All of Us and Everything E-Book

Bridget Asher

• Herausgeber: Corvus
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2015

Beschreibung

Esme: eldest child, control-freak, perfect wife. In fact, her husband has run off with his dentist and their teenage daughter is live-tweeting the entire mess to her 3,000 followers. Liv: middle child, fiancé stealer, squatter. Holed up in her ex-husband's apartment with her acupuncturist and a bottle of whiskey. Ru: youngest child, writer, runaway. Hopes to find inspiration for her second novel whilst fleeing her fiancé. One-by-one the siblings return to the family home, where a box of old letters awaits them containing the answer to the mystery they have all lived with, until now: who was their father, and why the hell did he disappear?

Leseprobe

For my sisters – those from birth and those I’ve picked up along the way. I love you all.

Contents

The Prologue

Part One

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Part Two

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Part Three

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Part Four

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Part Five

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

Chapter 34

Chapter 35

Chapter 36

Chapter 37

Chapter 38

Epilogue

A Conversation with Bridget Asher

About the Author

Also by Bridget Asher

Copyright

The Prologue

In which Augusta Rockwell attempts to teach her three daughters how to conduct a storm set to classical music.

SUMMER 1985

One evening in June 1985, Augusta Rockwell lined up her daughters—Esme, Liv, and Ru—in front of the rippling, leaded window on the third floor of the old Victorian on Asbury Avenue. She handed them small white conductor’s batons made of birch with pear cork handles, and, as dark clouds clotted the eastern sky over Ocean City, New Jersey, she informed them that she was going to teach them how to be conductors—not of music, but of storms.

“Storms are one way to define people,” Augusta told her daughters, squaring their shoulders in front of their glass reflections. “There are those who love storms, those who fear them, and those who love them because they fear them.”

The home on Asbury Avenue had been in the Rockwell family for generations. No relation to famed Norman Rockwell, painter of quaint Americana, these Rockwells had made great profit in the fishing industry, and later, after too many of them had died at sea, munitions, and after too many had died at war, banking. Augusta had informed her daughters that they were, by association and hand-me-down, sea-profiteers, war-profiteers, and finally greed-profiteers.

The third floor comprised one large room with a hall that led to the staircase. Here the girls enjoyed doing loud things that echoed well—singing along to Duran Duran, tap dancing, clogging. A long old mahogany table ran the width of the room at one end. It was surrounded by mismatched chairs from different eras of past Rockwell generations. A record table and organized collection of albums sat in its middle, along with a stack of the girls’ favorite Nancy Drews, which had floated up from their library—consisting of three bookshelves running the length of one wall in the living room on the first floor.

It’s important to mention that Esme, the oldest, had read all of the Nancy Drews in order, noting on the inside cover how long it took her to finish and initialing the data. Liv, purely because of her competitive nature, also marked her times and initialed them, but eventually gave up reading except for assignments. Ru, the youngest, read leisurely and for pleasure, and occasionally, out of spite, she changed her sisters’ times, slowing them down.

This room on the third floor had also been headquarters to Augusta’s monthly meetings of The Personal Honesty Movement, a fledgling group she’d founded that winter. It had ended a few weeks earlier—a fiery argument that echoed cacophonously in the large room. Her followers—at the height of the movement there were only four, plus her daughters—wrote her an angry letter about her stubborn withholding, and disbanded. Augusta preferred vague Statements of Personal Honesty, which disappointed members who’d expected a kind of full-blooded confessional movement.

The abrupt end to her movement had shaken her, and it wasn’t a coincidence that she was teaching her daughters how to conduct storms. It was, after all, an attempt to seize control of the uncontrollable.

And her decision to teach the girls to storm-conduct was also tied to the fact that they’d never known their father. He and Augusta had never married. This made the family seem unmoored in a way Augusta couldn’t have predicted.

But she wasn’t clear enough on the links among any of these things to make a Statement of Personal Honesty about it.

Augusta picked through the stack of albums, glancing at the dark clouds and waves beyond the windows, trying to decide what kind of storm this might be and how that would best be expressed in a classical arrangement. Thunder rumbled distantly.

Liv was staring down at the tourists—a teen in a neon bikini, thumbing a wedgy from her bum, a boy in plaid surfer shorts, shoving a cooler and two orange plastic beach chairs into the backseat of a convertible. Liv didn’t want to conduct a storm. She wanted to conduct other human beings. She thought, Take me with you.

Esme was tapping her baton on the window. “Which type of storm people are we?” She’d been thinking of starting her own movement but something completely different from her mother’s.

“We aren’t a type,” Augusta told them. “It’s how to define other people. We aren’t other people.”

Esme’s sophomore year of high school had challenged her mother’s strongly held conviction. It seemed as if Esme was other people’s other person. She’d written in her journal, “I feel otherly.” It was a negative self-assessment.

“We’re not other people because we’re us,” Ru said. Her mother and sisters were never quite sure whether Ru was being simpleminded—she was the baby after all—or profound, so she often went ignored.

Liv rested her forehead on the glass window, staring out blankly. She wondered what type of person she would be if she could choose from every type in the world. She was restless to be someone else. Maybe many different people.

Augusta slid an album from its paper sleeve and put it on the record player.

The needle made a soft crackling noise.

“Batons up!” Augusta said.

The girls lifted their batons in unison, as if they’d done this many times before. Hector Berlioz’s Symphonie Fantastique filled the air, quietly at first, and almost innately the girls started moving their single batons to the music.

“Eyes on the sky, the waves,” Augusta said, taking her place at the fourth window.

The girls didn’t need any coaxing. They understood they were taking control of the uncontrollable, and it set right with each of them.

And Augusta saw that she was giving them a coping mechanism. Life is as unruly as storms. Even the appearance of control can make one feel real control.

She’d been a quiet, nervous girl with a sparrow’s quickness—small sharp movements, a skittishness as if she were about to startle and take flight. The first time she decided to conduct the ocean, she was twelve and had come down with rheumatic fever, which would take a toll on her heart. She misheard it too—she thought she had a romantic fever. She thought of love as a disease, and, in her dreamy fevered state, her parents’ fighting made her believe the house was filled with vicious gulls. She cranked the Victrola, moved to the window, and had just enough energy to orchestrate a squall.

A few measures into the music, Ru recognized the piece. Only nine, she already had a keen memory for things she heard. Later she was diagnosed with a superb memory overall and a nearly perfect eidetic memory by a therapist her mother forced her to visit in her teens after Ru ran away from home. At this moment, the notes bobbing in the air, she shouted, “The Boston Symphony with Munch conducting, 1962!”

“Correct, Ru,” her mother said.

“But how would we know if we’re like other people?” Liv asked, unable to let it go. “We don’t know what other people are like.”

The girls weren’t encouraged to have friends. If anyone asked about their father at school, Augusta had instructed them to tear up, say he was dead, and refuse to talk about it. The closest Augusta had come to friends in recent years was the followers of The Personal Honesty Movement. She told the girls they were too mature to waste time with children who were only going to grow up to be automatons. She treated her daughters as small adults. “Better to be an individual than to find yourself in the heart of the herd,” she said, a summarizing sentence to a much longer speech.

Esme had started to desire the hearts of herds. She was pretty sure that her rebellious movement would be against the individuality her mother forced upon her.

The music quickened. The girls bounced their batons. The rain started up, fat drops splattering the sidewalk, slapping the window, the roof overhead. The waves kept heaving themselves onto the beach.

“But we do know Jessamine!” Ru said, smiling. She loved their housekeeper. She was their link to the outside world. She bought all of their food, clothes, and school supplies. She drove their large green station wagon around town and taught the girls how to do banking, how to order in restaurants, how to buy yards of fabric to make curtains.

“Don’t be an idiot, Ru. We pay Jessamine,” Esme said. “It’s not like she’s going to let us know who she really is. That’s the thing with money.”

Jessamine, standing on the other side of the door, could hear everything, but the Rockwells’ opinions of her had no effect. She saw them as an intensely neurotic family, barely kept together by their mother’s thin swaddling of self-deception. She kept her personal life private and never told anyone about the Rockwell household, as per the contract Augusta had made her sign.

“Yes, but I have lived a life—before you three were born,” Augusta said. “I have known many people so you’ll have to take my word for it. Other people are generally disappointing.”

“They can’t all be disappointing!” Esme said. Her arms were burning. She let them drop but found herself hoping—despite her rational mind—that her sisters’ conducting would be enough to keep the storm moving.

“Trying to find one who doesn’t disappoint you would take a lot of time and energy and that’s not necessary. We are enough. None of us would turn on the other.” Each of the girls had already turned on one another in small ways and felt a pang of guilt. Esme knew bigger betrayals were looming, and that her mother was really talking about men and love.

“What if only one person is worth it?” Liv said, and her mother feared that, at this young age, Liv was already a romantic. “Then isn’t all the time and energy worth it? For just one?”

Augusta didn’t answer. Her heart suddenly clenched in her chest. She told herself it was the remnants of the old rheumatic fever flaring. She pressed her hand to the cold glass.

“I’m going to Smith College one day!” Esme said, as if to warn them of her future betrayal. “I’m getting out of here and moving into the real world.”

“Smith College is hardly the real world!” The pain passed. Augusta shoved her hands into the pockets of her housedress.

“But I can go, right?” Esme faced her mother.

“We’ll see.”

Liv was conducting vigorously, her thick blond bob swaying as if her ears were onstage and someone kept opening and shutting the curtains. “I’d like to at least try to be like other people and see if it’s any good.”

Ru’s conducting was jerky but on-beat. “I’d like to meet Dad one day.” She was young enough to still say these kinds of things.

“Shut up, Ru. He’s a spy. He can’t meet you,” Liv said, echoing what her mother had said many times. “It would be too dangerous.”

Talk of their father was so rare that Ru ached to keep going. “Maybe one day when he retires, we can meet him!”

“He can’t just retire! He has enemies,” Liv said.

“I’ve explained the Cold War,” Augusta added.

This muted the conversation. The music turned inward with the plaintive call of oboes. Augusta hoped this would end the conversation, but she sensed the idea of their father as absentee spy was suddenly delicate—a soap bubble in a storm like this. It couldn’t really endure, could it?

As the music turned and swelled, Augusta watched her daughters lift their batons higher—even Esme returned to the work at hand—coaxing the ocean to rise with the violins. And as if the ocean could hear it, the waves rose and pounded, rose and pounded.

“I’d prefer you all stay close to home,” Augusta said. “Nothing can take the place of family.”

With this comment, Esme realized that her mother would never let her go willingly. She’d already given up on the idea of her father as a spy; her suspicions were affirmed during the painful meetings of The Personal Honesty Movement with her mother’s refusal to actually reveal much by way of personal honesty. Esme wheeled away from the window. “You can’t keep me from going to Smith!” She spiked her baton. “I’m applying my senior year, early decision.”

“We haven’t made a decision about Smith yet. I’ll talk to your father and . . .”

“How do you talk to him?” Ru cried out, orchestrating as hard as she could. “Why can’t we talk to him?”

“She doesn’t talk to him!” Esme said. “There is no him at all!”

Liv’s arms fell to her sides. She felt a sudden pooling of despair, a pain she’d eventually learn to medicate (and sometimes self-medicate abundantly). Liv breathed, “She made him up.”

Alone, Ru felt grave responsibility to keep the storm going. Lightning fluttered against the horizon.

Augusta was afraid that Esme was poisoning Liv and Ru. She had to contain this. “Are you calling me a liar, Esme?” In light of the Movement, however failed it was, the word liar was still the worst thing you could call someone in this house.

“Yes. In fact, I’m calling you a bad liar!” Esme said. “No one has a father who’s just a spy, who can never be met or talked to. You probably had sex with strangers!”

Ru predicted lightning. She felt it in her chest. She straightened her arms and a bolt stroked the sky. The thunder followed quickly.

“Why would I do that?” Augusta asked her daughter.

“Because you have intimacy and trust issues,” Esme said quickly, “but you wanted a family.”

“Stop,” Liv said to her sister. “Don’t.”

“Who told you that?” Augusta asked Esme.

The music was teeming with strings.

“No one.”

Ru was memorizing each word of the conversation, each note, the roars of thunder and beating rain. She would remember it all—as if it were one piece of music in and of itself—forever.

“I know you didn’t make this up yourself. It’s what some college-educated, slightly jealous woman would say about me! It’s the babble of an armchair psychologist! Do you have a friend you haven’t told us about? And does this friend have a mother—a conventional one who’s possibly threatened by my choices?”

Augusta was right. Esme had overheard two moms at a Teacher Appreciation Potluck gossiping about Augusta in the bathroom.

The lightning and the thunder were simultaneous. The shadowed room was flooded with a bright flare. The solitary tall tree across the street—a rarity in this coastal town, having withstood punishing storms for so long—lit up as the bolt touched down, searing a limb that cracked and fell onto the electrical wires where it balanced, bobbing in the wind and rain.

They crowded Ru’s window.

Ru tried to keep the limb balanced there with her baton, but it was no use. The winds were too strong, the wires too flimsy, the branch too thick—a barrel-chested thing that made her think it was a manly branch—it made her think of the word father because they were talking about her own father, his existence.

She couldn’t save the manly branch.

She sighed, dropped her arms, and the limb exhausted its support; the wires broke, snapping with electricity. The tree limb fell hard, denting the hood of their own wide green station wagon, which had been parked beneath it.

“Damn it,” Augusta said.

The electricity clipped off, and the whole world dimmed, darkness bleeding out over the ocean where heat lightning strobed. The music whined into minor chords as the needle ground to a stop.

Esme, Liv, and Ru looked at their mother in the dim light.

She stared out at the shore. She said all she was able to say on the matter of their father—three Statements of Personal Honesty that were also facts: “Your father is a spy. He can’t be known. I love him, despite myself.”

Ru circled back to the beginning of the lesson. “There’s a fourth kind of person. The kind who tries to control a storm, right?”

“Correct, Ru. More or less,” Augusta said. She patted Ru on the head. “You did the best you could.” She held her fist to her compromised heart.

Part One

In which we learn about the lives of Augusta Rockwell and her three daughters before and during the hurricane that unearths the package destined to change their lives forever.

SUNDAY, OCTOBER 28, 2012

CHAPTER 1

“I didn’t know you were supposed to shave collies,” the headmaster said while he patted the dog’s long thin snout and took a seat in Esme’s living room. “I mean, I’ve just never seen it.”

“I don’t think it’s recommended but imagine living with him! It’s like having a Russian in your living room who refuses to take off his fur coat and hat in the middle of the summer. Like Dostoevsky himself, brooding away.” Littering a conversation with literary and pop-culture references had become an anxious habit for Esme, maybe the result of the stiflingly crowded overeducated population that made up faculty housing at a boarding school. On campus, all of the dogs and cats—and many of the faculty children themselves—were named with some clever allusion in mind. Atty, Esme’s daughter now fifteen and sitting beside her on the sofa, was named after Atticus Finch, a man’s name, yes, but Esme didn’t want to saddle Atty with the name Scout and she was set on which book she wanted to allude to. Ingmar, the collie, was often mistaken for a Bergman reference but actually it was a more obscure reference to the lead character in a Swedish film that Esme and her husband, Doug, saw when they were dating.

“But it’s October,” the headmaster said. “Shouldn’t he be bulking up his winter coat?”

“Still, the metaphor stands even if it’s cold out. I mean, hey, take off your coat, fella, and stay awhile! Am I right?” Esme said, trying to lighten the mood. She’d actually shaved the dog specifically for this meeting. Ingmar’s coat had become matted from muddy romps out by the pond, and dogs weren’t supposed to be off their leashes. She looked at her daughter for a little help.

Atty—a budding social media guru—looked up from her iPhone, leaned forward, and said, “This dog’s no Dostoevsky. Don’t you worry.” As if the burden of being in the same room with a dog capable of literary genius would be too much for the headmaster to bear. “A corgi on human growth hormones, maybe, but that’s about it. He couldn’t get a kid out of a well if his doggy life depended on it.” She then tweeted both sentences with the hashtag #lifewithcollie.

“There are no wells on campus,” the headmaster said, defensively.

Atty looked at Esme in a challenging way. Neither of them was a great fan of the headmaster. Behind his back, they both referred to him as Big-Head Todd. He had a very big head and the history teacher, also a Todd, had a very little head so they called him Little-Head Todd. Atty’s look was meant as a reminder to her mother that she’d promised to call the headmaster Big-Head Todd to his face, one fine day, before she graduated.

Esme understood the look immediately and shot her a look that meant, Not now. Then she smiled at Todd. “Listen. What do you need to tell us? You’re here, making a house call on a Sunday with a huge storm moving up the coast.”

“A Frankenstorm,” Atty added. She’d been following video clips on weather.com, the growing buzz of online hysteria, mandatory evacuations on the coast—even in Ocean City, New Jersey, where her grandmother lived. Did her mother really care about this storm? Was she too busy bracing for this meeting, which was clearly going to be about Atty’s shit midterm grades and her diminishing prospects for a good college education? Atty could almost hear the headmaster saying, We’re talking fourth tier at best, now. Fourth tier.

“And you didn’t cancel because of the storm, which would have been fine.” Esme knew this visit might have something to do with Doug. He had led a group of sophomores on a study abroad program in Europe. Atty was a sophomore but her grades had been too low to make the cut, which meant that Esme had to stay behind with her. Esme had asked if Doug was dead as soon as Mrs. Prinknell had called to make the appointment. “No, no,” Mrs. Prinknell had assured her, “for deaths, he calls people in pronto.”

But that was Friday evening and this was Sunday morning, and Doug had missed their Skype session, which had made Esme anxious. He was the type to prioritize one of the student’s emergency issues over his own life and so she’d decided this was an issue with one of the kids on the trip.

The headmaster was still balking. “It’s just, maybe Atty has some studying to do and we can talk privately.”

“I believe in honesty,” Esme said. “Not just, you know, expressing one’s feelings, and listing your grievances and airing out emotions, but the truth, the facts. I have nothing to hide from Atty.” The dog looked at her sharply with his very small eyes. It was a genetic problem; his eyes were literally too small for his head, but these looks—little admonishments—always reminded Esme of her mother. The collie looked like pictures of her mother from the late 1950s—skinny arms and legs and a boxy middle, wearing woolen skirts with formfitting pleats tight through her ample hips. Why had she gotten a dog who reminded her of her mother? Maybe she’d done it subconsciously.

“Okay, okay.” Todd pulled back his suit jacket and looked at a walkie-talkie clipped to his belt. “If the squawk box goes off, I’ll have to take it. Sorry about that.”

“That’s okay. I’ve got a call in to my mother, who’s being evacuated on the Jersey shore.” Her mother was the stubborn type who refused to leave during storms. Esme was prepared to try to talk her into leaving, knowing she’d fail.

“Yep, yep. Hurricane Sandy has us on a twenty-four-seven alert. All-in, you know.”

“All-in,” Esme said, “of course.” She had no idea what all-in meant, and she hadn’t been paying attention to the storm. If storms defined people—those who love storms, those who fear them, and those who love them because they fear them—Esme was the type to try to ignore them because you can’t control them. She preferred limiting her life to things she could more easily control. It’s why she’d fallen for Doug. He was so practical, so tractable and reliable. And Esme had thought motherhood would be an experience of ultimate control—shaping a child, molding and nurturing them into adulthood. Raising Atty had proven her wrong.

Todd smiled sadly, and then he actually swept his hand over the wisps of hair on his big head and bent forward, leaning his elbows on his knees. It was the least robotic thing Esme had ever seen him do. In fact, it was so deeply human, she was worried. The news was bound to be very, very bad. “Doug’s left the study abroad program.”

“Left?” Esme said.

“It seems he’s run off with his dentist.”

“My dad’s gay?” Atty said. This wasn’t about her shit grades? She didn’t have to give her speech on the psychological effects of being a faculty brat? She immediately thought: My father has always kept a very tidy closet, but really gay?

Todd shook his head. “His female dentist.”

For a second, Atty felt guilty for assuming that the dentist was male. “Sorry,” she said, apologizing for her sexism.

“It’s not your fault!” Esme said quickly. She knew kids would blame themselves for marital issues. She herself had wondered if she’d been to blame for her absentee father. For years, she’d wondered if there’d been some good fatherly type that she’d driven away—so early in her life she couldn’t remember him.

Atty assumed her mother was taking blame for having raised Atty in a sexist culture, but didn’t dwell on it. She pulled out her iPhone and tweeted, I feel weirdly abandoned. Her tweets were usually so sarcastic that her followers weren’t sure what to make of the vague emotional baldness. If Atty’s grandmother were a follower—she didn’t have a Twitter account—she would have recognized it as a Statement of Personal Honesty, the factless variety, which she preferred.

It was a true Statement. Atty did feel unmoored—that disorienting moment in childhood when you realize that you’ve reached up and grabbed the wrong father’s hand and a stranger looks down at you and says, “Are you lost?” When this happened to Atty once at a Memorial Day parade, she’d gotten so embarrassed she turned it on the man. “I’m not lost! Let go of me, creeper!” And then she’d walked off and started crying. Doug found her in seconds.

Esme barely registered her daughter typing away with her thumbs. She irrationally assumed that Atty was going to look up the headmaster’s story on the Internet—as if she could find out if it was a hoax or an overseas scam—I’m stuck in Paris. A female dentist stole all of my credit cards and identification. Can you please wire money?

Part of Esme knew the story was possibly true. One of Doug’s molars had been killing him. She’d encouraged him to get it checked out. They were in Paris. Socialized medicine and all . . .

Esme stood up. Her arms hung at her sides. They felt loose, almost unattached from her body. She felt armless. She walked to the bay window. It was dark and rainy. The storm was coming.

“He’s no longer an employee of the school,” Todd went on.

“You fired him?” Esme asked.

“He quit.”

This was a very bad sign. “He quit? But he doesn’t have another job . . .” She shook her head. “He’s not the kind to run off. He has a really strong TIAA-CREF account. He’s not like this.”

“He told me that he has a plan.”

“You talked to him?”

“Well, yes. It’s how I knew he quit.”

Somehow she thought it had been handled by rumors and hearsay, as so many things were handled on campus. But, no. Doug had called the headmaster. And with this small detail, she knew that her marriage was over. She quickly blamed her mother-in-law. That side of the family was so uppity and elitist that there had been marriages between first cousins that had resulted in poor teeth, which meant Doug had to go to a dentist in Paris in the first place.

And then she thought, irrationally, that maybe her marriage was ending to make room for Ru’s. Augusta had told Esme the news one week ago today. What if there was a kind of curse—the family of three daughters and one mother could only contain one real marriage at a time. Esme’s brain used the caveat real because Liv’s marriages—all three of them—had always felt fragile and dubious—mainly because Liv so loudly insisted that these loves were great, sweeping epic loves that none of the other women in the family could really grasp. What was there to grasp? Liv married for money and did it well.

Once Esme had flitted through all the blame she could muster, she wanted to feel something. A deep splitting ache in her chest. But she wasn’t sure she loved Doug. Countless times, she’d imagined him leaving her, her leaving him, his sudden death. Awful things, but in truth she was not sure she’d ever loved him. She knew she’d never loved him the way she did her first love, Darwin Webber, who disappeared from college, not even leaving her a note. (And he was still nowhere to be found. She’d Googled him a bunch of times and he had no Internet footprint—not even a death notice.) She’d met Doug a year later, and having given up on the idea that she could love anyone again, she opted instead for what felt like a good partnership. (Was she just in the earliest stage of grief?)

“Do the kids on the trip know?” Atty asked.

Esme turned and looked at her.

“I mean, Maeve Brown is on that trip, and Piper Weir and George and Kate and Stew,” Atty rattled off. “What about the other chaperones? Jesus!” She rotated the small stud earring on one of her earlobes the way she’d been taught to do in the months that followed getting her ears pierced—when she was eight years old. Esme wondered if she was regressing before her eyes. “Do you know how big this is?” she said to her mother, wide-eyed, cradling her iPhone.

Her daughter had no idea how big this would be—personally. “This isn’t a public phenomenon, Atty. It’s a private matter.”

“What world do you live in? Everything here is public. We aren’t an actual family. We live on campus and represent an actual family so the boarding students can see how they function on a daily basis. We’re like those American towns set up in Russia so Russian kids can grow up to learn to be American spies.”

“No, we’re one big family,” Todd said, but he seemed shaken by the comment, like Atty had just laid something bare. “We’re a real community. We care for one another.”

“Sure. Right,” Atty said. “This is about to blow up.” She wanted to add that this would blow up atomically, and they would end up like the statues of human char she’d read about in oral histories of the bombings on Hiroshima and Nagasaki assigned by Little-Head Todd.

Esme turned back to the window. She tapped her fingernails against the glass, hoping to remind her body that she wasn’t armless. She wanted to run away. Ru had run away from home when she was a teenager for a total of twenty-one days. For three full days, none of them had noticed, not even Jessamine who assumed that Augusta knew what was what. Ru was so upset by that fact that she refused to tell any of them where she’d gone or what she’d done.

Atty was right. This was about to blow up. What kind of home, if any, would be left after the detonation?

Todd sighed. He knew Atty was right too. “I’ve been in situations like this—well, not quite this exotic—but yes, like this, and it’s not pretty, the deterioration is bad . . . people take sides—and when one partner is absent, sometimes it’s easier to blame the one who’s here. And some of the students come from divorce themselves. They act out various hostilities. It’s not pretty.”

“It’s not pretty,” Esme repeated.

“It’s actually a time bomb,” the headmaster said. “I mean, Atty’s right. That’s the metaphor I use.”

“A ticking time bomb.” Esme looked at the trees, the pumpkin-lined street. Atty’s bike and helmet were in the yard and she’d told her a million times to put them in the shed. When would she see Doug again?

Would they be divorcing via Skype—all disjointed, their voices not quite synced to the movement of their mouths? Would she divorce her husband of seventeen years like a badly dubbed Asian monster movie?

And then Esme spun around. She finally heard what Todd was trying to tell her. “Oh, we should leave. Move. You want us to move.”

“No, no, no,” Todd said. He leaned back, propped one ankle on one knee, and tapped his duck boot. “We have a contract as well. Your husband’s in breach. We’ll deal with that. But you can stay—through the end of the year.”

Doug had been the real hire. She’d been placed in the library as an unnecessary assistant. She was expendable. She hated Big-Head Todd right now. It was strange how she should be furious at her husband for running off with a French female dentist, but maybe being angry at Todd was helping her at least locate her anger.

She heard clicking. She turned and looked at Atty, who was texting madly. “Are you tweeting this?”

“Shiz is going down,” Atty explained.

“Are you on the record with that? Your father’s having an affair and you’re writing Shiz is going down? That’s how you’re going to tell this story one day. And then I tweeted all my followers that shiz was going down?”

It hadn’t dawned on Atty that this was a story she’d be telling for the rest of her life. She was telling it now. “I’m live-tweeting commentary.”

Todd sighed and stood up. He took Esme by the arm. “You’ve got to get a handle on her, Esme. You don’t want this to be a soap opera with a Greek chorus. I know these kids. Their Greek chorus work is dark.”

He walked to the door. It wasn’t their door. It belonged to the school. The house was appointed to them by the headmaster. Everything was a gift, even Atty’s education. It was part of their benefits package. She thought she’d only leave at retirement. But now she saw they were just passing through.

Todd opened the front door, popped open an umbrella decorated with the school’s crest, and looked at the groundskeeper, in a bright-green slicker also emblazoned with the school’s crest, who’d been waiting for him in a truck parked in front of the house. “We’ve really got to get this under control,” he said. “This is going to be one hell of a storm.”

For a second, she wasn’t sure if he was talking about the collapse of her marriage or Hurricane Sandy. She quickly realized that now outside he was talking about the literal storm.

“You can’t control a storm,” she said frankly. She thought of her sisters. She missed them deeply. She hadn’t had a real conversation with either of them in years. “Some people think they can. It’s not possible.”

He looked at her, cocked his head, as if he weren’t sure if she was speaking of the collapse of her marriage or the literal storm, but he didn’t ask. He turned and walked out onto the wet lawn.

Esme thought about her mother and she didn’t want to tell her about Doug’s disappearance. Her mother hadn’t ever been sure that Doug was the right one for her. Plus, her mother didn’t seem to care for the institution of marriage, and Esme feared a too-soon I-told-you-so.

Atty watched at the window, blurred by rain. She wondered where her father was this very moment. She imagined hastily packed foreign valises, and all the bitchy snots on the trip gossiping about her father. She hoped the dentist was pretty. If she wasn’t, it would be really embarrassing. Atty briefly wished the dentist had been a man. It would be really awful to make fun of a girl whose father was suddenly gay. I mean, she’d be further protected by political correctness, and she’d get to become an activist with a personal stake in it all. The LGBTQ kids would welcome her in, and she’d finally have something to write about for her college entrance essay.

Atty felt a surgical sting in her chest, and it was as if the attachment she had to her father were something physical. She could feel sutures being tugged.

No, she told the stinging. Don’t.

The stinging seemed to answer her, It’s not just your dad you’re losing. You’re getting kicked out too. You’ll lose everyone except your mother and the dog.

Ingmar stood beside Atty at the window. He could have been a fur model. He used to look like the collie version of Fabio, and now he was just a crew cut. She tweeted this quickly and then thought, This is my last year. And alongside the pain, she felt a twinge of freedom. She decided to lean away from the pain and into the freedom.

Atty ran to the front door, past her mother under the eave, out into the driving rain, and waved to the headmaster who was sitting in the passenger’s seat of the truck’s cab. “Thank you, Big-Head Todd! Thanks so much for the four-one-one! Talk to you soon! Good luck in the storm!”

Her mother didn’t flinch. Atty had done it. She’d called the headmaster Big-Head Todd to his face.

Esme couldn’t tell if he’d heard her. The windshield wipers beating across the glass, the blur and noise of the rain, his brow knitted, he gave a small salute.

The truck barreled out of the driveway and on down the road, leaving Atty standing in the yard, Esme behind her, the rain ticking all around them like thousands of time bombs.

CHAPTER 2

MONDAY, OCTOBER 29, 2012

Liv Rockwell was living in an apartment on the nineteenth floor of the Caledonia in West Chelsea.

Actually, she was a squatter.

She’d once shared the place, now almost completely empty, with her ex-husband—her third and most recent husband, Owen—before his second wife got pregnant and they moved to Chappaqua.

The Caledonia offered bamboo trees in the common open-air garden, a Boffi stainless-steel chef’s kitchen with a Wolf stove, and a view of the High Line park. These things were important to her because she wasn’t going out much. She ordered delivery from Bombay Talkie and Bottino—except for flan, which she made herself. She found the egginess a comfort. Her mother never cooked but flan was the specialty of their long-standing housekeeper, Jessamine.

She’d only replaced one of her favorite items—a Gaggia espresso maker that ran her almost two thousand dollars. She had money—that wasn’t the problem. She was simply losing faith in it.

She could have easily bought fluffy linens, even a luxury bed, but she refused to indulge herself. She slept on spare pillows topped with down outerwear she’d found in a box in a spare closet, plumping them in the middle of the floor in her old bedroom. She took down a white sheer from the living room and used it as a sheet, and her full-length fur coat—inherited from an elderly Rockwell auntie (her sisters had refused to wear it on moral grounds)—as a blanket. She was well aware that any day now a real estate agent was going to show up with movers delivering high-end rental furniture to stage the place for sale. She had other places to go, of course, including rehab, but she was feeling weirdly homesick—maybe because she was between husbands—and so she went to the place that felt at least a little like home, albeit a broken one.

(And she had to believe that the head doorman had alerted Owen that she was back, and Owen had been kind enough not to make a stink about it. He didn’t like stinks. The real estate agent would be stinky enough. If Owen didn’t want her to still have access to the place, he should have changed the locks.)

The storm had started to rattle windows, and the toilet had stopped flushing though the electricity was working. (It had crossed her mind that her toilet issue was a problem with her specific toilet, not the building, but she couldn’t call maintenance. It would draw attention.)

Liv sat in an Adirondack chair in the living room. She had a flashlight nearby, bottled water and salami in the fridge. That was the extent of her preparation.