“I spoke to Adrienne today,” Madeline said.
He went still much like an animal scenting danger might.
“I called your office trying to reach you after I heard from the hospital. She told me you don’t work there anymore. That you haven’t worked there for six months.” She swallowed and tears pricked her eyelids even though she’d promised herself she wouldn’t cry. “Is that true?” she asked. “Could that possibly be true?”
The air went out of him. Not slowly like a punctured tire, but fast like a balloon spurting out its helium. His shoulders stooped as he shrank in front of her, practically folding in on himself. Any hope that he might deny it or laugh at Adrienne’s poor attempt at humor disappeared.
“Yes.”
She waited for the explanation, but he just sat on the barstool with all the air knocked out of him, staring helplessly at her.
“But what happened? Why were you let go? Why didn’t you tell me?” The pain and hurt thickened her voice and it was hard to see through the blur of tears. Steve actually looked like he might cry himself, which did nothing to reduce the soft swell of panic. Why was he just looking at her like that; why didn’t he just tell her? “I need to know, Steve. I don’t understand how you could keep a secret like this from me. It’s my life, too.”
He took a deep breath, let it out. “The institutional accounts I was handling were actually being funneled to Synergy Investments. Malcolm Dyer’s firm.”
It was Madeline’s turn to go still. She was not a financial person, but even she had heard of the now-notorious Malcolm Dyer, whom the press had labeled a “mini-Madoff.”
“I should have known there was something off,” Steve said. “But the fund was performing so well. The returns were so . . . high, and they stayed that way for over five years.” He swallowed. “It’s hard to walk away from that kind of profit. I missed all the signs.” His voice was etched with a grim disbelief. “It was a classic Ponzi scheme. And I had no idea.”
He swallowed again. She watched his Adam’s apple move up and down.
“They closed down our whole division in September, but by cooperating with the government investigators, Trafalgar managed to keep it out of the papers while they regrouped. There was some hope that if the feds could get their hands on the stolen funds that they might be able to return at least a portion to our clients. A lot of them are nonprofits and charities.”
A part of her wanted to reach out and offer comfort, but the anger coursing through her wouldn’t allow it. For twenty-five years they’d told each other everything—or so she’d thought. “I can’t believe you think so little of me that you’d dress and go through that kind of pretense every day rather than tell me the truth.” She drained her wineglass, hoping to slow the thoughts tumbling through her head, maybe sop up the sense of betrayal. “How could you do that?”
Steve shook his head. “I don’t know, Mad. I just felt so guilty and so stupid. And I didn’t want to worry you or the kids. I figured I’d find something else and once I did—when there was no cause for panic—I’d tell you.”
Steve looked her in the eye then. His were filled with defeat. “Only I couldn’t find another job. Half the investment firms in the country have folded and the rest have cut back. Nobody’s hiring. Especially not at my salary level. Or my age.” His tone turned grim. “I’ve spent every single day of the last six months looking for a job. I’ve followed up every lead, worked every contact I have. But, of course, my reputation’s shot to hell. And I don’t seem to be employable.”
They contemplated each other for what seemed like an eternity. Madeline felt as if their life had been turned at an angle that rendered it completely unrecognizable.
“And that’s not the worst of it.” Steve dropped his gaze. He ran a hand through his hair and scrubbed at his face. As body language went it was the equivalent of the pilot of your plane running through the aisle shouting, “Tighten your seat belts. We’re going down!”
For the briefest of moments, Madeline wanted to beg him not to tell her. She wanted to stand up, run out of the room and out the front door, where whatever he was about to say couldn’t reach her.
“I, um . . .” He paused, then slowly met her gaze. “Our money’s gone, too.” He said it so quietly that at first she thought she might have misheard.
“What?”
“I said, our money’s gone.”
“Which money are you talking about?” she asked just as quietly. As if softening the volume might somehow soften the blow.
“All of it.”
There was a silence so thick that Madeline imagined any words she was able to form would come out swaddled in cotton. Gary Coleman’s trademark response, “What you talkin’’bout, Willis?” streaked through her mind, comic intonation and all, and she wished she could utter it. So that Steve might throw back his head and laugh. Which would be far superior to the way he was hanging his head and staring at his hands.
“How is that possible?” Her voice was a whisper now, coated in disbelief.
He met her gaze. “We were getting such a great return from the fund, that I put our money in.” He paused. “Every penny we didn’t need to live on went to Synergy.”
“But I thought most of our money was in bank CDs,” Madeline said. “Aren’t they practically risk free?”
“Yes, real bank CDs are secured by the bank. Nonexistent CDs backed by a nonexistent offshore bank? Not so much.”
Madeline felt as if she’d ended up in a train wreck despite the fact that she’d never set foot on a train or even gone to the station. The twisted metal of their future lay strewn across the tracks.
“I invested my mother’s money in the same fund.”
“Is there anything left?” Madeline thought her heart might actually stop beating. She could hear herself gasping for breath, but no air seemed to be entering her lungs.
“Just this.” He pulled a crumpled piece of paper from his pocket, smoothed it out, and laid it on the cocktail table in front of her. “The feds are looking for Dyer. In the meantime, he’s been judged guilty in a civil suit; apparently if you don’t show up, you’re found guilty. I filed a claim against Dyer’s seized assets.” He shoved the paper toward her. “This came yesterday. In addition to our house and what’s left of my mother’s house we now have a third ownership in a beachfront ‘mansion’ in Florida. In some booming metropolis called Pass-a-Grille.”
Madeline didn’t know where Steve slept or even if he did, and she was too numb to get up and find out. She spent most of the night tossing and turning on her side of their bed, realigning her pillow every few minutes as if simply finding the optimal position would grant her admission to oblivion. Several times she heard Steve moving around downstairs. At one point the family room TV snapped on.
Sometime after three A.M. she finally managed to drift off but slept fitfully, bombarded by disturbing dreams. One involved her mother-in-law in a pointy black hat pedaling a bicycle across a tornado-tossed sky. The
Wizard of Oz
theme played out all night. Steve appeared as the Scarecrow, and then as both the Cowardly Lion and a heavily rusted Tin Man. The worst scene featured Malcolm Dyer as the unscrupulous Wizard caught behind his curtain with Glinda the apparently not-so-good witch giggling in his lap.
Not surprisingly, Madeline awoke groggy and out of sorts. Steve’s revelations stole back into her consciousness to command center stage, and she buried her face in her pillow and cried. When the bedroom door opened and Steve padded into the room, Madeline squeezed her eyes shut and feigned sleep. While he showered and dressed in the bathroom she lay staring up into the ceiling. Although she felt him hesitate beside the bed, she kept her eyes shut and her breathing regular. She didn’t get up until she was certain Steve was gone.
By the time he returned with his mother, Madeline had put away the sheet and pillow Steve had left on the couch, tidied up the guest room and bath, and put on a pot of soup. Determined to make things look as normal as possible in front of her mother-in-law, she kept a smile on her face and her conversation casual. But pretending her world had not been shaken to its core required an Oscar-worthy performance.
“You seem a bit quiet, Melinda,” Edna said as Madeline tucked her into the guest room bed and aimed the remote at the television. Madeline willed herself to ignore the insult; it hardly rated in comparison to Steve’s revelations. “I’m sorry to be imposing on you. I wouldn’t have come if Steven hadn’t insisted.”
“We’re happy to have you,” Madeline said, straightening as the hosts of HGTV’s
Hammer and Nail
appeared on-screen and wishing this were true. She handed the remote to her mother-in-law, who was already focusing on the remodeling show. “But it would make me even happier if you stopped calling me Melinda.”
Edna’s gaze left the TV. Shock that Madeline had commented on the dig flared briefly in Edna’s eyes.
“I hate to think your mind has really slipped so much that you can’t remember your daughter-in-law’s name,” Madeline said. “Maybe we should do some cognitive testing. We never did go for that follow-up with the neurologist.”
Edna snorted. “They’re all just looking for any excuse to take away a person’s rights. First it’s the car. Then they don’t think you can live by yourself.” She strove for her usual belligerence but Madeline heard the note of fear underneath and chastised herself for putting it there. Her own fear was like a living, breathing thing. “There’s nothing golden about the golden years from what I can tell so far.”
“No,” Madeline agreed, reminding herself that her mother-in-law’s jabs were a very minor thing. “Getting older is definitely not for sissies.” But then neither, it seemed, was marriage.
Three
Madeline spent the weekend alternately grilling Steve about his plans to regain their financial footing and trying to figure out what she might do to produce income after twenty-five years as a full-time wife and mother. The answer to both of these questions appeared to be “nothing.”
She read through each and every want ad, but cleaning, cooking, and carpooling with heavy doses of prodding and organizing didn’t seem to qualify her for any of them. At a time when highly skilled and experienced people were out of work, her chances of finding a decent paying job ranged from “not anytime soon” to “not in this lifetime.”
By Sunday night she was exhausted from practicing “Would you like fries with that?” and pretending for Edna’s benefit that everything was as it should be. On Monday Steve, whose strength of will had been the first thing she fell in love with and whom she’d always considered a veritable “rock,” began to crumble. It seemed that now that he’d confessed, Steve felt free to wallow in his despair. For the first time he didn’t dress or leave, but assumed what became a favored position on the family room couch with the TV remote clutched loosely in one hand.
For most of the day he watched whatever sports he could find. Once she was mobile again, Edna waited on him and clucked over him, complaining that Trafalgar didn’t know what they were doing and predicting that other investment firms would be beating down her son’s door to get him. Madeline assumed Edna had been given the abridged version of Steve’s departure from his previous employer and no version of their, and her, dire financial situation.
Madeline waited for her husband to contact the insurance company to begin filing Edna’s claim, but this didn’t happen. Nor did he seem inclined to resume his job hunt or any networking activities. But he
was
working on memorizing the daytime television schedule and had devised a system for predicting who would be eliminated from
American Idol
and
Dancing with the Stars
. Both he and Edna had proven they were smarter than a fifth grader.
Madeline’s hurt and anger didn’t dissipate with time. Both emotions coursed through her, mingling with her fear and panic so that her heart thudded heavily in her chest. Unable to move or motivate Steve, Madeline dug through the file cabinet in their home office until she found Edna’s homeowner’s policy and bank statements as well as their own and spent several days poring over them. Confronting the reality of their situation in black and white made her feel even worse, which hardly seemed possible.
In fact, she began to feel very much like the Little Red Hen, from the nursery tale, as she made an appointment to meet the claims adjustor at Edna’s house and then went in to talk to their account person at the bank. She opened the bills that poured in, made note of them, then placed them in an ever-growing pile on the corner of Steve’s desk. No matter how often or how urgently she badgered him he refused to so much as look at one. When she dragged him to a psychiatrist for a session that they no longer had insurance to pay for, he refused to speak.
They’d been limping along this way for a number of weeks when Madeline came home from the grocery store where she’d maxed out her third and next-to-last credit card, and found her daughter sitting at the kitchen table, eating a sandwich. Two large suitcases stood in a corner. It was April first. “Kyra?”
“Hi, Mom.” Kyra stood and gave her a hug. “I saw Grandma in the other room with Dad. I hope my room’s still available.”
“Of course,” Madeline said. “But what’s going on? I thought you were shooting in Seattle through May.”
“I’m not on the shoot anymore.”
Madeline waited for the shout of “April Fools’!” Kyra had talked nonstop about the movie and the incredible cast and crew all through the holidays. It was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity and a complete career builder. “But I thought . . .”
“And, um, I have another . . . small surprise.”
“Do I need to sit for this?” Maddie thought maybe running and hiding would be better based on the look on her daughter’s face, but she held her tongue.
“Probably.”
Madeline sank down in the chair next to Kyra’s. Her daughter sat, too. She looked gaunt and her eyes were puffy. “So, how do you feel about . . . grandma?”