Four
We reach the far edge of town and the cluster of three country clubs—the golden triangle of suburban Maryland affluence whose fees were so high, Nick said they could pave the fairways with dollar bills. The fairways aren’t green today.
“I wonder what happened to her,” Emma says, looking toward the gates. “You think someone helped her out?”
She’s talking about the girl we passed last week, a thin and feral-looking child, but it might have been the dirt on her face and the leaves sticking to her hair that made her so. The girl could have been blond for all I knew. She was perhaps ten years old, possibly younger. Emma thought younger.
One thing I know, she was crying when we found her crouched outside the gates to the Burning Tree Club, which isn’t very far from the Congressional Country Club and the Bethesda Country Club. You could get between the three with a golf cart in low gear if you wanted, or if you had multiple memberships. So many country clubs, so much wealth.
I’d planned for us to cut through the golf courses instead of taking the long road around to the hardware store that morning. Pounding fifteen miles on tarmac every day had begun to numb the soles of our feet, and the grass was inviting. Also, it’s cooler on the fairways, especially once the sun hits noon height. If we tired of walking, there were places to sit. Benches at the fourth tee. Tables and umbrellas at the nineteenth hole.
But we never made it into the sanctuary of the clubs.
Emma saw them first, the lines of men at the Bethesda Club’s entrance with their guns slung over a shoulder and their ammo belts worn low around their hips. As we approached, they stood up a little straighter, squared their jaws. Someone must have told them not to talk to the foot traffic, maybe because that someone feared talk might lead to sympathy, an open gate, another mouth to feed and another body to protect. It’s easier to be unkind when you don’t interact. It’s easier to think of the ones on the outside as feral. Like stray dogs. You feel sorry for them, but you know you’ve got to stand tall and tough.
You know lines have to be drawn.
I tried. That was the best I could do, try to use Emma as my pawn, stir some pity in those cold eyes of the men. I didn’t even rate a “Sorry, ma’am.” So we moved on to Burning Tree, and we met the same welcome.
The club had been living up to its name. Two dozen trees had been felled from the woods around the main building. Men and women who had once worn Armani suits and Bruno Magli loafers or pumps and drove their Lexus SUVs from one meeting to the next now worked like lumberjacks, sawing and splitting and piling. Once in a while, a former partner at a private DC firm, maybe a lobbyist, would stop to wipe a brow. The men went shirtless, white skin toasting to pink under the punishing July sun. The women grimaced.
It had to be hard to stockpile firewood when fire didn’t seem at all necessary. But, of course, it would be. Soon enough.
I cursed the men as I passed. Some of the women, too, but mostly the men. That unhappy marriage of finance and politics is still mostly a big boy’s game.
Was.
You don’t see this shit coming down, sliding toward you in an ugly, fetid avalanche. No one pays attention to state pension funds, whether they’re underfunded or overfunded, or how California is supposed to meet a half trillion dollars of retirement obligations when it’s only got three billion in the bank. Nick paid attention, of course, when he wasn’t busy lying to me about his trading losses and remortgaging our house, but I didn’t. I left it all to him.
You want to know how we got here? Follow the money trail. Always follow the money.
Emma and I walked toward the girl squatting near the gates. I thought maybe we could take her home with us or, if she wouldn’t come, we could give her some food. But it would be better to take her back to the house before night came. Night had become too scary a time for girls.
I slipped off my pack, rubbed feeling back into my arms where the straps had cut in and stopped the blood flow. Then Emma and I searched through our supplies. We could spare a bottle of water and some canned fruit, maybe half a bag of banana chips. I kept the peanuts back, though. They’ve got protein, but the only ones left in the stores were salted. If the girl decided to join us, we could share them later on when we reached the house and had access to water.
The worst part, the part I hate myself for now, is that I really didn’t want her to join us. She was so small and weak, and we had barely enough food for two. Especially when one of us was already eating for two.
There. I’ve said it.
Emma reached out first, approaching the girl with the food and water under the steady gaze of the men behind the gates. She shrunk back the way a stray cat does when you stretch out a hand, refusing our offering, scuttling into the thick brush.
And we trudged on our way.
Last week seems more like last year.
“I don’t know what happened to her,” I say now, looking back once at the gates. They’re still closed, but no longer guarded. A few abandoned tools dot the brown grass, and half-sawn tree limbs lie where they fell. The parking lot, once full of Lexuses and middle-age-crisis Porsche roadsters, is empty today, a sign of exodus. “I don’t know what happened to any of them.”
Part of me doesn’t really care.
The Food Lion’s silhouetted logo rises from the pavement at the next corner. It looks more like a ravenous dragon than a lion, and I have my doubts that the long walk over here is going to be worth it when Emma points to street level. A crowd of desperate shoppers snakes from the front door around to the back of the building, where one lonely truck idles as one lonely teamster unloads four crates from it. And then the crowd is on him, pawing and clawing their way over his body, onto the ramp. A fistfight breaks out between two men I recognize from Emma’s school, soccer-dad types no longer. At least their wives are cheering them on.
“Let’s get the hell out of here,” I say, grabbing Emma’s hand and spinning us in the direction toward home.
By the time I realize I’ve made the wrong decision, it’s too late. A pair of hands rips the pack from Emma’s shoulders with enough force to knock her to the sidewalk. There’s a sickening crack, a weak and dry wishbone-after-Thanksgiving kind of a crack, and for a moment I think it’s her arm, but then I see the star-shaped shatter on her iPhone’s screen.
“Help!” I cry out in the direction of the Food Lion. A few heads turn toward us, almost bored, and then they turn back to the fistfight at the yawning mouth of the delivery truck as the thief who stole half our groceries runs across the street, Emma’s pack swinging with each step.
Five
Win was losing her only daughter, and there was nothing to be done about it. It hurt, this rift. It hurt more than the sharp, strangling contractions, more than the incessant pound of her head through thirty-six hours of labor, more than the episiotomy that allowed what she thought must have been a basketball through her as she lay sweating on the bed, cursing Carl for getting her into this shitty situation and cursing her own father even more for insisting on the marriage. But that pain was long forgotten. This new pain was fresh, and it renewed itself each time Miranda rolled her eyes, each time the girl shrunk away from a hug or turned her cheek so that Win’s lips met with the space just behind her daughter’s right ear.