“What do you mean, the best way?”
Her father looked down again, lifting his cigar from its ashtray He looked at her before releasing the smoke, and she closed her eyes for a moment. This smell had always, always meant her father, meant that he was telling her things she needed to know.
“The truth,” he said. “The truth is important. If you can just give everyone the whole truth about that final weekend, then show them where to look, everyone will know. We did everything—everything we could. No matter what, we couldn’t have withstood the people who were out to get us. But we were—”
She watched his face. He wasn’t looking at her anymore. He was looking into the middle distance, toward the pool, the woods, the world outside.
“An example,” he said, looking back at her wildly. “A classic trick. You want to short a stock, you spread the rumor on a Friday. Late on a Friday. Nobody can actually do anything, but then it spreads all weekend, like a virus. No, like an epidemic. And then, Monday, if you were the people who heard that rumor, what would you do? Of course you’d eliminate your exposure. Who wouldn’t? And then, the drop begins. The bottom falls out.”
“It sounds like my life,” she said.
Her father looked in her direction again. “What did you say?”
She’d spoken without thinking, but now he was focused on her.
“It just sounds like rumors,” she said. “At school.”
He only smiled. She had wanted him to laugh at the absurdity of what she’d said. It could not possibly be the case that her father’s life was like hers, that he could worry about the nattering and ill wishes of people who behaved like Wyatt Welsh or Zo? Barker. She refused to believe it.
“We were different,” he said. “That’s why they’re out to get us. We were as good as they were, but we were different. Do you remember Max Schaefer?”
She shook her head.
“Doesn’t matter. He was good, but no one special. But the point is, he called me, the other afternoon. He just wanted to say—he told me that I was the only man in any business, anywhere, he’d ever seen leave a meeting, no matter with who, no matter which client, just because my wife was on the phone. He’d never seen it anywhere. Because it wasn’t anywhere. There was no place else like us. Do you see what I’m saying?”
She could tell how desperate he was for her to agree with him. She nodded.
“And you have to ask,” he said. “When you’re calling for a head—I still owned ten million shares, Madison. I never so much as considered getting rid of it, any of it. I’ll never be made whole. That’s what it meant to me.”
She swallowed hard before speaking. “Who—what do you mean, calling for a head?”
Her father was staring down at the carpet now. He waited a long time to reply, but eventually a snowflake of cigar ash on the knee of his chinos brought him back.
“Nothing, sweetheart. It’s just words.”
What did that mean? It was all just words, she thought. He said that as if he hadn’t always known how precarious words were, as if his entire reputation didn’t rest on his propensity for silence and reticence punctuated by vivid, memorable outbursts of rage. If it’s all just words, she thought, then what the fuck did it mean every time he told me a story about himself?
“You’re talking about jail, aren’t you.”
Her father did not reply at first. He stood, crossed to the bar, and returned with a bottle of scotch and another glass, one she now knew would be for her.
“No,” he said. “Listen to me, Madison. No. Over my dead body. That’s what I’m saying. Over my dead fucking body.”
He looked up at her and held out the glass of scotch. She wanted to ask for an ice cube, but she couldn’t look away from her father’s face.
“Why don’t you just go out there, then,” she said. “Why don’t you just go out there and explain what everyone else has misunderstood?”
“It’s not the right time, Madison.”
She laughed, unable to help herself. “What are you waiting for?”
“Princess, you know I wouldn’t lie to you, but not yet. It wouldn’t be wise now.”
“Okay,” she said.
“How are you,” he said, looking down at his drink.
“I got into trouble tonight,” she said. “Or at least I assume I did. Mom didn’t stay up long enough to get me in trouble.”
“She outsourced it,” her father said. “Efficient lady.”
Was it possible he’d been in the house when everyone was here? That didn’t make any sense. Shouldn’t he be curious, then, about what had happened?
She moved closer to her father on the couch, and let him talk for a few minutes longer. Eventually, she curled into her favorite place under his arm, letting her head fall to his shoulder, hearing his voice moving through his chest and throat. Sometime later, she felt him carefully prying her fingers from her abandoned glass, and the movie was on, again.
She closed her eyes again, maybe slept some more, and her head was leaning against the leather and not against her father. She opened her eyes and saw him carefully stacking accordion folders, one on top of another. He placed them in the bottom drawer of his desk, carefully, as if they were porcelain rather than paper, then locked the drawer. She watched as he stood, letting his eyes range over his bookshelves, and then moved forward to take a picture of the twins, tackling each other in the pool at Shelter, and taped the key to the back of the picture frame. He replaced the photo.
The sounds from the television circled her ears, as unknown to her as other languages, and she knew she was falling back to sleep. She wanted to make a joke, ask her father why he’d chosen a picture of the boys instead of one of the many pictures of her. There was a gloaming in the room, the gray of unconsciousness already fuzzing the picture, but she knew it was real, she wasn’t asleep yet.
He returned to the sofa and took her by the hand and shoulder, sliding himself back beneath her.
The next morning, she woke up in her own bed. The golden clock said it was almost 10 A.M., but no one had come in to wake her.
III