Happy Families

Happy families are all alike. Every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way, and the Voss apartment on Central Park West was unhappy in a way that made the pages of three tabloids by Thursday.

It had been three days since Dana found the texts. Not the first time — there had been the trainer, the producer, the girl from the vineyard in Mendoza — but this time it was the nanny, the French au pair who had lived down the hall from the children for two years, and something about that crossed a line that even Dana's remarkable capacity for forgiveness could not negotiate. She had locked herself in the primary bedroom, told the housekeeper she was not to be disturbed, and begun, quietly and methodically, to plan her exit: the lawyers, the school forms, the sublet in Brooklyn Heights she had already toured under a false name.

Teddy Voss — Teddy to everyone who had ever wanted something from him, which was everyone — had not come home in three days. He woke on the fourth morning in the back-office lounge of his boutique hotel group on West 28th Street, under a coat that smelled of other people's cigars, and for one unguarded second, before memory arrived like a collections notice, he felt the pure animal happiness of a man who has slept well. Then he remembered, and his handsome, amiable face collapsed into something closer to grief than guilt.

He was forty-four years old and he still believed, with the sincerity of a golden retriever, that he was loved by everyone whose opinion mattered. Losing that belief was not an option. Losing Dana, however, now appeared to be on the table, and Teddy did what he always did with catastrophes: he ordered room service and reached for the one person in the world who had never once failed him.

His sister, Mara.

At Penn Station that morning, Mara Callahan stood on the platform holding a phone that had rung four times and gone unanswered, and watched a stranger die.

It happened the way it always happens, which is to say without dignity or warning: a track worker below the platform edge, a train coming in slow and enormous, a shout, a lurch in the crowd around her like a body flinching in sleep. Then the sirens, the police tape, the faces of the other passengers arranging themselves into the particular blankness Americans wear when the news is not for them. A middle-aged woman near Mara began to cry and then to apologize for crying.

Mara stood very still. She was thirty-six, she had ridden up from Washington on the early train, and she was thinking — the thought arrived before she could stop it — how unnecessary, how ugly and unnecessary it all is. She stayed on the platform longer than anyone else, until the ambulance men were done, and did not think about it again, which she would later understand was the whole of her character, stated plainly, on the first page of her story.

A thin old woman was asking passengers for change, mumbling about the dead man, about how he had a family, about how nobody thinks about the families. Mara gave her a twenty, and the old woman looked at her with sudden lucidity and said, "They say you can feel it coming. Before something like this. Some people can."

"Maybe they just aren't paying attention," Mara said, and smiled, and walked up into the morning light of Eighth Avenue.

Her brother met her at the apartment door with the expression of a man arriving at his own sentencing. "Dana won't see me," he said. "I've written her a letter. I want you to read it. I've thought about the financials, I've thought about the kids. I've been a complete idiot, Mare, I know, but you talk to her, she listens to you — she adores you —"

"Teddy." She looked at him for a long moment, this overgrown boy who had been breaking things since they were children in the house on O Street — since the money their grandfather had lost in the old country, since their father had lost everything else and the family had reassembled itself, one suitcase at a time, in America. "Does she know you asked me?"

"No. God. She'd be —"

"Humiliated. Yes." Mara took his letter, and sighed the sigh of a woman who has spent her whole life being the reasonable one. "I'll talk to her. But Teddy — this is the last time I lie for you. I mean it." She did not mean it. She had never once meant it, and they both knew it, and that was the texture of their love: absolute, amused, and slightly rotten at the core, like a beautiful old building whose beams everyone had agreed not to inspect.

Dana, red-eyed and furious and wearing the same clothes as yesterday, listened to Mara's careful speech about men, about marriage, about what it costs to start over with four children — Gus's allergies, Tessa's school, the baby — and hated herself for feeling the ground shift under her anger. By midnight she had not forgiven him. But she had, catastrophically, begun to consider it, and Mara, watching her sister-in-law cry into a dish towel in the kitchen, felt something she did not yet have a name for. It was the sensation of standing on a platform as a train comes in — of seeing, far down the dark tunnel, a single point of light that has not yet decided whether it is a lamp or a locomotive.

Lily Marchetti had known, the way twenty-year-olds know things, completely and incorrectly, that Cal Mercer was going to propose to her at the gala.

Everyone knew. Mercer was the best catch in the Eastern Seaboard: thirty-two, heir to a shipping-and-technology fortune that had laundered itself into respectability one generation at a time, founder and lead driver of Mercer Racing, an electric endurance-racing team that had made him the rare kind of rich man who is also on posters. He had been coming to dinner. He had skated with Lily at Rockefeller Center in December and held her hand in a way that had been described, in a group chat of eleven girls, in forensic detail. He had told Dana, at a christening, that he was thinking about "settling down," and Dana had told Lily's mother, and Lily's mother had already, in her head, redecorated the wedding.

The winter gala of the New York City Ballet was the social event of the season, and Lily — a soloist, twenty, with the kind of face that made strangers invent histories for her — had chosen her dress the way generals choose battlefields.

She was standing near the Christmas tree when she saw Mercer come in, and she saw the exact moment the whole fiction died. He scanned the room the way he scanned a straightaway, coolly, professionally — and then he found someone, and stopped scanning, and began, without hurry, to cross the floor.

It was Mara. Mara Callahan, in a black gown with no jewelry at all, her dark hair simply down, thirty-six years old and married to a senator and entirely unaware — that was the unbearable part, the part Lily would replay for months — entirely, genuinely unaware of what she was. She was laughing at something, then not laughing; she was listening to Mercer with the absolute, unguarded attention she gave to few people, and the ballroom, the orchestra, the ice-rink lights, the four hundred people who had come to watch a proposal, all of it contracted to the space between two bodies who were not, technically, doing anything wrong.

"May I have this dance?" Mercer asked Mara, publicly, unremarkably, and Mara, surprised by a small vertigo she filed under champagne, said yes.

Lily stood by the tree with her arms wrapped around herself, a soloist who had suddenly forgotten the choreography, and watched her whole imagined future cross the floor away from her. Later she would say the worst part was that he looked at her only once — one cool, courteous glance, a stranger apologizing in advance.

Mara fled to the night train to Washington the way she fled everything: early, elegantly, before anyone could ask her what she was running from. In the dining car she sat across from Mercer, because the train was crowded and the world is small, and discovered that he was not like the men who usually orbited her — the senators' husbands, the fund managers, the men who performed interest and collected it like dues. Mercer looked at her as if she were the only real thing in the car. It should have frightened her. Instead it felt like being handed a glass of water in a country where she had been thirsty for years without knowing it.

She talked about her son, Danny, eight years old, who had drawn her a picture of the Capitol with the flag wrong on purpose, to make her laugh. Mercer listened the way listeners in novels are said to listen. Somewhere past Philadelphia she realized she was talking too much, that she was happy, that her husband of fourteen years had never once looked at her the way this stranger was looking at her now — and the realization arrived, like all her worst realizations, dressed as an ordinary thought:

I should not be enjoying this.

She said good night early and firmly. In her sleeping compartment she sat by the window a long time, watching the dark country pour past, telling herself the solid, load-bearing sentences of her life: I am a wife. I am a mother. I am a good woman. It had always worked before. It is a strange property of dams that they hold for decades and then fail in a single night, and from the outside there is nothing to see at all — just a woman by a train window, somewhere in Maryland, pressing two fingers to her own pulse as if checking whether it were still hers.