She picked up her spoon and her knife and began dutifully to divide the fruit into slits, slipping each fleshy triangle from its spoke in the wheel. Her brothers munched their toast without question.
“Your mother’s going to drive you to school this morning,” Lily said from the sink, where she was washing dishes. What dishes could she possibly be washing? No one had finished eating yet.
“You mean, to the bus.”
“No—she’s driving you straight to school.”
“Why?”
“I’m sorry, do we need a special reason? Is this is a national disaster? Your mother wants to drive you to school, all right? Eat.”
Madison turned once more to her mother, who had always taken great pride in the fact that her children rode the school bus. Isabel despised the mothers who insisted their children be driven to school, as if the buses provided by their elite private schools were no better than the filthy, crime-ridden Manhattan subway—which, Isabel loved to point out, was no longer even filthy or crime ridden. If there was ever a reason they skipped the bus, a late appointment or a faulty alarm clock, it was Lily who drove them straight to campus. Not their mother.
“Where’s Dad,” Madison said. Luke looked up at her, his bottom lip protruding and threatening to undo his entire face.
“We don’t know,” he said gravely. Lily popped the roof of her mouth with her tongue.
“Don’t be silly, sweetheart,” she said. “Daddy’s at work. Where else would he be?”
Matteo turned to his mother for confirmation, and Isabel smiled and put one hand to his chin to snag a stray piece of cereal.
“You know that,” she said.
“He’s been in the city now basically since we got back from Shelter,” Madison said. “He’s still there? Is he coming home anytime soon for, I don’t know, a single night?”
She slid her half slice of toast across the table to her brothers, and Luke jumped on it. Even when I am an adult, she thought, the sounds and smells of toast will make me think of this. Crumbs brushed from fingertips, the inhaling of something warm and comforting that’s been burned. I’ll remember the five pieces of toast and my mother’s mouth fixed in a thin line.
“When everyone’s ready,” Lily said, “let’s meet out by the front door.”
She couldn’t be coming with them, could she? Lily and her mother could not possibly be driving them all to school together, as if they were fleeing some fast-approaching hurricane. Madison entertained a sudden, silly image, the car piled up with luggage on its roof, her mother hunched over the wheel, Lily navigating. The last Range Rover out of Connecticut. A dark, billowing storm in the sky, chasing them down.
Isabel began stacking plates and bowls in silence and carried them to the sink. Madison cleared her throat.
“I might stay late today,” she said. “After school.”
Isabel left the dishes in the sink and returned to the table with a damp paper towel, dabbing at Luke’s chin, at the peanut butter crumbs clustered at the corners of his mouth. She took his shirt with both hands, pinching the seams at each of his shoulders, and with one tug pulled it so that it hung straighter on his wiry frame.
“There’s a football game,” Madison continued.
“That’s fine,” her mother said. “So long as you get a ride home.”
And it was this more than anything else that left the world around Madison unchanged and yet ominous, as though everything in the kitchen had begun to list to one side. No questions, no suspicion from Isabel as to why her Super Bowl–ignorant tenth-grader might suddenly need to go to a football game. That plain fact, that it had been so simple to put one over on Madison’s mother, that Isabel had not required even the basic acrobatics of a massaged truth.
Madison took her plate from Lily’s hands and slid the hollowed grapefruit skeleton into the trash. She resisted the urge to prick at her mother, to insist that she was still hungry, and followed her brothers out into the front hall.
Isabel stood by the door, waiting for Luke and Matteo to shoulder their backpacks.
“Come on,” Isabel said to her children. “Smile like we mean it.” It was her constant refrain, anxiety sheathed in a joke, when the children accompanied her to parties or fund-raisers populated entirely by their father’s underlings. No one asked why this should be a necessary enjoinder on a regular Friday morning.
THEY DROVE PAST THE GOLDEN CURLICUES of the Weillands’ gate and the Kanes’ private course and the Sapersteins’ twisting drive, what could be seen of it before it was swallowed up by their cluster of white oaks. Madison could feel herself as she watched, some fluttering awareness somewhere that she should be paying close attention to something she hadn’t seen yet. The houses, the glimpses sometimes visible from the main road. The small details—the machinery at the front gates and the landscapers’ trucks parked at service entrances and the anomalous silver balloon lodged in a hedge at the edge of one property like a tiny ghost.
She had spent her entire childhood on this same expanse of land in Greenwich, and recently she’d thought she would leave this coast for college. But she knew how she would miss Connecticut. She would miss the shock of greenery when it returned in the late spring, and the way the falling plum-colored leaves from the dogwood trees clogged the pool during the first heavy rains. She would miss entering the house from the east door, leaving boots and parkas heavy with melting snow in the mud room and bursting through the swinging doors into the silver-and-blue kitchen, which in the after-school hours was as huge and cold and silent as a mausoleum.
She would miss, perhaps most of all, the smell of Connecticut in the summertime. The smell of green, that unbearable moisture in the air, the smell of water somewhere not too far away and of just enough nature to bask in but far too little in which to feel lost. She would miss the smell of the grass and leaves being gathered into massive piles as the gardeners moved methodically across the back lawn, their bodies braced against the slope of the hillside, gathering all signs of summer for one last time before winter took over. She’d been to Los Angeles in summer, and she’d been in winter; it all felt like the same bleached sunlight, hotter and more likely to cause nosebleeds in summer, but otherwise the same. The summer in Connecticut was something lush and alive, something so powerful that to open your mouth outdoors in July was to breathe in the ripeness, the season that hovered just on the edge of rotting.