“What made you think of that,” she tried then, careful not to betray her surprise, certainly not any dismay.
“I’m not saying my problems are—”
“Of course not,” Mina said. Don’t say more, she thought. Please don’t compare this to that.
She felt the same cramping fear she’d felt that night in December, waiting to find Madison. That Isabel wasn’t reacting as Mina had hoped she might; that all the things she’d always assumed existed so far beneath the surface, in her friend, might not be there.
She didn’t want to watch Isabel retreat further from reality, continue to lick her own wounds. There was a part of her, she knew, that wanted to watch her friend strike back, make him suffer for his mistakes. If you couldn’t do this now, when your husband had humiliated you like this, then when? When would it ever happen?
“I’m just saying, that’s what we are, at bottom,” Isabel continued. “People, I mean ‘we’ as in humans. That’s how we think. And I guarantee you, our names are on that list now.”
Mina wanted to ask her to clarify “our.” She wanted to ask whether that was so wrong, for someone’s name—Bob’s, at the very least—to be on such a list. Someone’s name, after all, needed to be there, when history returned to this time, found that list. But she knew that these questions were too much, even for this moment, porous as it was.
THIRTY-SIX
When Chip came to the door he looked, improbably, as if Madison had just woken him from a deep and isolating nap. He was wearing the shirt she’d come to think of as his trademark ever since the weather had turned from crisp to cold: a blue-and-green-plaid button-down, its sleeves cuffed neatly just below his elbows. She tried to control her gaze, to keep it from wandering to those elbows, to the soft parts of his inner arms where his veins pulsed beneath his skin. She also tried not to be insulted that he wore the shirt with a pair of Harvard sweatpants, their hems frayed, the fabric pilling.
His skin still held a trace of its ski tan from when he’d flown to Aspen in January, that weathered brown skin across his nose and cheeks; was that possible, even, more than two months later? He was leaving for Florida on Sunday, she knew.
“You made it. Cool,” he said. She shifted her weight from one foot to the other, feeling the cold beginning to eat through her mother’s boots. “Oh, right, yeah. Come on in. No one’s home.”
“Perfect,” she said, but he’d already turned away from her. She’d known already that the house would be empty; of course this was why she was here, on the first full day of their spring break. She hadn’t heard from him in so long that she’d already begun to think of him in the past tense until he’d started texting her this week. There’d been the attention over winter break, the late-night phone calls, a text he sent her at seventeen minutes past midnight on New Year’s Eve. February, and the necessity of Valentine’s Day, the way it sucked her attention away from anything else for weeks—early February was when he’d gone completely quiet.
And then, of course, more than a month later—a month during which she’d been so careful not to say his name in front of Zo? or Allie—his name popped up one night on the screen of her BlackBerry.
“D’Amico,” he said. “Where you been?”
As if nothing had happened. As if his life swirled past so quickly that he couldn’t be expected to observe the reactions of the people who’d been caught up in its wake. Valentine’s Day was never mentioned, like something they’d have had to choose to acknowledge together, as a team, if it were to exist. And now here she was, at his house, agreeing not to mention it.
She followed him inside.
The foyer opened directly onto an enormous, open living room, every surface jammed with photographs. Madison longed for a pocket of time to explore them, to look at the younger Chip decked out in the studied casual uniform of coordinated denim that had been so popular for family photographs in the midnineties.
“Do you want something to eat?” Chip tossed back over his shoulder. He led her down a hallway that ended in a kitchen with paneled hardwood floors, yellow curtains, a dripping faucet.
“Or, we can probably sneak two beers from my dad’s fridge in the garage.”
“Oh,” she said. “Yeah.”
“Because we’ve got a few hours at least before they come home.”
“Whatever you want.” She wanted to snatch the words back immediately, because hearing them out loud made her see how true they were.
“I was thinking we could watch a movie,” he said. “Have a beer. My dad has all the Oscar screeners.”
“That’s so cool,” she said. Could this possibly be the same boy who had followed her into a dark hallway on Halloween? Were they the same two people who had bantered back and forth, successfully, she was pretty sure, so many times?
She waited in the kitchen until he came back with the two beers and opened them on his kitchen counter. They ended up eventually in a second, more casual den, a room that had clearly been colonized, over the years, by the Abbott men. There were half-eaten bags of Doritos left at intervals throughout the room. Three different game systems and their accompanying power cords lay vanquished on the bottom level of a large, multitiered piece of furniture that held, among other things, a flat-screen television. Another wall was taken up by another built-in bookshelf, one entire section of which held DVDs.
“My dad’s a big movie guy,” Chip offered, as he walked over and began rifling through loose cases in search of something. “My mom says in another few years no one’s going to watch DVDs, and we won’t even be able to give these away.”
“You never know,” Madison said. “The things they’re always telling you will disappear next are never the ones that actually do.”
Chip didn’t look up.
“We’ve got this one,” he said, shaking one DVD in her general direction. “It’s supposed to be pretty depressing.”
“Way to sell it, Abbott,” she said, lifting her beer bottle to her lips. “Who could resist that pitch?”
And finally, he looked up and smiled at her. His eyes moved over her body as if he’d just noticed that she was in the room.
“This one it is,” he said. He crossed to the television and she curled up at one end of the couch. There was a nubbly chenille blanket balled there and she took it, spread it out over her knees, and burrowed deeper into the side of the sofa. She should have let him sit first, she realized then. He might have chosen the middle. He might have wanted to force their bodies closer together.