She tried to read it without taking it in, her eyes glancing off each word like a stone skipping along the surface of a lake. But of course she could guess, without reading the next paragraph in detail, whom Jake would decide to blame.
Bob D’Amico and his erstwhile buddy, Jim McGinniss. Erica Leary, the CFO they hired and fired within the same year. The Big Three. But the only one who should have been in the driver’s seat was Bob D’Amico. He’s Wall Street’s longest-running CEO; whether he likes it or not, his name is synonymous with the name Weiss & Partners. And as an article in the Times put it, Weiss is now the Roach Motel—its investors checked in, but they can’t check out. This will spread to the hedge funds, even if they’re not suffering yet. They’re going to have some bank runs of their own, and they’ll have to raise cash with fire sales of their assets. And what of D’Amico himself, the King of the Cockroaches? Did he scramble his way out of that car before it went over that cliff? Or will he have to answer, in court, for his crimes?
Where did the term “fire sale” come from, she wondered. Was the idea that there had been a fire, and you were capitalizing on it to sell things to the people who had suffered? Who was the injured party, during a fire sale?
But something about thinking that way, about her idle wondering, began to pour itself into the contours of what she’d read in Jake’s column in an unpleasant way. Thinking in those terms: blame, indictment, exploitation, exposure. She swallowed hard and crossed her legs. The newsprint had rubbed off on her elbows and fingertips. Her laptop had disappeared without comment from her bedroom last week, and Lily had said nothing since. The only other way to get online in the house—and Madison’s tongue went dry at the thought of someone seeing her reading any of this in the computer lab at school—was the family computer in the den, which was far too exposed during the regular flow and shuffle of breakfast time. But she needed to read in the morning; she needed to know what everyone at school would have seen on their breakfast table. And so she’d woken early, just as she had the day before, to swipe the newspaper from the foyer before Lily had time to hide it.
What about the fact that Jake knew Bob D’Amico personally? Shouldn’t he have been compelled to say, I despise this man and always have, read on with a grain of salt at hand? Why were her father’s flaws the only ones worthy of examination?
She opened the newspaper and read the column again.
MONDAY SLUICED PAST HER, just as each day had in the previous week. She woke up an hour before her alarm, snatched the newspaper, sat with her brothers at breakfast. She avoided Lily’s eye in the car. She went to class; she hid when she glimpsed Amanda at the other end of a clogged hallway. She came home, stole a few minutes at the computer whenever she could read what the Internet had to say about her father.
Other than brief glimpses upstairs, she had not seen her mother at all. It had still only been one week.
SHE WOKE UP IN HER BEDROOM, its familiar dark shapes all around her. It clearly wasn’t Tuesday morning yet, but she didn’t move to consult the clock on her bedside table, an ornate, gold-leafed behemoth her father had brought home on a red-eye from Milan. Isabel’s first reaction had been that the clock was “a bit much,” but Madison loved it, its bedside authority, its curlicues unfurling like the wings of a golden owl.
From across the room, she could see her phone’s shrill red blink. Most likely that was another mealymouthed text apology from Wyatt Welsh, meant to cover the most recent time he’d insulted her father while she stood within earshot. Today, it had been in the cafeteria, while she paid for her paper carton of tomatoes and lettuce drizzled in vinegar. Someone from school must have mentioned it to a parent, who would have called Wyatt’s house to chide his mother in a velvety whisper, because the two apology texts she’d received from him already were so clearly dictated to him that Suzanne might as well have sent them from her own phone. Which was worse, derision or the deflection of selfish fear? At least Wyatt made his thoughts known, with little remorse other than what was foisted on him by his mother. But Suzanne was so desperate for her condescension not to occur in the daylight, where others could see. She wanted permission to brag about the son she envisioned, wanted to wipe any evidence of a lesser, crueler person from the record. It was almost charming, in its way, so naive. You had to pity Suzanne, really. The woman didn’t even know where her own weak spots were.
Madison sat up, straining to hear whether someone was in the kitchen. Her bedroom was separated from the other parts of the second story by a hallway of its own, and noise floated up via odd channels, the house’s unexpected currents. On the nights when the kitchen became headquarters for a real party, an actual event that required the French doors be thrown open so that guests could overflow out to the lawn, Madison might track the course of the evening without leaving her bed. She would hear mostly the afterthoughts, all the accoutrements of the evening. The chimes of empty champagne glasses assembled on a tray, the suck and whoosh of four industrial ovens swallowing and then ejecting croquettes or risotto cups or, finally, the miniature chocolate passion fruit soufflés that Bob insisted on serving no matter what the meal’s theme. The smells, too, seeped up through the carpeting and filled her mouth with their oiliness, even though the food would surely smell amazing once it passed out into the party.
And the servers, she heard them, too, the grad students who covered their tattoo sleeves with tuxedo jackets, then sneaked out to the tiny enclosed courtyard off the kitchen for their pre-dessert-course cigarettes behind the hedge. Their wheezing laughter, their rasping whispers edgy but still timid. She couldn’t hear their words, just their boredom, their lip-biting frustrations.
Madison heard it, smelled it, all of it. When something happened down in the kitchen, it felt like she could decipher its import. She told herself that it was for this reason that she slid from bed, her feet sinking into the mossy carpet, and opened her door.
But then she was not downstairs, she was darting up to her parents’ wing of the house. She didn’t think about it any further. She didn’t care what was said, even, so long as someone—her mother—said it to her, said something out loud.
The fluffy sea-foam comforter on their bed was pulled so tight that small wrinkles stretched across its rounded surface, a voluptuous woman squeezed into a silk gown just a few sizes too small. Tiers of pillows in pearly shades bubbled up at the headboard, undisturbed. Madison knew that her mother hadn’t let anyone into this room for several days; no one was cleaning up. She just wasn’t sleeping in her bed.