“All I meant, when I said you must be glad not to be her. I just mean—I can’t imagine him doing that to her. To those kids.”
She made a soft sound in the back of her throat, a sound she knew Tom would interpret as gratitude, agreement. But she meant everything she’d said to him tonight. She believed, as strongly as anything else about this, that Bob had not done anything truly wrong. Because the man had his flaws, he was immature, he had an anger problem. But he wouldn’t put Isabel in danger. He might make her look foolish, but not craven, not vile.
Mina believed that more than she believed anything about her own marriage; this was what she couldn’t say.
“I just can’t see it,” Tom said. “Putting your wife through that. A real man doesn’t do that. Can you imagine what that girl’s been going through at the high school?”
“Oh, honey, they’re just teenagers.”
He didn’t answer. When Jaime had insisted that they let her apply to boarding schools, she’d given them dozens of reasons. More challenging academics. Learning to live away from home. Meeting people from other parts of the country. They’d known, all three of them, what the problem was. Jaime was frizzy haired and stocky limbed and hated makeup, hated group sports, described herself without bitterness or recrimination as someone who needed only one or two friends. She’d wanted out of Greenwich Prep, out of the home Tom had built for her. He’d never used the words betrayal, or rejection, but Mina knew how he felt.
“I could never put my girls through that,” Tom said again, his face buried in Mina’s shoulder.
“We know that,” she said, her lips brushing his ear. She had no certainty that Jaime did know that, but speaking up for herself was a privilege their daughter had relinquished when she left home at age fourteen, wasn’t it?
“Would you really have left me alone in here?” came her husband’s voice, small, sounding much farther away from her than he was. “Would you really have gotten another room?”
“I don’t know.”
Tom’s shoulders shook, and she realized that he was about to cry. She circled him tighter in her arms and braced herself against his sobs, flooded with gratitude, with a silly, swelled gratitude, for the man she’d just realized he wasn’t going to become.
“We’re all right, Tom. We’re okay. You said it yourself. It’s not over yet, but we’re okay.”
“You were right,” he whispered. His lips were so close to her ear that the sound of his voice tickled. He was smearing his tears across their cheeks, dampening the hair at her temple. “You were right. I’m sorry I screamed.”
He kept breathing beneath her arm, his body expanding and then receding, reliably, like an ocean tide coming close and then moving away. He was here.
“I was thinking today,” he said. “After you called. About the house. How we were thinking, maybe, we’d buy a house up here, even if we only meant to use it two or three times a year.”
She put her lips to his forehead again, thankful that he’d said “we,” thankful that they’d both been thinking of the same thing all afternoon.
“I’m sure all Bob can think of right now is how unfair, that this has happened to him and only to him. But it’s happening to all of us. We won’t be allowed to say any of the things we want out loud, not anymore.”
“You can say them to me,” Mina said.
“But I’m serious, Min. We have to be careful, for a while now. We’re okay, but we have to act as if we’ve lost something. They’re going to want us to decide that our life, our whole life, has been wrong.”
“You can say them to me,” she said again. His hand made its clumsy way across the comforter until it found hers, consumed it. His thick fingers dug into her palm, moving in such steady circles that she could tell he was unaware of the motion.
“I don’t understand what will happen,” he said. “If he belongs behind bars, I don’t know where they draw the line. We’ve all done exactly what we’re trained to do.”
“Stop.”
“It’s dumb luck, Mina. It was a flood that came and he was on the ground floor, and I just happened to be a few floors above him. If it comes back again and goes any higher, that could be us.”
“No,” she said. She heard her voice coming from deep in her chest, low and calm. “No, it couldn’t.”
Later, when his breathing had slowed, when she’d brought him first a glass of water and then a nip bottle of vodka, they shut off the lamp and turned to each other like children, wrapped tightly beneath the comforter. They clutched at each other’s shoulders, as if the bed were a swimming pool and they did not know how to swim, were afraid of drowning.
THIRTEEN
I don’t care,” Madison said. “I don’t care what we get. If it’s your treat, then that means you decide.”
The late-afternoon sunlight came angling through the Starbucks windows, hitting the scummy floor. It was amazing, she thought, how very much the same every single Starbucks was, no matter where you were. The women who streamed in and out of here all day buying their six-descriptor drinks wouldn’t be caught dead in any other place this haphazardly cleaned, this likely to be breeding a whole host of health violations. And yet here they were, lulled by the sameness and the acoustic guitar music. And, of course, the convenient location on its corner just across from the town hall, a corner every Greenwich mother passed by at least twice during her day.
Madison hated this Starbucks; she hated the way it always smelled, like burnt coffee beans and old egg sandwiches and baby wipes and air freshener. They shouldn’t use air freshener in places that served food. It was distasteful to her; she didn’t want to be here.
She kept her gaze squarely on Amanda. She even tried not to let her eyes catch on anyone else in the room.
“I don’t know,” Amanda said. “I feel like, it’s too muggy still for hot chocolate, but it’s October now and that’s what I want.”
“No one’s stopping you.”
Madison had avoided her best friend with dedication and precision for nearly three weeks now. But when school broke that Friday afternoon, Amanda cornered her at the lockers with such ferocious single-mindedness that Madison knew it would be easier to give in than to resist.