HER STOMACH BEGAN TO CHURN when he stepped off the train. She tried to hold tight to her annoyance, her determination to cut things off at the source. He had his hands on her immediately, when they were still standing on the platform, his fingertips at the buttons on her pea coat and immediately under her sweater and up against her skin.
“Surprise,” she said, wanting to shake her head at herself, her involuntary husky voice.
So now they were going for a walk, along Bruce Park Avenue of all places, because she worried that if they went anywhere secluded or warmer, she’d end up doing something like agreeing to give him a blow job on a park bench (this had been done before, though not in Greenwich) or, worse, agreeing to let him come back to the house with her, something she’d never done in the years they’d been together, never.
And then she saw the girls.
It was them, clear and obvious, no doubt in her mind. Zo? Barker was pulling into the station lot in an absurd convertible, and it was obviously Madison in the passenger seat. But the circumstances were so bizarre to Lily, in the context of the Madison she’d always known, that it was one of those times when you feel fate disintegrating your life into small pieces, sending the mundane routines of your days skittering away like marbles into hard-to-reach corners of a room. Because she, Lily, shouldn’t even have been down there, obviously, shouldn’t have been anywhere near Bruce Park Avenue except for the antics of her idiot boyfriend. Which could get her fired.
That thought, too, had crossed her mind. That Jackson was trying to make up her mind for her. If she was fired, he didn’t have to keep trying to goad her into quitting. She didn’t think he’d go that far—not he, who was so attentive to the right connections, to the casual meet and greet that could be nurtured into a future recommendation. She didn’t think he’d be so cavalier about muddying her future job prospects, but still.
The girls, surely, should have been more cautious. They might have considered driving to catch the train at Port Chester or even Rye. What would they have done if they’d run into a friend of someone’s mother, on the platform? The plan wasn’t so daring, perhaps, but it still must have taken a brassy confidence that was new for Madison.
Lily didn’t say anything. She never insulted Madison in front of Jackson. She didn’t like giving anyone even a narrow opening through which to ridicule the kids, or giving away any information that was rightfully theirs to release. So many parts of their lives only made sense if you saw the whole picture, if you were there every day. If you saw how much easier it was sometimes to spend a little money just to make life less stressful. That, up close, it was so silly—pretentious, even, the worst kind of snobbishness—to refuse to spend money for a good cause, whether that cause was helping those less fortunate or simply making life a bit easier for your own children.
But Jackson’s hand was in the back pocket of her jeans, and she’d made a soft sound of panic when she first saw Madison.
“What’s up?”
“Nothing,” she said. Even the way Madison carried her body was unfamiliar. Lily had never seen her move this way, as if she knew the world around her would take its step back to let her pass untouched. As if she knew that people would cede space to her, whether out of self-preservation or something deeper, some greater fear.
“Come on,” Jackson was saying, “I’ll leave tonight. I’ll leave before dinner. Just an hour or two.”
Lily watched the train pull into the station, watched them leave. She couldn’t see or hear them anymore, their glossy hair, their shrill calls back and forth to one another.
She thought again of something she’d been unable to erase from her mind for months now. If it were me. If the outside world had forced Lily to reckon with her own father, with the man in full, when she was fifteen years old. What would she consider possible, alone in the city, at a bar? Watching an adult man lick his bottom lip whenever she adjusted her bra strap or let her hair fall across her face?
She knew what she was meant to do, here. She knew, even now, what was important. Madison was a child, and her well-being was the job. Lily knew that she herself would, eventually, become unnecessary, this family’s phantom limb, causing them pain in her own desperation to make her presence more than a memory. But not yet.
When she took out her phone and dialed Isabel’s number, it rang sixteen times. There was no answer.
“Come on,” Jackson said. “Who are you calling? If we drive back now, we’ll have at least two whole hours. I took off work, Lil. I came here to see you.”
Maybe it doesn’t have to be mine to fix, Lily thought. What did they expect, ignoring her like this? And why shouldn’t she get to scare them, just for an afternoon? For all I know, they’ve got a security tail on her. She’ll be fine.
Jackson’s hand was under her shirt again.
TWENTY-FIVE
Madison was on the train with Zo? and Allie, thinking about Chip.
About the nights in his car, how once she was back inside her own house it seemed like they’d been spread across her very skin. His face above her, the cinnamon smell of the gum she never actually saw him pop into his mouth but that he was always chewing by the time it started. All of it brought with it an almost subterranean pressure, as if she fell deep down into some cavernous space when she was inside the car, so deep that the sounds and rhythms of the world receded entirely. Time could actually fly; people had not been making this up. When you had your tongue in someone’s mouth and wanted to touch every inch of his body, time could actually fly.
The first night, the movie after Thanksgiving, he hadn’t kissed her until the very last second. The second time, she’d been prepared. When he asked about her curfew, she told him they had time to kill. When he pulled into the bank parking lot off the Avenue, she had the good sense to sit still and wait for him to decide what to do.
The third night, they’d pulled over on a residential street a few minutes away from her house—“not on my street,” she’d warned, and because he was perfect he hadn’t asked why—and that time the whole pageant of getting themselves to the actual moment had clearly weighed on them both. Because he hadn’t even really reclined his seat, hadn’t maneuvered the coffee cup in the console between them out of his way, before he had his hands in her hair. Before he was cradling her head at the nape of her neck, his tongue touching the roof of her mouth, once, twice, again.