A Good Marriage(7)
“What emergency meeting?” Amanda asked.
“Come on, I told you. Remember? The contact list has been compromised!” She pressed her flattened palms to her cheeks and widened her eyes for a second, then smirked. “I know that Brooklyn Country Day isn’t one of those loosey-goosey progressive schools. We all love rigor and discipline and structure. That’s why we send our kids there. But honestly, you’d think the Country Day parents were all in witness protection or the CIA or something. They are losing it.”
Oh yes, Sarah had told her about that and Amanda had deliberately pushed it straight out of her mind. Zach would lose it, too, if he found out about some hacking situation. He was obsessive about their privacy. If their information got into the wrong hands, he would definitely hold it against the school, which he had picked specifically because of its attention to every last detail. He might even want Case pulled out and that could not happen. Despite its demanding academics, Brooklyn Country Day was the only bright spot for Case in an otherwise rough transition.
Amanda had hoped to wait until the end of the school year to move ten-year-old Case east, but in the end that hadn’t been possible. At least Case made friends easily. It helped that he fit in many different places socially. On the one hand, Case was an outgoing, athletic baseball fanatic, and on the other he was an introspective artist who could happily sit alone, sketching his favorite animal—jaguars—for hours. But a new school with only a few months left in fifth grade was a lot to ask of any child, even a flexible one.
There had been tears and some nightmares. Once Case had even wet the bed. Having often been plagued by terrifying dreams herself, Amanda had always taken her son’s sound sleep as a sign she was doing something right. Now even that was gone. At least Case had perked up once Amanda agreed to sleepaway camp: eight weeks all the way back in California with his best Palo Alto friend, Ashe. But what if her son’s sadness returned after camp ended and he came back to Park Slope? Amanda didn’t want to think about it. She’d always made whatever compromises necessary for Zach’s career, but never at Case’s expense. Her most important job was to protect her son, but in balancing Zach and Case, there were no easy answers.
“Oh, now don’t you get all freaked out, too,” Sarah said. “I see that look on your face.”
“I’m not freaked out,” Amanda lied.
“Anyway, the school is pulling out all the stops to investigate,” Sarah said, but she sounded a little like she was trying to convince herself. “Hired some fancy cybersecurity firm. You know Brooklyn Country Day. They take no prisoners.”
“I just—I had no idea,” Amanda said.
“That’s because the administration is being too close-lipped. I keep telling them that,” Sarah said. “It makes it look like they’re hiding something. So you’ll come to the meeting then?”
Amanda had been to one Brooklyn Country Day PTA meeting thus far and had found it extremely intimidating.
“Oh, I don’t know if I can—”
“Sure you can. Anyway, I need your moral support. These parents are looking for someone to turn on,” Sarah said, as though she wasn’t far more likely to cut them all down to size. “Eight p.m. My place. I won’t take no for an answer.”
Sarah didn’t need Amanda there, but she wanted her to be. And that was enough.
“I’ll be there,” Amanda said to her friend. “Of course I will.”
Lizzie
JULY 6, MONDAY
Rikers looked worse than I remembered, even in the dark.
The larger prison buildings seemed deliberately designed to clash, and the smaller buildings and assorted trailers—administrative offices, maybe, or guard barracks or weapons storage—were unlabeled and sagging. A massive concrete prison barge floated impossibly on the water, housing another few hundred inmates who—I’d read—had recently managed to cut the barge loose and almost escape by slowly floating away.
Barbed-wire fencing loomed everywhere. Tilted and flecked with rust, it ran in straight lines and formed squares and bent in circles, giving you the uneasy sense of being simultaneously locked in and locked out. But what I dreaded most from the last time I’d been at Rikers—years before, to interview a witness—was the acrid smell of sewage and the rats. Unlike ordinary nocturnal skittering vermin, the Rikers rats walked around boldly in daylight, aggressively standing their ground. One more reason to be glad for the dark.
Once inside Bantum, the building where Zach was being housed, it took another fifteen minutes of clearing security before I was finally sitting in a little box that smelled of urine and onions and sour breath, staring at a cloudy plexiglass divider as I waited for him to be brought up.
On the drive out, my friendship with Zach had come back to me in fits and starts. It had been ages, but we had spent quite a lot of time together for the better part of first year—studying, meals, movies. My forgetting the extent of our friendship wasn’t necessarily a reflection on Zach either. I had a very selective memory. But I did now remember this so clearly: I’d liked Zach because he’d felt familiar—in good ways, and bad. It had been especially evident the day our beloved contracts professor had spontaneously given us an impassioned “career counseling” lecture in class.