“Okay,” Lilly said quickly. “I’ll do that next time.” The phone rang again, and she headed into the kitchen to pick it up. But we could all still hear her say, “Hello? With the Times? No comment. Goodbye.”
“It’ll be like this all day,” the lawyer said evenly.
“I got a buddy, worked at BP during the spill,” said the business partner. “He knows the guys who did PR for them. They’re specialists at this kind of thing. We should look into it.”
“All right,” my mother said faintly. “I don’t care how much they cost—let’s get them.”
I was almost out the door before she noticed me leaving.
“Naomi?” she called after me. “Naomi, where are you going? Naomi, I need you!”
I didn’t say anything. I just let the door slam behind me. I got into the elevator and rode it down.
There’s a bus that runs to the Hamptons. It’s called the Jitney, and you can catch it at a few places in Manhattan. I looked up the schedule on my phone and found the nearest pickup location, about twenty blocks away. It would depart in forty minutes. I started walking.
My mind was kind of numb. It was full, I guess, with the equivalent of white noise. I systematically deleted each of my mother’s texts as they came in—they were plaintive, then angry, then cold, then angry again, and finally whiny. I didn’t pick up when she called. I deleted all four voicemails before listening to them.
Maybe it was coldhearted of me to leave her in her time of distress, even if the distress was of her own making. But I couldn’t take it. I couldn’t stand there and be supportive when I knew, just as well as I knew my own name, that she absolutely didn’t give a damn about the people who might’ve eaten the frosting and gotten sick from it. What she cared about was her reputation, and her income, and whether this would affect her getting invited to Alec Baldwin’s wife’s charity auction.
I went into a corner bodega and grabbed some napkins from the coffee counter. When I was back on the street, I wiped off the mascara and lip gloss and threw the napkins in the trash. I had to spit in the napkin to really get the mascara off, and I didn’t care how gross I must’ve looked to passersby. I just wanted that stuff off my face.
I got to the Jitney stop early and sat down on a bench and called Skags.
“You okay?” she asked as soon as she picked up.
“So you heard.”
“Of course I heard. It’s all anyone’s talking about on the cable news shows.” Skags loved cable news shows so much, especially Chris Matthews, whose animated freak-outs always cracked her up. Not until Skags told me she knew about my mother’s scandal did it hit me that everybody would soon know—my other friends at school, my teachers, and even people I didn’t know. As if hearing my thoughts, Skags said, “This’ll all die down soon. It’s the twenty-four-hour news cycle. They have to find stuff to talk about. Tomorrow it’ll be some hot blond chick who got kidnapped, or some celebrity in rehab, or something goofy the vice president said.”
“I don’t know, Skags,” I said. “It’s a federal investigation. This could, like, affect everything she does.”
“Not to be a bitch,” Skags said, which is exactly what someone says before they’re about to be a bitch, “but your mom isn’t Madonna. She’s Anne Rye. You think anybody cares that Martha Stewart went to prison for a little while?”
“Oh my God,” I said, so loudly that two little girls walking down the street turned and stared at me. “Do you think they’ll send her to prison?”
“No idea,” Skags said. “I’ll ask Diana at dinner tonight.”
“Who is Diana?”
“Jenny’s mother. She’s a lawyer.”
“You’re on a first-name basis with Jenny’s mother?”
“She asked me to call her Diana,” Skags said. “I’m amazing with parents. It’s really quite impressive.”
“I feel like nothing is normal anymore,” I said.
“Normal is overrated,” Skags said.
“Well, I could use more of it in my life,” I said. “I’m coming home.”
“When?”
“Tomorrow. The day after. I don’t know. As soon as I can get a flight.”
“You need to go to the cops before you leave,” Skags said sternly. “Your mom will handle whatever she has to handle. You’ve got your own stuff to worry about. You have to tell the police.”
“I know,” I said. “I will. Tomorrow. I just—I can’t handle it today. And Delilah might do the right thing.”
“Yeah, right,” Skags said. “This one’s all on you, Naomi.”
After we got off the phone, I tried to do some people watching from that bench on Fifth Avenue. Skags loves people watching. She can go to the park, sit down under a tree, and people-watch all day without getting bored. I’m not like that. I try to imagine what different strangers are like at work, at home, in the bedroom, but I just get distracted by my own thoughts. And my thoughts kept wandering back to Jacinta Trimalchio, or Adriana Whatever. It was like I didn’t have room to think about my mom. Maybe I actually respected Jacinta more than my mother.
Just as I knew I “should” be on my mother’s side no matter what, I knew I “should” despise Jacinta, or at least look down on her. But I didn’t. I still liked her and I still respected her. Why?
I was noodling on this idea when my phone buzzed with an incoming text. It was from Jeff Byron.
Please pick up, it read. And then the phone rang.
I considered letting it go to voicemail, but instead I picked up.
“Thank you,” Jeff said as soon as he heard the din of city noise.
“What’s up?” I asked.
“I thought you would want to know that Delilah told her parents what happened,” he said. “They’re going down to the police station today to talk.”
I was shocked.
“Are you serious?” I asked. “She told the truth?”
“Absolutely,” he said. “So don’t be shocked if you see squad cars next door tonight.”
“At Jacinta’s house? Why?”
“Why? Because she murdered someone with her car and kept driving, is why. She even hid the car in the woods near Delilah’s house and made Delilah promise not to tell anybody. She said she’d be sorry if she did. Can you believe that psycho?”
“But that’s not true,” I said with a trace of indignation that surprised even me. “That’s not true. Delilah was driving. She and Jacinta switched places on the way home.”
“Who told you that?”
“Jacinta!”
Jeff gave a dry, bitter little laugh. “Jesus, Naomi, she really got to you, didn’t she? You’re going to believe some crazy grifter over Delilah? You saw them leave. We all did. Jacinta was driving.”
For a moment my head spun. Could Jeff be right? Maybe Jacinta had made up this story, too. It would make sense—she was already a liar about big and small things alike. Why wouldn’t she lie about something this huge, something that could put her in prison for decades or even the rest of her life?
And then I thought about that morning, about the childlike hope in her eyes when she said that Delilah would probably want to spend the day at her house, and I knew she’d told me the truth. Maybe she’d lied about where she was from, where she went to school, and even her own name, but Jacinta Trimalchio had been honest about what happened last night. And that meant Delilah Fairweather was a liar—and a criminal.
I realized then that Jeff was still talking.
“I have to go,” I said hurriedly, and hung up on him. Then I dialed Jacinta. She picked up on the first ring.
“Hello, love,” she said, as if everything were perfectly normal.
“Listen to me,” I said in a low voice. “Jeff just called and told me Delilah is going to the police with her parents. She’s going to tell them you drove the car last night.”