Jonathan Dee - The Privileges

“How did we get here?” she said. “I mean, I try to sort of look back and find out where I made the mistake, but I can’t.” And then, frustratingly, she started to cry — like she was the daughter, like she was the one who had been through something and needed to be comforted. “I feel like I’m losing you. How can I keep that from happening?”

“Mom, you are not going to lose me,” April said, not particularly kindly. “Please. Like there’s not enough drama here already.”

“I’m sorry, but you cannot just scare the shit out of me like that and expect me to be cool about it. I do not want that to happen again.”

“I don’t want it to happen again either,” April said.

Edina came in with the Advil and a glass of water on a tray; she placed it on the far edge of the glass-topped table and withdrew.

“That’s what gets me, actually,” April said, in a voice that wasn’t quite as sharp. “I’m pretty sure it will. Happen again. Even though I don’t want it to. I can feel myself forgetting what it feels like to feel this way.” She snorted. “Another few days and I’ll be hanging out with the same people doing the same stupid shit even though I don’t really want to. Why is that? I mean, what am I supposed to do with all my time?”

Cynthia reached out and tried to stroke April’s tangled hair, but April pulled her head away. Her kids’ moods had always had a way of swamping hers and so after ten minutes of sitting at the opposite end of the couch staring at nothing, she found herself feeling just as mad and hopeless as April did, just as stonewalled and estranged, even though in truth, outside the confines of this moment, she had never in her life felt closer to the heart of things than she did right now. She was chair of one of the top ten fastest growing charitable foundations in New York. The foundation, at Adam’s insistence, had her name on it. People brought her antipoverty initiatives of all kinds and her interest made them real, not just at home but overseas, in countries she had never seen. No more intermediaries between her desire for a better world and the world itself; all she had to do was imagine it. But even these triumphs receded like moons into a distant orbit of the fact of her child’s unhappiness. She laid her cheek on the arm of the couch and waited.

Adam found the two of them still in that position, like listing bookends, when he came home half an hour later; their expressions made it appear as if they’d fought more than they actually had. He sat down across from them and took a silent minute to try to focus. It was much harder than it should have been to stop thinking about work. The problem was that everything seemed rooted in work these days. Day and night. Everywhere he went, people begged him to take them on as investors in his hedge fund, which over the four years of its existence had put up numbers that pushed him into shamanistic territory, where people earnestly believed that he was performing a kind of magic. Old friends, total strangers — they treated even finding themselves in the same room with him as the portent of a lifetime, and some of them were the type who prided themselves on not taking no for an answer. They would lose their manners completely. Some of Adam’s junior partners tried to tell him he was insane for not traveling with security just to keep the wannabes at a respectful distance from him, but he really did not want to go that route, especially not at what were nominally social occasions. Now the fund was filing for its own IPO and that meant the news was about to break that one of its nonvoting stakeholders was the Chinese government. There was nothing wrong or underhanded about it; still, when it came to money, there was a certain threshold of size past which outsiders just reacted irrationally. But that particular freakout was still a few weeks away. He and Cyn had spoken at least ten times that day already, so there was nothing on which he needed to be brought up to date. They had a plan and now just needed to draw from each other the resolve to go through with it. He waited for April to meet his eyes.

“First of all,” he said, “Mom and I want you to know that this isn’t about the drugs. We are not going to be hypocrites about that.”

“Is it the drugs, though?” Cynthia said. “I mean, I think it has to be asked. Are you an addict, do you think?”

“Jesus,” April said. “If you had ever in your life seen an actual addict, you would know better than to ask that. I love how you guys always want to establish your street cred.”

“Okay,” Cynthia said. “It just had to be asked.”

No one said anything. Adam’s phone vibrated; after a second’s deliberation, he looked at the screen and saw that it was a call from Devon. Six months ago he’d put Devon in charge of the fund’s nascent commercial-realty speculation arm; it was the only aspect of the fund that might be said to be underperforming right now, but that would turn around. The more immediate problem was that in terms of decision-making Devon wasn’t quite the self-starter Adam had hoped and so he was getting these phone calls seven times a day. He let this one bounce to voice mail. Somewhere upstairs they heard a door open and close.

“It’s true that I would like to do less drugs than I currently do,” April said. “But that’s not the same thing.”

“I think even you have to admit,” Cynthia said, “that this was a close one. You get that, right? I mean, you have to admit that yesterday could easily have ended in some way very much worse than you sitting on the couch in your own living room getting lectured by your parents. It’s not exactly a big stretch to imagine it ending with you dead or in jail.”

“Or dead and in jail,” April said.

“Please don’t be smart,” Adam said. “There is a point to this conversation. We spent a lot of time today talking to Marietta, and what she kept stressing is that we all have to get used to a new way of thinking around here. Like it or not, this family has a name now, a profile. We have been fortunate enough to make a lot of money, which is fascinating to people, and we are in a position to use some of that money to try to do some good. Which, oddly enough, makes us all a target. There are a lot of people who do not want people like us to succeed, even when our success benefits them. Like the scorpion and the frog. They would rather see us brought down. But we are not going to be brought down. We’ve done what we can to keep the media in particular off the scent of what happened yesterday, but information like this is like water, if you’re not ultracareful it’s going to find a way out, and in order to protect both you and the good work that this family wants to continue to do, we have to take some steps. We have to be proactive.”

April started to look worried. “If you say the word ‘rehab,’” she said, “I swear to God I am going to fucking lose it.”

“Nope,” Adam said. “Better. This was Marietta’s idea, actually. I have to go to China for ten days or so, for business and also for a little foundation work, and we have moved up that trip so that it starts the day after tomorrow. You’re coming with me. That’ll be enough time for your buddies who trashed our country place to go through the system and for us to settle with the van driver on their behalf.”

“What?” April said. “China? Wait. If you want to just stash me somewhere, can’t I at least pick where?”

“Sorry, no. No St. Barts, no Chateau Marmont, none of your usual haunts. None of your usual friends. The whole point is to be somewhere where nobody has any idea who you are.”

“I can’t believe this,” April said. She was struggling not to cry. “You’re trying to disappear me.”

“Au contraire,” Adam said. “You will never be out of my sight. It’ll be a little father-daughter time.” His phone vibrated again. “And I’m pretty sure you will see some things you’ve never seen before. Travel broadens the mind. Anyway, it is not negotiable. Cyn, could you maybe have Dawn help with calling the consulate and all that?”