THE DAY CAMP REGAN HAD CHOSEN was all the way up on East Eighty-Second Street. This was in the winter, when slots were filling up fast, and it had seemed important that the kids have some sense of continuity with the old neighborhoods. What it had not been, especially, was logical. She wasn’t thinking about forty minutes on the train to drop them off and then fifteen back down to the Hamilton-Sweeney Building for work. When she was Will’s age, she’d ridden the subway alone, but nowadays you might as well have set your kids up with a drug habit and a loaded gun. If they weren’t bathed, dressed, and breakfasted by ten to eight, the better part of valor was just to put them in a cab. Currently, it was 8:23 a.m., July 13, two days into a heat wave. She watched Will work to isolate a Cheerio on the end of his spoon. “Do you think you could speed it up, honey, possibly?”
He made a cherubic trumpet of his mouth, sucked the Cheerio down. What rankled was the shrug that followed. Their connection had once been clairvoyant; he would materialize beside her without her having heard his approach, as if he could sense the pressure building within and had no other means to ease it. Indeed, she suspected it was the weird way he saw through you that made Keith want to pack him off to boarding school. But she hadn’t even been able to let Will go to sleepaway camp, and now he seemed to be punishing her for it. In the twenty-four hours before a custody visit, he resented even her gentlest suggestion. He would prefer not to, the shrug seemed to say.
Then Cate came kiting in from the bathroom, which in the new apartment, through some architectural oversight, abutted the kitchen. “Can I have some Cheerios?”
“You had eggs, honey, not fifteen minutes ago. Did you light a match?”
She nodded, and Regan decided to withhold comment on her mismatched socks and on the nest of hair that appeared to have been sucked through a cotton gin. “Go get your bag, sweetie.” No doubt the camp counselors would look at her and think, Negligent parent, but that was fine, it was all a penance, besides which, there was no time. In sixty-four minutes, Andrew West would be in her office to run back over the statement they’d drafted. At 1:30, they would ride the elevator to the newly renovated press room on the fortieth floor to tell the assembled microphones that, to the charges of tax fraud and insider trading, her father would enter a plea of not guilty. The U.S. Attorney was apparently hours away from finalizing an immunity deal with a second informant anyway, and once that happened, Daddy’s chance at a plea bargain would expire, along with the symbolic power of refusing it.
Everything that was going to happen would happen today.
Sixty-three minutes.
She forced herself not to say anything, knowing that if she did Will would downshift even further, to a gear somewhere between deliberate and geologic. She tried to reopen their connection. Come on, honey. Of course, given that he was a male, frustration was just another way of loving him. The foxed neck of his tee-shirt. The freckled bridge of his slightly upturned nose. His long hair, his probably unwashed hair, falling artlessly in his eyes.
“William Hamilton-Sweeney Lamplighter, you have exactly ten seconds to finish your breakfast.”
“Can’t.”
“Excuse me?”
He put his hands up, as if to show he was unarmed. “I’m full.”
“Then andiamo, already.” She pretended not to see the way he left the bowl out for her to clean up later.
They were at the door, Regan one sleeve into her suit jacket, when she noticed something was missing. “Where’s the overnight bag, Will?”
“Oops.”
“You didn’t pack?”
“You didn’t remind me.”
“I didn’t remind you to put on pants, either, but you managed to get it done.”
Again, the shrug, which had acquired italics in her mind. Her watch said 8:34, and she felt that if she said another word to him, he would know he’d won. She knelt and buttoned her daughter’s polo shirt. Time was, it had been Cate dragging her feet and Will who was dutiful. “Honey, tell me your father keeps a change of clothes for you guys.”
Cate smiled and twisted away. At some point, she’d lost a tooth. “We have TVs in our rooms now.”
“It’s true,” Will said. “He lets us watch whatever we want.”
“God damn it, Will, you can do this or I’ll do it myself, and I will pick clothes that make you regret it. Don’t make me count to three.” It never crossed her mind that maybe it wasn’t her he was resisting. That maybe, secretly, he really didn’t want to go.
WHAT TO DO WITH CHILDREN IN SUMMER was a question to which she’d never given much thought, prior to this annus horribilis. Even working full-time for the firm, she got paid leave, and the period between Memorial Day and Labor Day was supposed to stretch into a succession of long weekends at Lake Winnipesaukee with her kids and husband splashing in the water, days passing leisurely as sailboats beyond the blue cordon of buoys.
Now the fact that the camp only ran from nine to three, with aftercare costing extra, seemed a kind of scam. She’d called ahead to let the camp people know Keith would be picking the kids up today. He was supposed to take them to a Mets game and then keep them through the weekend, and although she would miss them, as she always missed them, there was a part of her right now, and this must represent some kind of progress, that thought, Let’s see how he deals with all of this, with Will’s too-long showers and Cate’s nightmares, with waking at midnight to Cate hovering out in the hall and asking in her most forlorn voice, Can I sleep with you tonight? as if she hadn’t already assumed the answer was yes. The problem was that it probably wouldn’t bother Keith. He was a man who struggled with cause-and-effect. Late for camp? No big deal. The pilfering of an entire jar of Vaseline? Boys will be boys.
No, the problem was, actually, that she missed him. She missed his laugh, missed the way he balanced her out, missed sometimes not having to be the one who let things slide, and when Cate piped up from the doorway, she had to check to make sure her own face was dry, because with the lights off, except for the tranche of streetlight from between the curtains, she kept trooping back over their life as a family, trying to find the exact spot where the ground had given way. Climb in, sweetie, she would say.
When she thought now about sharing her bed with Andrew West, Andrew of the poreless skin and hair-model hair, what she felt was more like this indulgent mother-love than like the hunger she wanted to feel. She had put off mentioning him to the kids for a number of reasons, one of them being that Will might view him as a rival, and another being that there was probably something to that. Andrew was only twenty-eight. She had also put off sleeping with him. Still, she’d decided that tonight, when it was all over, she was going to let him do to her anything he wanted. She hoped Will hadn’t noticed the leg of lamb and the bottle of Chardonnay in the fridge when he went for the milk. Or, given that the kids were her only remaining conduit to her husband, maybe she hoped he had.
IT WAS OUT ON HENRY STREET playing Spot the Cab that Regan realized she didn’t have the fare to make it all the way uptown. Will didn’t have any cash, either—he’d blown his allowance on those damn wizarding cards—so her options were to be late for her meeting with Andrew or to put them on the subway alone. A pinkish fog crowned the tops of the bridges, humidity mixed with auto exhaust and the ash pouring out of the ghettos. Motes of birds hung motionless, white. Forecasters were predicting record highs today, and she could already feel her blouse starting to cling. She looked Will over. He was still a good boy, she thought, a good and bright and courageous boy, and the only people on the train at this hour would be commuters. She launched into a practicum on avoiding strangers, but he cut her off.
“We ride by ourselves all the time when we’re at Dad’s, Mom.”
“I’m going to pretend I didn’t hear that,” she said, meaning she had no way of knowing if it was just bluster. When she tried to follow them down into the station to make sure they got on the right train, Will groaned. She gave him a kiss on the head before he could duck away, and then one for Cate, and watched them disappear into the ground. But why, seconds later, was she following at a discreet distance? The turnstile wouldn’t let her through without paying, so she stayed there on one side of the bars, watching her progeny wait on the platform, flanked by older kids canoodling in hormonal fury and by West Indian women in nurse’s shoes and by people on benches who already seemed drunk. In one hand, Will had his yellow duffel, with his school’s crest on the side and a little bloom of tee-shirt caught in the zipper like a weed in the sidewalk. In the other hand, he held his sister’s.
Regan wished, not for the first time, that she were someone else, someone who would trust these eminently capable children, and so wouldn’t have to follow them down here, as if to jump the stile at the last minute, to scoop them up and save them from growing any older. But as they boarded and sat down facing her amid the entropic graffiti that now covered the windows completely, she couldn’t look away. Cate spotted her and waved before the doors closed, but Will just stared blankly ahead like any other adult with places to be—like William, somehow, the uncle he’d never met. Between them at any rate was enough space for another child. And she knew as the train pulled away that all these disappearing kids would be the picture in her head when she spoke before the cameras about the future of the company that was her family, and later as she watched her junior colleague and would-be seducee fumble with the corkscrew, and finally in the darkness when he began to snore and Regan was left on her own again, as one always apparently is.