She almost stayed where she was, hidden. She almost let them go without revealing herself. Even as she was acting, having already made the decision, Lily knew that it would be more loyal, better, to remain hidden. But she just couldn’t resist. She was not wired that way, and deep down, she didn’t really think Isabel was, either. She told herself she was considering her options and stooped to examine a bias-cut black dress, floor length. It felt lethal beneath her fingers. She wanted to whip it at them, the opposite of a white flag, but she settled for just waiting until they turned, then stepping out into their path.
Mina caught herself before her face changed, but she couldn’t control her limbs. Her arms retracted, clenched close to her body. Then she kept walking. All three women seemed to ignore the fact that they’d paused upon seeing Lily.
They’d slipped up. If nothing was wrong, then Mina would have waved, bustled over to embrace her. They’d be hoping, now, that she hadn’t overheard their conversation. But she had.
She watched Mina’s back as she disappeared down beneath the top of the escalator. The next time she shows up unannounced, Lily thought. The next time she tries to take a dish from me to carry in to the kids, or act like I don’t know that she’s been trying to push her pills on Isabel. That I know she just wants to be indispensable, to anyone. She’ll remember this, the next time.
WHEN SHE GOT HOME that afternoon, she considered knocking at Isabel’s door, cheering her with the image of Suzanne Welsh’s face freezing, as if she’d just been told her husband had exposed himself on the dance floor at the annual Robin Hood Foundation gala.
But Lena had been waiting in the kitchen with a list of household questions, a lieutenant perturbed by the absence of her captain. Lily did her best to direct the woman, to remind her of which areas needed special attention, but she’d been shaky. Lena’s eyes widened as she saw that Lily was improvising here. That she’d no more been told what to do this week than anyone else had.
“I clean everything,” she said mournfully, before leaving the kitchen.
Lily turned, then, to dinner. She made the kids pasta Bolognese, something else she’d learned to cook during her first few months in Greenwich. Despite the mid-September air outside, she made it. Comfort food, something heavy and warm that would settle in your stomach. Something to push the dread somewhere else for a few hours.
“But if Mom’s sick, why is she still at home?” Matteo said after she’d called them in to eat. “She should go see the doctor. Is she just mad?”
“No one’s mad,” Lily said. “Didn’t I just tell you that?”
“I cleaned my whole room,” Luke said. “If I go knock, I could show her. I put everything away in all its drawers.”
“No one’s mad at you for not cleaning your room,” Lily said again. “No one’s angry at all.”
“You get mad at us all the time for not cleaning our rooms,” Matteo said pointedly, tilting his head and widening his eyes so that he appeared to be giving the fish eye to his bowl of pasta.
“Okay,” Lily said, “enough. Enough! How many times do I have to answer the same questions from you two?”
She pushed her chair back from the table, and both boys looked up in suspended amazement. Matteo held his fork in the air like an offering he’d hoped to surrender.
“We only asked one,” he grumbled. Luke looked from his brother to his nanny with poorly concealed terror. Matteo considered his food with distaste, but in another moment he was humming. She knew he’d begin eating again soon, and that his brother would follow.
“I’m sorry I yelled,” she said, but they’d both sealed their outrage and moved on without waiting for her to beg their forgiveness. The boys were like this; maybe all small children were. They didn’t appear to hold anything against you, they moved through a world that was always the present tense, always shifting around them as if it were a rotating backdrop on a stage set. But once they’d been hurt by something, the hurt remained forever enshrined in the past tense. You could not heal it, once they’d put it away.
She thought again of Mina’s face that afternoon. Lily could tell the woman was just dying for someone to confirm her place in Isabel’s inner circle, to give her a clandestine wink so they could all draw a clearer line between “us” and “them.” And it had been obvious all week that Mina was afraid of Lily. As she bustled in and out, uninvited, with her trays of prepared salads from Aux Delices, her pastry boxes. As if anyone in this house was eating junk food!
Luke let out a muffled gurgle, his mouth full, and Lily turned to look behind her. Madison was standing there, her body slouched against the door frame.
There was something sinister to Madison’s new awareness of her body these past few months, as though she’d been told by an outside source that she was now at the age when boys would notice what her skin smelled like and whether she led with her hips when she walked. Watching her negotiate the things she hadn’t had before—her coltish legs; the high, insistent globes of her newly rounded ass; the breasts that as far as Lily could tell had sprouted quite literally overnight—felt like watching a child finger a weapon.
It was always running, now, in the back of Lily’s mind—even when she decided not to listen to it, the way she’d sometimes doze on the train in the city but still startle awake for her own stop. The same thought: that the boys were fragile, yes, but Madison was volatile, like something that needed to be kept in a test tube and stored in a safe. That if this had happened when Lily was fifteen, she would have swallowed anything that was handed to her, pressed herself against the first boy who offered, gotten as naked as she could as quickly as she could just to feel another kind of pain.
And yet when she’d slapped Madison’s cheek, it had felt soft and barely able to hold itself together, like the fragile skin that forms on the surface of warmed milk.
“You hungry?” she said. Madison shrugged, and Lily waved a spoon back toward the table.
“Sit down, I’ll bring it to you.”
“I’m fine.”
“Proper meals are important,” Lily replied, hating herself even before she’d spoken. “Even when things are messed up. Especially then. Come on. Do me a favor.”
These children had never been confused about her, living in their house, cooking their meals. It was something she was proud of, actually. That she managed to live between the two states of being that rendered the quasi-familial roles of so many others in her position so miserable and awkward. They never saw her as a relative or a friend; their father paid her salary, and as a result she was owed a certain respect. Lily saw the behavior of other children—bright-colored smoothies spilled intentionally on silken upholstery, food thrown at walls coated with paint as expensive as a weekend at a Manhattan hotel. All to punish the people their parents paid to teach them right from wrong. Not these kids. But it was now, asking this girl to “do me a favor,” that Lily felt, radiating from Madison, an unfiltered hatred so strong it seemed to take its seat with them at the table. Madison sat down and looked up in a mockery of expectation. Her silence picked at Lily’s skin.
“All right,” Lily said. “Starve yourself. See if I care.”
Madison turned to the boys.