Nanny Returns

A Novel

EMMA McLAUGHLIN

and

NICOLA KRAUS

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the authors’ imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 2009 by Italics, LLC

All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. For information address Atria Books Subsidiary Rights Department, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020

First Atria Books hardcover edition December 2009

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Manufactured in the United States of America

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.

ISBN 978-1-4165-8567-1

ISBN 978-1-4165-8589-3 (ebook)

A NOTE TO READERS

Nanny Returns
is a work of fiction. Names and characters are the product of the authors’ imagination. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is coincidental. Although some real New York City institutions—schools, stores, businesses and the like—are mentioned, all are used fictitiously.

New York Magazine
, “The Family Astor,”

8/7/2006, Meryl Gordon

“And yet, for all his good works, Herman (Merkin) was a remote, withholding father. Short of not living at home he couldn’t have been less involved.”

New York Magazine
, “The Monster Mensch,”

2/22/09, Steve Fishman

“The (Madoffs) have not spoken to their father since his confession to them …or to their mother, not because they think she was involved—they don’t—but because they believe her tendency to side with him, no matter what …enabled his dirty deeds.”

Vanity Fair
, “Did the Madoff Sons Know?”

6/3/09, David Margolick

CONTENTS

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Acknowledgments

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1

“What’re we doing?”

At the sound of my husband’s voice I twist atop the ladder, where I’m attempting to jerry-rig a curtain panel to an ancient nail. He stands in the doorway of the otherwise empty room, wiping his flushed face with the bottom half of his damp Harvard T-shirt. “Hey, there,” I say.

“Three weeks of living in a construction site and Mom’s lost it already, Grace.” Ryan addresses our twelve-year-old golden retriever as she tromps up the last few stairs to join us on the fourth floor of our new home. Beneath the stark light of the bulb jutting from the ceiling’s plaster rosette, we watch as she promptly drops her throw rope at his sneakers for a treat. “Good girl.” He ruffles her head and she saunters to the ladder to greet me, her paws grayed with the grit of Riverside Park.

“Did ya have a fun jog with Daddy?” I call as she trundles away to her water dish waiting in our bedroom next door. Loud lapping ensues.

“They’re opening a Starbucks on the spot where that bodega burned down.” He tugs his feet out of his Nikes and walks over in his socks.

“Then the drugstores, then the banks. We’re ahead of the wave.”

“So.” He nuzzles my bare thigh with his sweaty brown hair before turning to peel off his shirt. “What
are
you doing?”

“I found the curtains!”

“So I see.” He swipes up his sneakers on his way out.

I stretch to secure the other end of the cerulean linen fabric onto a second nail protruding from the fossilized wallpaper and, with a bracing hand on the cool metal, lean back to assess. Smoothing my palm along the crease from the last month the curtains have spent boxed, I remember scoring them at an Uppsala flea market two years ago to lift our flat from the Swedish winter blahs. Not that I’m complaining. After Ryan’s position with the UN had relocated us from Haiti to southern Africa to northern Africa, I was just grateful to have seasons, even if three out of the four involved snow.

I adjust the cloth to hide the sea of sledgehammer dents where Steve, our contractor, “investigated” to see if it was feasible to install a window. Or if the openings had been bricked up sometime in the last century for a reason. Like the brownstone’s back wall will collapse.

“Nan.”

“Check out my window.” I clamber down as he reappears in the doorway with a towel around his waist. “I’m going to put Grandma’s old red desk under it and it’s going to be my nook.”

He comes over and wraps me in his arms, pulling me against his sweat-damp frame, the nubbly terry cloth brushing my legs. “We have over three thousand crumbling square feet—”

“Of potential.”

“—of potential. You will have your nook and your window, and I have to ask if you are planning on wearing this to my parents’ closing?” He slides up the sweater of his that I threw on in lieu of my still-missing robe. “Because I, for one, will find that distracting.”

“I thought that’s why I was coming, to distract you.” I tug the towel free from his waist.

“To support me. And we’re pushing the clock here.” He grabs the towel back and snaps my ass as he strides out and down the short hallway to the one bathroom that functions in our over three thousand crumbling square feet. “I promised my dad he wouldn’t have to give this closing a second thought. So fifteen minutes and we need to be walking out the door.”

“Okay, but I need coffee first and the machine just conked,” I update him from the doorway of my future office. “Another fuse blew in the kitchen.”

“Bringing us to—”

“Three: the hall, the bedroom, and the bathroom. Any sign of Steve out front?”

“Not yet.”

“It’s almost nine. I should call him.”

“You’re stalling! You can call from the cab!” I hear the protesting shriek of the hot water being summoned. “And subtract five minutes for a pit stop if you want coffee!”

“I
want
a hit of the crack conveniently sold across the street!” I yell back, but he’s already underwater. As I enter the bedroom, Grace raises her head from where she’s flopped across our mattress, and I face the wall of wardrobe boxes. “You’d need crack, too, if he was making you go back to 721 Park.”

A half hour later, the taxi jerks forward to traverse another halting increment of Park as all its lights turn green in unison, a municipal detail I always thought so perfectly fit the neighborhood’s constricting mores—everyone on the avenue pressed to do the same thing at the same pace. I remember how much the unpropitious stop lights stressed me out when I worked here, now well over a decade ago. Placating some nap-deprived child squirming beside me on the backseat, I’d be breaking into a cold sweat over whether we’d be late for whatever the next bizarre assigned activity was—Flower Arranging for Four-Year-Olds or Tai Chi for Tots—and wishing the subway I rode to and from work with the rest of humanity was deemed safe for little Elspeth.

Below Ninety-sixth Street the meridians are blooming with lushly packed Easter tulips and I remember accompanying my grandmother, trowel in hand, to help plant the bulbs when I was a child. But by the time I grew up to work in the buildings flanking these flower beds, my employers had long since outsourced the duty to others for whom English was a second language, as was their predilection for any task requiring them to drop to their knees. We pass a limestone building I nannied in my first year at NYU, the one where I discovered the teenage daughter had some guy from the shooting galleries Of Tompkins Square Park squatting in her walk-in closet. Yeah, seven years of babysitting, two summers au pairing, and three years of full-time nannying were more than enough. I’m still amazed that after my last day of my last job, in the building we’re barreling toward, I managed to wait for Grace to get her shots so we could fly over the ocean—instead of running across it—to shack up with Ryan in the Hague.

In the lower Seventies the cab halts yet again and my gaze lands on a black woman pushing a towheaded child, who has the glazed, contented look children assume in strollers (on a good day). Suddenly the child’s face lights up. I strain to see a blonde standing at the corner in a lavender dress, smiling broadly, shopping-bag-laden arms outstretched as the two approach. The mother rushes toward the stroller, grin in place—bypassing its passenger to hang her straining bags on the titanium handles—and with a few words to the pilot, she continues past unencumbered. The child erupts into a shocked wail, raising a tortured belly against the NASA-grade nylon straps restraining him—and our cab inches onward into the Sixties. I feel myself starting to slide down in my seat.

“Nan.”

“Yeah, babe,” I answer, keeping my eyes on my BlackBerry as I scroll to my lone client’s latest missive. Which I start to answer in a tone designed to entice copious referrals. Which will, God willing, multiply into an actual consulting business.

“You look like we’re driving by a house you got caught TPing.”

“Uh-huh.” I hit send and feel a firm grip on my bicep as Ryan lifts me from my near-horizontal slouch.

“You’re thirty-three.” He raises an eyebrow.

“Yup,” I concur as the cab pulls to the curb and I slip the device into my handbag.

“You speak three languages.”

“True.” We both reach for our wallets, but he gets to his first, tugging out a twenty to pay our fare.

“So—”

“So she was a very scary lady.” I press my lips together to refresh my gloss.

“But now you can be very scary.” He touches his forehead against mine as he lifts to return his wallet to his back trouser pocket. “It could be a scary-down.”

“I’d prefer it be a nothing-down.” I pivot to face the caped doorman as he opens the cab door and, against every instinct, step out under the shade of the pale gray awning. Then, as another doorman pushes back against the brass-encased glass to the somber dimness of the Xes’ lobby, I one-eighty to the departing cab like Grace entering a vet’s office.
Oh, this? Here? That’s—no. No, thanks! I’ll just—

But Ryan solidly encloses my hand, and after a few pleasantries with the staff, thankfully neither of whom I recognize, we’re en route to the mahogany elevators.

“So far, so good,” Ryan stage whispers as he pushes the up button, setting it aglow.

“I’ve thanked your parents for moving to Hong Kong?”

“In your wedding speech. Twice.”

The door rolls open and I drop my head, hair falling in my face as I stare intently into the gleaming marble tile. A pair of black velvet slippers with embroidered jester monkeys emerges from the elevator, and I tighten my grip.

“Hello,
Mr.
Rallington,” Ryan says pointedly as he guides me into the mahogany cab. The doors slide closed and he hits eleven. “I don’t get the slippers thing.”

“And that’s why I love you.” I look up into his brown eyes and he smiles, little lines crinkling in the corners.

“Hmm, our old stomping grounds,” he murmurs, sliding his hand down my suit. I lean in for a deep kiss, flashing to when I would ride this very elevator, praying to run into him—H.H.—the Harvard Hottie who lived just two floors above my employers. We come up for air as the cab opens to the familiar vestibule. “You made it!” He raises my hand in victory and reaches into his trench for the keys.

But our repartee evaporates as the front door closes us inside the emptied home, vacant after years of subletting. Standing in the front hall, we find ourselves suddenly quiet. Ryan releases me to take off his coat and we hesitantly venture inside his parents’ former apartment, footsteps amplified by the lack of orienting furnishings to absorb their sound.

I take a tissue from my bag and wipe at my smeared gloss, realizing that we’ve bamboozled ourselves. All conversations about this final walk-through, only weeks after our own, had focused on whether I’d have the balls to come to a building, a neighborhood I’ve flatly avoided when visiting the city for holidays. The discussion revolved around the probability of making it from point A to point B without seeing
her,
Mrs. X. Not point B itself, and what it would be like for Ryan to be the one to hand over the keys to his childhood home. Or for me to stand in an emptied apartment whose layout is identical to the Xes’.

“It’s weird, right?” He crosses his arms over his folded trench and hunches into himself, looking a bit lost.

“Yeah,” I murmur, rubbing his shoulder.

“I guess we should . . .”

“Walk through?”

He turns and leads the way. I follow as he stops in each room and gives a little nod. When we get to the end of the hall of bedrooms, I feel a bruise of sadness gaining definition in my chest.

“Grover’s—”

“My—”

“—room,” we speak at the same time. Ryan walks inside as the mid-April sun streaks through the shutters onto the exposed herringbone floor. He wanders over to the window and I step past him, drawn to the adjoining bathroom. Standing in the doorway, I feel the shudder of Grayer’s sobs as we sat on the edge of the tub two floors below—the terror of not knowing what to do, how to help him breathe, the helplessness as his fever raged, the sweltering steam of the running shower amplifying the panicked fog of having this four-year-old’s life left in my twenty-one-year-old hands.

“No way!”

I spin to see Ryan crouching under the shutters, the radiator box askew as he lifts what appears to be a dirty hairball to me. “Han Solo.” He unfetters the figurine from its debris. “I hid him here when my brother was little and kept tryin to play with my cool shit. Crazy.” He stands and dusts off his trousers, the particles billowing into the slatted sunshine. It takes me a minute to register that he’s nodding to himself with progressive intensity. He grips the brown plastic and turns to me, his lips pursed, eyes sparkling. “I want this.”

“We can’t afford this, remember? We’re building ours out of a bomb site a hundred blocks north.”

“No.
This.
Family, children—a child.”

I nod, tucking my hair behind my ear. “And we will.”

“What are we waiting for?”

“Um,
four
working fuses, a kitchen. My business getting off the ground. Getting our feet planted in one country for more than a year—”

“I’m ready.” He looks around the room, a revelatory smile spreading from ear to ear. “I’m ready, Nan. Let’s not rent out two floors. We’ll rent one and keep the other for kids—”

“Plural?” I ask, starting to see patchy blurs where he’s standing in the dust-flecked light.

“A baby. I want to have a baby. With you. Now.” He steps over, fervently taking both my hands, the Star Wars action figure wedged painfully between our skins.

“I’m . . .” I withdraw from his grip, the yuck of my tenure in this building flooding back as Han Solo somersaults to the floor. “I—
this
is totally changing our everything, being completely responsible for another person’s life, their happiness, twenty-four seven until we’re dead. It’s not some nostalgic impulse purchase.”

“Okay.” He bends to retrieve the toy. “I’m giving you that because we’re in this building. That’s your freebie for the week.”

“Thanks.” I bite my lip.

“Nan, it’s not like we haven’t talked about this.”

“But
this
was down the line. I don’t know if I’m ready.”