Madison knew, during this time, that a story was being built up around her. She knew it was far more than the boys at school, their hissing insults, their jokes coughed into cupped hands. She knew that her life was becoming a communal possession, shaped by the world lying in wait beyond the assaulted borders of her own daily routines.
This had always been true, she’d always needed an awareness of what her life looked like from the outside in. But now, every small detail was potentially treacherous. The empty bottles shimmering green and blue in the hallway outside her father’s study, waiting with frankness for Lily to dispose of them each morning. The glossy black sedans that waited at the foot of the drive each day to follow their car to school, unobtrusive and unmentioned. The cigar ash left in tiny piles by the pool, just next to the diving board. Madison’s home was now populated by people and things whose presences were not to be mentioned. There was no longer any such thing as blissful inattention; each day took on an unfamiliar and unsettling sheen of its own. Everything she chose not to acknowledge remained background, sparkling at the edges of her consciousness, no sooner identified than it disappeared.
She might have asked Lily, a year ago, what she thought about this. But Lily, since the morning they’d heard the first news, spoke to her with deference and caution and even, sometimes, joking irreverence for the overall mood. But never with candor, and never with warmth.
And so it seemed even more important that Madison’s behavior not go unnoticed by her mother. During those first few weeks after he came home, she wasn’t always sure of what she needed to survive, to keep up that illusion of forward motion, to match her mother’s stride. She simply did it, tried to, in such a way—she liked to think later—that her mother must have noticed, that must have made Isabel proud.
SIXTEEN
Amanda couldn’t believe she was going to this Halloween party.
The previous afternoon, by the lockers, Zo? Barker had seemed actually to displace the air around them as she approached, sending it swirling past in coconut-scented eddies. Amanda could never tell if the fragrant cloud that seemed always to surround Zo? was her perfume, or something more innate, something that resided in her skin.
Amanda should have slammed the locker door and hurried down to the pool, because she knew exactly why Zo? was coming toward her. But she was, as ever, just a few seconds too slow to figure out her own life.
“Hi! Do you have plans tomorrow? For Halloween?”
“I’m not a big Halloween person,” Amanda said. Which was true, but the truer truth was that she hadn’t been asked, by anyone, to do anything. She liked the other girls on the swim team, but they mostly respected one another, urged one another on during meets, then said cheerful good-byes and went their separate ways. She’d had no new plan in place when she’d set Madison aside that summer.
“You don’t seem like a costume person, either.”
“Nope.”
“Well, Wyatt is having a party,” Zo? had said. “Wyatt Welsh.”
“I know who Wyatt is.”
Zo? smiled and let her eyes drift slowly beyond Amanda, to consider each successive group of people walking toward them. You had to admire her, that unruffled acceptance of her opponent’s flint. Amanda could see the appeal, in its way. If you could only keep this girl on your side, she’d frighten so many other, lesser threats away from you.
“Actually, Madison’s coming. I just thought, you know, she might be more comfortable with you there.”
She’d left it there between them, Madison’s name, like a poker chip on the green felt.
So now, like some total idiot, Amanda was in the front seat of her father’s car. She was wearing a Peter Pan costume she’d imagined as clever and effortless, a clear rebuke to all the girls who used Halloween as an excuse to wear lingerie in public. Instead, she feared, she looked like an overgrown (and pudgy and possibly male) elf.
Her mother had agreed to give her a ride, but had then, at the last minute, tagged her father into the game. It was such a transparent move that Amanda had to admire her mother’s guts, Lori not usually known for being either ballsy or manipulative. They were just such a team, her parents. It was its own form of showing off, really, their constant united front.
He said nothing for the first ten minutes, not until they were driving up into the quieter, winding roads. It got so dark up here, this time of night, this time of year. Usually she found it silly, that people in Greenwich still wanted to act like they lived in the country. But when you were coming around one of these darkened curves, beneath someone’s gray stone wall, it’s true you could forget this was basically a suburb of lower Manhattan.
“Which one is that party Suzanne always throws?” her father asked suddenly.
“The Bruce Museum benefit,” she said. “It’s always in April or something.”
“That’s right. Your mother was wondering.”
“Tell her not to worry,” Amanda said, snorting. “I’m just going to this one party, no need for us to make friends with the Wicked Witch of the Welsh.”
“You know your mother,” her father said, running his hands along the steering wheel. “She likes to have all the information.”
“Even on people she doesn’t actually care about?”
“Well,” Jake said, and Amanda could sense him settling in, could sense what he’d been waiting to discuss. “I’ve tried to explain this to you before. You don’t understand what it would have been like, growing up in her parents’ house. They were both the sole survivors from their families. When they met they became all and everything the other one had.”
“I know all of this,” Amanda said, smoothing her green skirt across her thighs. They were almost to the house.
“No,” he said, his voice flaring, “you don’t.” It was as sharp as his voice ever got, especially since they weren’t even discussing Bob D’Amico or his cronies.
Which, though, they somehow always were.
“You’re always terrified something will pass you by. It makes you desperate to know who has what, so you can keep yourself close to the person who’s going to be able to help you. If it ever happened again. You cling to that idea.”
“What idea?”
“Influence,” he said. “Just, influence. You have to be able to get out right away if there’s ever trouble, before it even starts. So you have to know the people who will know when trouble is coming.”
She didn’t say anything for a minute; the car stayed dark between them. He was wrong. He hadn’t said any of this to her before.
“Then why would she marry you?”
She saw a flash of tooth, where his face was in shadow, and knew that her father was smiling.
“I’m not saying your mother always agrees with my tactics,” he said. “But this is my job, Amanda. That’s what I’ve been trying to get through to you. Your mother understands, it’s my job.”
“Good for her,” Amanda said. “And good for you, I guess.”