“You know what’s next, Min.”
But Isabel said no more than that, and Mina did not reply. She didn’t know the answer; after all this time, she couldn’t say which things Isabel would mourn the most. She must care about all of it. Isabel couldn’t stand to live here, in this house of all houses, otherwise. But Mina didn’t think they were talking about MoMA or the apartments or sending the kids away, getting them out of Greenwich. Or even Congress, again. It’s something else, she thought. She’s going to say one of the words we don’t say. Prison, foreclosure. Divorce.
It’s our husbands, she thought. The spirit or the letter of their laws. It’s what our lives would look like, suddenly, without them.
There were so many things Isabel might be talking about, and the thought that Mina might reply as if she knew the answer, and be thinking of something that hadn’t yet occurred to Isabel, was a paralyzing one. And so she said nothing, and Isabel didn’t repeat her question. And even though they hadn’t actually discussed any of those more graphic harbingers of misfortune, even though Isabel had confided nothing, it was in this moment that Mina felt closer to her friend than she had in years, since those first years before this house behind them had been built.
After another few minutes of silence, it began to rain.
TWENTY
It seemed to Lily at first that coming home to find that woman in the house, and Mina Dawes swanning around like the mistress of ceremonies, would be a surprise so scattering that they’d lose the afternoon for good. Madison had already been sassy to the point of insolence for the entire ride home from school, despite the early dismissal for Thanksgiving. By the time they reached the house, it seemed like all Lily could hope for just to get Madison upstairs and into her room where she’d have no target but herself.
And then they came home to find Isabel acting as if the past two months had been imagined. Throwing her weight around, acting as if she’d never disappeared, never hidden away upstairs. Giving a tour of the house to a stranger.
It wasn’t good. Lily tried, at first, to convince Madison to sit down in the kitchen for a snack.
“We’ve got fresh strawberries,” she said. “Fruit salad?”
“No thank you,” Madison said. “Don’t you find it a little, like, disgusting, the way we just demand every kind of fruit or vegetable at any time of year? Zo? was just telling me about this. In her bio class, they were talking about genetically modified crops. It’s so pathetic, how we have to have whatever we want and don’t ever even think about the consequences.”
“I could even whip some heavy cream,” Lily continued, undeterred. “You can eat them with cream and brown sugar. We may be able to get them, ugly Americans and sinners that we are, for the rest of the winter, but they’ll be less juicy with every batch. I promise you that.”
Madison looked up at her, her face open, unwrapped by pure anxiety.
“Don’t make jokes like that,” Madison said. “I feel like we shouldn’t make jokes like that.”
Lily’s hands twisted with regret, then, at the words she’d chosen: sinful, ugly. She wanted to apologize, but she knew from these past few weeks with Madison that showing this teenage girl her soft underbelly would be a mistake. Even in capitulation, even during a moment of Madison’s own childish fear.
She sat down beside her at the table.
“You don’t have to watch what you say,” she said. “Not in front of me, and certainly not when you’re here at home. I understand you want to be careful when you’re out there, I don’t blame you. But you don’t need to worry when you’re here, okay?”
She could see Madison leaning in toward her, hungry for more. But since the morning of the slap, and again on the night of the Halloween party, Lily felt unsure of when and how Madison might choose to deploy her weapons. She turned away, and pretended not to see the way Madison put one finger to her sternum and held it there just for a second, as if to steady some heirloom left wobbling on its treacherous perch.
Lily washed the strawberries, making as much noise as she could, then told Madison she didn’t have to stay to eat them.
SHE WAS MIDWAY through dinner prep when Jackson called. During her work hours, which he knew he was never supposed to do, and to talk about the holiday weekend, which she’d already made clear she wouldn’t discuss further.
“I hear you,” he said. “I’ve been trying to hear you. But you haven’t been into the city in, like, a month.”
“I don’t think it’s been that long,” Lily said. “And I tried to explain this last night. I don’t want to be gone for the entire weekend, and if I don’t have the actual meal at my mother’s, with my family, you know that will be six months of a soap opera. They’re already furious that I don’t visit more.”
“We can go over there more often, too,” Jackson said, and they both held still and let the offer pass into polite, uncluttered silence.
He knew full well that she’d never ask him to do that. He’d visited with her once. Her mother had asked him not a single question, had snapped at him when he offered to help in the galley kitchen, then demanded to know why he looked so “perplexed” when he stood and watched, helpless, as she removed casserole dishes from the oven in a flurry.
Lily had known, even as they sat down to lunch, that she would not ask him to visit the apartment again. She knew he thought he was proving his own seriousness, as a man, by dating a girl who’d worked her way through the Ivy League, and that he’d been ever so slightly disappointed by the stability and self-possession of her family. He’d grown up in a perfectly unglamorous family, managing but far from comfortable, and he was the first one to go away to college. And he thought these facts nullified any differences between him and Lily’s family. But her mother saw those differences as fundamental; Lily couldn’t explain this to him. His father was a drunk and his mother was sleepwalking through her own life, and as long as he never called Pennsylvania to ask for money, they saw his decisions as entirely his own. She couldn’t explain to him, or chose not to, that her mother saw him as little more than the sum of his selfish, frivolous choices. Two Ivy League degrees so that he could be broke, writing mostly for the web, not even a “real journalist.” Always dressed like a slob. Always sponging off her hardworking daughter, a girl who—her mother still seemed convinced—had brilliance and clout in her future.
“I need to be back here by Friday night,” Lily said. “I’m sorry.”
“I’m not trying to be a dick. But you are far, far too loyal to these people. It’s getting delusional.”
“There aren’t degrees of loyalty,” she said. “That isn’t what that word means. You are loyal to someone or you aren’t.”
He said nothing.