And then, so slowly she wasn’t sure what was happening at first, Leo took her hand in his (for a foolish moment she thought he was going to kiss it, like a character in one of her mother’s telenovela shows) and placed it on his lap. And she would always remember this part, how he never stopped looking at her. He didn’t close his eyes or lean his head back or lunge in for a sloppy kiss or fumble with the buttons on her blouse; he looked hard and long into her eyes. He saw her.
She could feel him respond beneath her hand and it was thrilling. As Leo held her gaze, she applied a little pressure with her fingers and the balance of power in the car abruptly shifted in her favor. “I thought we were going to see the ocean,” she said, wanting to get out of sight of the kitchen. He grinned and put the car into reverse. She had his pants unzipped before his seat belt was fully fastened.
YOU COULDN’T BLAME LEO for the rapidity of his climax. His wife had cut him off weeks earlier, after she caught him fondling a babysitter in the back corridor of a friend’s summerhouse. Driving toward the water, Leo hoped the combination of booze, cocaine, and Wellbutrin would stall his response, but when Matilda’s hand tightened with resolve, he knew everything was happening too fast. He closed his eyes for a second—just a second—to collect himself, to stop the intoxicating image of her hand, her chipped blue fingernails, moving up and down. Leo never even saw the SUV barreling down Ocean Avenue, coming from the right, perpendicular to their car. Didn’t realize until it was too late that the screech he heard wasn’t Matilda’s voice coming from the sound system, but something else entirely.
Neither of them even had time to scream.
PART ONE
SNOWTOBER
CHAPTER ONE
Because the three Plumbs had agreed on the phone the previous evening that they should not drink in front of their brother Leo, they were all—unbeknownst to one another—sitting in separate bars in and around Grand Central, savoring a furtive cocktail before lunch.
It was a strange kind of autumn afternoon. Two days earlier, a nor’easter had roared up the mid-Atlantic coast, colliding with a cold front pushing east from Ohio and an arctic mass dipping down from Canada. The resulting storm had dropped a record-breaking amount of snow in some places, blanketing towns from Pennsylvania to Maine with a freakishly early winter. In the small commuter town thirty miles north of Manhattan where Melody Plumb lived, most of the trees were still shouldering their autumn foliage, and many had been destroyed or damaged by the snow and ice. The streets were littered with fallen limbs, power was still out in some towns, the mayor was talking about canceling Halloween.
In spite of the lingering cold and spotty power outages, Melody’s train ride into Manhattan was uneventful. She was settled in at the lobby bar of the Hyatt Hotel on Forty-Second Street where she knew she wouldn’t run into her brother or sister; she’d suggested the hotel restaurant for lunch instead of their usual gathering spot, Grand Central’s Oyster Bar, and had been mocked by Jack and Beatrice, the Hyatt not landing on their list of venues deemed acceptable by some arcane criteria she had zero interest in decoding. She refused to feel inferior to those two anymore, refused to be diminished because she didn’t share their veneration for everything old Manhattan.
Sitting at a table near the soaring windows on the upper level of the hotel’s massive lobby (which was, she had to admit, completely unwelcoming—too big and gray and modern, some awful kind of sculpture made of steel tubing lurked overhead, she could hear Jack’s and Bea’s pointed ridicule in absentia; she was relieved they weren’t there), Melody ordered the least expensive glass of white wine (twelve dollars, more than she would spend on an entire bottle at home) and hoped the bartender had a generous pour.
The weather had remained unseasonably cold since the storm, but the sun was finally breaking through and the temperatures beginning to rise. The piles of snow at every Midtown crosswalk were rapidly melting into unnavigable puddles of slush and ice. Melody watched a particularly inelegant woman try to leap over the standing water and miss by inches, her bright red ballet flat landing squarely in the water, which had to be frigid, and filthy. Melody would have loved a delicate pair of shoes like those and she would have known better than to wear them on a day like today.
She felt a twinge of anxiety as she thought of her daughters heading uptown and having to navigate the treacherous street corners. She took a sip of her wine (so-so), removed her phone from her pocket, and opened her favorite app, the one Nora called Stalkerville. She hit the “find” button and waited for the map to load and for the dots that represented her sixteen-year-old twins to materialize on the screen.