The Darlings (18 page)

This mode of operation was suitable for both parties until a crystalline Tuesday in September. Duncan was enjoying coffee from his new French press on the terrace. Henry was out with the dogs. Though he should have been at work, Duncan was indulging; the air was crisp and the sky was a brilliant shade of azure. Because his face was buried in a book—he remembered it to be John Irving's
The Fourth Hand
, which he wasn't particularly enjoying but which was on the bestseller list at the time—he didn't see the plane that hit the north tower of One World Trade Center. The rolling, booming sound jerked his head and ricocheted throughout his chest cavity like a collapsing mine. He stood up, and could see a wall of black dust billowing upward. It wasn't until nineteen minutes later when Henry burst through the front door, the hysterical dogs gathered like laundry in his arms, that Duncan realized that they probably knew someone who was dead.

Alexa was grown by then. She had just graduated from Harvard Law and was traveling through Europe when her father was killed. After a few hours, once the phone lines were partially restored, Roxanne had finally gotten through to Duncan. Michael, her husband, had been on American Airlines Flight 11 bound from Boston to L.A. Michael was traveling for work; it had been a last-minute trip; he had added L.A. to the schedule only the day before; there was still a small chance he wasn't on the plane, but safely in Boston. Unable to speak of any larger ramifications, they focused on how to get Alexa home. It was hours before they were even able to reach her because the circuits were jammed in New York and Alexa was in Prague without an international cell phone. Henry was able to get through first by having his secretary dial her hotel from an open line at Morgan Stanley. Alexa answered cheerfully, strangely unaware of how the world, and her world most specifically, had changed.

Because her mother was unable to speak, Duncan was the one to tell her.

“Your father, you see . . . well, something's happened,” he said, and the rest of the conversation was a blur.

Duncan remembered standing in his kitchen, pouring the dregs of the French press coffee down the drain and thinking:
When I brewed this, the world was still whole.

In their first few conversations, Duncan and Roxanne told Alexa that her dad might be in the basement of the tower. They were telling themselves that, too. It was a myth that people were allowing themselves to retell, like a bedtime story or fairy tale, for nearly a week. No one knew from where that information had originally come. During those first days, information was passed through the news and Web sites and neighbors, bouncing around like a cue ball on a pool table, the words losing momentum with each retelling. Still, to say anything else felt sacrilegious.

Afterward, Duncan had tried to be more present for Alexa. He took her for an occasional drink, met her for breakfast at a coffee shop near her law firm. He found that he liked her, not as a niece, but as a person. And after a short while he realized that he looked forward to their meetings as eagerly as he did dinners with his closest friends. She was exceptionally bright, and had an implacable vivacity. She liked dark chocolate; she possessed as sharp a wit as he had ever seen on a southerner; she read the
New Yorker
religiously; she got her friends to try Greek restaurants in Astoria and Russian cabarets in Brighton Beach. Worst of all, she looked like Duncan. She had his round eyes, luminous as buttons, and her hair was so black that it read nearly blue. In restaurants, people mistook her for his daughter.

“Oh, spare me your narcissism!” Henry would moan when Duncan came home from a visit with Alexa, breathlessly extolling her virtues. “You love her because she's exactly like you!” Finally, he understood what it might be like to want children.

Where, where would he put her?

After an internal debate and several rotations of the silver-rimmed place cards he had bought for the occasion, Duncan sat Alexa between Daniel and Marcus. He didn't want her to think he was trying to fix her up with Leonard, who oftentimes came across as straight, and he didn't want to monopolize her by seating her next to himself. Marcus, he reasoned, could talk with her about the law. And Daniel was straight and had a lot of straight friends in finance and could, perhaps, think of someone new for her to date. Duncan placed himself at the head of the table, flanked on either side by friends. He felt rather regal as he did so, like the king of his own small fiefdom.

When he was done, he stepped back and surveyed the table with a critical eye. It had been a long time since he had entertained. The silver napkin rings and good china had to be exhumed from the storage boxes at the top of the linen closet and dusted off. At the last minute, he splurged on white orchids for the centerpiece; the expensive ones from L'Olivier that came potted in square vases filled with black pebbles. There had been a time when he and Henry had kept orchids around the house, even when they weren't expecting company. “They're for us,” Henry would say. “Why should we have them just for guests?” That was a bygone era, the heady days of two incomes and a buoyant stock market.

Though Duncan found round dining tables visually displeasing, he found himself resenting the large rectangle in front of him. Rectangles were so unforgiving when seating a number other than ten or eight or two. There would always be two heads to the table. Across from his place was a blank slate, an unused chair. It felt as awkward as a gap-toothed child. Though he thought for a moment to remove it, he concluded that it was less significant somehow to allow the chair to stay where it was. Then the bell rang, and as he went to answer it, the thought was lost.

Alexa arrived first. Right away, he could sense her nervousness.

“Am I too early?” she said from the doorway, craning her neck like a goose into the silent apartment. A brief scan turned up no evidence of other guests.

Duncan reached for her coat, which she tendered with slight reluctance. She had grown thin. Nervously, she forked her fingers through her mass of curls, fluffing the tendrils. “I know I'm early,” she said, “Is that all right?”

“Of course. I'm thrilled to get you to myself for a while.”

She was too early in fact; it was just past 10 a.m. and no one else would arrive until noon. Duncan was quietly glad. He hadn't seen her in months, and while he had waved off her periodic apologies and cancellations with cheerful iterations of “It happens!” and “I'm swamped, too!” the distance had saddened him.

Duncan set some fresh coffee to brew and turned on some jazz, so that she wouldn't feel as though she was intruding on a house unprepared for visitors. As he fussed in the kitchen, she opened the sliding door and walked out onto his balcony. He could see her through the kitchen window, her smooth, white hand on the railing as she looked out across the Hudson River.

“Gorgeous day,” she called. “Cold, but beautiful.”

He joined her on the terrace, handing her a mug of coffee. He had prepared it with a dash of soymilk and Splenda; he had bought both for her, for this specific purpose. He took his own coffee black. “A little gray, no?” he replied. “Looks like snow.”

She nodded. “A little gray. But I kind of like it this way. It's so peaceful before it snows. The sky feels empty.” A sharp wind blew across the terrace. They stood side by side, each tilted slightly forward against the cold. His button-down shirt felt thin against his chest. Out on the river, the wind ruffled the water into tiny crested waves, like the tops of a meringue. A single sailboat was tacking to the west, its prow aimed at Ground Zero.

“Let's go in,” Duncan said after a minute. “It's too cold to stand out here.”

The sliding door made a hearty
thunk
as it closed behind them, sealing them in. The apartment felt warm by comparison.

“It's still strange for me to see the empty space,” she said, tracing a circle around the dining room table. Her voice didn't register any wistfulness, and for a moment, he thought she was referring to the single unused chair. Her slender fingers dragged lightly across the chair backs as if they were piano keys.

Duncan nodded. He understood what she meant. “You can still feel them on the skyline, can't you? The city's phantom limbs.”

“Do you miss him?”

“Who, your dad?”

“No, Henry. I mean, I'm sorry. I know that's a weird question. You probably don't even think about him anymore. I didn't mean to open old wounds.”

“It's all right. I do, and you're not.”

She inspected the names on the place cards. When she found her own, she took a seat, slumping down into the chair. Her feet splayed out in front of her in first position, like a dancer. “I just really tried to steel myself against missing Dad during the holidays. Happens every year. Last night I couldn't sleep. So eventually I turned on the television and ended up watching—don't laugh at me, I know you're going to laugh when I say this—I ended up watching
Sleepless in Seattle
at two in the morning and I just lost it.” She laughed at herself; Duncan could see her eyes glass over with tears. “I mean, I had snot running down my face. It just bowled me over, this intensely overpowering feeling of loneliness and failure and sadness and hurt. It felt like when you get hit square in the chest by a wave and pulled under into the surf. I could barely breathe.”

The timer
dinged
in the kitchen; the oven had reached 400 degrees. Duncan turned and went to put the turkey in, trying to think of what to say.

“They should ban that movie from the airwaves,” he called from the kitchen. “In fact, they should ban every movie Meg Ryan has ever been in. At least during the holidays. I mean, my God.
You've Got Mail
,
When Harry Met Sally
? Please. I don't need that. No one needs that.”

Then Alexa laughed and her shoulders trembled. “Sorry if I sound a little melancholy,” she said. She pushed her chair back and joined him in the kitchen. Wordlessly, they began to unwrap the cheeses and place them onto a cheeseboard.

“You all right otherwise?”

“Work's been tough,” she said, spooning fig jam into a small bowl. “I mean, the pay's shit, but I knew that going in. It's something else. I'm thinking about leaving.”

Duncan's hands stopped moving. He lay the cheese knife down on the cutting board. “Talk to me.”

“I don't know if I can.”

“Quitting's a pretty big decision, especially for you.”

The cracker arranging ceased, and she sank onto a kitchen stool, one foot still on the floor. She stared blankly at the counter, avoiding his gaze.

“You have to promise that you won't look at me like I'm crazy, even if you think I am.”

Duncan turned off the music with a remote control. The apartment fell silent. “I'm always here for you,” he said. “Whatever you need. My job aside, I'm an excellent keeper of secrets. Decently good adviser, too.”

Alexa frowned, thinking. She trusted Duncan implicitly, perhaps more than anyone else, but she felt her heart pounding in her rib cage. Telling anyone, even Duncan, felt wrong. It felt wrong, she knew, because it was wrong; speaking about an investigation with someone outside her office was a clear breach of confidentiality. Even if she didn't use names, her toe was on a cliff edge and she could feel the earth giving way beneath it.

They sat down together at the kitchen table, the half-assembled cheeseboard between them. The air was filled with the potent scent of roasting turkey and tuberose candles.

After a moment, she said, “David—he's the guy I've been seeing, but he's also, well, my boss—has been investigating a hedge fund for a few months now. Without going into specifics, he's built a really strong case for fraud. In our office, the next step is to submit a memo requesting that the investigation be elevated to formal status. That allows you to issue subpoenas, that sort of thing. So he did that, and never heard back. At first, he blamed it on bureaucracy; you know, the usual government office complaint. But weeks passed. He got totally obsessed, he was working all the time, and he became really vocal about needing the office's support. I thought he was going a little crazy, to be honest. And when he told me what he was involved in . . . well, it's massive. Billions of dollars. Literally, these people have stolen billions of dollars from investors.”