Before the Fall(66)

But then she thinks maybe all Doug needs is a chance. Maybe inheriting a four-year-old boy will motivate him, turn him into a family man. Then again, isn’t thinking a child can save your marriage the classic delusion? They’ve had JJ with them for two weeks now, and Doug isn’t drinking any less, hasn’t changed his comings and goings, hasn’t treated her any better. Her sister is dead and the boy is now an orphan, but What about Doug’s needs? he says with every thoughtless comment. What about how this affects him?

She helps JJ get his pants up and wash his hands. Uncertainty is making her light-headed. Maybe she’s not being fair. Maybe she’s still upset about meeting the estate attorneys and business managers, the finality of the thing. And maybe Doug’s right. Maybe they should move into the house in the city, give JJ a sense of continuity—use the money to re-create the luxury he knows? But her instinct is that that would only confuse him. Everything has changed. To pretend otherwise feels like fraud.

“Ice cream?” she asks him as they walk back outside and the full heat of the day hits him. He nods. She smiles and takes his hand, leading him to the car. Tonight she will talk to Doug, lay it all out, how she’s feeling, what she thinks the boy needs. They will sell the real estate and put the money into the trust. They will give themselves a monthly stipend that’s big enough to cover any additional expenses the boy brings, but not enough to allow them to quit their jobs or become people of luxury. Doug won’t like it, she knows, but what can he say?

The decision is hers.





Chapter 25


Rachel Bateman





July 9, 2006–August 23, 2015




She remembered none of it. What details she knew had been told to her, except for the image of a rocking chair in a bald, bare attic, rocking back and forth on its own. She saw that chair from time to time in her mind, mostly in the ether on the verge of sleep, an old wicker rocker creaking toward and away, toward and away, as if to soothe a ghost, dog-tired and cross.

Her parents named her Rachel after Maggie’s grandmother. When she was really little (she was nine now) Rachel decided she was a cat. She studied their cat Peaches, trying to move like it. She would sit at the breakfast table and lick the back of her hand, wiping her face with it after. Her parents put up with it until she told them she was going to sleep during the day and roam the house at night. Maggie, her mother, said, “Babe, I just don’t have the energy to stay up.”

Rachel was the reason they had bodyguards, the reason men with Israeli accents and shoulder holsters followed them everywhere. There were three normally. In the lingo of the business, Gil, the first, was a body man—paid to stay in direct physical proximity to the principal. In addition, there was an advance team, usually rotating, of four to six men who watched them from farther away. Rachel knew they were here because of her, because of what had happened, though her father denied it. Threats, he said vaguely, implying that running a TV news network was somehow more relevant to their daily threat level than the fact that his daughter had been kidnapped in her youth, and that quite possibly one or more of the kidnappers were still out there.

At least those were the facts in her head. Her parents had assured her, as had men from the FBI (as a favor to her father last year) and a high-paid child psychiatrist, that the kidnapping had been the work of a single, deranged man (Wayne R. Macy, thirty-six), and that Macy had been killed (shot through the right eye) during the ransom exchange by a lawman in a flak jacket, but not before Macy had shot and killed a second lawman in the opening salvo of a fleeting firefight. The dead lawman was Mick Daniels, forty-four, a former FBI agent and veteran of the First Gulf War.

All she remembered was a chair.

*



She was supposed to feel things. She knew that. A nine-year-old girl in summer, on the verge of her teen years. She had been out on the Vineyard with her mother and brother for the last two weeks, lying about. As a child of great wealth there were countless options available to her—tennis lessons, sailing lessons, golf lessons, horseback riding, whatever—but she didn’t feel like being trained. She had studied piano for two years, but ultimately wondered to what end and moved on. She liked being home with her mom and her brother. That was basically it. She felt useful there—a four-year-old boy is more than a handful, her mother would say—and so Rachel played with JJ. She fixed him lunch and changed his pants when he had an accident.

Her mother told her she didn’t have to do it, that she should go out, enjoy the day, but it was hard to do with a large Israeli man (three sometimes) following your every move. Not that she could argue the need for it. Wasn’t she herself proof that you can’t be too careful?

So she stayed home, lying on the porch or the back lawn, staring at the ocean—blinded by it sometimes, that diamond sparkle. She liked to read books about wayward girls, girls who fit in nowhere, then discovered they had magic powers. Hermione, Katniss Everdeen. She’d read Harriet the Spy when she was seven and Pippi Longstocking, and they were competent, but in the end simply human. As she grew, Rachel felt she needed more from her heroines, more teeth, more fight, more power. She liked the thrill of danger they faced, but didn’t want to have to actually worry about them. It made her too anxious.

Whenever she reached a particularly distressing section (Hermione versus the troll in Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, for example), she would walk the book inside and hand it to her mother.