Before the Fall Read online

  Just him? she asked.

  So far. But we’re looking.

  She woke Doug and told him they had to go to a hospital on Long Island.

  Now? he said.

  She drove, putting the car in gear before Doug, his fly undone, sweatshirt half on, had even gotten the door closed. She told Doug there was a plane crash somewhere in the ocean. That one of the passengers had swum miles to shore, carrying the boy. She wanted him to tell her not to worry, that if they survived, then the others had survived as well, but he didn’t. Her husband sat in the passenger seat and asked if they could stop for coffee.

  The rest is a blur. She remembers jumping out of the car in a loading zone at the hospital, remembers the panicked search for JJ’s room. Does she even remember hugging the boy, or meeting the hero in the bed beside him? He is a shape, a voice, flared out by the sun. Her adrenaline was so high, her surprise at the magnitude of events, at how big life could get—helicopters circling wave caps, naval ships deployed. So big that it filled the screens of three million televisions, so big that her life was now a historic mystery to be discussed, the details viewed and reviewed, by amateurs and professionals alike.

  Now, in the conference room, she makes her hands into fists to fight off the pins and needles she’s feeling, and tries to smile. Across from her, Larry Page smiles back. There are two lawyers on either side of him, split by gender.

  “Look,” he says, “there’ll be time for all the minutiae later. This meeting is really just to give you an overview of what David and Maggie wanted for their children in case of—in the eventuality of their death.”

  “Of course,” says Eleanor.

  “How much?” asks Doug.

  Eleanor kicks him under the table. Mr. Page frowns. There is a decorum he expects in dealing with matters of extreme wealth, a studied nonchalance.

  “Well,” he says, “as I explained, the Batemans established a trust for both children, splitting their estate fifty–fifty. But since their daughter—”

  “Rachel,” says Eleanor.

  “Right, Rachel. Since Rachel did not survive, the entirety of the trust goes to JJ. This includes all their real estate holdings—the town house in Manhattan, the house on Martha’s Vineyard, and the pied-à-terre in London.”

  “Wait,” says Doug. “The what now?”

  Mr. Page presses on.

  “At the same time, their wills both earmarked a large sum of cash and equities to a number of charitable organizations. About thirty percent of their total portfolio. The remainder lives in JJ’s trust and will be available to him in stages over the next forty years.”

  “Forty years,” says Doug, with a frown.

  “We don’t need much,” says Eleanor. “That’s his money.”

  Now it’s Doug’s turn to kick her under the table.

  “It’s not a question of what you need,” the lawyer tells her. “It’s about fulfilling the Batemans’ last wishes. And yes, we’re still waiting on the official pronouncement of death, but given the circumstance I’d like to free up some funds in the interim.”

  One of the women to his left hands him a crisp manila folder. Mr. Page opens it. Inside is a single piece of paper.

  “At current market value,” he tells them, “JJ’s trust is worth one hundred and three million dollars.”

  Beside her, Doug makes a kind of choking noise. Eleanor’s face burns. She’s embarrassed by the clear greed he’s showing, and she knows if she looked he’d have some stupid grin on his face.

  “The bulk of the estate—sixty percent—will be available to him on his fortieth birthday. Fifteen percent matures on his thirtieth birthday, another fifteen percent on his twenty-first. And the remaining ten percent has been set aside to cover the costs of raising him to adulthood from this point forward.”

  She can feel Doug beside her, working out the math.

  “That’s ten million, three hundred thousand—again as of close of market yesterday.”

  Outside the window, Eleanor can see birds circling. She thinks about carrying JJ from the hospital that first day, the heft of him—so much heavier than she remembered, and how they didn’t have a booster seat so Doug piled up some blankets in the back and they drove to a Target to buy one. Car idling in the parking lot, they sat there in silence for a moment. Eleanor looked at Doug.

  What? he said, his face blank.

  Tell them we need a booster seat, she said. It should be front facing. Make sure they know he’s four.

  He thought about arguing—Me? In a Target? I fucking hate Target—but to his credit he didn’t, just shouldered the door open and went in. She turned in her seat and looked at JJ.

  Are you okay? she asked.

  He nodded, then threw up onto the back of her seat.

  The man to Page’s right speaks up.

  “Mrs. Dunleavy,” he says, “I’m Fred Cutter. My firm manages your late brother-in-law’s finances.”

  So, thinks Eleanor, not a lawyer.

  “I’ve worked out a basic financial structure to cover monthly expenses and education projections, which I’d be happy to review with you at your convenience.”

  Eleanor risks a look at Doug. He is, in fact, smiling. He nods at her.

  “And I’m—” says Eleanor, “—I’m the executor of the trust. Me?”

  “Yes,” says Page, “unless you decide you do not wish to carry out the responsibilities afforded to you, in which case Mr. and Mrs. Bateman named a successor.”

  She feels Doug stiffen beside her at the idea of passing all that money on to some kind of runner-up.

  “No,” says Eleanor, “he’s my nephew. I want him. I just need to be clear. I’m the one named in the trust, not—”

  She flicks her eyes toward her husband. Page catches the look.

  “Yes,” he says. “You are the named guardian and executor.”

  “Okay,” she says, after a beat.

  “Over the next few weeks I’ll need you to come in and sign some more papers—and by come in, I mean we can come to you. Some will need to be notarized. Did you want the keys to the various properties today?”

  She blinks, thinking about her sister’s apartment, now a museum filled with all the things she will never need again—clothes, furniture, the refrigerator filled with food, the children’s rooms heavy with books and toys. She feels her eyes well with tears.

  “No,” she says. “I don’t think—”

  She stops to collect herself.

  “I understand,” says Page. “I’ll have them sent to your house.”

  “Maybe somebody could collect JJ’s things, from his room? Toys and books. Clothes. He probably, I don’t know, maybe that would help him.”

  The woman to Page’s left makes a note.

  “Should you decide to sell any or all of the properties,” says Cutter, “we can help you with that. Fair market value for the three combined is around thirty million, last time I checked.”

  “And does that money go into the trust,” says Doug, “or—”

  “That money would fold in with the current funds available to you.”

  “So ten million becomes forty million.”

  “Doug,” says Eleanor, more sharply than she intended.

  The lawyers pretend not to have heard.

  “What?” her husband says. “I’m just—clarifying.”

  She nods, unclenching her fists and stretching her hands under the table.

  “Okay,” she says, “I feel like I should get back. I don’t want to leave JJ alone too long. He’s not really sleeping that well.”

  She stands. Across the table, the group stands as one. Only Doug is left in his chair, daydreaming.

  “Doug,” she says.

  “Yeah, right,” he says and stands, then stretches his arms and back like a cat waking from a long nap in the sun.

  “Are you driving back?” Cutter asks.

  She nods.

  “I don’t know what car you’re in, but the Batemans owned several, inclu
ding a family SUV. These are also available to you, or can be sold. It’s whatever you want.”

  “I just—” says Eleanor, “I’m sorry. I can’t really make any decisions right now. I just need to—think or take it all in or—”

  “Of course. I’ll stop asking questions.”

  Cutter puts his hand on her shoulder. He is a thin man with a kind face.

  “Please know that David and Maggie were more than just clients. We had daughters the same age, and—”

  He stops, his eyes filling, then nods. She squeezes his arm, grateful to find something human in this moment. Beside her, Doug clears his throat.

  “What kind of cars did you say again?” asks Doug.

  * * *

  She is quiet on the ride home. Doug smokes the other half of the pack, window down, making calculations with his fingers on the steering wheel.

  “I say keep the town house, right?” he says. “A place in the city. But, I don’t know, are we really going to go back to the Vineyard? I mean, after what happened?”

  She doesn’t answer, just lays her head against the headrest and looks out at the treetops.

  “And London,” he says, “I mean, that could be cool. But how often are we really going to—I say we sell it and then if we want to go we can always stay in a hotel.”

  He rubs his beard, like a miser in a children’s story, suddenly rich.

  “It’s JJ’s money,” she says.

  “Right,” says Doug, “but, I mean, he’s four, so—”

  “It’s not about what we want.”

  “Babe—okay, I know—but the kid’s used to a certain—and we’re his guardians now.”

  “I’m his guardian.”

  “Sure, legally, but we’re a family.”

  “Since when?”

  His lips purse and she can feel him swallow an impulse to snap back.

  He says:

  “I mean, okay, I know I haven’t been—but it’s a shock, you know? This whole—and I know for you too. I mean, more than me, but—well, I want you to know I’m past all that shit.”

  He puts his hand on her arm.

  “We’re in this together.”

  She can feel him looking at her, hear the smile on his face, but she doesn’t look over. It’s possible that in this moment she feels more alone than she’s ever felt in her life.

  Except she isn’t alone.

  She is a mother now.

  She will never be alone again.

  Chapter 14

  Painting #2

  If all you looked at was the center frame, you could convince yourself that nothing was wrong. That the girl in question—eighteen perhaps, with a wisp of hair blown across her eyes—is just out for a walk in a cornfield on an overcast day. She is facing us, this woman, having only seconds before emerged from a tight labyrinth of towering green. And though the sky atop the cornfield is a somewhat ominous gray, the woman and the front row of corn behind her is lit by a feverish sun, febrile and orange, so much so that she is squinting through her hair, one hand rising, as if to make out an object in the distance.

  It is the quality of light that draws you in, makes you ask—What combination of colors, applied in what order, with what technique, created this thunderstorm glow?

  To her left, in a canvas of equal size, separated by an inch of white wall, is a farmhouse, set at an angle to the field across a wide expanse of lawn, so that the woman in the foreground appears to dwarf the house, so powerful is the trick of perspective. The house is red clapboard, two stories with a slanted barn roof, shutters closed. If you squint, you can see the wooden flap of an earth-bound storm door flipped up from the ground on the side of the house, revealing a dark hole. And from that hole emerges a man’s arm, clad in a long white sleeve, the tiny hand grasping a tethered rope handle, tense, frozen in motion. But is he opening the door or closing it?

  You look back at the girl. She is not looking at the house. Her hair is across her face, but her eyes are visible, and though she faces forward her pupils have danced to her right, drawing the viewer’s eye across the intricate splay of leafy green, across another inch of white gallery wall, to the third and final canvas.

  It is then you see what this girl has just now noticed.

  The tornado.

  That swirling devil’s clot, that black maelstrom of cylindrical majesty. It is a swirling gray spider egg unspooling, filled with rotten teeth. A biblical monster, God’s vengeance. Whirring and churning, it shows you its food, like a petulant child, houses and trees cracked and spinning, a gritty hail of dirt. Viewed from anyplace in the room, it appears to be coming right at you, and when you see that you take a step back. The canvas itself is bent and fraying, its top right corner bent inward, cracked and twisted, as if by the sheer power of the wind. As if the painting is destroying itself.

  Now you look back to the girl, eyes widening, hand rising, not to pull the hair from her face, you realize, but to shield her eyes from the horror. And then, hair rising, you look past her, to the house, but more specifically to that tiny storm door, that black pit of salvation, and within it a single man’s arm, his hand grasping the frayed rope tether. And this time, as you take it in, you realize—

  He is closing the storm door, shutting us out.

  We are on our own.

  Chapter 15

  Layla

  The things money can’t buy, goes the famous quote, you don’t want anyway. Which is bullshit, because in truth there is nothing money can’t buy. Not really. Love, happiness, peace of mind. It’s all available for a price. The fact is, there’s enough money on earth to make everyone whole, if we could just learn to do what any toddler knows—share. But money, like gravity, is a force that clumps, drawing in more and more of itself, eventually creating the black hole that we know as wealth. This is not simply the fault of humans. Ask any dollar bill and it will tell you it prefers the company of hundreds to the company of ones. Better to be a sawbuck in a billionaire’s account than a dirty single in the torn pocket of an addict.

  At twenty-nine, Leslie Mueller is the sole heir to a technology empire. The daughter of a billionaire (male) and a runway model (female), she is a member of an ever-growing genetically engineered master race. They are everywhere these days, it seems, the moneyed children of brilliant capitalists, using a fraction of their inheritances to launch companies and fund the arts. At eighteen, nineteen, twenty, they buy impossible real estate in New York, Hollywood, London. They set themselves up as a new Medici class, drawn to the urgent throb of the future. They are something beyond hip, collectors of genius, winging from Davos to Coachella to Sundance, taking meetings, offering today’s artists, musicians, and filmmakers the seductive ego stroke of cash and the prestige of their company.

  Beautiful and rich, they don’t take no for an answer.

  Leslie—“Layla” to her friends—was one of the first, her mother a former Galliano model from Seville, Spain. Her father invented some ubiquitous high-tech trigger found in every computer and smartphone on the planet. He is the 9th richest person in the world, and even with only one-third of her inheritance vested, Layla Mueller is the 399th. She has so much money she makes the other rich people Scott has met—David Bateman, Ben Kipling—look like working stiffs. Wealth at Layla’s level is beyond the fluctuations of the market. A sum so big she could never go broke. So great that the money makes its own money—growing by a factor of 15 percent every year, minting millions every month.

  She makes so much money just being rich that the annual dividends her savings account earns make it the seven hundredth richest person on the planet. Think about that. Picture it if you can, which of course you can’t. Not really. Because the only way to truly understand wealth at that level is to have it. Layla’s is a path without resistance, without friction of any kind. There is nothing on earth she can’t buy on a whim. Microsoft maybe, or Germany. But otherwise…

  “Oh my God,” she says, when she enters the study of her Greenwich Village home and sees Sc
ott, “I’m obsessed with you. I’ve been watching all day. I can’t take my eyes off.”

  They are in a four-story brownstone on Bank Street, two blocks from the river, Layla and Scott and Magnus, whom Scott called from the navy yard. As he dialed, Scott half pictured him still sitting in his car outside the gas station, but Magnus said he was in a coffee shop putting the make on some girl and could be there in forty minutes, faster once Scott told him where he wanted to go. If Magnus was offended at being ditched before, he didn’t say so.

  “Look at me,” he tells Scott after the housekeeper lets them in and they’re sitting on a sofa in the living room. “I’m shaking.”

  Scott watches Magnus’s right leg bounce up and down. Both men know that the audience they’re about to have could change their artistic fortunes irrevocably. For ten years Magnus, like Scott, has nibbled at the fringes of artistic arrival. He paints in a condemned paint warehouse in Queens, owns six stained shirts. Every night he prowls the streets of Chelsea and the Lower East Side, looking in windows. Each afternoon he works the phones, looking for invitations to openings and trying to get on the guest list for industry events. He’s a charming Irishman with a crooked smile, but there is also an air of desperation in his eyes. Scott recognizes it easily, because until a few months ago he saw it every time he looked in the mirror. That same thirst for acceptance.

  It’s like living near a bakery but never eating any bread. Every day you walk the streets, the smell of it in your nose, your stomach growling, but no matter how many corners you turn, you can never enter the actual store.

  The art market, like the stock market, is based on the perception of value. A painting is worth whatever someone is willing to pay, and that number is influenced by the perception of the artist’s importance, their currency. To be a famous artist whose paintings sell for top dollar, either you have to already be a famous artist whose paintings sell for top dollar, or someone has to anoint you as such. And the person who anoints artists more and more these days is Layla Mueller.