“He won’t be home.”
“Excuse me?”
“He’s not coming home. Not for a while. Don’t you remember September eleventh? He didn’t come home for days.”
“This is different.”
“Sure. Now he has a reason to feel ashamed.”
“Stop it, Madison.”
“I’m sorry, what? Are you going to defend him?”
“Mad, I know you’re upset, but pushing me to insult your father is not the way to go.”
“Sure,” Madison said, and she could feel the words gaining steam, sliding from their rails. She could feel herself approaching something she wouldn’t be able to retract. “I guess I just have to wait it out. It won’t be so hard, I would imagine, to get you to insult him down the road.”
Even through her clenched jaw, Lily smiled in amusement.
“Yeah? What’s down the road?”
“Well, you know. I’m sure he’s going to start firing people. My father doesn’t trust any of you anyway. He’s not going to want a bunch of random employees in and out of the house, leaking things to the city papers, whatever. And if he wants to fire you without paying you severance . . .”
“Stop it, Madison.”
“I think we both know he’ll find a way. So I mean, it’s not like you’ll have wasted these past eight years, really, but I’m sure it’ll feel sort of—”
The slap was so quick, so unexpected, that the sting on her cheek almost felt as if it had come from within, as if something inside Madison’s mouth had pierced right through her cheek. She put one hand to the spot on her face. When she looked up, Lily sat thrown back against the opposite arm of the couch as though she’d been the one slapped, one hand covering her mouth. Madison saw the tears welling at the corners of Lily’s eyes and felt a sudden and roiling disgust, the way she had for the trader on the news. If she wasn’t crying, daughter of the downfall, then surely the rest of them could hold it together.
“Stop,” she said, and Lily looked up at her in horror.
“Excuse me?”
“Just, stop. Please don’t cry. This day is going to be hard enough.”
Lily looked around the room, as though there might be someone else on the receiving end of Madison’s reproach, and then laughed, once. She put both hands to her cheeks and swept the tears from her face.
“All right.” Her voice was testy, long-suffering, and yet it was cool again, deferential. They’d both slid back into place. Madison moved closer to her on the sofa.
“Other girls would try to get you fired for that,” she said.
Lily inhaled long and hard, so Madison could hear her breath skittering around inside her chest.
“Yeah,” she said. “Be that as it may, listen to me, Madison. You don’t know what happened, and you don’t know what your father did or didn’t do. But you are his family, and once you turn on him, that’s it. You have to believe him even when no one else does. Are you listening to me? You have to tell the same stories, even when everyone questions them.”
Madison curled her feet beneath her on the sofa cushion. The actual pain in Lily’s voice, the foundation of anger beneath it, had bent Madison’s rage back on itself. She knew, the way she’d sometimes see that her father’s associates knew, even in the midst of having tied one on in a bad, bad way. She could feel the next wave of sick remorse that awaited her. She knew that the panic would recede, and that she’d feel terrible for having spoken this way to Lily. But it was too late, she thought. Lily’s seen, now, that I have these thoughts somewhere in my brain.
She’d never thought of herself as someone who would be a brat in a crisis. She’d always imagined she’d be a rock, in a crisis, be like her mother. But apparently that wasn’t the case.
“Everyone’s going to take their cues from you. You walk through school like it’s any other day, your father comes home tonight like he does every Monday. They won’t be getting any blood when they bite, and they’ll move on. Maybe the whole thing itself won’t blow over, but they’ll stay away from you. This isn’t any more familiar to them than it is to us.”
Madison wondered, with a pop of clarity like a camera’s flash, whether Chip had seen the news.
“I’m fine,” she said. “I’ll go sit with the boys, but I don’t want to eat.”
Lily nodded, and they stood up.
“I guarantee you,” Lily said. “Everyone at school is still going to be watching to see what you do first.”
LATER, WHEN LILY LINED THEM UP by the front door for inspection, she grabbed Madison’s wrist. For such a small woman, Lily was possessed of surprising strength, her fingers like wire around Madison’s bony forearms. Madison let her body go limp; she’s forgiving me, she thought, and waited for Lily’s mouth pressed to her temple, her hands on her hair, for the wordless clemency of a kiss. They didn’t hug each other as often as they had when Madison was younger, but Lily still always knew when it was the right moment for it.
But Lily held her there, for a moment, and did not embrace her. Finally she took two fingers and pinched a strand of Madison’s hair.
“You had something,” she said. “A crumb, or a leaf or something.”
They both shook themselves away from each other, the same way they’d brush rain from wet clothes, and followed the boys out to the car.
EIGHT
Well, you know, he hasn’t even come home yet.” Mina wedged her BlackBerry between her shoulder and her ear. She finished potting the basil plant she’d bought that morning and carried it into her office off the kitchen, the room with the best light.
“He hasn’t been home yet, and it’s been three days. And I will tell you, because I can’t tell anyone else—she’s been a wreck, Dee. An absolute wreck.”
Her sister Denise had met Isabel only once, when she’d spent the day in Greenwich and Isabel had stopped by to loan Mina an evening gown, but she’d been hearing about the woman for years.
“Well fine, tell me more. When you say wreck, we’re talking . . . crying? Broken glass? Or just staying in bed all day? This is great! Keep going.”
Mina sat down at the kitchen table. This was only her sister. Dee would tell her friends over white wine at her divorcée book club out on Long Island and none of them would have more than a vague idea who she was even talking about. It would never make its way back to Isabel, Mina told herself. It was only betrayal to say something to someone out here, in all the places she passed through each day. It was only betrayal if you got caught.
Besides, it was too irresistible, the way Denise would hear this. The most dramatic thing happening in the country this week, and Mina was in charge.