“Can you hear me?” Peyton asked. “Max? Max! Can you please take those off?”
Max ripped them off angrily and threw them across her bed. “What do you want?”
“I was telling you that I spoke—”
“Yeah, Nisha and her lawyer friend. I heard you. Is there anything else?”
“She reiterated the need for all of us to keep a tight lid on things, but I know you understand that. I’m hoping Daddy will be home in the next few hours, and we can sit down and have a proper conversation about all of this.” Peyton reached out to place her hand on Max’s leg, but her daughter jerked it away. Her tight lips and gritted teeth had been the same since toddlerhood, an expression that only a mother would know: Max was trying not to cry.
“A ‘proper conversation’? About my father ruining my life? Yeah, thanks but no thanks. I’m good.” She leaned across the bed and yanked her headphones back on.
Peyton was lost for words. There were a thousand things she knew she should say, but not a single one was clear in her mind. Instead, she quietly closed the door.
Her phone buzzed immediately.
What’s happening? Skye texted.
Lawyer hired. Hopefully Isaac home soon. Peyton pecked this out and hit send but then wondered: Was someone reading her texts? Did Nisha really mean no contact with anyone?
She walked into the family room, adjacent to the kitchen. It was small but comfortable, with lots of white and gray and subtle animal-skin prints. The whole apartment was like that: the three-bed, three-bath in a doorman building was certainly a luxury but far from extravagant, and what mattered most to Peyton was that it was cozy and chic. They’d only moved in a year earlier, when Peyton’s promotion to morning anchor and ensuing salary bump kicked in, and she loved the place.
Although she knew she shouldn’t, Peyton switched on the TV, automatically set to ANN. Renee’s face filled the screen, and Peyton felt a wave of nausea as she realized her friend and colleague was not only reporting on Isaac, but hadn’t bothered to send so much as a text beforehand.
“We are hearing that charges have been filed against Isaac Marcus, husband of ANN’s own Peyton Marcus, by the district attorney’s office. Reports are saying that Marcus, a part-time real estate investor, has been accused of conspiracy and mail fraud. It is alleged that he paid a ‘fixer’ to secure his daughter’s admission to Princeton University, where he himself is an alumnus.”
Peyton exhaled. Frustration and impotence rose in her. She grabbed her phone.
Seriously? You couldn’t even call me first? she wrote, her fingers banging the buttons.
She regretted it as soon as she pressed send. Of course, there was no response, even as Renee handed it off to Dean, the host who took over at 5 p.m. Come to think of it, not a single one of her friends among her TV Moms group had called or texted, despite the fact that they typically messaged at all hours, nearly every day. They’d all met as young reporters in their twenties and become allies in a hypercompetitive and cutthroat industry. They’d changed from TV Chicks to TV Moms—and fifteen years later, only Peyton and Renee were still in the business—but these were her work friends. The ones who had her back. The women who had sneaked in sushi and champagne to the hospital after she’d delivered Max, and brainstormed brilliant ways to get revenge on sexual-harassing co-workers at the networks where they worked, and planned dates and dinners when any of them were single, depressed, divorced, or alone on birthdays. And yet her entire world was blowing up, and Peyton hadn’t heard a word from any of them? She checked her phone again. Her mother had messaged another three times, Skye twice, Kenneth had left a voicemail, but there was still nothing from the lawyer or Isaac.
She started to pace the apartment, taking long strides up and down the center hallway, starting in the foyer, passing Max’s room, the bedroom that served as a shared office for Peyton and Isaac and a guest room with a pull-out couch, and finally, their airy bedroom with a western-facing view of the treetops in Central Park. The kitchen and family room, which flowed together, took up the space opposite the bedrooms, and although the layout was straightforward—some might say unimaginative—Peyton loved how contained it kept their little family. Ducking into their office, Peyton glanced at the picture she’d only just framed and placed on her desk: her and Isaac at this year’s ANN holiday party, looking happy and handsome in their formal wear. At forty-two, Isaac had hair as thick and dark as the day they’d met. Sometimes he would pull it tight with both palms and show her his supposedly receding hairline, and she would roll her eyes and tell him he was losing his vision, not his hair. And also, he should fuck off, because it wasn’t remotely fair that Isaac got more handsome with every passing year. The creases around his mouth made him seem perpetually happy, and the bit of salt and pepper in the two-day stubble he typically sported somehow looked extra masculine. His eyes, an unnatural shade of bright blue, hadn’t dimmed or dulled a bit. Staring at the photo, she felt an unfamiliar panic rising. How had things gone so badly wrong?
The front door opened and she jumped. What the hell? Was that Max going out? No, she wouldn’t. The doorman wouldn’t let anyone up without her permission, unless…could it be Isaac? She’d only hung up with Nisha an hour earlier; there was no way he could already be home. There was no way he wouldn’t have called her.
“Isaac? Honey? Is that you?” She pulled nervously on her fitted cotton sweater, the blue one, his favorite, as she strode down the hall.
Her husband was kicking off his shoes and looked up when she walked into the foyer, but he didn’t say a word. Even now, after they’d spent eighteen years together, his lopsided grin was enough to quicken Peyton’s breath. Not that he was grinning.
“Oh, thank god,” she said, wrapping her arms around his chest. She brushed a lock of hair out of his eyes and stood on her tiptoes to kiss him, but he pulled away.
“Where’s Max?” Isaac refused to meet her eyes. His voice was cold and hard.
“She’s in her room. I told her we’d give her a little time, but that we’d all sit down and have a talk over dinner tonight.” Peyton tried to make her voice reassuring, the way she’d often done with Max as a toddler and then again as a teenager.
Isaac didn’t say a word but made his way down the hallway to Max’s room.
“Mackenzie?” He knocked three times, then three more. “Open the door, please.”
Peyton couldn’t hear what her daughter said in response, but she knew there was zero chance of Max opening that door to the father she felt had betrayed her. Isaac returned a moment later.
“How could you?” he asked, his anger palpable. “After our whole conversation! After I explicitly told you not to get involved. After you promised you wouldn’t! What in god’s name have you done?
Peyton walked over and gingerly took his hand, which he shook free. “Come sit down, okay? I’ll pour us a little wine, and we can have a—”
“You covered this fucking story, Peyton. Two years ago! You spoke about it so often, you couldn’t stand to report on it for another second. You saw what those idiots did. How they broke the law. How they went to jail. And then you go and do it yourself?” His voice was low, a growl.
Peyton filled two glasses with pinot grigio and looked at him. “Those parents were consciously and deliberately breaking the law. They paid people to take the SATs in place of their kids. Made their kids pose for pictures like they were getting recruited for sports they never even played. I mean, that’s completely insane—and entirely different from what you and I talked about.”
“You don’t think writing a check qualifies as breaking the law?” Isaac asked.
Peyton shook her head. “Not unless building a science lab or a stadium at a school also qualifies. People do that all the time—have done it for generations—and no one throws them in jail. Of course I wouldn’t cheat like those people did.”
“Oh my god
, Peyton. Please tell me you don’t believe what you’re saying. Tell me you understand there’s a difference—in real life, but also in the eyes of the law—between writing a check to a bullshit charity to get your kid into college and making a donation to the school where the entire community stands to benefit. Please.”
Peyton shook her head stubbornly. “It’s not like that.”
“Like what?” Isaac asked.
“She never would’ve gotten in without a little push. You know it, and I know it, too.”
Isaac stared at her, his eyes wide.
Peyton took a deep breath. “Did you think that because she had great grades and decent test scores she was going to get into Princeton? Because that’s just plain crazy. And don’t deny that you wanted her to go there every bit as much as I did.”
“Of course I want her to go there,” he hissed, a mottled red spreading across his neck. “I want her to go there because I loved it. Because the professors and programs are amazing and the campus is gorgeous and I think she’d find her people there in a way that she never managed to in that suffocating, soul-crushing Milford Academy that we forced her to attend because that’s where all the ‘right’ families went.”
Peyton recoiled even though they’d had the conversation about Milford a hundred times before. “We sent her to Milford because it’s the finest preparatory school in the city, and they get the most kids into the best schools every year. You know that. We agreed.”
“Well, who are the idiots now? We could’ve sent her anywhere if you were just going to buy her way into college.”
“Isaac, honey,” Peyton said quietly. “Princeton is the perfect school for Max. I did what needed to be done. What hundreds, if not thousands, of parents all over America do to give their kids every advantage.”
Isaac took an angry gulp of his wine. “She had a 4.0 and 1480 SATs. Max is a rock star of a student. She would’ve gotten in on her own.”
With this, Peyton’s eyes widened. “No one loves Max more than I do, and we both know that she’s an extraordinary human being. But as an applicant to an Ivy League school? She’s a dime a dozen.”
“That’s a lovely way to talk about our daughter.”
Peyton held up her left hand and opened her fingers one by one. “She’s a white Jewish girl from Manhattan: strikes one, two, and three. Never played first violin in the New York Philharmonic, strike four, never started her own globally successful internet company, strike five, never identified a new species, strike six. No substantive yet fascinating physical or psychological traumas, strike seven. She hasn’t overcome poverty, racism, or any kind of discrimination to get where she is now, strike eight. Her parents are straight, and as far as we know, so is she—strike nine. Must I continue?”
“By all means, make it an even ten,” Isaac said, his voice tight.
“Despite all of these incredible advantages—or maybe because of them—she got a 4.0 and a 1480, which are probably on the lower end of scores to these schools—strike ten. Do you see what I’m saying?”
“I can’t,” he said, standing up.
“Please don’t go,” she said pleadingly. She couldn’t remember ever seeing him like this. Her palms were uncharacteristically damp, her heart beating in her chest.
“We talked about this, Peyton. I made my thoughts on it super clear. You promised.” He sounded genuinely hurt, and that, more than the cold anger, made Peyton feel queasy.
“Isaac, I only did what—”
He strode across the family room and turned. “One last thing. Tell me why you wrote the check from my account.”
Peyton’s eyes flew up. “Your what?”
“You wrote the check from my business account, not your individual checking account. Or our joint one.”
Until that moment, Peyton hadn’t thought for a single second which account she had used. “I couldn’t find any other checkbooks. I used whatever one was sitting on your desk. Obviously, I didn’t try to, like, hide the paper trail or whatever. It was just a donation. I never thought for a second…”
He nodded. “You never thought for a second that you were going to blow up your daughter’s life.” He stared at her with an anger she couldn’t ever remember seeing from him and then strode out. A moment later she heard the door to their shared office click shut.
Peyton took an enormous glug of wine, although it was hard to swallow with the knot in her throat. It was true, they had talked about it last summer when Max was starting her applications, and she had promised him that she would drop it. She did drop it. But when the insanity of applying to schools intensified at the beginning of Max’s senior year, and both her daughter and her husband were wrecks about the entire process, Peyton thought of the guest she’d had on her show. And still—still—she hadn’t called him. She’d promised Isaac she wouldn’t. But when the man had called her, as though he somehow had a camera in their living room and knew how stressed they all were, she answered. And listened.
She swallowed again and thought back to that very first night she’d brought it up to Isaac, a Friday in late August, when they’d met at their neighborhood Italian joint for dinner.
“I had an interesting guest on the show today,” she had mentioned, casually she hoped, after they had sat down at their usual table.
Isaac had scrunched his nose then, too. “Was today that actor, the one who blew the whistle on Johnny Depp? I’m blanking on her name….”
“Yes, but after her, I interviewed this revered college counselor. You should hear the way people talk about him—like he can wave a magic wand and get your kid into Harvard.”
“I don’t want our kid to go to Harvard. She’ll become one of those Harvard people who finds a way to work ‘Harvard’ into every conversation.”
“We should be so lucky,” Peyton said.
“Max is not going to Harvard.”
“It’s really a moot point, because she is never going to get into Harvard. But anyway, this guy came on to promote his new book, Cracking the Code, where he explains the best strategies for identifying your target school’s priorities and then figuring out how to align with them.”
“Let me guess,” Isaac said, grinning. “For the bargain price of twenty-two ninety-nine, he’ll divulge all his secrets in a hardcover.”
“The book is not the point,” Peyton said, waving her hand. “The point is that I was speaking to him afterward in the greenroom, just, you know, telling him that Max was a senior and did he have any advice for her.”
“And?”
“He asked where we were applying, and whether or not we had any personal connections to the schools. When I told him that you had graduated from Princeton, he said he has a very close friend on the Board of Trustees there, and that he’d be happy to talk to him on Max’s behalf.”
Isaac had stopped eating. He looked at her. “Why would he do that? He doesn’t know Max—or us.”
“It’s one of the services his company offers. So long as we make a donation to his educational charity, he’ll work his personal connections and advocate on her behalf. Of course, he can’t make any guarantees, but he has a ninety-five percent success rate—higher when the student has credentials in the right range, like Max.”
“An educational charity? What charity?” Isaac looked confused.
It had taken all of Peyton’s effort not to show her annoyance. He was focusing on all the wrong things!
“I don’t know. He tells you which one,” she said, struggling to keep her voice even. “The suggested donation is fifty thousand, which, don’t get me wrong, is not nothing. But when you look at what the college counselors around here charge for a handful of appointments and some essay editing, it’s actually a fair deal.”
“I don’t care if he’ll do it for ten bucks.”
“Oh, come on, Isaac! What you’re not acknowledging is that we’
ve already paid to get Max into the best possible school. Her tuition has been over fifty thousand dollars a year, starting in kindergarten. We hired a private field hockey coach in third grade. Remember the professor from Columbia with a PhD in applied mathematics to tutor her in algebra? Or the nearly twenty grand we paid last summer so she could ‘volunteer’ to build homes for needy families in Costa Rica? We’ve done all these things with the express intention of giving our child every conceivable advantage so eventually she could get into the best possible college. How is this different?”
Isaac examined his plate. “When you lay it all out like that, I’m not proud of some of the decisions we made. But this isn’t a good idea.”
Peyton smacked the table then—she cringed now merely thinking about it. “You’re missing the point! What about the checks you already write to Princeton each year? Was it a coincidence you started the year Max was born? Can you honestly say you’ll continue donating after she goes to college? Have you been giving money to support the school and show your appreciation or to increase the chance that she gets admitted? Be honest.”
“Both,” he said. When Peyton tried to interject, he held up his hand. “Our ten or fifteen grand each year isn’t affecting Max’s admission. It takes millions to do that.”
Peyton leaned toward him. “But what if it didn’t?”
They ate the rest of the meal in silence until Isaac said, “I’m not interested, P. And you shouldn’t be either.”
“Then what have we been doing for the last seventeen years?” Peyton asked.
Isaac cleared his throat. “Look at me,” he said, his voice comforting, peacemaking. “I don’t want to fight. I know you only have Max’s best interests at heart. But I need you to promise me that you’re not going to talk to this Cracking the Code guy again. Okay?”
“But I think that if—”
“Peyton James Marcus. Promise me. We’ll support Max in every way, and I know—and you know too—that she’s going to get in somewhere great. And that she’ll love wherever she ends up going. Promise me you won’t do anything further with this guy.”
Where the Grass Is Green and the Girls Are Pretty Page 6
