The Admissions (19 page)

Angela had already dropped the ball; she’d dropped it weeks ago, when she hadn’t chosen a topic, hadn’t written an outline, hadn’t read any literary criticism. She couldn’t just pick it up now like it was no big deal.

How would she get caught, anyway? Ms. Simmons hadn’t been the AP English teacher when Teresa wrote that essay; Mr. Strickland, now the department head, had been. Ms. Simmons wouldn’t
recognize
it. Teresa didn’t even go to the school anymore.

Geez.

“Yes,” said Cecily. “I’m happy when I’m dancing. Happier than I am doing anything else.”

To ace this paper, to secure her GPA, her class rank, once and for all. This was the last time as a high school student that she’d ever have to worry like this. This was the final shitty hurdle in an extremely long race.

“Then keep dancing, Cecily. I mean it.” She was still holding Cecily by the shoulders. She squeezed them in a gentle, sisterly way, and Cecily smiled. “Keep dancing!” said Angela.

In a way, Angela was not doing this for herself. Look at her parents, who had given her so much, who had worked so hard for her, given her every advantage. She couldn’t fail them now.

In this way, in Angela’s mind, the action became noble.

Fifteen milligrams. Maybe twenty.

Gabe was in his office, looking over the Bizzvara presentation on his computer, when Abby Freeman knocked on the door and let herself in. If he were Don Draper he would have had a secretary to stop her. Why wasn’t he Don Draper? Gabe raised his eyes and then lowered them back down, being careful to make himself look busy. Since the drink at the wine bar he’d felt exceedingly uncomfortable around Abby Freeman. She looked young (she was) and harmless (she wasn’t). She was a wolf in sheep’s clothing, if he could permit himself an idiom.

“Hello!” said Abby. “I just came by with a couple of questions. I hope that’s okay.”

“Shoot,” said Gabe.
Shit,
he thought.

“I was talking to someone, I forget who it was, and they mentioned that you don’t have an MBA.” She stood in front of his desk and swayed a tiny bit in the heels she was wearing.

So they were doing this. Here. Now. This was it. He met her gaze. “I don’t.”

“That’s unusual, in this industry. Highly unusual. Wouldn’t you say?”

“That’s right.”
Highly unusual
seemed like a strange phrase for a girl Abby’s age to be using. A young lady.

Abby picked up a family photograph Gabe kept on his desk in a plain silver frame. The photograph showed the Hawthorne females on the beach in Rhode Island during a family trip two summers ago. No, it must have been longer ago than that; Cecily’s front teeth were missing. Three years ago? Nora had sunglasses pushed up on top of her head. She was holding Maya, who looked a little too big to be held and slightly embarrassed about it. Cecily was wearing a bright green bikini and her collarbones and ribs were sticking out. Everyone was suntanned and happy. Gabe had taken the photo. He remembered how hard it had been to get everyone to look at the camera at the same time; finally he’d given up. Angela was looking off to the side just a little bit, hair caught by a summer breeze. As if (this occurred to him only now) she were looking toward the future. His heart constricted a little bit at that thought. “Beautiful family,” said Abby.

“Thank you.”
Put down my family.

“I really enjoyed meeting Angela, that time she came by. I see a lot of myself in her.”

No you don’t, you witchy woman. Bite your tongue.
Abby put the photo back incorrectly, and Gabe angled it toward himself, the way it had been. “I mean, really almost unheard of, not to have the MBA. Am I right?”

Gabe sighed. “These days, certainly. But keep in mind, when I started Elpis was
tiny.
Three people in a run-down office in Outer Sunset. We were scrappy. They weren’t as worried about degrees then as they were about gumption. People skills. Excellent communication. Experience. All of which I had.” Gabe took a second to remember those days, the tech boom new, the city bright and promising. The bars full of paper millionaires. Everybody was smiling, all the time. They all thought it would last forever. “There were the founders, and then they hired me. Four of us, then that doubled, then that doubled, and so on.” He paused and turned from Abby to look out the window, over at the little bit of the Transamerica that he could see, though he was too close, of course, to see the top. He’d lived here so long that he remembered when the twenty-seventh floor was still an observation deck. They’d taken Angela up there when she was little.

“And you never went back for your MBA?”

Jesus H. Christ. Maybe you should be interning at a law firm.
She could give Nora’s sister, Marianne, a run for her money.

“I thought about it. I wanted to. But then my oldest daughter was born, and I couldn’t go full-time. I needed the job.”

“Nights, though? Weekends?”

Keep it cool, Gabe.
He sort of felt like he was in an episode of
The Good Wife,
being questioned like this. He lifted his hands in a what-do-you-want-me-to-do gesture. “Didn’t work out. Wasn’t really necessary, at the time. Now, of course, you’d never make partner without it. You’d never get hired without it. But it was different then. I learned on the job.”

“Mint?”

“What?”

“I mean, can I have a mint?” Abby nodded toward the bowl of Wint O Green Life Savers on Gabe’s desk, next to the picture.

No. Please leave my office and let me look at the Bizzvara presentation on my own, and please take your uncomfortable line of questioning with you.

“Of course. Absolutely. Help yourself.” If she had been his daughter, he would have instructed her to say, “
May
I have a mint.”

Abby took a mint and unwrapped it quickly, then stuck it in her mouth. The mint made a cracking sound when she bit down on it.
Man oh man,
thought Gabe,
if this is how you always eat hard candy, Abby Freeman, you are going to have some real problems with your molars by the time you’re my age.
He felt a spasm of satisfaction at that thought. Of course, Elpis had a good dental plan. They were about to pay for Cecily’s braces. Nora had pristine teeth; she was a nut about flossing, never needed anything but her regular six-month checkups. Maya was still losing teeth. Gabe loved the lisp that little kids got when they were missing a front tooth. He looked at his laptop and tapped a few keys, although the document was locked. He was just reviewing it, giving it the final once-over. Actually the team had done an
outstanding
job on this presentation. Bizzvara was going to eat it up.

“Is that the Bizzvara presentation?”

Gabe nodded.

“How’d it come out?”

“Great,” he said, “really great. You all did a fantastic job on it. The analysts told me you had some good insights.”

Abby looked pleased. She took another mint and sat down in the chair across from Gabe’s desk.

“I’d like to be one of the key presenters.”

Gabe laughed out loud at that, and Abby blinked at him. “With all due respect, Abby, you’re an intern. We don’t let interns present to new clients. Sometimes—
sometimes
—we let them sit in the room. But that’s it. And even that, not very often.”

“I’d like you to make an exception.”

“I don’t think I can make an exception.”

“Here’s the thing,” she said. “I think you can. Because there’s something I know about you that I’m guessing you don’t want getting out around the office.”

Was it Gabe’s imagination, or were the walls closing in on him?

He cleared his throat. “Excuse me?”

“I know your secret.”

The rush of blood to Gabe’s head was so sudden and so loud that it almost made him dizzy. A mortified little voice in his head whispered,
Here we go.
Dully, he said, “Secret?”

“You see, there’s a little habit I have, a little Google habit. I Google everything.”

Gabe wanted to wipe the floor with Abbie’s smug expression, but the best he could manage was to say, “Everybody Googles everything.”

“I guess I should say I Google
everyone,
when I land in a new place. Like here, at Elpis. I Googled all of the partners, just to make sure I had all the information.” She smiled. “Did you know Doug Maverick has done
three
Ironman triathlons?”

Gabe did know that; he’d known Doug Maverick forever.

“And did you know that Stu’s son plays Division I lacrosse at Dartmouth?”

Yes, Gabe knew that too.

“And it was weird, because I didn’t find what I was looking for about you—”

“Abby,” he said firmly. “I’m afraid I don’t understand what you’re talking about. And if you don’t mind, I really need to get back—”
Admit nothing.

Joe Stone from HR walked by the office and waved enthusiastically, like a child riding on a carousal might wave to his parents standing outside the gate and snapping pictures. Gabe noticed that his own hand lifted and waved back at Joe; he could feel that his own lips smiled. He was pantomiming the movements of a man whose world was not about to come crashing down. He cleared his throat again.
Think of her as cattle, Gabe. Make her do what you want, even if she wants to do the opposite. Prod her, Gabe. But he was mute.

“Want to know how I know? After my Googling proved to be, well,
disappointing,
in your case, I did something nobody in this company ever bothered to do. I called the registrar’s office. At Harvard.”

A voice that sounded a little bit like Gabe’s spoke. “I’m offended, Abby, that you would insinuate something like this. Offended and, well, frankly, disappointed. Also, I don’t believe that any person can just call up and check someone’s résumé. And even if you could—”

Abby took three mints this time. “You’d be surprised, what you can find out, if you have a relative who works in the registrar’s office. Like my aunt does. I think you’d be really surprised.” She smiled again. “The records at Harvard go back, gosh, decades and decades and decades. Electronic, now, of course, but before that, microfilm.” She folded her hands like a little girl at church. “And would you believe that there
was
a Gabriel Hawthorne. But he graduated in 1938.”

Thank goodness Gabe wasn’t blushing; he’d be able to feel it if he were. Blushing was such a dead giveaway. No, he knew that if he looked in the mirror he’d be drained of color, white as a sheet, a ghost, a freshly painted wall. One of Gabe’s knees was knocking against the other.
Admit nothing.

“So you never peed on the John Harvard statue. You never lived in Adams. You never did the Primal Scream, except maybe when you were born. Not only did you never graduate, you were never enrolled. You never matriculated. My guess is that you never even
applied,
but of course I don’t know that for sure. They don’t keep records of every applicant. Can you imagine if they did?” She looked him straight in the eyes and said, “So many people want to go to Harvard. So many people.”

“Listen,” said Gabe. Abby looked at him expectantly. “It’s not what you think.” He stopped there because the truth was that it was exactly what she thought.

“Someday, when we have a little more time, I’d love to hear the story, about how you got away with it. No hurry, of course.”

“Abby—”

“I’m not going to do anything about it
today,
or anything. But there are a couple of things I’d like.”

Somehow, he got his voice to work. He sounded almost normal, casually nonchalant. “Okay, Abby. Out of sheer curiosity, what would you want? If what you’re saying has any basis in fact. Which I’m not saying it does.”

“I want to sit in on the Bizzvara presentation, for one.”

Deep breath. “Fine, okay, done. But you can’t present.”

He thought of Nora, of his daughters. He thought of his brother Michael, the only person who’d called him on it. Who’d been disgusted by it.
A coward move, Gabe.

“I want to present Bizzvara.”

What an asshole move,
Michael had said. He didn’t care about Lauren anymore at that point. He’d forgiven that, but not this.

“You know you can’t do that.”

“But I want to.” She folded her hands and tapped her index fingers together. It was the gesture of a much older person; he wondered where she’d picked it up. “I want it on my résumé, that I presented to a major client. And I would never, ah,
lie
on my résumé.”

Deeper breath. Deeper, now. Steady. “You can present a little bit. Just the beginning. I’ll let Dustin know. You can do the intro. But then you have to hand it over to the manager. You have to. Anything more than that would look—well, it would look unprofessional.”

“Got it,” she said. “And I want”—she paused to unwrap yet another mint—“I want a job.”

“Pardon me?”

“When the internship ends. Full-time, with benefits. Analyst position, associate track. I want to be working here when I apply to business school.”

Gabe thought of a bar in Noe Valley, a beautiful girl with skin that glowed from the inside out.
Hey, I’m Nora. Nice to meet you. I just moved here. Wyoming? What’s it like living on a ranch?

“Abby. You know I can’t promise that.”

“If you can, your secret is safe with me.”

“I can’t.”

“You’re a partner.”

“Not a senior partner. They make decisions like this, the founders. I don’t have the power to…”

“You’re a smart guy. I mean, not
Ivy League
smart or anything.” Abby plucked five mints from the bowl and held them in her hand, considering them. Then she closed her fist over them. “But smart enough. You have some time. My internship goes through December. You’ll figure it out.”

3:03 a.m.

Dear Marianne,

After Cecily’s debacle at the
feis
she went back to the Seamus O’Malley School of Irish Dance. I thought that was very brave of her. I told her she didn’t have to go—I wouldn’t have gone, myself. But she’s braver than I am. She’s like you, Marianne, afraid of nothing. So she went, and when I picked her up—I did not entrust this delicate task to Maddie—she got in the car and promptly burst into one thousand tears. She said it was terrible. They didn’t talk to her, her Irish dance friends; they pretended she wasn’t there. Those little bitches. I swear to God, I could pummel their pale little faces.

Nora wanted to wait until the moon was nearly full. Earlier that day she had asked Cecily, and Cecily checked her notes, fiddled around on a couple of websites, and pronounced the full moon just a couple of days away. She didn’t want to wait a couple of days. A couple of days might be too late. Almost full was close enough.

A Steller sea lion, a humpback whale, for Christ’s sake: these she could get on board with preserving. Even the California red-legged frog—she could see the value in that. Red legs were unusual, Nora granted the world that. Particularly on a frog. She’d looked it up: the frog looked like it had been dipped in Kool-Aid. But the Marin dwarf flax? Seriously? A
plant
was going to undo everything she’d toiled for, her entire career? All those Sundays spent in open houses, the evenings away from her husband and her children, cajoling buyers, convincing sellers. No, sir. No, it wasn’t. Nora had worked too hard for this. She’d sacrificed too much.

It was easy to get out of bed without waking Gabe. He slept like he was getting paid to sleep. His concentration was utter, and his breathing was deep and even. Had Nora’s beloved Frankie still been alive, this would have been more difficult; Frankie slept like a menopausal woman, nodding off easily but after an hour or two waking at the slightest noise and remaining restless after that.

Quiet, now, slipping out of the house on little cat feet. Quiet!

Nora couldn’t remember the last time she’d been outside after midnight. As she drove, she thought once again of the gold rush settlers, driving their wagons west and west and west or taking ships around the tip of South America. She was under the impression from overseeing Cecily’s fourth-grade homework that the South American route was the preferred one, although that seemed crazy: the trip took something like five to eight months. Not that dragging a wagon full of complaining kids across the entire country would have been any picnic either. If Nora had been a gold rush settler she would have been so impatient with the slow pace of the wagons that she would have called the whole thing off, turned back home. Gabe would have had to call upon some of his endless supply of patience to try to calm her down. “Come on, Nora-Bora,” he’d say. “Just a little longer. We can make it.” And she would have sighed heartily, looking around the plains, and said, “Seriously? Is
that
what they’re getting for a log cabin these days?”

Cecily told her that San Francisco had a population of only two hundred before the first gold was discovered. Imagine! There were more parents than that in the volunteer database at Cecily’s school. It was not even a town; it was an outpost, the raw beginnings of something, that’s it. At the start of the gold rush, Cecily had said, the nuggets were so big and so blatant that gold seekers could pick them up right off the ground. Nora took a moment to imagine what that must have been like, gold more common, more easily located, than the insidious Marin dwarf flax. The promise and exhilaration of that!

Driving, driving, on her way to the Miller property, no big deal, just driving, a drive she’d made dozens of times when the home was on the market. The house had been a snap to sell. It had practically sold itself. The market had been on an uptick then. There was almost no inventory in Marin. She could have sold that home to at least a dozen families, it was simply her bad luck that it had gone to Loretta and Barry Miller, who, instead of being happy with what they got, wanted to
expand.
Go figure.

The moonlight dancing in San Rafael Bay was truly lovely. Nora should make a point to get out late at night more often. She should look at the water more often. She didn’t take the water here as seriously as she took the ocean in Rhode Island. She saw the water almost every day, either the bay or the majestic Pacific, but these weren’t real
beaches;
these weren’t places you could go with your friends and stick your toes in the sand and get a good old-fashioned sunburn while you drank soda (or beer poured into soda cans) and gossiped. If you were only halfway sane and a tremendously talented surfer you could go to Mavericks near Half Moon Bay, and certainly the view of the ocean lashing the cliffs was breathtaking. But if you were just a regular person, just a person who wanted to hang out at the beach, you were mostly out of luck.
Water water everywhere and not a place to swim.

These thoughts occupied Nora for much of the short drive, but then her anxiety returned with renewed strength and vigor. She should turn back, she should forget this whole expedition, let fate run its course.
Turn this wagon around, Gabe. Girls! We’re going back. No gold for us.
If the Millers sued her, the Millers sued her. If they lost their home, they lost their home.

Okay. What if? So they’d sell their home, and live—
where
? And pay for Angela’s college tuition—
how
? They wouldn’t be able to. The Hawthornes would become one of those families you heard about who made one mistake and,
kaput,
there went their lives. People would say things about them like,
They were doing so well! Why’d they go and risk it?

Or, worse,
I always knew there was something about them. Don’t you think, in the end, they got what they deserved?
They would become a cautionary tale, like the baseball manager with the doomed land investments or the brilliant businessman who bet it all on one horse.

Nora didn’t want to become a cautionary tale. She wanted to keep her regular life. She wanted to continue working for Arthur Sutton. She wanted to take care of her children and love her husband. (If he wasn’t having an affair with the intern and planning to divorce her. Although if he were having an affair and not planning to divorce her she’d have to divorce
him
once she found out, in the name of feminism and also because she couldn’t imagine ever sleeping with him again after he slept with someone else. Nora was monogamous to the core.) She wanted Angela to get into Harvard because it would make Angela and Gabe happy and would give them more reason to go east. She wanted to visit her mother and Marianne in the summer and take a day trip to Newport and eat a lobster roll at Monahan’s. Cecily loved the lobster rolls at Monahan’s, and Maya loved the mozzarella sticks.

And to keep all that, she needed to do this.

She took a deep breath, exhaled audibly. She found a classical station on the radio and was momentarily calmed by the music; her mother used to listen to classical music in the afternoons, and the sound brought to mind coming in the door after school, the hiss of an iron across white dress shirts, the sound of the oven door creaking open. Nora was too type A for listening to classical music at home. Or, for that matter, for ironing. They sent Gabe’s shirts out to the dry cleaner’s for pressing, and Nora herself favored clothes that tended not to wrinkle, or that wrinkled in such a way that the wrinkling seemed purposeful.

When Nora reached the Millers’ street she did something she hadn’t done since she was in high school, cruising toward the beach at Narragansett in Stuart Mobley’s old Buick: she turned off the headlights and coasted quietly to a stop.

She was dressed like a cat burglar, in all black: black yoga pants, never used for their expressed purpose, and a black turtleneck that called to mind either Steve Jobs or an East Village poet from the 1970s. Nora detested turtlenecks and had had to reach deep into the archives of her closet to recover this one.

She had with her a backpack with a flashlight and a small trowel she’d found in a mislabeled bin in the garage. She got out of the car on her little cat feet and headed around to the back—the Millers had no front fence, just the one along the back. No dog, which was a plus. Also, they weren’t home. They were in Hawaii, drinking cucumber and pineapple mojitos and eating farm-to-table vegetarian dip at the Ritz-Carlton on Maui. (Nora, in a fit of envy and curiosity, had looked the menu up online.)

I’m not doing this,
she told herself.
I am not. Doing. This.

And yet she was! She was doing it. Here she was, closing the car door softly, softly, so softly that she didn’t hear so much as the whisper of metal on metal. Here she was, sneaking around to the backyard. Here she was turning on her flashlight, shining it along the back fence. Here she was, looking, looking. Looking for the plant that was keeping the Millers from expanding their already-large home.

Except. Here she was, and here was the flashlight. But where was the plant?

Here she was, looking harder, looking more. She had thought it would be easy. But she’d neglected to consider something obvious. The Marin dwarf flax was a
flowering
plant. Flowering plants didn’t flower all year long, at least that’s how it worked in the botanical world that Nora imagined, though she knew little about it herself.

She had thought that under the light of the (nearly) full moon, with the pinky-white flowers glowing against the fence, it would be easy to pick them out. Loretta Miller had said there were only a few plants, three or four; she had told Amanda that it was astonishing and irritating that such a small number of plants—a smattering of weeds, really—should keep them from expanding. This job should be easy.
Easy peasy lemon squeezie!

But the goddamn plants weren’t flowering. It was November, not the middle of summer. Nora shined her flashlight along the edge of the fence. What did the dwarf flax look like when it wasn’t flowering? She should have brought her iPhone in her backpack so she could take a quick look, but she’d left it in the car. Not worth going back for: too risky, even though the Millers were on vacation.

An anomaly,
Loretta Miller had told Amanda.
Just our house, and the house next door.
So maybe the plants were right on the border with the neighbor’s yard. But which neighbor? There was a house on either side. Nora crept to one side of the yard and shined the flashlight at the corner of the fence. She was too warm in her turtleneck. How did Steve Jobs stand it? Of course, he had a total of zero body fat. Lot of good that did him, in the end. Don’t be uncharitable, Nora. Just focus on the task at hand.

Well, she’d just have to pull up anything that looked like a possibility.

The back door opened. The outdoor lights came on, illuminating the pool, illuminating the chaise lounge chairs that (Nora knew) the Millers had purchased from the sellers for a very good price, illuminating the palm trees that stood sentry around the pool, and illuminating (Nora was certain) Nora herself, standing in her cat-burglar suit, holding a trowel and her ten-year-old’s backpack.

And then a voice spoke: a strident, possibly frightened female voice, a voice that did not belong to Loretta Miller.

“Hey!” said the voice. “Hey! Is someone out there?”

What was Nora supposed to do? Answer, not answer? She was, of course, out there.

“I’m calling the police,” said the voice. “Don’t you dare come any closer. I’m calling the police.”

Housesitter,
thought Nora. Of course. Typical. Loretta Miller wasn’t going to leave her house unattended during a vacation. At the same time she thought,
Police!
How formal. In Rhode Island people would say
cops.
And at the same time she was thinking all of that she thought,
Don’t just stand there, Nora-Bora, you idiot. Run!

But she couldn’t run. Her feet were frozen; her legs were paralyzed. And from a great distance a mind that didn’t seem to belong entirely to her wondered,
Is this what it feels like to die of shame?