Chapter 19
The residence on North Tigertail Road is less house than estate. The sight of numerous luxury SUVs parked in the roundabout driveway gives Rebecca pause.
The front doors are enormous, two stories high, wrought-iron and glass, looking into a foyer the size of Rebecca and Mark’s backyard.
A staircase sweeps up to floors unseen. On the landing wall, an enormous Lichtenstein beams red and yellow Ben Day dots.
A beady black eye of a lens peers out from the modern doorbell, and yet the chime sounds throaty, like a medieval organ.
Footsteps patter.
An attractive woman appears, a pencil skirt constraining gym-slim hips, a glamorous cashmere cape swept around her sequin camisole, rakishly barefoot.
Sydney’s mom—Sheila—waves; her other arm, bent angularly, terminates in a sleek bowl of white wine.
Given the expanse, it takes some time for her to reach the door, and they hold eye contact through the glass.
Rebecca shifts awkwardly on the porch, wishing she’d changed out of her mom jeans.
“You must be Maddy’s mommy,” Sheila says, her smile pronounced between sexy, augmented lips. Sheila offers an icy hug, contorting at the waist, head thrown wide, face turned away, a skeletal pat of Rebecca’s back. Her powerful perfume, lavender and citrus, calls to mind Derek’s wife, Alexa.
Mean Girls, Rebecca thinks, as she follows Sheila back.
A massive bearskin hugs the marble before a hearth the size of a Cybertruck. “Don’t worry,” Sheila says breezily, “not real.”
They pass staff everywhere, chefs moving briskly in the kitchen, maids scurrying past, cleaning crews dusting and bustling.
A decorator-type resets basketballs in a tank of water, a Jeff Koons–like installation or, more likely, an actual Jeff Koons.
A butler halts his progress to stand at attention against a wall as they pass.
Rebecca’s midwestern upbringing flares, and she gives him a smile. He returns a nearly imperceptible nod.
Sheila leads Rebecca down a corridor wide enough to accommodate a subway train. “The girls and I are just down here,” she says, and Rebecca feels her stomach constrict at the notion of an ambush.
Sure enough, there the girls are, spread around divans and couches, each more expensively curated than the next.
Pearls glitter; jewels match ear to wrist; hairdos present with professional severity.
The room is like a salon from the Roaring Twenties designed by someone obsessed with taupe.
Introductions are made, Rebecca failing to keep up with the names.
“Glass of Vermentino?” Sheila asks.
Rebecca has never heard the word and does not want a drink. “No, thank you.”
One of the women, a wide-mouthed brunette says, “This is sooo much better than the Viognier.”
Rebecca scratches her shoulder, realizes she is doing it, stops. “I’m sorry,” she says, cursing herself for apologizing even as she’s doing it. “I didn’t realize I was interrupting a social gathering.”
“Oh, this isn’t social,” Sheila says.
“Well, everything we do is a bit social,” says the redhead, running manicured nails through a faux-fur throw on the divan.
“Given your concerns,” Sheila continues, “I thought I’d get all the girls together from, you know, our daughters’ group.”
Maddy does not have a group. And if she did, it certainly wouldn’t be composed of the offspring of these harpies.
“I know Maddy has been uncomfortable—”
“No,” Rebecca says, “she’s been bullied.”
“That’s one version of events,” says another woman, East Asian, severe makeup, world-class legs crossed high at the thigh beneath a micro-mini Rebecca might have been able to fit into when she was twelve. “But everyone has their own.”
“Especially girls,” the redhead chimes in. “I mean, half the stories we get are ‘She said, she said, she said.’”
“Maddy sustained a bad burn,” Rebecca says, somehow defending herself, her injured child. She admonishes herself mentally for resorting to the dramatically medical sustained.
“We understand that, sweetie, and we feel terrible about it,” the brunette says, “but everything that happens doesn’t have to be someone’s fault. I mean, they’re children. And children play.”
“Maddy was bullied into getting on that slide.”
“Bullied,” the redhead laughs, with a roll of her head.
“Yes,” Rebecca says. “Bullied.”
Sheila lays a too-thin hand on Rebecca’s arm. “I mean, can we really believe her story, what with her sensitivities and filters and . . . limitations and whatnot?”
Unprepared for a direct attack on her daughter, Rebecca is stunned into speechlessness.
“We can’t slow down a whole village to accommodate one child,” another woman says, somewhere behind Rebecca, by the leather-padded bar.
Sheila pivots in front of Rebecca, an assault of high-end perfume and aggressively sympathetic eyes: “What we’re saying is, Maddy really seems to be struggling with her mental health.”
“She’s not struggling,” Rebecca says through clenched teeth, though of course Maddy is. “She just needs to not be bullied.”
“Look, Rebecca, we’re here to talk mothers-to-mother,” Sheila says. “And we wanted to present the possibility that maybe another place could meet Maddy’s needs better.”
Rebecca realizes then that the situation is hopeless, that she is outmatched and outgunned, that she lost before she even arrived here in this adult playpen of a room.
She stares at the panorama of made-up eyes, those oft-injected doll faces not quite capable of arranging themselves into expressions of human warmth.
Smugness shines through the thin veneer of feigned empathy, the secret triumph of the ascendant mother.
They are more robotic than Mr. Man.
Rebecca’s face is hot, her throat constricting. But she will not give them the satisfaction of seeing her lose her composure. She turns crisply and walks out.
Behind her, voices quickly resume, a hushed murmur.
Oh my God, do you think she’s okay?
Should one of us go after her?
Poor thing. Can you even imagine?
Like daughter, like mother.
Rebecca holds a crisp pace. Visible through doorways and windows, house employees bustle like animated characters on a Disney ride, making beds, folding cloth napkins, dipping through the black sheet of an infinity pool to test the pH level.
Finally Rebecca enters the massive foyer, but with every step she takes, the front doors seem to recede. The Lichtenstein notes her progress, unimpressed.
She’s just reached the door when she hears, “Ms. Rebecca?”
Her kiss-and-ride name.
She turns.
Sydney stands at the lip of another preposterously wide hallway, dwarfed by the architectural scale. Behind her, fifteen feet down the hall, stands a squat, dour-faced woman, who Rebecca takes to be the watchful nanny.
Wearing a navy blue cardigan sweater against the mausoleum chill, Sydney looks young and lost.
Rebecca registers the slightest softening in her momma-bear heart.
“I didn’t think she’d get burned, like, for real,” Sydney says, twisting her wrist loosely in her opposite hand.
“Even so,” Rebecca says, not unkindly, “it was mean.”
Sydney nods and then nods again. “Sorry.”
“No more, okay? No more mean.”
Sydney lowers her face. “She screamed real loud.”
“Yes,” Rebecca says. “She did.”
Tears dot the marble tile at Sydney’s feet. She lets go of the wrist she’s been rubbing, and that’s when Rebecca sees it, feather-like bruising along her forearm from where it has been grabbed.
“Tell her I’m sorry,” Sydney says.
Despite her best efforts, Rebecca feels her anger melt away. “Okay, honey,” she says. “I will.”