“I just don’t even think it’s about loyalty right now,” she continued. “We aren’t even there yet. I’m just trying to get them through each successive school day.”
“Okay,” he said. “Well, I would like to see you soon, if only to discuss what’s been happening. I am very concerned that you aren’t taking this seriously.”
“I take care of two eight-year-olds who haven’t slept a full night in two months. I’m taking it seriously.”
“You know what I mean,” he said, and kept talking. She thought ahead to what still remained to be done for the weekend. Isabel had rented a limo, for tomorrow, to take the kids into the city for the weekend. They did not know this yet. Bob was, as far as Lily knew, still asleep on the couch in his study. He’d been in there, this time, for nearly forty-eight hours straight. He’d taken breaks this week only to field incoming calls from his colleagues, other men she could only assume were ignoring their own wives and families, drinking themselves into their own specific bouts of paralytic grief. In the immediate weeks after his return, Lily had been told to ignore the phone, leave it off the hook for hours at a time, but that was no longer a feasible strategy. If Bob wanted to answer it, he was going to answer it. And his infantry wanted to commiserate. They wanted their Silverback.
“I was talking to some of the DealBook guys,” Jackson said. “That one guy just left, you know, to start his own site. You remember my friend Gabe? You met him that time at the Exley. He says it’s going to get uglier. They’re saying that when they really start going through the actual records, from Weiss, your guy is going to look incredibly—”
The phone didn’t beep through right in that moment, though that would have been so much tidier. In reality, Lily had to go on listening to her boyfriend’s halting cadences, the loud chewing of his Vietnamese sandwich in between grievances. It was several minutes before the other phone call gave her a graceful out.
“Someone’s on the other line,” she said, abandoning Jackson for a few moments, without warning.
“They filed for bankruptcy,” he was saying when she clicked back over. “So there’s going to have to be an actual investigation. He can’t just clap his hands and make it go away. And neither can you, Lil.”
She tried to picture Chip Abbott, who was on the other line. The Abbott family kept to themselves; she couldn’t remember the mother’s face, which meant she wasn’t one of the group that was always arrayed around Alexandra Barker, moving with her from room to room like her own personal storm cloud. When had Madison started dating Chip?
“I have to go,” she told Jackson. “There’s a boy on the phone for Madison.”
“You aren’t doing this on purpose, are you?” Jackson said. “Like, you’re not sticking around there thinking that you can use this to your advantage, down the road? Because I could get behind that, honestly. If there was at least a strategy. But you aren’t doing that, are you?”
TWENTY-ONE
What Madison hadn’t told her mother was that she’d already spoken to her father. Had encountered him several times since Halloween, in the kitchen, late at night. Just the two of them, always the unspoken agreement to pretend it was coincidental. He’d talk to her, ramble in long streams about people she’d never met. One night, he’d made them hot toddies and cooked soup. He told her one thing, then another, all these pieces of information stacking up somewhere inside her chest, like dollar bills.
The first time had been just a coincidence, though. She was relatively sure. She’d come inside, after Halloween, after Chip and Zo? and the silent cars down by the gate. Her father had been sitting in the kitchen. Not waiting for her, maybe, but there.
WHEN SHE CAME IN, he kept his elbows down and his chin propped on his hands, moving only his eyebrows. But when he cleared his throat she saw that he was holding the pose with shaky confidence, that he must have seen her on a security screen somewhere—or possibly, she thought with distress, gotten a call from one of the men in the cars down the hill—and known she was coming.
“Hi,” she whispered.
“You’re just getting home?”
“There was a Halloween party.”
“And you’re dressed as . . .”
She held up her angel wings, which had come off after only fifteen minutes at the party, a crumpled handful of white tulle and curved wire.
“Of course. What else would you be?”
“What are you doing up?”
“Oh, I couldn’t sleep. I just came out here—I thought I might have a snack.”
They both looked down at the bare table.
“Did you have dinner with the boys?”
“No, I wasn’t hungry then.”
“Is Mom upstairs?”
“Isabel?” He said this with genuine inquiry in his voice. “Yes, she’s—she’s asleep.”
She looked at his face, the first time she’d been permitted to do so in weeks. The untamed eyebrows and the thick creases that led from his nose down to his mouth, like scores cut in wet clay. The large, jumping tendons that spanned the backs of his hands. He looked like the same man as always, but faded, rubbed with a dirty eraser.
“Would you like something to eat?”
“If you’re hungry,” she said, and he shuffled over to the refrigerator. She sat down, the alcohol hum between her ears amplifying every noise—the sucking sound the fridge made when he tugged at its door, the worn cloth of his old NYU sweatpants rustling against itself.
Her father hunched before the purring refrigerator, the Sub-Zero he loved so much. Often he would pat it as he passed through the kitchen. He took off his glasses and hooked them from each ear, letting them dangle beneath his chin. She was pretty sure this gesture had originally been an artificial one, designed to delight her when she was a toddler, when she’d loved to swipe at them, to put her fingertips to his chin. By now, though, it was a habit. He did it all the time, but she thought about how long it had been, this fall, since she’d seen him do it.
“I don’t really know what we have,” he said. “This is not my forte.”
“I know,” she said. “It doesn’t matter. I’ll just have some grapefruit or something. I’m sure we have fruit.”
“That’s a morning meal,” her father said, twisting his neck to see into the corners of shelves as if new food might suddenly appear there. Madison smiled in spite of herself; her father, like Nonna Concetta, always had strict guidelines as to what foods could be eaten at what times of day.
“I’m not even really hungry,” she said.
“Well, I am. Now that we’re talking about it, I’m famished.”
He looked around the room with expectant eagerness, then clapped his hands together.
“I bet I know what we have. Is there bread in that bread box?”
“Is that a serious question?”
He smiled, and she could see his embarrassment. “I don’t know, Mad. I don’t know when in the week Lily does the marketing.”