The coverage is . . . not great. “Benedetto Bares All,” proclaims the headline on the Sinclair, with a link to the video itself plus a slideshow of Olivia’s most revealing outfits. “Liv’s Festival Fiasco,” Us Weekly reports. In Touch is blunter about it: “Olivia’s Moon Landing Sex Tape Scandal,” they promise, in a font bright enough to hurt Lilly’s eyes.
“Where’s all the feminist outrage?” she fumes, stomping down to the kitchen for a bag of pretzel rods, though of course she already knows the answer, which is that she and her sisters are not exactly the kind of women most feminists particularly care about. Though no one has said it explicitly—well, no one outside of the Meet the Benedettos subreddit—the general consensus seems to be that Olivia had this coming. Lilly remembers that feeling from after Joe died: the creeping suspicion that she lived a kind of life that invited spectacular calamity and so had no right to be anything but unsurprised when it came calling. It doesn’t feel any better this time around.
Days pass. Lilly walks the neighborhood, committing the curve of the road to memory. She finishes her draft, sends a dozen hopeful emails to literary agents. Gets a dozen form rejections almost as fast. She takes a deep breath, reopens the document. Takes a second look and tries again.
On Saturday morning she finds her dad up in the gym, where he’s lying on the bench joylessly pressing two hundred pounds over and over. “Need a spotter?” she asks.
Dominic shakes his head, jaw clenched. “Finishing up,” he grinds out, setting the weight back on the rack with a noisy clank before sitting up and reaching for his towel. “How’s your sister doing?”
Lilly hesitates. Which one? she wants to ask him. The one with the sex tape, the one with the eating disorder, the one with all the talent nobody cares about, or the one who doesn’t want anything to do with the rest of us? “I think she’s been better in her life,” she finally allows.
“Yeah.” He rubs the towel over the top of his head before draping it around his neck. “Did you come up here to say ‘I told you so’?”
“What? No,” Lilly says, stung. “When have I ever said anything like that to you?”
“Well, maybe you should,” her father says. “You did tell me so. Or you tried, at least.”
Lilly opens her mouth, closes it again. It’s her instinct to make him feel better—to tell him it’s not his fault, he tried his best, that Olivia’s a grown woman—but in the end she doesn’t say anything, and after a moment her father continues.
“I wanted to give you girls more than I had,” he says quietly. “The house, the pool. That’s what every father wants, right? That’s American. But now that it’s all said and done . . . I don’t know if it was the right thing.”
Lilly doesn’t know if it was the right thing, either. She wonders sometimes what their lives would look like now if they’d stayed in the house in the Valley—if maybe they’d have grown up and moved out and found identities apart from one another. If maybe Joe would still be alive. Still, when she thinks about it for any length of time she doesn’t think it would have changed anything, not fundamentally. She thinks fundamentally they’d all still be themselves. “I don’t know if it was the money that got us here.”
Her father shrugs. “What, you mean because of your mother?” he asks with a shake of his head. “That’s what I’m saying. The money turned your mother into—”
“I’m not talking about Mom right now, Dad!” Lilly’s surprised by the heat in her voice, the surge of defensiveness she feels on her mother’s behalf. “I’m talking about you. You just . . . gave up on us. At some point you decided we were spoiled and ridiculous and ungovernable, same as everyone else did. And you just gave up.”
“Meaning what, exactly?” Her father’s eyes narrow; the two of them haven’t argued in years. “I’ve been here every day—”
“Here,” Lilly says, gesturing around at the gym. “Up here working out by yourself, getting stronger and stronger—for what? What battle are you preparing for, exactly? Because I’ll tell you, there have been a hell of a lot of them in our house the last few years, and you left us to fight them pretty much on our own.”
“When have you ever needed me?” her dad explodes. “When have any of you ever, ever wanted my help?” He shakes his head. “You girls have always been your own nation, all to yourselves.”
Lilly has no idea what to say to that, exactly; she knows she’s not going to get what she wants from him, that he abdicated his responsibility to them a long time ago. Still, “Every nation needs a leader,” she can’t help but remind him. “Ours included.”
Her father smiles at that, just faintly. “Well,” he says, and lifts his chin in her direction, “lucky for your sisters, yours has one.”
Lilly shakes her head, something that feels dangerously like tears rising at the back of her throat. “Dad,” she starts, but Dominic shakes his head.
“I’ve got two hundred push-ups to do,” he tells her, tossing his towel in the hamper. “I’ll see you girls at dinner.”
* * *
Back in the house her sisters are draped across the sofa in the living room, the quartet of them all scrolling their phones in silence like some kind of bizarro Renaissance painting. “Listen up,” Lilly announces, with as much authority as she can muster. June is the only one who bothers to lift her eyes from the screen.
Lilly sighs. She’s not an idiot. She knows what people see when they look at her family. Her father’s failing business and obsession with his own pectorals; her mother’s swollen, flattened lips. Olivia’s mostly one-sided feud with Lorde, who to this day refuses to acknowledge her in interviews. Lilly guesses she can’t blame them. After all, that’s what the Benedettos have shown to the world—in brilliant, blazing Technicolor—for over a decade. Still, those people weren’t there the nights her father brought home a tall stack of pizzas for taste-testing, all of them crowded around the table at the old house; they weren’t there when he collapsed on the patio in the middle of a diatribe about their mother’s landscaping expenses and needed nine hours of emergency surgery at Cedars. Those people don’t know that after Joe died all four of her sisters holed up in her bedroom with her for five full days without leaving, June stroking her hair and Olivia reading her magazines out loud and Kit rubbing lotion into her feet. Even Mari stayed close, curled in the armchair like a cat with her computer in her lap, the sound of her endless typing like one of those white noise machines people use to shush babies to sleep. Every once in a while Lilly still creeps into her room if she’s restless in the middle of the night, dozing off in the cool blue glow of the screen. Marianne has never once told her to leave.
She doesn’t notice she’s crying, but she must be, because all at once Kit catches sight of her and sits up on the sofa, a half-empty bag of Smartfood popcorn sliding off her lap and onto the floor. “Lilly?” she asks. “What’s wrong?”
Lilly shrugs helplessly. “I can’t fix any of it,” she confesses. “I don’t know how to make the video go away. Junie is sick again and I can’t get her to talk to me. I fucked things up with Will. And I have no idea how we’re going to save the house. It feels like the end of everything, and I don’t know how to stop it from happening. I don’t know how to solve any of it by myself.”
For a moment none of her sisters say anything, a quick silent conversation happening among the four of them. In the end, Mari is the one who speaks first.
“Lilly,” she says, holding her hand out so she’ll join them. “Why the fuck would you ever think you had to?”
* * *
A week passes. They hunker down. Their phones ring endlessly, calls rolling in from every gross, unsavory corner of the Hollywood-industrial complex: An offer from Joe Rogan. An offer from TMZ. An offer from a producer at Big Dipper Adult Enterprises—who, Cinta is validated to learn, did in fact rent Charlie’s house on Netherfield Place for a period of time several years ago. “They used it to film Oceanfront Orgy,” she reports when she hangs up, sounding satisfied. “Also, Oceanfront Orgy 2.” She gestures knowledgeably with her wineglass. “They added the ocean in post.”
Kit throws her phone into the pool in protest, then changes her mind and dives in to fish it out again. Lilly doesn’t check her email for eight days. “Maybe I should just do it,” Olivia says, working her sharp nails beneath the skin of an orange at the table on the patio. “I mean, not the porn, obviously. But the podcast.”
Kit makes a face, plucking the peel from Olivia’s hand and draping the long curly strip of it over her lips like a mustache. “Honestly,” she advises, “at this point I think you’d be better off doing the porn.”
Lilly’s phone buzzes, skittering nervously across the table like a tropical bug. She grits her teeth and moves to send it to voice mail, then changes her mind at the last possible second and lifts it to her ear instead, punchy and brave. “Whatever it is,” she announces, “she’s not interested.”
“Oh. Uh, sorry,” a voice says—young and female and perky, though not quite as young and female and perky as most of the assistants who’ve been calling. “I think I might have the wrong—is this Lilly Benedetto?”
Lilly frowns, glancing around the table at her sisters’ curious glances. She pushes back her chair. “Yes,” she says, slipping around the side of the house for some privacy. “This is Lilly.”
“Oh, good,” the woman says. “Lilly, this is Marissa Tasco, with Ravenwood Literary Associates in New York.” She pauses then, the noise of a city faintly audible in the background. “I’m calling to talk to you about your book.”