“I’m sick of it,” he said. “When I get out of the car in the morning, and see the building, I can’t stand the sight of it. I don’t want to walk in. I don’t want to get into the elevator.”
“Sweetheart,” Mina said, lowering her face to his, brushing his temple with her lips. She felt him shudder, involuntary. “We don’t have that luxury.”
“He gets to just disappear,” Tom murmured. “They should make him show up in my place every day, and explain to my team what’s going on. That should be his penance. He should go from firm to firm.”
She imagined them, her husband’s hands tensed like claws and Bob’s crisp white shirt wilted into his lower back with anxious sweat. Bob’s head lowered in docile acceptance, letting her husband hurl everything at him, every piece of fear sharpened into fury, like shards of glass. She couldn’t picture it; she couldn’t imagine Bob, even now, so broken.
She knew Isabel was still waiting for it, because she was still waiting, too. For the last piece of information to fall into place, for the final card to land without the house falling. The proof, for every prying eye, that Bob had done his best, had really tried.
She said none of it out loud, of course, and they sat in silence. She could feel Tom shifting toward her, and she knew that in a few minutes they’d go upstairs, that her husband wanted to have sex with her. But in the meantime, they sat together and didn’t drink their drinks, and looked out at the pool they couldn’t see.
AFTER HE’D FALLEN ASLEEP, she decided to call her daughter. She could hear him even from their sitting room, his rasping punctured only every few minutes by a violent attempt to snore. She knew he had that apnea problem, he should probably be one of those men wearing a mask to sleep, but she couldn’t even get him to go in for a consult to discuss it.
It would make more sense to go downstairs, where there was no chance he’d hear her, and where beyond that she had some tidying to do. The house still had to be closed down, everything turned off, darkened. But he’d been so sweet to her all night, so unlike the barking, quivering man he’d been all month, and now she didn’t want to leave him, even his unaware sleeping body. She wanted to stay where she could see him, listen to his fragile breath, think about the nice evening they’d had together.
Jaime’s cell phone, as it almost always did, went straight to voice mail.
“Honey,” Mina whispered into the phone, craning her neck to peer out at the back lawn and at the distant lights from next door, where there appeared to be a party of some sort. There were orange lanterns strung through the trees back beyond Mina’s tennis court. “Jaime, babe, it’s me. I’m sure you’re out or something, I just called to see what your costume was. I was thinking of that year you were Dorothy, do you remember? And Isabel had all the kids over to their house, and as soon as we got there, I realized you weren’t just in a bad mood, you were running a fever.”
It had been another brutal Halloween, with Isabel insisting that they didn’t have to leave, Jaime could just lie down in one of the guest bedrooms, don’t worry, Lily had every possible fever reducer and homeopathic remedy on hand. Just let her sleep there until you want to go home, Isabel had repeated, over and over. But Jaime had refused to be shunted quietly into some abandoned corner upstairs, and she had cried in big gulping sobs as Mina tried to explain that she couldn’t bob for apples with everyone else, that she would contaminate the water.
“Anyway,” she said into the phone, putting some sort of faith in the fact that her daughter would listen to this message, “you know how I love Halloween. I was just wondering what you dressed as tonight. You would have thought it might be quieter here, this year, but actually we had more kids come up to the house than usual. And the costumes—just as bad as ever. There was a little girl dressed as Britney Spears, or something. You would have been horrified, babe.”
She rambled into the phone for a few more minutes before hanging up, feeling—as ever—that she’d been vaguely traitorous to her husband, her daughter, her sister, and her town, all at once, equally.
EIGHTEEN
The second Welsh gate had already shuddered behind her when the car’s headlights slid across her body, and Madison recognized Jake Levins’s Volkswagen. She could see his face, his body hunched like a turtle over the steering wheel, and that was how she knew that he surely had seen her standing there.
What possible reason could he have for being here?
“Jake!” she yelled, cupping her hands to her mouth. “Jake! Stop!”
The car pulled away from the house, disappeared smoothly down the drive.
“You’re a dick,” she called after the car, her voice useless. She kicked a cobblestone and narrowly avoided getting a stiletto heel caught in a groove. She told herself he’d heard her, and turned back to the house.
It leered up before you as you crested the hill, its upper stories dark above the ponderous sconces that festooned the ground-level facade. A fountain sat, unapologetic, in the middle of the courtyard, bottom-lit a garish green color, its water arcing in four directions. She marched past it, her shoes already rubbing raw circles into the soft parts of her feet; they didn’t fit.
She’d stolen them from Isabel’s closet while her mother was still locked in her office downstairs. She’d even put them on and worn them out of the house, the heels making curt little sounds on the floor as she passed her mother’s door, but no one had said a word. No one had shown any interest in her whereabouts, even, except Lily.
“I’m not a chauffeur,” she’d said when Madison begged to be dropped off at the bottom of the hill. “I’ll drive you up there and wave to the adult you say will be supervising this whole thing.”
Madison had almost replied that, technically speaking, chauffeur was one of Lily’s jobs. But the last time she’d spoken to Lily that way, she’d gotten a quick slap to the cheek. And it felt like she should pick and choose those occasions. Save them for when she really needed them. These minor furies would choke her, not strangle her.
“You know the rules as well as I do. I could get your mother involved, but do we even need to do that? Don’t we both know where she’d come down on this issue?”
“Be my guest, Lily. Seriously. Here—take my phone. Give her a call.”
And they’d both stared at the cell phone extended between them.
Now, Madison was here, standing at Wyatt’s front door because Chip had convinced her to come to this party. She rang the doorbell and prepared to smile.
“Good evening,” said the small woman who answered. She wore a uniform, something that looked like hospital scrubs but slightly less antiseptic.
“I’m so sorry,” she said. “I’m—my name is Madison D’Amico. I’m looking for Wyatt?”
She told herself she’d imagined it, that the woman’s eyes hadn’t flickered when she heard the name.