The Nest: America’s hottest new bestseller

Louisa laughed but she was nervous. Ditching SAT prep had started as a joke. “We could leave our phones in our lockers and just take off,” Louisa had said to Nora after one excruciating session. “The only person who cares if we’re here is Mom.” Louisa knew by the look on Nora’s face that she’d unwittingly put something inevitable into motion. They both hated the classes. The tutor who ran their group seemed barely older than they were and never took attendance or remembered anyone’s name or seemed to care who did what. “This is largely self-directed,” she’d say, sounding bored and uninspired while staring out a window that faced Columbus Avenue, looking as if her most fervent wish was to leap outside and stroll back into her precious weekend. “You get out of it what you put into it.”

“You’re a genius,” Nora had said to Louisa. “Let’s do it!”

“I was kidding. Mom and Dad are paying for this.”

“Everything is in the book!” Nora’d pulled out the enormous SAT guide. “They paid for this book. All that tutor does is read from the chapter and make us do the exercises. We can work on the train and at home. It’s not even that hard. We have another year before applying anywhere. We’re juniors.”

Louisa was tempted but nervous. She agreed the classes were lame, but she felt guilty. Something was up at home concerning money—there was always something up concerning money, there was never enough money—but this time seemed different and possibly more dire. Her parents spent a lot of time heatedly whispering and had even taken their discussion to the freezing and snowy yard the night before. But she knew once Nora set her mind to something that it was just a matter of time before it happened.

“Think of how beautiful the park will be today with the snow,” Nora said, petitioning the second they were out from under their mother’s watchful eye. “Snow in the city is evanescent. See? I just used an SAT word. Come on. Today’s the perfect day.”

Nobody stopped them when they bolted out of the building through a side door and ran down the street expecting to hear their names called at any second. They buried their cell phones deep in a locker in case their mother checked their location on Stalkerville (and she was their mother; she always checked their location).

Louisa hesitated. Melody’s admonitions about Central Park and its dark pathways full of nefarious men wanting vaguely disturbing and dangerous things genuinely frightened her. But Nora wanted to find a hot dog vendor and the carousel and Belvedere Castle and other things they’d heard about but never seen. She’d downloaded and printed a map before they left home. “We’ll stick to the main paths today,” she said, unfolding the map and pointing to the spot marked “Strawberry Fields Memorial.”

“Let’s start here.”

LEO PLUMB WAS LOST. He was not ordinarily an uptown guy and what he’d thought was a shortcut through Central Park had led him into an area he didn’t recognize. It didn’t help that the park was like a disaster area after the snowstorm. The snow and ice that had settled over the still-leafy trees had perilously weighed down the branches, destroying or damaging countless trees. Many of the park’s walking paths were like obstacle courses, slippery and littered with debris. A massive cleanup was under way, and the sound of chain saws reverberated from every direction. Some areas were closed off with police tape, necessitating circuitous detours; Leo was completely turned around.

He looked up at the sky, trying to spot the distinctive peaks and gables of the Dakota on the park’s west flank and take a bearing, but from where he was standing he could only see taller, unfamiliar buildings. Leo was running late for his appointment, the one he’d scheduled by phone the day he left rehab, to meet his old friend Rico at the Strawberry Fields Memorial. He had to find his way to higher ground. He used to know some trick about figuring out where he was in the park, something about numbers at the base of the cast-iron lampposts. He walked over to the nearest one. Yes! A small metal plaque affixed to the base was engraved with four numbers: 6107. Did that mean he was only at Sixty-First Street? But didn’t the “07” indicate something, too? East side or west side or smack in the damn middle? Fuck Olmsted and his meandering faux-bucolic pathways. He shoved his hands in his pockets and started walking in a direction that felt like he was heading west.

“IT’S COOL, I GUESS,” Louisa said, staring down at the black-and-white mosaic on the ground with the word IMAGINE at the center. She’d pictured something very different, with an image of John Lennon maybe. Or Strawberries. Or Fields.

Nora was bouncing on her toes, because she was excited and because it was cold. “Let’s head into the park. Look at this place. It’s full of people and families. The boathouse is right down that hill to the left.”

Nora was right. The park didn’t feel dangerous at all. It felt lively and bright. “It’s downright ebullient,” Louisa said, summoning another SAT word. “Lead the way.”

HURRYING AS QUICKLY AS HE COULD MANAGE given the scrim of ice coating the pavement, Leo finally came to a path he recognized. He could see the Dakota now. The path was ostensibly closed, blocked off with police tape, and beyond the tape an enormous broken branch of an old elm was swaying dangerously a few feet above the ground. He ducked under the tape and started to lightly jog up the walkway. It was steeper than it looked and the soles of his expensive shoes were paper-thin. As he maneuvered around some fallen limbs, giving wide berth to the elm, he slipped on a long, nearly invisible frozen puddle that cracked under his weight and before he could catch himself, both legs went out from under him and he landed on his backside. Hard.

“Crap,” he said to a flock of sparrows twittering maniacally in the surrounding bushes. Leo stayed prone for a minute. He was sweating heavily even though his extremities were freezing. Above, the vivid blue sky belied the approaching winter; it was a spring sky, he thought, a sky full of promise. He almost wanted to close his eyes and forget about his meeting. (Meeting? He could hear the voice of his rehab counselor in his ear, her derisive tone, her familiar snort. Let’s call things by their real name, Leo. It’s a drug buy.)

As he sat up, he heard a commotion up the path. Two teenaged girls rounded the corner, heading downhill. Their heads were bent close; one was animated, talking quickly and gesticulating, the other was shaking her head and frowning. Leo liked something about the way the girls kept leaning into each other as they walked, almost as if they were tethered at the shoulder or elbow. The blonde looked up, noticed Leo sitting in the middle of the icy walk, and froze. Leo smiled to reassure them, gave a little wave.

“Careful,” he called out. “It’s treacherous down here.”

The blonde looked alarmed and grabbed her friend who was staring at Leo with—was he imagining this?—recognition. The three of them faced off for a moment, and then the blonde grabbed the brunette’s hand and both girls turned and hurried up the path.

“Hey,” Leo yelled. “I come in peace!”

The girls moved faster, holding on to each other’s arms for balance.

FOR A MINUTE, it seemed to Nora and Louisa that Melody had arranged Leo’s nearly mystical appearance, had planted him there to say: See? See what trouble lurks in the park? See how lucky you are that I’m your mother? They were always asking about Melody’s siblings, the siblings who lived in the city and seemed so interesting and exotic, especially their uncle Leo whose picture would sometimes be in the Sunday Styles section with Victoria, their glamorous aunt. (Louisa had tried calling her Aunt Victoria once at a rare family gathering and couldn’t tell whether the woman wanted to laugh or spit at her.) Melody looked pained when the girls would point out the photos, her face clouding with a mix of disapproval and disappointment. Her expression made the girls feel so bad they stopped mentioning the pictures, hiding them instead in a Tupperware container in their shared closet. Sometimes they’d ask their father about Leo who would only say, “He’s always been perfectly nice to me. Not much of a family man.”

And here he was. Leo. Flailing about like an upended turtle. (“He wasn’t flailing,” Nora said, dismissing Louisa’s attempts to describe the odd moment while they were heading home on the train later. “He was trying to get up. It was icy.” But Louisa was firm, Melody-like; newly out of rehab, she insisted, Leo should not have been in the park. He was supposed to be meeting his siblings for lunch!) At the top of the path they stopped and hid behind a tree trunk to spy on Leo.

“It’s totally him,” Louisa said.

“Should we say something?” Nora asked.

Louisa hesitated. She wanted to approach Leo, too, but thought they shouldn’t. “He’ll tell Mom,” she said. Nora nodded, mouth drawn tight, disappointed. They both held still, barely breathing, and watched Leo for a few minutes. He stood and brushed off his pants. He sat on a large boulder. “What is he doing?” Nora whispered as Leo stared up at the sky. She wished they were a normal family. She wished she could run down the path, waving, and he’d smile and laugh and they could spend the day together. Instead, here they were, cowering behind a tree. They didn’t have all the details of his trip to rehab, but they knew there was some kind of accident and that it was bad and involved drugs. “Who does blow anymore?” Louisa had heard her mother say to their father one night last summer.

“He might be buying drugs,” Louisa said, looking at Nora, worried. “Why else would he be all the way up here right before lunch?”

LEO SIGHED AND HOISTED HIMSELF UP, brushing twigs and dirt off his pants. He sat on a nearby rock, assessing the damage to his scraped palms. Something nagged at him, something about the girls. He’d really spooked them. He assumed his fall was inelegant, but couldn’t imagine that he looked dangerous. Why had they been so spooked? Kids probably weren’t allowed anywhere in the park without a parent these days—not even teens, not even boys. Those girls were probably already looking for a cop.

Dammit, Leo thought. What if they were looking for a cop? What if they thought he was drunk or worse and gave his description to the police who were patrolling for him right now? He couldn’t be caught with drugs. His lawyer had been crystal clear: Keep your nose clean until the divorce decree comes down. No travel. No suspicious spending. No trouble. Leo stood and headed toward the sound of traffic. At the top of the path, he turned a corner and finally knew exactly where he was. Central Park West was straight ahead. He could hail a taxi and go directly to Grand Central and not be late for lunch. If he made a right, he’d be at Strawberry Fields within two or three minutes.

He hesitated. Above him, an ear-splitting screech. He looked up to see three enormous crows, perched on one of the few trees that had already dropped its leaves. They were all squawking at once, as if they were arguing about his next move. Directly beneath, in the midst of the stark and barren branches and at the base of a forked limb, a mud-brown leafy mass. A nest. Jesus.

Leo checked the time and started walking.

CHAPTER TWO

Nobody remembered who started calling their eventual inheritance “The Nest,” but the name stuck. Melody was just sixteen when Leonard Plumb Sr. decided to establish a trust for his children. “Nothing significant,” he would tell them repeatedly, “a modest nest egg, conservatively invested, dispersed in time for you to enjoy but not exploit.” The funds, Leonard Sr. explained, would not be available until Melody, the youngest, turned forty.

Jack was the first to argue vociferously against this distribution, wanting to know why they all couldn’t have their share sooner and pointing out that Melody would get the money earlier in her life than everyone else and what was fair about that? But Leonard had given the distribution of funds, how much and when, a great deal of thought. Leonard was—and this was quite literally how he thought of himself, several times a day—a self-made man. It was the organizing principle of his life, that money and its concurrent rewards should flow from work, effort, commitment, and routine. At one time, the Plumbs of Eastern Long Island had family money and a decent amount of real estate. Decades of behavioral blunders and ill-conceived marriages and businesses run amok had left next to nothing by the time Leonard was in high school. He’d wangled himself an engineering scholarship to Cornell and then a job with Dow Chemical during a time he referred to, reverently, as the Dawn of the Absorbency Revolution.

Leonard had lucked onto a team working with a new substance: synthetic polymers that could absorb three hundred times more liquid than conventional organic absorbents like paper and cotton. As his colleagues set to work identifying potential uses for the new superabsorbers—agriculture, industrial processing, architecture, military applications—Leonard seized on something else: consumer products.

According to Leonard’s oft-repeated legend, the business he and his two partners started, advising larger corporations on how to use the new absorbers, was nearly solely responsible for daintier feminine hygiene products (which he never failed to mention in mixed company, mortifying his children), better disposable diapers (his proudest accomplishment, he’d spent a small fortune on a diaper service when the first three were babies), and the quilted square of revolting plastic that still sits beneath every piece of slaughtered meat or poultry in the supermarket (he was not above rooting through the garbage at a dinner party and hoisting the discarded square triumphantly, saying “Mine!”). Leonard built a thriving business based on absorbency and it was the thing he was proudest of, the fact of his life that lent a sweet gleam to all his accomplishments.

He was not a materialistic man. The exterior of his roomy Tudor house was scrupulously maintained, the interior one tick short of slovenly. He was loath to spend money on anything he thought he could fix himself, and he believed he could fix everything. The contents of the Plumb house existed in varying states of disrepair, waiting for Leonard’s attention and marked with his handwritten notes: a hair dryer that could only be held with a mittened pot holder because the cracked handle overheated so quickly (“Use with Care!”), outlets that delivered tiny electric shocks (“Use Upper, Not Lower!”), leaky coffeemakers (“Use Sparingly!”), bikes with no brakes (“Use with Caution!”), and countless defunct blenders, tape recorders, televisions, stereo components (“DO NOT USE!”).

(Years later, unconsciously at first and then deliberately because it made them laugh and was a neat, private shorthand, Bea and Leo would borrow Leonard’s note vernacular for editing manuscripts—use more, use sparingly, DO NOT USE!)

Leonard was a careful, conservative investor in blue chip stocks. He was happy to set aside some funds to provide a modest safety net for his children’s future, but he also wanted them to be financially independent and to value hard work. He’d grown up around trust fund kids—knew many of them still—and he’d seen the damage an influx of early money caused: abundance proffered too soon led to lassitude and indolence, a wandering dissatisfaction. The trust he established was meant to be a soupçon, a little something to sit atop their own, inevitable financial achievements—they were his children, after all—and pad their retirement a bit, maybe help fund a college tuition or two. Nothing so vast as to be truly significant.

Keeping the money tied up until Melody was forty appealed to Leonard for many reasons. He was realistic about the maturity—emotional and otherwise—of his four children: not commendable. He suspected if they didn’t get the money all at once, it would become a source of conflict between those who had it and those who didn’t; they wouldn’t be kind to one another. And if anyone was going to need the money earlier in life, Leonard imagined it would be Melody. She wasn’t the brightest of the four (that would be Bea), or the most charming (Leo), or the most resourceful (Jack).

On the long list of things Leonard didn’t believe in, near the top was paying strangers to manage his money. So one summer evening he enlisted his second cousin George Plumb, who was an attorney, to meet for dinner and hammer out the details of his estate.

It never occurred to Leonard that evening, as he and George leisurely made their way through two Gibson martinis, a superior Pommard, twenty-eight ounces of rib eye with creamed spinach, cigars and brandy, that in less than two years he would be felled by a massive coronary behind the wheel of his scrupulously maintained fifteen-year-old BMW sedan while driving home from work one late night. He never imagined that the bull market of the aughts, riding on mortgage-backed securities, would balloon the trust far beyond his intention, nor could he have foreseen how the staid but eerily prescient George would providentially transfer The Nest to the safer havens of bonds right before the market’s decline in 2008, protecting the capital that the Plumb siblings had watched, during the decade before Melody’s fortieth birthday, inflate to numbers beyond their wildest dreams. He never imagined that as the fund grew so, too, would his children’s tolerance for risk, for doing the one thing Leonard had repeatedly warned them not to do, ever, in any avenue of life, from the time they were old enough to understand: count the chickens before they hatched.

The only person who could access the funds early was Francie and in spite of her casual allegiance to Leonard while he was alive (or maybe because of it, she married her second husband practically within minutes of shedding her widow’s weeds), she abided by Leonard’s wishes to the letter. Her interest in her children, anemic when she was actually responsible for them, dwindled to the occasional holiday brunch or birthday phone call. Leo was the only one who had never petitioned Francie for a loan using The Nest as collateral. Jack and Melody and Bea had all asked at one time that she consider an earlier dispersal, but she stubbornly refused.

Until Leo’s accident.

CHAPTER THREE

The day Leo was released from rehab, a few days before the family lunch at the Oyster Bar, he went straight to his Tribeca apartment hoping to broker some civil temporary living arrangement with his about-to-be ex-wife, Victoria. That she had other plans became clear when his key no longer fit in the lock of the front door.

“Don’t bother fighting this one,” George told him over the phone. “Just find a hotel. Remember my advice. Lie low.”

Leo didn’t want to confess to George that Bea had taken his wallet the night of the accident. He’d arrived at rehab with nothing more than his house keys, his iPhone (which was immediately confiscated and returned to him the day he was released), and sixty dollars in his pocket (ditto). Standing at the Franklin Street subway station, paging through the contacts on his phone, he realized with deflating clarity how few people in Manhattan would be happy to lend him their sofa. How many friendships he’d let wane and diminish over the past few years while he and Victoria indulged each other’s miseries and spent money as if it were somehow magically regenerating. How few people would be sorry to hear he’d had some trouble and would hope for his recovery or return. He’d lived in New York for more than twenty years and had never not had a place to go home to.

The small piece of paper with a cell-phone number on it, pressed on him by his rehab roommate “just in case,” felt like a squirming minnow in his back pocket. He took the paper out, punched the numbers into his phone, and left a message before he had time to think about it, which was exactly the opposite of what he’d been incessantly lectured to do during his stay in Bridges, the recovery center where his family had dumped him for twelve endless weeks. He’d hated every minute of it. Individual therapy hadn’t been half bad; he’d vented practically nonstop about Victoria and had almost exhausted his bitterness over her avarice. He almost felt like getting rid of her was worth the enormous price tag. Almost. But he should have negotiated something about the apartment for the next week or two.

The wool jacket he was wearing was not nearly warm enough. The day was unusually cold for October. He was vaguely aware of an ominous weather report. The New York Post headline at the subway newsstand screamed SNOWTOBER! As Leo stood waiting for a return call on his phone, he watched two panhandlers at the subway entrance compete for change. On one side, an elderly homeless guy was holding a knit cap in his hand and exuberantly addressing passersby with a hearty Hello! Stay dry! Cold one today! And in what Leo thought was a particularly brilliant marketing move, exhorting all the small children to Read a book!

“Did you read a book today, young man?” he’d say. “Don’t forget to read a book!”

The kids would smile shyly and nod, chew on a finger while dropping a parent-supplied dollar bill into the paper bag at the guy’s feet.

On the opposite side, a young bareheaded musical student (smart, Leo thought, his head of streaked blond curls was impressive) had a violin tucked under his elongated chin. He was playing popular classical riffs, lots of Vivaldi, a little Bach, and was very popular with the ladies not pushing strollers; the older ones in their fur coats, the younger ones wearing headphones or carrying reusable shopping bags.

The pelting rain that had been falling all morning was changing over to sleet. Whoever was on the other end of the phone number hadn’t called him back yet. He didn’t have an umbrella, didn’t even have a hat, and the shoulders of his expensive jacket were soaking wet. He paged through the contacts on his phone again, looked at Stephanie’s name for a few seconds, and hit “call.”

“THINGS MUST BE WORSE than I’ve heard if you’re begging to cross the bridge to Brooklyn,” Stephanie said to Leo. She picked up after only the third ring.

“I’m not begging. I need to spend time with somebody normal, somebody I actually like.” Stephanie didn’t respond. She wasn’t going to make this easy. “What have you heard anyway,” Leo asked, “about my situation.” He braced himself. This was another reason he needed to see Stephanie, to figure out how much of the story was out there, see if George had done what he promised.

“Hardly anything,” Stephanie said. “I heard you checked into Bridges. That’s it. Your consigliore is doing a good job. So how was it?”

“How was what?”

“The Carnival cruise,” Stephanie said, trying to decide how far she could push on the phone. Probably not very far.

“You are still not quite as funny as you think,” Leo said, trying to decide how much he’d have to cede before she invited him out. Probably not much.

“How was rehab, Leo? What else would I be asking about?”

“It was fine.” Leo’s fingers were starting to go numb in the cold.

“Are you all beholden to your higher power? Working through the steps?”

“It wasn’t really that kind of place,” Leo said.

“What kind of place was it?”

“Steph, I don’t know if you’ve looked out the window recently, but I’m standing outside in a monsoon of freezing sleet. I’m soaking wet. It’s really cold.” He stomped his feet a little to try to warm his toes. He wasn’t used to being in this situation, waiting on a request.

“Come out. You know where I live.”

“What subway do I take?” He cringed, hearing himself sound so eager and grateful.

“My lord,” Stephanie said, laughing. “Brooklyn and not via town car? I guess the mighty really have fallen. You know there aren’t tokens anymore, right? You have to buy something called a MetroCard?”