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.
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.
Melody couldn’t believe the miracle of a handheld device that allowed her to track Nora’s and Louisa’s precise whereabouts as long as they had their phones. And they were teenagers; they always had their phones. As the map started to appear, she felt the familiar panicky palpitations until the tiny, blue pulsating circles and the word Found! popped up at the top of the screen, showing the girls exactly where they were supposed to be, at the SAT tutoring center uptown.
They’d been taking the weekend classes for over a month, and usually Melody tracked their morning progress from her kitchen table, watching the blue dots slowly glide north from Grand Central according to her meticulous directions: From the train station, they should take the Madison Avenue bus to Fifty-Ninth Street where they would disembark and walk west to the tutoring center on Sixty-Third just off Columbus. They were not to walk along the park side, but were supposed to walk on the south side of the street, passing by the parade of uniformed doormen, who would hear them scream for help if they were in trouble. They were strictly forbidden from entering Central Park or deviating from their route. Melody put the fear of God into them every week, filling their heads with stories of girls being snatched or lost, forced into prostitution or murdered and dumped in the river.
“The Upper West Side is not exactly Calcutta,” her husband, Walter, would gently argue. But she got scared. The thought of them wandering the city without her protecting their flank made her heart thud, her palms sweat. They were sweating now. When they’d all disembarked at Grand Central that morning, she hadn’t wanted to let them go. On a Saturday, the terminal was full with tourists checking guidebooks and train schedules and trying to find the Whispering Gallery. She’d kissed them good-bye and had watched until she could no longer see the backs of their heads—one blonde, the other brunette. They didn’t look like visitors; there was nothing tentative about how they moved through the crowd. They looked like they belonged to the city, which filled Melody with dread. She wanted them to belong to her, to stop getting older. They didn’t confide every last thought or desire or worry anymore; she didn’t know their hearts and minds the way she used to. Melody knew that letting them grow and go was the proper order of life. She wanted them to be strong and independent and happy—more than anything she wanted them to be happy—but that she no longer had a fix on their inner workings made her light-headed. If she couldn’t be sure how they were moving through the world, she could at least watch them move through the world, right there in the palm of her hand. She could at least have that.
“Leo’s never paying you back,” Walter had said as she was leaving for the train station. “You’re all dreaming, wasting your time.”
Though Melody feared he was right, she had to believe he wasn’t. They’d borrowed a lot of money to buy their house, a tiny but historic building on one of their town’s most beautiful streets, only to watch the economy collapse and property values sink. The fluctuating interest rate was about to rise on the mortgage they already couldn’t afford. With little equity in the house, they couldn’t refinance. College was approaching and they had next to nothing in the bank; she’d been counting on The Nest.
Out on the street, Melody watched people tug off their gloves and unwind scarves, lift their faces to the sun. She felt a tiny surge of satisfaction knowing that she could spend the entire afternoon indoors if she wanted. The main reason Melody loved the bar at the Hyatt was because she could access it through an underpopulated, nondescript hallway connecting the hotel to Grand Central. When it was time for lunch, she’d return to the terminal through her secret corridor and head downstairs to the Oyster Bar. She would spend hours in New York City and not have to step one sensibly shod foot onto pavement, could entirely avoid breathing the Manhattan air, which she always pictured as rife with gray particulate. During her and Walt’s brief
