Madison woke in the middle of the night, hours after Mina had tucked her into bed. For once, Mina’s desperation to be included, central, hadn’t bothered Madison. It had just been what was needed. But now her mouth felt dry, wrong, it was sticking to itself like Scotch tape.
She went downstairs for more water; she needed ice from the freezer.
As soon as she reached the base of the staircase, she heard the murmur coming from her father’s study, saw the wedge of light coming from the open door. He’s waiting for me, she thought. He left the door open on purpose.
A cigar smoldered in a cut-glass ashtray on the coffee table, which was otherwise covered with piles of paper of varying heights, each stack pinned in place by a book, plaque, cigar box, or some other improvised paperweight drawn from the room’s furnishings. Her father sat on his couch, his weight forward and his elbows on his knees, taking notes on a legal pad. The television had been brought out from its cabinet again, and these were the voices she’d heard; a black-and-white movie was flashing on the screen. She couldn’t identify the film itself, but she recognized the woman’s thin slash of a mouth. Katharine Hepburn.
Her father looked up, ripping off his glasses as if he needed urgently to distance himself from whatever he was doing.
“I thought I heard you.”
“What are you doing?” she asked. His eyes scanned the coffee table as if he, too, had only just now come in to discover the piles.
“Nothing much,” he said. “Reviewing some documents. Just looking a few things over.” He began hastily to wed the piles together, creating a precarious stack of papers.
“You don’t need to move them,” Madison said cautiously. “I’m not going to sit on the coffee table.”
“Will you come sit here, then? With me?”
She sat, curling her legs beneath her and leaning back against the sofa’s arm so that she faced her father. He reached to the table beside the couch, and when he turned back to her he had a drink in his hand. She cut a quick look at the bar, but nothing was out of place, it wasn’t clear even what he’d been drinking. The bottles were all in their usual tidy rows, like cadets awaiting their orders.
“What’ve you been doing,” her father began, keeping his eyes on the screen.
“Which movie is this?”
“You break my heart, kiddo. Adam’s Rib. It’s a classic.” His voice was almost wistful. Madison twisted her rings on her fingers. Could they begin where they’d left off the first time, the night of Halloween? She hadn’t seen him this open, unguarded, since that night. They’d talked since then, but not in the same way. He never seemed to be talking to her, really, never cared that he was using terminology she could grasp at only vaguely, with frantic hands.
“I saw a movie the other night,” she volunteered.
“Oh, did you?”
“It wasn’t very good.”
“Oh?”
“Slumdog Millionaire,” she said. Her father still seemed as attentive to the movie as he was to her. Had she been wrong to come in here? It had never in all her life been difficult to tell when her father wanted to be left alone. She couldn’t accept, couldn’t believe, that he might be so exhausted by the events of the past few months that he might have lost the will to castigate his children. To bark her out of an off-limits room.
“I thought it was silly,” her father said. “Frivolous.”
Madison hadn’t paid that much attention, since she’d been at the movies with Chip, but she remembered enough to frown at this.
“Frivolous?”
“Poverty isn’t a learning experience,” her father said. “Being broke isn’t noble. I worked my ass off and paid my own way through business school at night during my first few years at Weiss.”
He hadn’t, that she could remember, said the actual name before, not any of the times they’d talked at night like this. Not since September.
“You didn’t really grow up in poverty, though,” she said. “Grandpa and Nonna Connie did, but you didn’t.”
Her father smiled.
“Compared to you, kiddo, yes I did.”
She felt annoyance rising in her throat, the troubling arrival of tears. She could not cry in front of her father, and certainly not if she couldn’t explain to him why it was happening.
“Compared to me, everyone’s growing up poor,” she said. “Right?”
Her father looked at her, the spell of Hepburn and Tracy finally broken.
“I was just teasing,” he said. “Pay me no mind.”
And then another question, the one she should have asked first, surfaced.
“When did you go see a movie?”
Her father had looked away again, stealing glances at the piles of paper as if ruing the decision to toss them all together into one unruly group.
“I went on my own,” he said. “I go to the movies, sometimes.”
Madison felt a brief panic, first that her father might have seen her with Chip one of these nights, then that anyone else might have seen her father.
“Here?”
“God, no. You have to ask? I go into the city.”
This did not seem an appreciably better state of affairs.
“When?”
“I don’t know, I go into the city sometimes. When I need an afternoon off. Listen,” he said, grabbing the remote from the floor beneath the table and extinguishing the movie with one swipe of his thumb. “I know I’ve probably been confusing you, a little bit. Our talks. I know it can be a lot of information all at once.”
Madison felt her breath catch in her chest with the weight of an actual physical obstruction, as if it had snagged on something sharp she hadn’t realized she had in there.
“No,” she said. “Not too much information. Almost no information, actually.”
“That’s what I’m saying,” he said. “I owe you an explanation.”
“Dad—”
“Madison, please. All I’m saying is that I know it. And there is one coming, I promise. I’ve been going over and over some of this, figuring it all out. Everyone else seems to think they know what happened, but I’m finally getting to the bottom of it. It’s all here,” he said, waving his hand over the papers as if absolving them of their sins. “And it’s important that other people know this, but I have to find the best way to communicate it to them. To everyone, really.”
Her father was speaking in clipped sentences, his voice lowered to almost a whisper. She couldn’t help but feel that he was enlisting her as a conspirator, but while he seemed to have a quite clear sense of his own conspiracy, she still couldn’t tell what, if anything, he’d told her. He seemed wholly in control of his own faculties. But then it seemed like he’d been drinking tonight, too.
She considered, for the first time since her childhood, that she might not know the contours of her father’s drunkenness as well as she’d always thought she did. And maybe it was this threat, the possibility that one of the threads that tied her and no one else to her father might have frayed, that edged her closer to him on the couch, prompting him to continue.