Lily sighed, stretching her body from her toes, then curled herself closer to the banister. She wrapped her fingers around the cool wood, its curves shapely, almost feminine. She knew, of course, the real reason Isabel was so upset by his absence. Bob D’Amico didn’t do any more to raise these children than the man who came to clean the pool filters, and Isabel didn’t need his help. It was the apartment in the city. It was his presence there on the nights he was expected home, in Connecticut, his presence there now. It was his refusal to draw himself over the lives of his family, his disinterest in crawling into bed with Isabel, resting his head on her chest, listening to the sound of her breathing. That he’d chosen to be alone. After all this, all this time they’d been married and she’d been working for them, and one thing Lily would not have guessed about Isabel was that this surely illusory part of marriage was what mattered to her in her own.
When Lily heard the noises from downstairs they were not what she’d been expecting. She’d been waiting either for Isabel to return alone—this, in truth, had seemed most likely—or for the stately rustlings that usually announced their arrival home together, the sounds of keys hitting porcelain trays and wooden hangers knocking together in the concealed closet in the foyer. The tiny noises that seemed so loud and obtrusive when you realized that they signified two bodies, the owners of which weren’t speaking to each other much.
There had been one night when she’d asked for some time to go into the city to see a cousin’s graduation from Hunter, but had come back on the Metro-North and taken a cab to the house rather than stay over with her parents. She’d relieved the housekeeper, who had agreed to stay to put the children to bed, and had been reading in the kitchen when they came home. They must have assumed that Lena, an older Ukrainian woman who inhaled with guttural sounds and sighed in a falsetto whenever the twins did anything even a tiny bit rowdy, would be dozing already. Lily had heard the door slam harder than usual, heard a body thrown against it with unmistakable force. She was on her feet, moving toward the foyer, before she heard the rumblings of Bob’s voice, Isabel’s hissed replies, and realized that the words she was hearing were charged with erotic challenge and not malice or violence. She’d hovered there in the doorway for a second, more, longer than she would ever admit, before tiptoeing backward through the kitchen and sliding out through the mud room.
That might, in the end, be an ideal marriage, she’d thought then. Leave each other in peace, except for the days when you can’t keep your hands off each other.
“Bob, please,” she heard from downstairs. She crouched on the steps like a runner awaiting the starting pistol. There was a loud thud, some sizable mass hitting the floor, and she knew that whatever was happening would not be managed by Isabel alone.
But Jackson was wrong, she did listen to him, and she knew what he would say. Don’t see anything. Wait until they’ve forgotten you’re there, then listen.
The next sound, the clatter of something sliding from the table in the foyer, was loud enough that the boys might have heard it, and so Lily stood. She tried to jog down the stairs with brisk intent, the way she would on any other day, attending to any other task, and when she came into the foyer and saw them she kept her face neutral.
Isabel stood helpless above him, the front door still open behind her. Bob was splayed across the floor, twisted like he’d begun to flop himself over before thinking better of it. He had also knocked over the antique wooden table that stood beneath the mirror, its legs split like branches snapped for kindling. Lily had an absurd image, suddenly, of Bob D’Amico locking them in, barricading the house against outside intrusions. They could do this to all the furniture, tear it to pieces, feed the fireplace, wrap the children in blankets and teach them to survive without the world beyond their parents.
“Lily,” Isabel was saying, “I need your help. Just help me get him standing. I can get him upstairs, just help me get him off the floor.”
Isabel didn’t seem surprised to see Lily, didn’t seem caught off guard or overwhelmed with gratitude to see that her nanny had waited up. Lily swallowed the taste of something sour, but she didn’t move. She didn’t begin to help.
Bob rolled over onto his back, his knees pointing at the ceiling, and tried to lift himself up off the floor. It was threatening, almost, to see so much energy left dormant, like an exquisite gourmet summer meal left out to spoil in the sun, the cheeses growing sweaty skins, the salad greens wilting. His meaty upper arms, straining at the white dress shirt, looked more frightening now than they ever had in action. She was used to them flexing at intervals during even the most casual conversation, his hands in his pockets. She couldn’t look at anything else, now; he was mewling there, on the ground, and all she could notice were his huge arms, the dark hairs on his knuckles. His thighs giant and tubular, clad uncomfortably in the silk legs of his trousers. The sickly, jaundiced-looking exposed strip of skin just above the top of his diamond-patterned socks. He’d always looked a bit off in the uniform, though, like he belonged in a wrestling singlet rather than formal attire. That wasn’t because of what was going on right now. He’d always looked that way.
Why was he wearing a suit? Where had Isabel even found him?
“Jesus, Lily, help me!” Isabel barked.
“I’ll never know,” Bob was howling. “I’ll never get it, not when they put me in the ground. They’ll fucking bury me and I still won’t understand why they let this happen to me.”
This was private. Lily shouldn’t be here, she did not want to go to them. She’d seen him drunk and jovial, drunk and vicious, they all had. But she’d never seen this and she couldn’t be certain that some part of this wouldn’t be preserved somewhere in some tiny, well-lit room in that black-out-curtained brain, that he wouldn’t hate her the next time he saw her. She had never been afraid of Bob D’Amico before—nervous, anxious, but not afraid. But she watched him lift one leg and then let the foot drop to the ground, watched him keening like an injured animal, and she saw that he no longer had any reason to go along with anything, to tolerate any presence in his life that would remind him of any of these moments.
Why had Isabel brought him home like this? Her daughter was upstairs, the teenager with frown lines like a middle-aged woman, her shoulders perpetually stiffened lately, as if they were her only protection. The boys, the way they clutched each other in sleep every night. What about this man looked like something you’d want to bring into your home, the place where your children slept?
“Lily!” Isabel actually snapped her fingers. “Get over here. Please.” She was back on her knees, trying to pull Bob up by his armpits. She gave up, letting him fall back to the floor, and clambered so that she was on top of him, straddling his body, holding down his pinwheeling arms.
Lily watched Isabel again try to lift her husband. What did you expect? she thought, and it was no longer just the moment, the act of bringing him home. Isabel had made a choice, sometime long before Madison, before the boys. She’d chosen him, and shouldn’t this have been part of it, whatever she expected? Lily saw Isabel’s humiliation, saw her futility, and she knew she should feel something closer to Isabel’s pain. But all she could think was that Isabel had made some egregious error, long ago, and that now Lily and the children she cared for were going to be made to pay for it.