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But I knew that wasn’t true. For one thing, she was determined to get me there, and where I hadn’t succeeded or hadn’t been particularly concerned with succeeding, Mom was going to be victorious—that I never doubted. She’d gotten me into Reardon, after all, no doubt greasing a few palms along the way.
I was eleven when Dad became a state senator, and I was thirteen when a kid at camp passed me my first joint behind the counselor’s cabin. The smoke stung my nose, but I laughed it away. A year later, a girl from Manhattan demonstrated for me on a zucchini how to give the perfect blow job, which I tried out the first chance I could on a skinny boy from Syracuse.
By that time, I was used to seeing my dad in the papers—his graying hair, his dark suits, his demeanor that was serious and affable at once. There was a growing divide between the picture-perfect Mabreys and me. Dad was instrumental in passing legislation that regulated the purchase of pseudoephedrine, an ingredient used in methamphetamine production, and I once snorted a line of coke in someone’s bathroom and danced the rest of the night on top of his kitchen table.
“Our wild child,” Mom would say without a hint of affection when she saw my report card, when she chatted with Reardon’s dean of students, when she saw me slouching next to Kat and MK.
She didn’t mean this as a compliment, but I wore it like a badge of honor.
* * *
When I was seventeen, Dad ran for a US Senate seat, a campaign that consumed our lives all summer with photo ops and media blitzes, the Mabrey name plastered on posters and lawn signs and headlines in the Hartford Register. Since I was officially too old for another summer away at Camp Watachwa, I was forced to present myself with a smile at family outings and lunches around town. Tired of dragging me along with her, Mom found a volunteer position for me at the Hartford Arts Cooperative, half an hour from our house in Simsbury. The Coop, as it was known, was a politician’s dream, bustling with five-to twelve-year-olds who arrived with dirty hands and growling stomachs to produce cheerful portraits of their future lives as pro football players, astronauts, doctors and teachers. Even though I knew my position there was more or less an extension of the campaign, a footnote on the larger résumé of what the Holmes-Mabreys had done for Connecticut, I loved it anyway. Four afternoons a week, I stocked supplies and rinsed brushes and posted artwork on the walls, while as many as thirty kids ran circles around me. By the end of the day I was exhausted and satisfied, convinced that for once I was doing something that actually mattered.
During my first week on the job, I fell hard for Marcus, a sophomore art major at Capitol Community College and one of the few paid staff at The Coop. That summer he was working on a giant mural going up on the south side of the building, where previously there had been only the initials of taggers and a giant F YOU in five-foot letters. Marcus had a broad chest and ropy arm muscles, and his fingers were permanently paint stained with a crusty layer of blues and yellows and greens. The first time he touched me, brushing a piece of hair out of my face as I stood over the sink washing brushes, I felt a thrumming all the way to my toes. The next night he stood behind me at the sink, his thumbs pressing into the knots of my shoulders as the water ran from blue-purple to clear. When I turned off the faucet, he wrapped his arms around me in a giant backward bear hug, rocking me from side to side in a goofy, loose way, as if to tell me I shouldn’t take it or him too seriously.
Another girl might have left it at that, but not Lauren Mabrey. Marcus was the exact opposite of everything that had been planned for me from day one. He had never known his father, had three half siblings, lived off student loans and a stipend from The Coop. He didn’t own any button-down shirts, and he hadn’t recognized my father until I pointed out a campaign advertisement with the five Mabreys all lined up, Dad’s arm around Mom’s shoulders. “That’s cool,” Marcus had said. “So your family is famous or something?”
I laughed, not denying this, although famous was the wrong word. Powerful was more accurate. Influential.
At any rate, I knew Marcus was the exact wrong pick for me, but when the bear hug ended, I turned around, pressed my wet hands to his T-shirt and kissed him full on the lips.
Twenty minutes later, I’d lost the rest of my virginity on the sagging couch in the break room, and soon enough sex became an everyday thing, part of our closing ritual after the paint caps were tightened and the brushes laid out to dry. Marcus locked the outside door and flipped off the light switches, and we undressed each other in the semidarkness, laughing at our more adult version of blind man’s bluff. Afterward, staring up at the bulbous tubes of exposed piping near the ceiling, I felt for the first time that I could have been anyone in the world, not Lauren Mabrey, not part of a political family, not a prep school kid, not wealthy.
I was just happy.
Marcus always had a baggie of pot in one pocket or another, and sometimes we went up to the roof of The Coop to smoke, the sky darkening in lazy purple drifts, and listened to the sounds of the city: horns and sirens and barks and scraps of conversation that floated upward from street level. That summer, more and more, I was flirting with disaster, arriving home long after The Coop closed, sometimes after my parents had returned from one fund-raiser or another, picking a fight with them the moment I walked through the door. I was lazy, I was irresponsible, I had a bad attitude and I didn’t care.
I’d smoked here and there at Reardon, whenever one of my classmates went home for vacation and connected with a local hookup, returning with a few buds. The most I could handle was a hit or two before I felt sleepy and weak-kneed, but I didn’t want Marcus to see that I was a lightweight. When he passed me the joint, I always took my turn.
“I can get you more, if you ever need any,” Marcus said into my ear, a sweet trail of smoke wafting past my nose.
I laughed. “Pretty sure my parents bought into the whole Just Say No thing.” My words came out slurry—sure as soor, bought as brought.
“I mean like a side business, for when you go back to school. I bet those Reardon kids have deep pockets.”
I shifted, leaning back against his chest, hoping he would drop the idea if I didn’t offer encouragement. This time when he passed me the joint, I only pretended to inhale. My body felt heavy, and I still had the drive back to Holmes House.
“Or bennies or ’shrooms. Whatever you want, I could probably get it.”
“What are you, my dealer?”
He pinched out the end of the joint and dropped it in a plastic baggie, which he returned to his pocket. “Hey, some of us have rent to pay, you know.”
I’d been to a pharm party last January at Reardon, where everyone was required to contribute a few tablets filched from their parents’ medicine cabinets to enter, and then got to take from the bowl whatever they wanted to try. I’d added three muscle relaxers, my dad’s drug of choice for his occasional back spasms, and fished out two pastel pink pills for myself. On a beanbag in the corner, I’d waited for the pills to do something, to make me feel anything, but it never happened. The only thrill had been from the idea of getting busted, of my parents driving up from Hartford, the blue veins in their foreheads pulsing with rage as they helped me pack my suitcases and then led me in disgrace from the dorm. But nothing so exciting happened. A staff member came in, took one look at the pill potpourri and unceremoniously flushed the remains down the toilet, before ordering us back to our rooms.
This fall, if everything in the campaign went as planned, I would be Lauren, the senator’s daughter. It gave me a perverse thrill that I might also—or instead—be known as Lauren, the girl with the pot. I stood up, brushing my palms on my jeans, trying to sound casual, like this was the sort of deal I negotiated every day. “Maybe,” I said. “Let’s see what you’ve got.”
A week later, at the beginning of my shift, he showed me a quart-sized baggie fat with green clumps of pot, then shoved it deep into the zippered interior pocket of my backpack. “It’s good stuff,” he said. “Two hundred should do it.”
My stomach turned, a weird, queasy flip-flop. I’d pictured myself at a party this fall, casually producing enough to roll a joint. I couldn’t possibly hide this much at Holmes House, where Mom would sniff it out with her razor-sharp sense for whatever I was doing wrong. I thought about telling Marcus that I’d made a mistake, that I couldn’t do it—but that would mean losing whatever reputation I had with him. It would mean, most likely, losing him. Maybe I could ditch it somewhere on my way out of Hartford, make some homeless person’s day when he found it in a Dumpster.
“I know you’re good for it,” Marcus said, giving me a quick kiss on the cheek, and I said, “Course I am.”
That afternoon, I was replenishing paint palettes from giant tubs of tempera when the police officer came in, a radio crackling at his hip, a drug-sniffing German shepherd at his side. It was like watching an after-school special, some cautionary tale about what happened when a good girl met a bad boy from the wrong side of the tracks. I watched as the officer and my supervisor chatted with their heads bent close together before they disappeared into the break room. Later, the rumor would be that someone had smelled marijuana and called the police. More likely my supervisor had been watching Marcus and me all along.
A minute later, she reappeared in the doorway of the break room, scanning the studio until her gaze settled on me, frozen in place, a blob of yellow paint running down my arm.
It was one thing to flirt with disaster, to tiptoe up to the edge of the canyon and peek over the side. It was another thing entirely to jump.
I said, That’s my backpack, but I don’t know what that stuff is.
I said, Someone must have put that there.
I said, I need to make a phone call.
A lawyer met me at the police station, demanding that I be released immediately. Marcus, it turned out, had a previous misdemeanor; he was cuffed and led away, and he passed me without making eye contact.
I never knew what my parents did, what strings they pulled or how they’d known to pull them in the first place. That night, I was cited for a misdemeanor and released, and my name never made it into the papers. At home, Dad paced while Mom did the talking, her voice losing its customary coolness. Did I understand the damage I had caused? Did I know what something like this might do to Dad’s career, to his reputation, to our family? Was I aware of his stance on drugs, the hypocrisy of his daughter being involved with a drug dealer, being found with an amount that constituted a felony? And just what did I have to say for myself?
I asked what would happen to Marcus, whether he would have to spend the night in jail.
“Wake up!” Mom hissed. “What do you think will happen to him?”
A few weeks later Mom wrote a check, I pled to a lesser charge and my record was sealed. My only punishment was the type of community service that would eventually work its way onto my résumé.
More pot had been found at Marcus’s loft, a place I’d tried to imagine over the six weeks we’d been together, when I’d fantasized about the two of us in an actual bed, on an actual mattress, with actual sheets. For bringing drugs into a place whose official mission was to serve children, Marcus was charged with a felony. That fall, I served a Mabrey-imposed house arrest, only leaving my bedroom on Tuesdays and Thursdays when Mom brought me to a local senior center to serve out my sentence.
One day that October, she slapped the Hartford Register in front of me, open to an article about an inmate that had been killed in a brawl. He was identified as Marcus Rodriguez, twenty, of Hartford, awaiting trial for felony drug sales. The article didn’t mention that he’d been a student at Capitol Community College, that he’d coordinated the new mural at the Hartford Arts Cooperative, that he’d had a kind smile, that he liked to talk after sex, that his girlfriend had sold him out.
In November, Dad won the senate race by a landslide.
* * *
I spent most of that fall on my childhood bed in Holmes House, shifting from hysterical to catatonic like they were the only settings that had been programmed into me. Marcus was dead, and I was going to come out unscathed. Marcus was dead, and his death was directly related to me, set in motion by the kiss I’d given him that night at the slop sink, my hands soapy with water, as if a line could be drawn between the two, a simple dot to dot.
Mom had spread the word that I was suffering from a bad case of mono, and from time to time get-well cards arrived from my classmates at Reardon. I completed my coursework that semester through independent study, moving zombie-like through worksheets and take-home tests.
Once Mom found me on my bed, sobbing into a pillow. “What now?” she asked, as if I’d done some new horrible thing.
I wiped away my tears, but my voice came out weak and blubbery. “He was so young.”
Mom leaned close, and for a moment I thought she might do something to comfort me, like pat me on the shoulder or tell me it would be okay. Instead, she slapped me across the face. “You will snap out of this,” she ordered. “You’ll get on with your life and we will never speak of this again, do you understand?”
She was true to her word; if Kat or MK knew anything about what I’d done, they never mentioned it me. Dad had already leased an apartment in Washington; after the election, that became his permanent residence, his stays at Holmes House brief and rare. Up until then, Dad had been a buffer between Mom and me, a mild-mannered negotiator. Now that he was gone, the silence stretched between us, too large to be breeched with a phone call.
Once I wandered downstairs while Mom was hosting a meeting for the local branch of the League of Women Voters, pausing in the hallway as the women chatted and sipped tea from china that had been in the Holmes family for a hundred years. Hildy, our live-in domestic help, passed me with the tea service rattling faintly on a silver tray.
“How is poor Lauren?” one of the women asked, and I started, hearing my name.
Mom didn’t miss a beat. “We were so worried about her, but she’s been growing stronger every day. This virus just hit her hard, poor thing.”
I leaned against the wall, listening to the women’s sympathetic murmurs as Mom reinvented my troubles—fevers and listlessness, loss of appetite, how devastated I’d been not to participate in more of the campaigning. “Lauren’s a strong girl, though,” Mom said. “She’ll be back to her old self in no time.”
It was an amazing performance, award-worthy. Somehow, Mom had managed to erase the drugs in my backpack, the hours I’d spent in the police station, Marcus bleeding to death in the Hartford Correctional Center, the months I’d spent crying into my pillow. She’d reinvented me as a brave warrior, a dutiful daughter.
She was so convincing, I almost believed it myself.
OCTOBER 10, 2016 (#u7d714980-24eb-5b13-8c26-2defe74dab6c)
Megan
The alarm on my cell phone went off at 6:25, then again at 6:30 and, as a last call, at 6:35. Marimba—the world’s most hateful sound. Bobby’s side of the bed was empty, and when I entered the kitchen five minutes later, he was already draining his first cup of coffee and filling his thermos with the thirty-two ounces that would get him through the day.
I stood in the doorway, yawning.
“Well, if it isn’t the woman of my dreams,” Bobby said, grinning at my disheveled state. I was wearing one of his old UMass shirts, the decaying hem hanging to my knees.
I pulled a face. “Save any for me?”
Bobby gestured to a steaming cup on the end of the kitchen peninsula. The coffee was the exact murky shade of brown I liked, tempered with a bit of cream. He was dressed in everything but his shoes and his pants, which were draped over a bar stool, and I gave him a thumbs-up at the effect: a blue-and-white striped shirt, a tie with the tiny floating heads of the Beatles, plaid boxers, tan dress socks. Bobby was one of the cool teachers. Every high school had one—the teacher who donned the giant tiger mascot for pep rallies, who somehow managed to make class so interesting that his students forgot all about their smartphones for fifty minutes. If he had to, he would stand on his desk to get their attention, à la Dead Poets Society or challenge a student to a lunchtime dance-off as a form of motivational bribery. Once, I accused him of having literally no shame, and he seemed surprised by the idea. Why in the world should he have shame?
I took a few fast sips, willing the caffeine to head directly to my brain. “What’s on the agenda for today?”
He screwed the lid on his thermos, tightening it and holding it upside down, just to make sure, before setting it next to his briefcase. “Still slogging through the American Revolution.”
“At least you’re finally done with those Puritans,” I commented.
“Those prudes.” He grinned, giving me a slap on my decidedly round ass. I looked more and more like my mother each year, despite eating salads for lunch and pounding out the miles on a treadmill at Planet Fitness.
The movement sent my coffee sloshing, and I cupped my hands around the rim to stop it from spilling. “It’s far too early to be so frisky.”
“No such thing as too early.” Bobby was stepping into his pants, creased sharp from ironing the night before. “What’s your day like?”
I grimaced. “Meetings from eight-thirty to noon, drop-ins after that.”
“Do we have any plans for tonight? Because if we don’t—” he tucked and zipped and reached for his belt “—a few of my buddies are playing at this bar in Ballardville.”
I shrugged. “Okay.”
Bobby worked his feet into his shoes, bending to tie the laces. “They aren’t very good, or at least they weren’t the last time I heard them.”
I smiled. “I’ll adjust my expectations accordingly.” Bobby was the exact opposite of me—he made friends easily and collected them everywhere he went: work, fast-pitch softball, hockey games. Two minutes after leaving a party, Bobby’s phone would ping with the notification of a friend request from someone he’d just met. Me—I kept things cooler, played my hand close to my chest. For the most part, other than those times I snooped from Bobby’s account, I avoided social media altogether, and my work friends were just that—friends at work.
I met Bobby’s goodbye kiss head-on, cringing at my own blend of sleep and coffee breath. Bobby didn’t seem to mind.
He grabbed his thermos and laptop bag, patted around for his wallet and keys. “Maybe we can leave around seven?”
“Sounds good.”
I emptied the rest of the coffee from the pot, swirled it with cream and sugar and reached for the remote. These were my private moments each morning—coffee, the Boston Globe and whatever dishy gossip was happening on the Today show. At work, I would be slammed—first our weekly departmental meeting, with its twenty-bullet-point agenda, then the dozens of students I would see, some in two-minute bursts while I helped them find the right form or directed them to the right staff member, and others for long, tear-streaked discussions that began with a question about registering for fall classes and ended with a general unburdening about the difficulties of balancing work and school, the impossibilities of child care, the unreliableness of their transportation.
I flipped from NBC to MSNBC to CNN, dodging commercials. Like the rest of America, I was on election overload, but it was an itch I couldn’t resist scratching. What had happened overnight? Who had said what on Twitter? Bobby and I rarely talked politics—not because we weren’t interested in elections or invested in their outcome, but because there were sticking points, touchy subjects that led us from reason to argument in about sixty seconds flat. “I thought people from the Midwest were supposed to be conservative,” Bobby would tease.
“That’s a stereotype,” I would remind him, and besides, it was a long time since I’d been in the Midwest.
I heard news of a suicide bombing at a market in Pakistan, then the financial report. The Dow was up, and that was a good thing. Thirty-five years old and I still had only a basic grasp of the stock market, although for the first time in my life, I actually had money there, in the form of a direct transfer from my monthly paycheck. I stretched and stood, making my way back to the sink. Behind me the news had switched back to the national scene, to politics. That’s when I heard the name Mabrey and wheeled around. It was as if I could face him head-on, as if he were in the room with me, that slow grin on his face. My head went fuzzy with the white noise of memory—rushing and pulsing, things that were long buried threatening to rise to the surface.
The caption on the screen read Senatorial Sex Scandal.
I didn’t even know that I’d dropped the mug until I heard it shatter, the last inch of lukewarm coffee splattering on the tile and a small shard of ceramic nicking me in the shin.
And just like that, it all came back.
FRESHMAN YEAR 1999–2000 (#u7d714980-24eb-5b13-8c26-2defe74dab6c)
Megan
From the window seat on the bus, America was a blur of fields and forests, the brick fronts of small-town buildings, the jutting skylines of cities. Every bit of it was unfamiliar and terrifying. Maybe this was a mistake. Maybe Woodstock, Kansas, was my destiny, and I was only fighting it by heading all the way to the East Coast with my worldly possessions crammed into two army-green duffel bags and my old JanSport backpack. Maybe Woodstock was what I deserved after everything I’d done.
Enough. I tried to sleep, but besides the occasional jolting was the fear that I might close my eyes and wake up in Canada or Texas, or all alone. Each time the bus stopped, I hooked my backpack over my shoulder and lined up for the exit, then rushed to the bathroom and back, afraid to be left behind. Once a man about my dad’s age tried to chat with me, but outside the bounds of Woodstock and the diner, I seemed to have forgotten how to have a polite conversation. Did I look like a typical college student or an overgrown runaway?
“I’m not going to kill you, you know,” he huffed, and when I slid back into my seat, my cheeks were flaming.
We were delayed fifty miles outside of Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, with an overheating engine, and it took a few hours for a replacement bus and luggage transfer, then for new tickets to be issued. It didn’t occur to me until we were on the road again that I would be arriving at the bus station in Scofield much later than originally planned. Keale’s shuttle system ran on the half hour, but it stopped each night at nine. Using my wristwatch and the illuminated road signs, I calculated the distance and realized I was officially screwed. The bus wouldn’t be arriving until ten at the earliest. In the beam from the overhead light, I consulted the map supplied by a travel agent at AAA and learned that the Scofield station was five miles from campus—an impossible distance to walk with my bulging duffel bags.
Three hours later, I pressed my forehead to the glass when I saw signs for Scofield. You live here now, I told myself—something that seemed both impossible and incredibly surreal, as if I were trying to convince myself that I’d grown a third foot. Two miles south of town, the bus rumbled past a good-sized lake, the surface shimmering with boats and Jet Skis docked for the night. Everything felt sleepy, winding down from too much summer. I squinted out the window at the license plates on the Audis and Peugeots, trying to determine if they belonged to locals or vacationers.
Either way, I thought, wealth lives here. Privilege. People different from me.
The main drag was settling down for the night—lights off at most of the stores. Everything had a cutesy name—To Dye For and Slice of Heaven and Scoops & Swirls, which had a giant ice cream cone protruding from its striped awning. A few families were still clustered around sidewalk tables, wearing flip-flops and suntans, catching the drips on their ice cream cones.
There were four passengers left aboard the bus, and only two of us—myself and a man with a pronounced limp—stood to disembark at the Scofield station. The porter handed down our luggage, and the other man left immediately with his pull-along bag, dragging his bad leg behind him, aiming for the lone car in the parking lot.
I stood with the duffel bags that contained everything I owned in the world, my gaze following the porter’s gesture to the pay phone at the end of the platform.
“Maybe you can call a taxi, if you don’t have someone meeting you,” he said, although his voice was hesitant, rising in a question. We hadn’t passed any taxis in town.
“I’ll be fine,” I said, not wanting to concede helplessness already. As the bus pulled away, I hauled my bags one at a time up to the platform, plopping them beneath the closed ticket window. Fishing a few quarters from my wallet, I set out to investigate the payphone. If there was no taxi service in Scofield, I’d try the college. And if no one answered there, what would I do? I could call Mom back in Kansas, where she and Gerry Tallant were probably sitting down to dinner, thrilled that I was out of the picture and that they had the place to themselves. It was a horrible idea, one that belonged to my life as a teenager, not an independent college student. How could my mom help from fifteen hundred miles away?
Twenty yards out, I saw that the payphone was broken, its coiled metal cord dangling without a receiver.
Well, shit.
The night had quickly descended into late-summer darkness, the air humid and thick with insects that dive-bombed my face. I circled the station, weighing my options. In Woodstock, I would have hailed a passing car, because I was likely to know the person who stopped—someone whose kids I’d gone to school with, someone who had worked with Dad or managed a booth at the fair with Mom.
The phrase You’re not in Kansas anymore burned in my brain. Hah, a bad joke.
An older-model Honda passed on the road, tailpipe rattling. I wondered if the driver had seen me, or if I should have tried to flag down the car. Too late now.
