“So the bird that died today?”
“Yes, honey?”
“Since you put the bird in the garbage it will be part of the garbage forever?”
“Oh, well, no. Someone will bury it in the ground,” Darley lied. “I love you so much, honey. Sleep well.” She turned off the light and backed out of the room, full of the understanding that her children were going to be totally fucked up.
* * *
Darley and Malcolm had two sets of wedding vows: The ones they said in church in front of God, their friends, and family, and the ones they whispered later that night in bed, holding hands and giggling at the false eyelashes still stuck to the pillow like spiders, the bobby pins Darley kept discovering lodged deep within her mop of sprayed hair. Holding hands, their wedding bands catching the light, they whispered: I promise I will never expect you to pack my suitcase, I promise I will never hide in my office and pretend to work when our friends are over, I promise I will never sit in the back seat while you drive me like a chauffeur, I promise I will never sleep with anyone but you.
* * *
—
Darley had friends, she had cousins, she had a vibrant social life filled with dozens of people she could call for a cocktail, for a tennis match, a manicure, or even, possibly, a kidney—but she didn’t trust anyone like she trusted Malcolm. Her husband was, without a doubt, the best person she had ever met. Together they had a marriage unlike that of any of her friends in that they never, ever lied. It was stunning how casual lying was woven into most married life. Her friend Claire had a bank account she’d never mentioned to her husband. Her godmother hid shopping bags behind the study door and waited until her husband was out to put the new clothes in her closet, cutting the tags and shoving them deep in the trash. Her best friend occasionally snuck off to get a haircut or a facial and told her husband she had a meeting, not because he would even mind, but because she said she just wanted to have something for herself. Darley didn’t get that at all. She could never function in a relationship full of cavalier deceit, and she knew Malcolm felt the same way.
When they decided to get married, Darley couldn’t ask Malcolm to sign a prenup. The entire thing felt like arranging for their eventual divorce and drew a thick line between what was hers and what was his. She didn’t feel the money belonged to her anyway. It belonged to her grandparents and her great-grandparents. She had done nothing but act as a drain—private school and vacations and clothing and death by the thousand cuts that was raising a child in the most expensive city in America. The family lawyer explained to Darley that she had two choices: She could have Malcolm sign the prenup and agree to some paltry sum that would be given to him each year after their eventual divorce, or she could lock the account away, refuse the money, and have it all pass directly to her children when they were adults. She consulted Malcolm, and he said it was ultimately her decision. He would sign it, or she could have her trust skip her entirely, and they could use their very expensive educations to make their own way. So, Darley did it. She locked herself out of her own inheritance and bet all her chips on love.
Malcolm was already earning more money than most Americans could even dream of. He was not only a genius but had the sort of obsessive intellectualism that is rewarded in the financial sector. He was fascinated by airplanes and had been since he was a child. As a teenager he started a blog about the different features of various plane models that was so thorough that Boeing had linked to it on their website. He studied flight routes and identified inefficiencies, posting them on his blog and emailing airlines with his findings. He enrolled in business school, and after he graduated he earned his pilot’s license in his free time, using weekends to dart up and down the East Coast, often landing just to eat a sandwich near the airport before getting back in the Cessna. Darley went with him, a copilot in seating arrangements only, content to wipe the windshield and check the oil levels and otherwise stare out the window as New England spread out below. Once, they packed sleeping bags and slept on an airfield in West Virginia, rising with the sun to buy matching baseball caps at the airport convenience store before climbing back in the plane to be home for lunch.
Malcolm was hired right out of business school to work for Deutsche Bank’s Global Industrials Group. He knew more about aviation than any of the other associates did, hands down, and quickly built client relationships that went far deeper than those of his peers. Deutsche Bank moved him to the Aviation Corporate and Investment Banking Group, where he continued to rise quickly. Unlike the rest of banking, where pedigree mattered intensely, Aviation was international, all business conducted in English, a sector where depth of knowledge mattered more than connections. Malcolm traveled all the time, flying ten hours just to attend one pitch meeting and then taking a flight home that very same night—the boomerang. For most people this travel would be crushing, but for Malcolm it was flying—sure, he was a passenger instead of the pilot, but this entire world thrilled him. Unlike typical bankers who had to travel to Molina, Illinois, or Mayfield Heights, Ohio, where their industrial clients were based, airline bankers had clients in the best cities in the world—London, Paris, Hong Kong, and Singapore. Plus, with the secret status hat trick he had—ConciergeKey on American, Global Services on United, Diamond 360 on Delta—travel was never the soul-crushing experience it was for the hoi polloi. He breezed through security, he carried his laptop to the lounge, he walked onto the plane last and slid his bed into the lie-flat position. He didn’t care about champagne or hot towels, he just wanted to work on his computer with a minimum of annoyance, then wake up refreshed in time to find the uniformed driver holding his name on a sign at the other end.
This left Darley alone with the children, but she was never really alone. Malcolm texted her at takeoff and landing, in the car to the hotel and after the meeting. She knew where he was at every moment, from Brisbane to Bogotá, and they would FaceTime from his near-identical hotel rooms. He brought her home airline pajamas from so many flights that she had an entire section in her closet filled with unopened plastic pouches.
Malcolm had coworkers who used their business travel as a sort of international sex buffet, activating Tinder wherever they landed. A guy on his team had girlfriends in Sydney, in Santiago, and in Frankfurt, and he visited the same ones over and over. Did these women think their American boyfriend was going to fall in love and bring them back to New York? Or was it just consistent sex from a handsome, rich guy who breezed into town and bought them dinner and gifts? Darley didn’t know what the man’s wife knew, and it didn’t concern her. While he was off drinking pisco sours with pretty young strangers, Malcolm was in the hotel room on the phone with his wife.
Darley and Malcolm met in business school, married the summer after graduation, and somehow ended up pregnant right away （not “somehow,” it was the usual way, but always sort of a shock）。 When Darley got pregnant again a mere six months after Poppy was born, it felt like a bomb went off in the middle of their youth. While she had been an associate at Goldman Sachs and had managed to have a baby and a career, it was impossible to work eighty-hour weeks with two under two. She quit her job so Malcolm could keep his, but Darley never would have survived it without Malcolm’s parents. The Kims were everything the Stockton family was not. Soon-ja and Young-ho Kim had moved to the United States from South Korea in the late 1960s; the Stocktons came over on the Mayflower. The Kims had made themselves from scratch, Young-ho earning his PhD and making a successful career as a chemist; Darley’s father had inherited both his fortune and entire business from his father. The Kims were also communicative, loving, and functional. After their wedding, Soon-ja and Young-ho insisted that Darley call them by their first names, something Darley felt hesitant to do at first. She’d grown up calling all her parents’ friends “Mr.” and “Mrs.” She had heard that Korean families were usually even more formal, so for the first year of marriage Darley mostly called them “Um,” to avoid saying any name at all. They showered Darley with gifts, never arriving at her apartment without an eighty-dollar candle purchased from a department store or beautiful cloth napkins with a Proven?al print. When Poppy was born, Soon-ja moved into their apartment the day the baby nurse left and slept on the sofa for six months, taking turns with Darley overnight, feeding Poppy bottles of expressed breast milk so that Darley could sleep, giving the baby baths and trimming the tiny crescent moons of her soft fingernails. Poppy and Hatcher were as much her babies as they were Darley’s, and any sense of formality between them had long disappeared into that vortex of time filled with naked breasts and milk stains and cream for the scar that ripped across her abdomen.