The room had gotten louder. Somehow, the underlying din was always male—deep voices rumbling past one another like tectonic plates shifting beneath their feet. The shrieks that punctuated those rumblings, the reaction sounds, were always women.
Hugh returned with three drinks, a second round only for the girls. Madison had asked for vodka this time.
“Ladies,” he said. “This has been a pleasure. But we’re actually late,” and here he paused heavily to look at Jack, “for a client dinner. So you’ll have to enjoy this round for us.”
“Hugh!” Craig yelped, for the first time showing a rowdy streak that might match him more logically with Jack. “One more round!”
“Take a look, girls,” Jack said, joining in. “This is what comes of marriage. He’s got to catch the train to the ’burbs. He’s got the wife waiting for him. There’s a drip in the kitchen, the sink needs fixing. He can’t be drinking away his Friday night with three California girls.”
Hugh mumbled something about a glass of water, and began moving back toward the bar, his progress coming in waves—a wall of bodies would crush him, then something would give and he’d surge forward. Madison watched him move away from them. She took the straw out of her highball glass and gulped the drink.
“Let me tell you guys a little secret,” Craig said. “He’s twice as hammered as either one of us. He’s probably been drunk since lunch.”
When she left the table, the last thing Madison heard was Jack explaining something to Allie.
“Me, I’m there for two years, tops,” he said. “Then maybe I move to a hedge fund, PE, somewhere else. Then business school if I have a good sense of what I want, but only down the road. The guys who go straight to school, honestly—those are the pathetic guys, the ones who become lifers at these places. You don’t want to be a lifer, because unless you end up, you know, CEO, you’re sort of stranded. And especially right now. Probably you don’t know about this, but it’s a weird time to be working at a bank.”
Madison followed Hugh to the bar.
TWENTY-EIGHT
When Lily heard Isabel’s car pull into the drive, it could have been ten minutes or three hours since they’d seen Bob in the kitchen; she had no idea.
A moment later, her phone chimed. Then again, then a third time. Beneath her, Jackson opened his eyes and cocked an eyebrow.
“What’s wrong,” he said, and it was hearing his voice, slower and clogged somewhere in his throat from the bottle of wine he’d already drunk down, that did it. That and looking around them, the curtains pulled, everything about this so clearly a terrible idea. Her own worst behavior wasn’t going to jolt anyone else back into any normal degree of giving a fuck. It was just going to put her in the place of primary danger, which would only call attention to the months they’d already spent in that very spot.
She grabbed her phone; Isabel was calling, having given up on texting.
She got out of bed and slid back into her underwear, pulled on her jeans, ran into the bathroom to brush the wine sediment from her front teeth.
“The fuck?” Jackson was saying, but she was herself again, she knew what to tell him.
“I screwed up,” she said. “I saw Madison when we were by the station, I saw her getting on a train. I tried to call Isabel but then—I should have done something more. I have to go talk to her.”
“Okay,” he said, “okay, but—”
“Just stay in here,” Lily said. “Just don’t do anything. Please. Do literally nothing at all. Don’t make any noise. Don’t go outside for a cigarette. Literally nothing. Promise me.”
“Sure,” he said.
Up at the house, Isabel was standing, perplexed, in front of an open cabinet, her arms stretched out to either side, hands clasping the cabinet handles.
“Did you move things around in here, Lily?”
“Hi,” Lily said, and waited for the ignored question to snag her boss’s attention.
“I’ve been trying to reach you,” Isabel said. “It seemed odd no one was here. Where’s Madison?”
“She went over to Allie’s house,” Lily said. She noticed, with something she tried to keep from becoming smugness, that Isabel couldn’t place the name.
“But, actually, there’s something—I tried to call you earlier.”
“I haven’t been watching my phone. It was off.”
“Well, I’m a little bit worried.”
Isabel’s face shifted as Lily spoke, composing itself. Lily felt the same comforting click she’d felt back in her bedroom, climbing away from Jackson, remembering her job. She could make this sound normal, her part at least. She and Isabel could speak to each other, again, the way they had on the night Bob came home. Something had been disjointed between them ever since that night. It had really started then, not after Thanksgiving. She rewrote the history now, in her head, quickly. On the night Bob came home, she’d been too slow to respond. Her loyalty, her dependability, had stuttered. And now she was on the outside; Isabel had been keeping her at a distance. But it could stop now. Isabel could need her, again. There could have been a reason, a use, for her behavior this afternoon.
Lily told everything very clearly, in a very untruthful way.
“Are you sure it was that early?” Isabel said.
“Yes. Right when I called you.”
“So they were getting on the 3:12,” Isabel said, scrolling through train schedules on her phone.
“The other two were already on the train by the time I saw her,” Lily lied. “I just barely got a glimpse of her before she stepped off the platform.”
“So then how can you be sure?” Isabel said. Her voice was steamrolled, with little actual inquiry included in the question.
“Maybe it wasn’t her,” Lily said. “But my first thought was to call you.”
Isabel stared down at her BlackBerry’s screen.
“I only see one call,” she said after a moment, and Lily seized on that lag time, took a shot.
“Well, your phone was off,” she said, “you wouldn’t have seen the missed calls. If you turned it off after my first call, I mean.”
Isabel pressed something on her phone and lifted it to her ear, staring at Lily.
“Madison’s phone is off now,” she said. “But you didn’t try her at the time?”
“No.”
“And you called me . . . once.”
They stood in silence, because again, Lily knew it hadn’t been a question.
“We could call the school,” she said then.
“No, I don’t want to clue them in. Obviously they’re too inept to realize she didn’t attend her last class, otherwise we’d already have gotten a call.”
Isabel moved to the sink, where she’d been cutting calla lilies before Lily came in. She washed her hands slowly, reflectively, then turned and leaned back on the heels of her hands, propping herself against the counter.
“What do you want me to do,” Lily said. She was worried the wine had crept into her voice, into its volume and its cadences. But Isabel wasn’t looking at her.
“The boys,” Isabel said suddenly, pulling away from the counter with a small start. “I completely forgot.”
“They’re over at Kenny’s again.”
“Jesus, thank God. Is Bob down the hall?”
“No,” Lily said. Isabel faced away from her, looking out the window, but her body stiffened. “He’s not here.”