The Nest, page 1
Copyright
The Borough Press
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
www.harpercollins.co.uk
First published by HarperCollinsPublishers 2016
Copyright © Cynthia D’Aprix Sweeney 2016
Cover design by Dominic Forbes © HarperCollinsPublishers 2016
Cover illustrations © Shutterstock.com (shoe, lips)
Cynthia D’Aprix Sweeney asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books
Ebook Edition © March 2016 ISBN: 9780008133740
Source ISBN: 9780008133726
Version 2016-02-11
Dedication
For my family: my parents, Roger and Theresa;
my sister, Laura; and my brothers, Richard and Tony—
who all love nothing more than a good story, well told.
There was always this dichotomy: what to keep up, what to change.
—WILLIAM TREVOR, “THE PIANO TUNER’S WIVES”
That’s how I knew this story would break my heart
When you wrote it
That’s how I knew this story would break my heart
—AIMEE MANN, THE FORGOTTEN ARM
Table of Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
Prologue
Part One: Snowtober
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Part Two: The Kiss
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty–One
Chapter Twenty–Two
Chapter Twenty–Three
Chapter Twenty–Four
Chapter Twenty–Five
Chapter Twenty–Six
Chapter Twenty–Seven
Chapter Twenty–Eight
Chapter Twenty–Nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty–One
Chapter Thirty–Two
Chapter Thirty–Three
Chapter Thirty–Four
Chapter Thirty–Five
Part Three: Finding Leo
Chapter Thirty–Six
Chapter Thirty–Seven
Chapter Thirty–Eight
Chapter Thirty–Nine
Chapter Forty
Chapter Forty–One
Chapter Forty–Two
Chapter Forty–Three
Chapter Forty–Four
Chapter Forty–Five
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
About the Author
About the Publisher
PROLOGUE
As the rest of the guests wandered the deck of the beach club under an early-evening midsummer sky, taking pinched, appraising sips of their cocktails to gauge if the bartenders were using the top-shelf stuff and balancing tiny crab cakes on paper napkins while saying appropriate things about how they’d really lucked out with the weather because the humidity would be back tomorrow, or murmuring inappropriate things about the bride’s snug satin dress, wondering if the spilling cleavage was due to bad tailoring or poor taste (a look as their own daughters might say) or an unexpected weight gain, winking and making tired jokes about exchanging toasters for diapers, Leo Plumb left his cousin’s wedding with one of the waitresses.
Leo had been avoiding his wife, Victoria, who was barely speaking to him and his sister Beatrice who wouldn’t stop speaking to him—rambling on and on about getting together for Thanksgiving. Thanksgiving. In July. Leo hadn’t spent a holiday with his family in twenty years, since the mid-‘90s if he was remembering correctly; he wasn’t in the mood to start now.
Cranked and on the hunt for the rumored empty outdoor bar, Leo first spotted Matilda Rodriguez carrying a tray of champagne glasses. She moved through the crowd with a lambent glow—partly because the setting sun was bathing the eastern end of Long Island an indecent pink, partly because of the truly excellent cocaine wreaking havoc with Leo’s synapses. The bubbles rising and falling on Matilda’s tray felt like an ecstatic summons, an invitation meant just for him. Her sturdy black hair was pulled away from the wide planes of her face into a serviceable knot; she was all inky eyes and full red lips. Leo watched the elegant weave of her hips as she threaded her way through the wedding guests, the now-empty tray held high above her head like a torch. He grabbed a martini from a passing waiter and followed her through the swinging stainless-steel doors into the kitchen.
IT WOULD SEEM TO MATILDA (nineteen, aspiring singer, diffident waitress) that one minute she’d been passing champagne to seventy-five members of the extended Plumb family and their closest friends and the next she was barreling toward the Long Island Sound in Leo’s brand-new leased Porsche, her hand down the front of his too-tight linen trousers, the fat of her thumb inexpertly working the underside of his penis.
Matilda had resisted when Leo first pulled her into a side pantry, his fingers cuffing her wrists while he pelted her with questions: Who are you? Where did you come from? What else do you do? Are you a model? An actress? Do you know you’re beautiful?
Matilda knew what Leo wanted; she was propositioned at these events all the time, but usually by much younger men—or ludicrously older men, ancient—with their arsenal of lame pickup lines and vaguely bigoted attempts at flattery. (She was constantly being called J. Lo in spite of looking nothing like her; her parents were Mexican, not Puerto Rican.) Even in this moneyed crowd, Leo was unreasonably handsome, a word she was quite certain she’d never employed for someone whose attention she was almost enjoying. She might think hot, she might think cute or maybe even gorgeous, but handsome? The boys she knew hadn’t grown into handsome yet. Matilda found herself staring up at Leo’s face trying to determine which variables added up to handsome. Like her, he had dark eyes, dark hair, a strong brow. But where his features were angular and sharp, hers were round and soft. On television he would play someone distinguished—a surgeon maybe, and she would be the terminally ill patient begging for a cure.
Through the pantry door she could hear the band—orchestra, really, there had to be at least sixteen pieces—playing the usual wedding fare. Leo grabbed her hands and pulled her into a little two-step. He sang close to her ear, above the beat, his voice pleasantly lively and rich. “Someday, when I’m awfully low, when the world is cold, I will dah-dah-dum just thinking of you, and the way you look tonight.”
Matilda shook her head and laughed a little, pulled away. His attention was unnerving, but it also made something deep within her thrum. And fending off Leo in the pantry was marginally more interesting than wrapping asparagus with prosciutto in the kitchen, which was what she was supposed to be doing. When she shyly told him she wanted to be a singer, he immediately offered that he had friends at Columbia Records, friends who were always keen to discover new talent. He moved in again and if she was alarmed when he stumbled a little and seemed to need to keep a palm on the wall to maintain balance, her worry evaporated when he asked if she had a demo, something of hers they could listen to in his car.
“Because if I like it,” Leo said, taking Matilda’s slender fingers in his, “I’d want to get on it right away. Help you get it to the right people.”
AS LEO DEFTLY MANEUVERED MATILDA past the parking valet, she glanced back at the kitchen door. Her cousin Fernando had gotten her this job, and he would be furious if he found out she’d just up and left. But Leo had said Columbia Records. He’d said, Always looking for new talent. When did she ever get opportunities like this? She would only be gone for a little bit, just long enough to make a good impression.
“Mariah was discovered by Tommy Mottola when she was a waitress,” she said, half joking, half trying to justify her behavior.
“Is that right?” Leo hustled her toward his car, scanning the windows of the beach club above the parking lot. It was possible that Victoria could see him from the side terrace where everyone was gathering and quite probable she’d already noticed his absence and was stalking the grounds looking for him. Furious.
Matilda stopped at the car door and slipped off her black-canvas work shoes. She took a pair of silvery stilettos from a worn
“You really don’t need to change shoes for this,” Leo said, resisting the urge to put his hands around her tiny waist right then and there in plain sight of everyone.
“But we’re getting a drink, right?” Matilda said.
Had Leo said something to her about a drink? A drink was not possible. Everyone in his tiny hometown knew him, his family, his mother, his wife. He finished off his martini and threw the empty glass into the bushes. “If the lady wants a drink, we’ll find the lady a drink,” Leo said.
Matilda stepped into the sandals and gently slid one slender metallic strap over the swell of her left heel, then her right. She straightened, now eye level with Leo. “I hate wearing flats,” she said, tugging her fitted white blouse a little lower. “They make me feel flat all over.” Leo practically pushed Matilda into the front seat, out of sight, safely behind the tinted glass.
SITTING IN THE FRONT SEAT OF THE CAR, Matilda was stunned to hear her tinny, nasal voice coming through the car’s obscenely high-quality speakers. She sounded so different on her sister’s ancient Dell. So much better.
As Leo listened, he tapped his hand against the steering wheel. His wedding ring glinted in the car’s interior light. Married was most assuredly against Matilda’s rules. She could see Leo struggling to summon an interest in her voice, searching for something flattering to say.
“I have better recordings. I must have downloaded the wrong version,” Matilda said. She could feel her ears flush with shame. Leo was staring out the window. “I better get back,” she said, reaching for the door handle.
“Don’t,” Leo said, placing his hand on her leg. She resisted the impulse to pull away and sat up a little straighter, her mind racing. What did she have to sustain his attention? She hated waitressing, but Fernando was going to kill her for disappearing during dinner service. Leo was boldly staring at her chest. She looked down at her lap and spotted a small stain on her black trousers. She scraped at the spot of balsamic vinaigrette with a fingernail; she’d mixed gallons of it. Everyone inside was probably plating the mesclun and grilled shrimp now, squeezing the dressing from bottles around the edge of each plate into a pattern that was supposed to approximate waves, the kind a child would draw to indicate a sea. “I’d like to see the ocean,” she said, quietly.
And then, so slowly she wasn’t sure what was happening at first, Leo took her hand in his (for a foolish moment she thought he was going to kiss it, like a character in one of her mother’s telenovela shows) and placed it on his lap. And she would always remember this part, how he never stopped looking at her. He didn’t close his eyes or lean his head back or lunge in for a sloppy kiss or fumble with the buttons on her blouse; he looked hard and long into her eyes. He saw her.
She could feel him respond beneath her hand and it was thrilling. As Leo held her gaze, she applied a little pressure with her fingers and the balance of power in the car abruptly shifted in her favor. “I thought we were going to see the ocean,” she said, wanting to get out of sight of the kitchen. He grinned and put the car into reverse. She had his pants unzipped before his seat belt was fully fastened.
YOU COULDN’T BLAME LEO for the rapidity of his climax. His wife had cut him off weeks earlier, after she caught him fondling a babysitter in the back corridor of a friend’s summerhouse. Driving toward the water, Leo hoped the combination of booze, cocaine, and Wellbutrin would stall his response, but when Matilda’s hand tightened with resolve, he knew everything was happening too fast. He closed his eyes for a second—just a second—to collect himself, to stop the intoxicating image of her hand, her chipped blue fingernails, moving up and down. Leo never even saw the SUV barreling down Ocean Avenue, coming from the right, perpendicular to their car. Didn’t realize until it was too late that the screech he heard wasn’t Matilda’s voice coming from the sound system, but something else entirely.
Neither of them even had time to scream.
PART ONE
SNOWTOBER
CHAPTER ONE
Because the three Plumbs had agreed on the phone the previous evening that they should not drink in front of their brother Leo, they were all—unbeknownst to one another—sitting in separate bars in and around Grand Central, savoring a furtive cocktail before lunch.
It was a strange kind of autumn afternoon. Two days earlier, a nor’easter had roared up the mid-Atlantic coast, colliding with a cold front pushing east from Ohio and an arctic mass dipping down from Canada. The resulting storm had dropped a record-breaking amount of snow in some places, blanketing towns from Pennsylvania to Maine with a freakishly early winter. In the small commuter town thirty miles north of Manhattan where Melody Plumb lived, most of the trees were still shouldering their autumn foliage, and many had been destroyed or damaged by the snow and ice. The streets were littered with fallen limbs, power was still out in some towns, the mayor was talking about canceling Halloween.
In spite of the lingering cold and spotty power outages, Melody’s train ride into Manhattan was uneventful. She was settled in at the lobby bar of the Hyatt Hotel on Forty-Second Street where she knew she wouldn’t run into her brother or sister; she’d suggested the hotel restaurant for lunch instead of their usual gathering spot, Grand Central’s Oyster Bar, and had been mocked by Jack and Beatrice, the Hyatt not landing on their list of venues deemed acceptable by some arcane criteria she had zero interest in decoding. She refused to feel inferior to those two anymore, refused to be diminished because she didn’t share their veneration for everything old Manhattan.
Sitting at a table near the soaring windows on the upper level of the hotel’s massive lobby (which was, she had to admit, completely unwelcoming—too big and gray and modern, some awful kind of sculpture made of steel tubing lurked overhead, she could hear Jack’s and Bea’s pointed ridicule in absentia; she was relieved they weren’t there), Melody ordered the least expensive glass of white wine (twelve dollars, more than she would spend on an entire bottle at home) and hoped the bartender had a generous pour.
The weather had remained unseasonably cold since the storm, but the sun was finally breaking through and the temperatures beginning to rise. The piles of snow at every Midtown crosswalk were rapidly melting into unnavigable puddles of slush and ice. Melody watched a particularly inelegant woman try to leap over the standing water and miss by inches, her bright red ballet flat landing squarely in the water, which had to be frigid, and filthy. Melody would have loved a delicate pair of shoes like those and she would have known better than to wear them on a day like today.
She felt a twinge of anxiety as she thought of her daughters heading uptown and having to navigate the treacherous street corners. She took a sip of her wine (so-so), removed her phone from her pocket, and opened her favorite app, the one Nora called Stalkerville. She hit the “find” button and waited for the map to load and for the dots that represented her sixteen-year-old twins to materialize on the screen.
Melody couldn’t believe the miracle of a handheld device that allowed her to track Nora’s and Louisa’s precise whereabouts as long as they had their phones. And they were teenagers; they always had their phones. As the map started to appear, she felt the familiar panicky palpitations until the tiny, blue pulsating circles and the word Found! popped up at the top of the screen, showing the girls exactly where they were supposed to be, at the SAT tutoring center uptown.
They’d been taking the weekend classes for over a month, and usually Melody tracked their morning progress from her kitchen table, watching the blue dots slowly glide north from Grand Central according to her meticulous directions: From the train station, they should take the Madison Avenue bus to Fifty-Ninth Street where they would disembark and walk west to the tutoring center on Sixty-Third just off Columbus. They were not to walk along the park side, but were supposed to walk on the south side of the street, passing by the parade of uniformed doormen, who would hear them scream for help if they were in trouble. They were strictly forbidden from entering Central Park or deviating from their route. Melody put the fear of God into them every week, filling their heads with stories of girls being snatched or lost, forced into prostitution or murdered and dumped in the river.
