There was a low hum, an energy, in the room that Madison took for the sound of her own blood in her veins. But of course it was only the bathtub, the steady rising fall of water cascading from the faucet. Her mother was drawing a bath.
It wasn’t really snooping; she passed the bedside table on her way to the bathroom door. It was easy to imagine that the bottle, glowing burnt orange with its own secrets, had caught her eye from across the room. It was a bigger bottle, not the smaller one her mother’s Ambien was usually kept in, and it was lying on its side, the cap next to it, as though her mother had torn it open in a hurry and then cast it away from her. It was Mina’s name, on the bottle. The drug’s name was an unfamiliar one, and Madison both read it and did not. She filed it away between the same folds of her brain that had swallowed every word Jake Levins had written about her family that week.
She looked again at the bed, at the myriad pillows piled up for no one, but this time she could see the slight impression where her mother had curled her body, night after night, without disturbing the sheets.
It was possible that the bottle was lying there because Isabel had decided not to take anything. It was absolutely possible, and if her mother had chosen not to take these pills, that meant that she was coming out of it, recovering. That she would be not only prepared to talk to Madison, but probably wanted to. She might even have made noise downstairs on purpose. She must be hoping for just this moment, for Madison’s knuckles against the white paneled bathroom door, tucked discreetly into the bedroom wall.
The water didn’t shut off after her first knock, but she could have sworn that she heard her mother’s motions cease—whatever she’d been doing, whatever lotions or salt rubs she’d applied to her own body before lowering it into the hot water, stopped. Madison could hear her mother trying not to be heard. She knocked again. The water shut off.
“Who is it? Lily?”
“No, it’s—it’s me. I just wanted to make sure everything was okay. I heard a noise from the kitchen.”
“Jesus, you scared me. Did I wake you?”
“I just wanted to make sure everything was okay,” Madison repeated. She heard a gentle sound, the displaced water lapping against the edge of the tub. Her mother had climbed the steps that led up to the sunken Jacuzzi tub, and now she was in. Which could, technically, be an invitation. It definitely wasn’t the usual deflection.
“I don’t want to bother you.”
“Well, Madison, I’m not going to beg you to come in.”
Her mother almost never invited her into this room. They were both, it often felt, still treating it as the violated sanctum it had been when Madison was eight years old and Isabel had found her perched on the vanity, tubes of lipstick scattered at her feet, her hands pressed to the mirrored cabinet and her bare toes curled over the edge of the sink. Isabel had plucked her from the mirror like an errant ball of lint caught in the sleeve of her Barbour jacket.
Every surface in the room was reminiscent of a pearl: opal-toned marble, gauzy mint green curtains, pale pink towels, and numerous iridescent bottles and tubes and pots of velvety lotions.
To the right, a door led to her father’s bathroom. In there it was different, everything dark wood, her father’s effort to transport himself to the house in Sun Valley for his daily lather and shave. When she was smaller, he’d regularly let her curl up in the empty bathtub to watch him while he shaved, and even in summers she’d close her eyes and pretend it was snowing outside, that they’d been snowed in together. That he wasn’t leaving. That there was no one else on earth who needed his time any more than she did, no one else to whom he’d made any real promises.
Isabel was lying with her head cradled against the far corner of the tub, the rest of her submerged completely beneath the bubbles. Her eyes were closed.
“Come sit with me for a bit,” she said. “Everything’s fine.”
Madison leaned back against the wall.
“How has school been?” her mother said.
None of her teachers had said anything specific yet. In Trig she’d seen Mr. Warren try to catch her eye a few times, just after dismissal. He always looked so young when he tried to stand at the front of the room and give them all some command. His dirty blond curls looked perpetually shower damp, cropped short and beaten into submission. His cheeks were flushed and clammy, his short-sleeved button-down surely clinging to the part of his back just between his shoulder blades. He was in a band with a few of the other math teachers; she knew that about him. She also knew, just from the way he shifted his weight from foot to foot when he wrote the answers to their homework on the board, that he hadn’t grown up any place like her part of Greenwich. And so she always wondered what he thought of them, his students. The blithe way they tumbled into each minute of the future, the way their hands curled instinctively around the screens of their iPhones, the sparkling BMWs in the senior parking lot. She had wondered these things even before, about Mr. Warren, even during that first week of school in September. She thought about things like this, even if everyone around her assumed that she didn’t.
“None of my teachers have mentioned it,” was all she said. Isabel nodded.
“You haven’t been sleeping a lot, have you?” Madison said. “I’ve been seeing your coffee mugs downstairs, sometimes. When Lily doesn’t get to them first.”
“Should I have been hiding them from you?” Isabel’s eyes remained closed but she let her hand flutter through the air above her.
“I didn’t mean—”
“Well, you know, I wouldn’t allow this if I didn’t know Lily was capable. She’s beyond capable. I mean the boys are more comfortable with her than they are with me, aren’t they?”
“No,” Madison said, because her mother’s eyes were still closed, and what other reply could she possibly give?
“You never did that. But then of course you were older by the time we’d hired real full-time help. When you were small, I guess I was all you had.”
The words were strange, altered; they sounded like they’d made their way all around Isabel’s mouth by the time they hit the air. Still; her mother never talked about what it had been like, when Madison was a baby.
“I don’t remember that,” Madison said. She didn’t think it was true that they hadn’t yet had full-time help when she was a baby.