“Honestly, Madison,” Lily said, her hands clenched into small, scrappy fists. “I’ve been yelling your name all over this house.”
The fists were angry, but Lily’s face was soft, malleable, as though she might be the one to cry. Madison returned to the sofa, to the television. The same blond reporter was now stressing that there were unconfirmed reports that Bob D’Amico had wanted to come down to the trading floor but had been dissuaded by senior management fearful that there might be an outbreak of actual physical violence. It wasn’t yet clear, the woman continued, whether any Weiss executives would be subject to criminal investigation.
“Come on,” Lily said. “Give me the remote. Don’t do this. Don’t watch.” Madison pointed to the floor, to the bits of shattered plastic and the exposed batteries. Lily marched over to the television and turned it off at the source.
“Why do they say something and then remind you that it’s unconfirmed?” Madison said. “Why say it at all, then?”
“Madison, come on. Come eat something. I know the boys would love to see you. They’re nervous. They’re little boys, not idiots. They know something’s wrong.”
“Well, isn’t it your job to take care of them?”
Lily inhaled slowly, as though counting the length of her breaths, as though Madison was a frustrating challenge and she was going to meditate herself out of the room.
“Yes, but you’re their sister, and I think having you in there would make them feel better.”
Madison didn’t say anything. Her father told her once that, in a negotiation, you just sat in silence until the other guy began to jabber. Until he’d reached the point where he’d offer anything, absolutely anything, just to hear your voice.
Lily started to talk.
“Look, Madison, I don’t know. Is that what you want me to say? Because fine, I don’t know. Soon, if your mother doesn’t come downstairs, I’m going to have to say something. But they haven’t seen the paper, and even if they did—your dad’s work isn’t really my business. My business is taking care of you three.”
Madison could feel Lily trembling beside her, her coiled energy, like a hunted animal.
“Well, the boys should stay home. We all should. We shouldn’t go to school.”
“Absolutely not.”
“I’m not afraid, Lily, I’m just trying to be realistic. You know what it’s like here. Do you remember after Jim McGinniss, over the summer? You remember when we saw Kiki at Starbucks?”
A part of her, at the time, had thought that Jim’s wife deserved it all—the gravid silence that seeped to the very edges of the store, the way she’d had to keep her sunglasses on the whole time, as if she didn’t know every woman in line behind her. Kiki didn’t even live around here; it had been a stupid, splashy gesture, to show up one afternoon at a Greenwich Starbucks. Madison had felt a chill, watching Kiki’s shoulders draw closer and closer in on themselves. But Isabel had always said she was a foolish woman, and it had been foolish, parading herself around the same week Jim announced his resignation from the bank.
“Yes,” Lily said, “I remember Kiki. I’m not sure that’s a comparison that really makes any—”
“You think everyone won’t jump on this immediately, that my father fired his best friend in July, and everyone said Jim was the problem, my dad had the solution, and two months later some idiot trader is trashing them both, together, on the morning news? We just have to give it a few days. It’ll blow over and people will lose interest and then the boys can go to school and Isabel can order her own soy lattes in peace and it’ll just, it won’t be just that my father—”
She felt a keen awareness of the shape of the words, of the effort it took to move her teeth and tongue and lips in just the right ways to say what she really meant. That my father, what? That my father failed. That his bank will not exist anymore. That my father lost his job. That my father lost everyone else’s job.
“It’s not just Mr. McGinniss,” she said. “Right? The news—they’re talking about this like someone’s going to go to jail.”
“That’s absurd, you must know that’s absurd,” Lily said. “But no, I don’t think it will blow over. Not yet.”
Madison nodded.
“Listen to me,” Lily said. “There’s no point in worrying now. Your father will be home soon, and your mother will be up, and you’ll all talk about it then. But for now, you need to go to school. Think about everything else. Anything else at all.”
Madison turned to look at her, but Lily was staring straight ahead, out the window, beyond the pool to the trees. Her jaw was clenched so tight that it looked like her face had been carved from stone. She looked like a woman who should appear on a gold coin, on the bas-relief facade of one of those towering granite buildings in Manhattan, the ones that blocked out the sunlight.
“Where’s Isabel?”
“I don’t know, sweetie. I haven’t seen her. Mina came over this morning. They’ve been upstairs ever since.”
Madison laughed. She couldn’t control it; the sound poured out of her in light trills, as though she were an adult, a few drinks too deep at a cocktail party.
“That’s nice,” she said. “The important thing is that she comfort Mina right now. Let’s all remember that.”
“Madison,” Lily began. She was clearly hesitant and also, Madison could see with something like wonder, afraid. “I grew up, with my parents, in a certain—I never had a problem with the way I grew up. But then I got to college, and I was surrounded by all these other girls who had such, such different backgrounds. I wasn’t embarrassed, because of my parents, but, you know. I mean, they became a different thing for me. Not, like, a liability, but—”
“Lil,” Madison said, distaste on her tongue. “It’s fine.”
“No, I just want you to know. Obviously, I’ve never been through anything like whatever this is. Of course not. But I know that parents can be complicated. You know, your parents make decisions that affect you, but you don’t get to have a say, really, and I know that’s so hard. And in my family, really, we’ve had difficult things happen. And the important thing always in those situations is that you can all pull together, regardless.”
“Okay, that’s enough,” Madison said. This was beneath Lily; this would be blush worthy when Lily thought about it tomorrow. That she’d chosen this pep talk to offer, at this moment.
“All I meant is that there are much worse problems in the world. And your dad loves you.”
“Super,” Madison said. “Thanks very much.”
She could see Lily twitching, swallowing the admonishment, and she began to feel the new freedom, the bad behavior this might allow. No one, she realized, would deny her for a few days. She would become, for the adults in her life, evidence of all the potential damage still to come. Whatever she did, short of actual violence, would be considered “handling it so well.” She felt this awareness spreading through her, loosening the knotted muscles at her neck, cracking at her knuckles.
“Your father will be home soon,” Lily repeated, “and until then nothing is certain. Right?”