* * *
? ? ?
The bus dropped her in Chinatown, and she walked up, up, up, following Third as the street numbers climbed higher. The same route that her son would take years later. As she walked, she remembered the long treks uptown, after curfew, from that crowded apartment with Domi and her ex and his sister, up to the quiet golden bubble she and Ethan shared. She remembered, still, how to avoid the corners where policemen stood, the areas where she might be conspicuous, and she skirted these, taking the long way around, looping down side streets and around corners until she was sure she was in the clear. Working her way over to Park, she found it: the red brick townhouse with huge apple-green doors. The round window set in the white arch above, like a Cyclops’s watchful eye.
Hello, she said, as the door opened. A middle-aged white man wearing a decorous navy suit and a deferential expression. Is this still the Duchess residence?
When Margaret was at last ushered through the marble-floored entryway and up the sweeping staircase, there she was. A little plumper, a little older. New wrinkles creasing from nose to chin, bracketing her mouth. Eyes tired, faintly ringed. But still the same.
Well, well, Domi said. Look who it is.
* * *
? ? ?
She had never expected to see Domi again. After the way they’d parted, after the last thing Domi had said to her: Sellout. Whore. Fuck you. She’d put Domi out of her mind, packed their time together in the smallest box she could, taped it firmly shut. Then, years later, scrolling the news while Bird napped, she’d spotted a headline: the largest gift ever given to the New York Public Library. The name beneath leaping out like a ghost from the shadows. Electronics heiress Dominique Duchess. Duchess Technologies. And a photo. Last time she’d seen her, Domi had been in a man’s leather jacket and lug-soled boots, both hand-me-downs from Margaret. The blond of her ponytail streaked dark with sweat and grime. In the photo she was impeccable in a tailored Chanel suit. Her hair was blown to pale gold, clipped short in the businesslike bob Domi had always mocked: rich man’s wife, she’d called it, after her stepmother.
Margaret scrolled through the article. New head of Duchess Technologies. Founded by her late father—inherited after his death. Groundbreaking audio components—smallest and lightest—revolutionized cell-phone technology. And the caption: Ms. Duchess, at home in her Park Avenue residence.
She remembered that house, that rare single-family, the golden numbers gleaming against the brick, the lantern above the entrance, patinaed to green, held aloft by twin swirls of iron. Snakes, Domi had said, looking up at them, I thought they were snakes, as a kid. They’d been hungry that day; she remembered her stomach growling. Her feet throbbing. The sound their spit made as it hit the sidewalk. Fuck you, Domi had screamed up at the windows, and then, as her father’s face appeared behind the glass, she’d grabbed Margaret’s hand and they’d jumped on their bikes and fled, laughing, pedaling and pedaling until their thighs ached.
So Domi called Daddy after all. Margaret clicked the browser window shut. Well, fuck you, Domi, she thought.
But in the following years Domi appeared again and again, in small sharp flashes. Donations to women’s shelters, to food banks, to union groups. Donations for health-care assistance. Donations to libraries, a string of them, all over New York, here and there all over the country. Margaret watched, holding these acts up to the Domi she’d once known, as if holding a sealed letter to the light. The night before she left, she’d scribbled down that address on Park Avenue—the one person who might help, the only person left besides Ethan who’d ever cared about her—and hidden it in the safest place she could think of, because it was too painful to go without leaving even one bread crumb behind.
And here she was. Life had a strange symmetry, she thought: years ago she’d left Domi to take refuge with Ethan; now it was the other way around. Domi touched Margaret’s arm, and her hands, once red and chapped from the cold as she clutched Margaret’s in the night, were soft and pale, like just-risen dough. Margaret kissed her on the cheek and it, too, was tender, so tender she expected to see the imprint of her lips on Domi’s skin.
It’s good to see you, Domi said.
* * *
? ? ?
In the end Domi had decided to hide, too. At the depth of the Crisis, around the time Margaret had left New York, Domi had called her father. Help me, she said, and he’d sent a car within the hour. He’d whisked her out of New York to the safety of the countryside, a summer cabin in Connecticut she hadn’t seen since she was a child, which her father had built when the land had been cheap, before his company took off, before they’d had any real money. When he’d still just been Claude Duchess, a young upstart businessman; when her mother had still been alive. Over the years, as his company had grown, he’d acquired the parcels of land around it, chipping out a larger and larger pocket of wilderness around them; he’d added a powerful generator, a fresh coat of paint—but it still bore the traces of what it had been, just a simple house set away from everything, beside a rocky little ocean inlet. So when he wanted to escape the unrest in the city, what better place than here, in the past, a time when everything was still in the future for him, when the world was nothing but possibility? Here alone, out of all his houses, they did not have to hear protests in the streets or the eerie silences in between; here, there was nothing but the constant whoosh of the ocean’s waves. Here, they could pretend they were not eating cake while everyone else had no bread.