remember what. The woman had been there for all of a year, otherwise Madison surely would have met her at some point. It was odd, actually, that she hadn’t. She would have to find Jake’s article, later, online. She would have to read everything she could. She could not have anyone else at school know any more about this than she did. They only had half the story; they didn’t know her father. She was the only one who could know everything.
She tried to remember the woman’s name, but it kept receding further. Sometimes, when her mother ordered dry martinis on the rocks at dinner, her father would slide the glass over to Madison when the wine arrived. She would try to spear the olives with a toothpick, softened and useless from the vodka, and it would skid off the fat little globes, sending them tumbling down beneath the ice cubes. The longer she tried, the harder it became to skewer what she wanted.
The guy being interviewed on the sidewalk was talking now. He was a young trader, the reporter said. Fresh from the Ivy League. If he was really Ivy League and had a decent GPA, he wouldn’t be on the trading floor, would he, Madison thought with a twinge of smug pleasure. He’d be an analyst. She imagined her father here with her now, on the couch behind her, stroking her hair absentmindedly when she pointed this out to him, proud that she knew the difference.
Madison turned up the volume.