“Has anyone contacted either of the other two young women?” he asked.
“I don’t have their numbers,” Isabel said.
“And could we contact their families?”
“I’m not,” Isabel said. “I’m not willing to do that.”
Mina thought about the girls. They’d all know, even if they hadn’t phrased it thus to themselves, that they’d have no chance of keeping the trip a secret if anyone, however distant an acquaintance, saw them on their way in. Not with Madison in tow. Maybe it was just for fun; maybe she’d paid for their fake IDs, who the hell knew. Could they really be, at this point, unaware that the city might not be the safest place for Bob D’Amico’s daughter right now?
She tried to remember what the world of men in lower Manhattan had looked like to her, back before it had become the place where her own life unfolded. Maybe this was how she would help; Isabel had never gone into the city as an outsider, and now her daughter was trying to do just that. Mina had some experience, here, that Isabel never would. But she couldn’t think where Madison might go. She’d never been any good at reading the minds of teenage girls, as her own daughter had made perfectly clear.
“And we’re sure that her father doesn’t know anything further about what she might have planned to do in the city?”
“By all means,” Isabel said. “If you can find him, please ask him.”
“Well, then,” the other security guy said, a skinnier man who looked troublingly like he’d love a nap. “There isn’t much we can do but sit tight. But you need to consider, Ms. D’Amico, that one of these other families might have also noticed they’re short one daughter. If somebody else calls the police, then this becomes a different situation.”
“I know,” Isabel said. “I know.”
“There’s also the question of someone possibly recognizing her. Someone with a grudge. But I’m not telling you anything you and your husband don’t already know.”
“Well, nothing I don’t know,” Isabel said, her syllables clipped.
“Isabel,” Mina said. “I’ll go wait at the station. I mean, what if she comes back? We won’t even know until she makes her way up here. I’ll just go watch the incoming trains. Why not?”
“I can go,” Lily said.
Isabel didn’t even look in that direction. She turned to Mina.
THIRTY-ONE
They rode the train back in silence, Zo?’s a fuming silence, Allie’s one of fear. Madison felt, given the panic that had driven her out onto Stone Street in the suddenly falling sleet without her winter coat, strangely peaceful.
Benevolent, actually, was the word. Zo? didn’t have to make up an excuse, now, wouldn’t have to adjust for the fact that any one of those men might have paid more attention to Madison than to her. She wouldn’t be forced to square the mundane end to their actual evening with the evening she’d imagined: the three of them piling into a cab with guys who would buy them peach-colored drinks at whatever velvet-rope club they’d be shuttled into. Some man wedging his fingertips between her skin and her bra, allowing her to feel superior to Wyatt, who probably hadn’t texted her in days.
The fact was that they’d all been spared these many small embarrassments by the sheer urgency of Madison’s meltdown. Allie, who had brought Madison’s coat out with her when they left the bar, seemed to understand this, too.
The train skated through Harlem-125th Street and then lower Westchester. Madison rested her forehead against the window, watching the raindrops tadpole their way along the glass.
Somewhere between New Rochelle and Larchmont, she decided to go for a walk. She’d never been on the train this late before, and she began to wonder who else rode the 8:39 local to Stamford on a Friday night. Surely men with families would have gone home earlier, on a Friday, or else would be in the city drinking up the requisite numbness to board a later homeward train. Overworked, entry-level analysts like the ones at the bar? But surely they all still lived in the city, hadn’t yet been caught by the migratory drift into the more affluent precincts of Connecticut. Housekeepers, nannies, and other domestic help with the weekend off? But they, too, would be on a train in the opposite direction.
Madison stood and told Allie that she was going to look for the bathroom. Zo? had curled herself into a tight ball, her high heels abandoned on the unclean floor, her eyes closed to the music streaming through her earbuds.
Just like the slammed crowd back at the bar had created its own pace, its own ecosystem, there was a pleasing rhythm to the train’s progress. Madison would come to the end of a train car, wrap her fingers around the metal handle on the door, brace herself, pull it, let the train’s momentum carry her forward and onto the small jangling platform between cars. Ignore the nighttime whooshing in her ears, look neither left nor right. Grab another, identical metal handle, this time heaving her body weight forward, letting it carry her past the yawning, heavy door and into the new train car. Move in waves through the car, her balance dictated by the motion of the train. Reach the far end of that car, the next door. Repeat.
And then she was in the bar car.
A long, grimy bar with fake wood paneling stood at one end of the car, with train seats lining the other end. Metal poles placed at intervals had plastic discs on them, with holes cut out for cups. The car was empty except for a few standing customers clustered at the bar. A man who might as well have served as the actual Metro-North mascot—thick neck, dark hairs pelting his forearms, spider veins burst on his nose, guttural voice and authentic Bridgeport accent—slouched behind the bar, entertaining two women who clutched plastic cups. Two men stood closer to Madison, one reading a newspaper and seemingly younger, the other with his back pressed to the wall, his chin drifting periodically toward his neck.
“What brings you here, sweetheart?” the bartender said, pulling himself with reluctance away from the two women.
“Hi,” she said. “I’ll have—you have bourbon?”
The old man at the end of the bar snorted, but the younger guy closest to her didn’t look up from his paper. He had taken a small notebook from his pocket, one of those black leathery ones, and started jotting down notes.
“Let me make you a deal,” the bartender said. “What do you say we make it ginger ale, and keep it between us?”
“Please?” she said weakly.
“Come on, Steve-o,” one of the women chimed in. She beckoned him over and slid one of her cigarettes behind his left ear. “Let us buy her a drink.”
The bartender grinned at Madison. “These girls have been trying to get me fired for going on decades,” he said. “You wouldn’t want them to finally get their way, right? You wouldn’t do me like that.”
Madison smiled and tried not to cry.
“No,” she whispered.