Nothing to See Here
Kevin Wilson
One
In the late spring of 1995, just a few weeks after I’d turned twenty-eight, I got a letter from my friend Madison Roberts. I still thought of her as Madison Billings. I heard from Madison four or five times a year, updates on her life that were as foreign to me as reports from the moon, her existence the kind you only read about in magazines. She was married to an older man, a senator, and she had a little boy whom she dressed in nautical suits and who looked like an expensive teddy bear that had turned human. I was working two cashier jobs at competing grocery stores, smoking weed in the attic of my mother’s house because when I had turned eighteen, she had immediately turned my childhood bedroom into a workout room, a huge NordicTrack filling the place where I’d unhappily grown up. I sporadically dated people who didn’t deserve me but thought they did. You can imagine how Madison’s letters were a hundred times more interesting than mine, but we stayed in touch.
This letter had broken up the natural spacing of her correspondence, precise and expected. But that didn’t give me pause. Madison and I did not communicate except on paper. I didn’t even have her phone number.
I was on break at the Save-A-Lot, the first chance I’d had to read the thing, and I opened it to find that Madison wanted me to come to Franklin, Tennessee, where she lived on her husband’s estate, because she had an interesting job opportunity for me. She’d included a fifty-dollar bill for bus fare, because she knew that my car wasn’t great with more than fifteen-mile distances. She wouldn’t say what the job was, though it couldn’t be worse than dealing with food stamps and getting the fucking scale to properly weigh the bruised apples. I used the last five minutes of my break to ask Derek, my boss, if I could have a few days off. I knew he’d say no, and I didn’t begrudge him this refusal. I’d never been the most responsible employee. It was the hard thing about having two jobs: you had to disappoint them at different times and sometimes you lost track of who you’d fucked over worse. I thought about Madison, maybe the most beautiful woman I’d ever met in real life, who was also so weirdly smart, always considering the odds of every scenario. If she had a job for me, I’d take it. I’d leave my mom’s attic. I’d empty out my life because I was honest enough to know that I didn’t have much that I’d miss when it disappeared.
A week after I wrote back to Madison with a date that I’d arrive, a man in a polo shirt and sunglasses was waiting inside the bus station in Nashville. He looked like a man who was really into watches. “Lillian Breaker?” he asked, and I nodded. “Mrs. Roberts asked me to escort you back to the Roberts estate. My name is Carl.”
“Are you their driver?” I asked, curious as to the particulars of wealth. I knew rich people on TV had drivers, but it seemed like a Hollywood absurdity that didn’t connect to the real world.
“No, not exactly. I’m just kind of a jack-of-all-trades. I help Senator Roberts, and Mrs. Roberts by extension, when things come up.”
“Do you know what I’m doing here?” I asked. I knew what cops sounded like, and Carl sounded like a cop. I wasn’t super jazzed about law enforcement, so I was feeling him out.
“I believe I do, but I’ll let Mrs. Roberts talk to you. I think she would prefer that.”
“What kind of car are you driving?” I asked him. “Is it your own car?” I had been on a bus for a couple of hours with people who communicated only in hacking coughs and weird sniffs. I just wanted to hear my own voice go out into the open air.
“It’s a Miata. It’s mine. Are you ready to go, ma’am? May I take your luggage?” Carl asked, clearly ready to successfully complete this portion of his task. He had that cop-like tic where he tried to hide his impatience with a tight formality.
“I didn’t bring anything,” I said.
“Excellent. If you’ll follow me, I’ll get you to Mrs. Roberts ASAP.”
When we got to the Miata, a hot red number that seemed too small to be on the road, I asked if we could ride with the top down, but he said it wasn’t such a great idea. It looked like it pained him to refuse. But it also looked like maybe it pained him to be asked. I couldn’t quite figure out Carl, so I settled into the car and let everything move past me.
“Mrs. Roberts says that you’re her oldest friend,” Carl said, making conversation.
“That might be right,” I said. “We’ve known each other a while.” I didn’t say that Madison probably didn’t have any other real friends. I didn’t hold it against her. I didn’t have any real friends, either. What I also didn’t say was that I wasn’t even sure that we were actually friends at all. What we were was something weirder. But Carl didn’t want to hear any of that, so we just rode in silence the rest of the way, the radio playing easy listening that made me want to slip into a hot bath and dream about killing everyone I knew.
I met Madison at a fancy girls’ school hidden on a mountain in the middle of nowhere. A hundred or so years ago, maybe even longer, all the men who had managed to make enough money in such a barren landscape decided that they needed a school to prepare their daughters for the eventuality of marrying some other rich men, moving up in life until no one remembered a time when they had been anything other than exemplary. They brought some British guy to Tennessee, and he ran the place like a school for princesses, and soon other rich men from other barren landscapes sent their daughters. And then, after this happened enough times, rich people in real cities, like New York and Chicago, started hearing about this school and started sending their own daughters. And if you can catch that kind of good luck, it holds for centuries.