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She had also been a nightmare of a teen. Her endless litany of regrettable, ill-advised, and occasionally calamitous choices had made our poor mother’s life embarrassing some days and terrifying on others. She got to know the local police awfully well, and one state trooper must have had our mother’s number on speed dial.
In all fairness, she rallied in college and turned her life around. By the time we were in our midtwenties, despite the inherent, diminutive nature of the name Betsy, she carried herself more like a marine than a social worker who helped teens in trouble. Or, maybe, carrying herself like a marine was how she was able to do what she did, since teens in trouble can be awfully—again, to use a Windsor Castle colloquialism—pikey. Or, to use the Las Vegas vernacular, happy to cut your balls off. Not literally. At least not in Burlington, Vermont, where she worked, but you see my point. If teens don’t respect you when you’re their social worker, you’re in trouble. So, it made sense that she moved like she was an alumna of Parris Island. Meanwhile, I moved as if I were holding flower bouquets that adoring throngs had just given me as I emerged from one of the royal Bentleys or Aston Martins to greet the people.
True, our mother’s death had diminished her. The guilt had diminished her. I saw that when I flew east after the accident. Growing up, her mistakes were Olympian compared to mine, and they had been since our stepfather had died when we were in elementary school. (We never knew our father. He’d died when I was a toddler and Betsy was an infant, when a milk tanker hit a patch of ice on a two-lane road and plowed into his Plymouth Colt, slamming it into a massive shagbark and collapsing it like a beer can.) But if I wanted to cling to whatever remnants of sanity I still had, I needed to release her. We’d never been the sorts of sisters who spoke or texted all the time, and now the less contact we had, the better. It would have been a failed charade if we had tried to feign closeness.
“Families are complicated,” Nigel was saying.
“I know,” I said. “Don’t fret. I’ll call her back.”
Lily returned with our drinks, and Nigel ordered his avocado toast. He tried to order a plate for me, too, and while the casino’s avocado toast was rather scrummy—Diana might have used that slang pre-Charles, but after wedding the prince she would have been more likely to refer to the BP’s avocado toast as brilliant—eating it here in the cabana might have precluded me from giving it back. So, I told Lily that Nigel was chivalrous, but a Bloody Mary would suffice for my breakfast today. Or brunch.
“Betsy sounded like she has news,” he said. “That was the vibe I got.”
From outside the cabana I heard an Earth, Wind & Fire track I liked a good deal. It would be followed by a KC and the Sunshine Band song I loathed and then another Bee Gees hit. Sometimes it worried me that I knew the playlist so well.
“For what it’s worth,” he went on, “I have issues with my siblings, too.”
Not like mine, I thought, but I didn’t verbalize it. Not like mine.
I was in one place when I was ten, and they wouldn’t let us on the Wi-Fi, even for homework, unless they were watching. Insane, right? It was extra crazy because they never wanted to help us with homework or let us on the computer. (Not that I ever needed anyone’s help with homework, especially from the pair getting paid by the state that year to “raise” me.) So, I took the mom’s phone when she was taking a nap and downloaded an app that cracks passwords. I got the password for the home Wi-Fi—it was super easy—then deleted the app from her phone. But, from then on, I was able to get online when they left me alone and even do some homework. I gave the password to one of the other kids they had at the time, because he was eight and cool enough to keep a secret.
CHAPTER TWO
Betsy
She was burned out, the woes of the world and her own laments as a Dowling too much with her. They were inside her, lurking like free radicals waiting to blossom into tumors as solid as golf balls. That, she would tell herself later, would explain a lot of it: she was impelled by the amplified grief—harmonies of pain sung by teens—that had been her job for a decade. She’d seen one too many kids who were cutting or popping oxies like M&M’s, she’d counseled one too many girls who’d been abused by their uncles or one too many boys with learning disabilities that no one diagnosed until the child (and these were children to her) dropped out of high school, got kicked from his home, and wound up on the street. She’d seen one too many trans kids vilified by their families or bullied on playgrounds. They all took a little piece of her heart.
Some people imagined that Vermont was an oasis where teens lived on ice cream and skiing, and the state was awash in dairy farms and sugarhouses. For the grown-ups, there was an endless array of microbreweries and craft distilleries. But, Betsy knew, the state was more complicated than that. Vermont did many things well, but like every state it had always had its share of children who were deserted and teens who imploded and families that fell apart.
She knew—or thought she knew—what had been happening years earlier in her own family’s Victorian.
She got sick during the pandemic in 2020, prior to the rollout of the vaccines, and she supposed that was a factor, too, a part of the demonology explaining why she did what she did. She wasn’t hospitalized, but she couldn’t get out of bed for two weeks in the fall of that year. She could always breathe, but the fever and the weakness and the chills were terrifying, and she was all alone. At the time, she was between boyfriends. Crissy was in Las Vegas, and there was no way in hell that Betsy was going to let her mother near her and risk her health. She didn’t even have a cat or a dog, which exacerbated the loneliness and the bleak places where her feverish mind would stagger, but was probably a blessing since she had no idea how she would have walked a dog, or scooped a cat’s litter box. She wouldn’t regain her sense of smell until the summer of 2021. (First aroma? Fried dough with maple syrup. She was at a county fair, and son of a bitch, there it was. She was in heaven.)
All of the therapists at the counseling service got sick in 2020. Including Betsy, there were six of them who worked with teens or teens and their families, and five more who worked at the shelter in Burlington, and there wasn’t enough hand sanitizer (or masks) on the planet to keep them all from, eventually, coming down with the virus. They did a lot of the counseling via Zoom, but a shelter for homeless teens is going to be a hot spot. Fortunately, they weren’t all sick at the same time.
And so when she got involved with an older man whose own family was unraveling and he threw her a lifeline—a way out—she grabbed it. Yes, she was working with his son. Yes, she was working with the whole family. But the marriage wasn’t salvageable. Staying together wasn’t going to save their son. And while sometimes in her mind those sentences sounded like a justification on her part for sleeping with the father—a euphemism, because at the beginning there had been no sleeping—she would take a breath and reassure herself that they weren’t. That was just the way it was.
She was attracted to Frankie Limback in part because he was nothing like her image of an investment banker, an impression, she had to admit, generated wholly by what she saw in the movies and on TV, and the father of one of her friends from college. He wasn’t clad in Italian suits and red power ties, and his accent oozed the Long Island suburb where he’d grown up. But he traveled a lot, and the places were toasty (Grand Cayman) or chilly (Moscow, prior to Putin’s invasion of Ukraine) or storied (Cambodia, including Angkor Wat). And she appreciated how much he loved his children and was broken by his son’s persistent struggles. She was awed by his life experience. She was seduced by his kindness.
And she began to understand with intuitive precision that he was her ticket out of Vermont. Oh, she knew nothing about running a hedge fund (Frankie’s old business) or cryptocurrency (his new one), but even if the ethereal machinations of invisible money were beyond her ken, she had concluded now that she had to get out of social work. She was thirty-four, and she felt the funnel of life’s opportunities starting to narrow. She was desperate. She was done.
And she was grieving. Not mourning. Grieving.
The difference was not semantics. After her mother’s death, she knew firsthand that those two words were not synonymous.
* * *
Betsy’s first exposure to cryptocurrency was at the counseling service, and it had nothing to do with Frankie Limback. It was in that period when much of the nation thought—the first time—that it was in the tail end of the pandemic: people were getting vaccinated, and the Delta variant hadn’t created the first of what everyone feared would be seemingly endless Greek-lettered waves. Betsy had just met with a sixteen-year-old client, and the teen’s older brother was picking her up after their session. Her brother was twenty-three and had moved back home in March 2020, his senior year of college, and stayed after his virtual graduation. While the siblings and Betsy were making small talk in the counseling center’s parking lot, he joked about the new car he had bought, thanks to Futurium.
“What’s Futurium?” Betsy asked.
He laughed. “You’re kidding, right?”
She shook her head.
“It’s a cryptocurrency. I was living at home and had, like, zip expenses, and so I took my pandemic stimulus checks and bought some. When I showed my parents how much money I’d made, they loaned me some cash and I bought some more. They bought some, too.”
She’d seen the ads for the new currencies and the exchanges everywhere. The likes of LeBron James and Larry David had starred in them. She scrolled past articles about NFTs on her phone.
