The business with Sally wasn’t particularly straightforward, either, but we all got there eventually. Sally, still in dogged pursuit of her therapy goals, was doing a lot of internal excavating of her own, and with just about every member of her family. She cried a lot with me when we worked together in Ithaca that summer, and she cried with our mother when Johanna came up to visit us in late July. She cried when Stella forgave her for following Salo to Henry Darger’s opening-night party at the museum (though Stella kept insisting there was nothing to forgive), and she cried each time she introduced another member of her family to her partner, Paula, a woman who (like Lewyn’s former roommate, the first Mormon he’d ever met) had come from far away to Ithaca, New York, in order to become a vet (large animal).
Ironically, to me at least, she never cried on the job, not even when a house we were working on was itself choked with sadness. I learned pretty quickly that I didn’t share my sister’s remarkable ability to wade into muck, to shovel years of layers of unspeakable detritus into plastic bags, nor to deal calmly and professionally with the embittered families that always seemed to surround (and sometimes, unfathomably, live in) these houses. I spent most of that summer becoming acquainted with a broad range of filth (and taking long showers at night, as hot as I could stand, to wash it away), and getting to know Paula, and working my way through the reading list Roarke had sent (to redress some of the lacunae it had identified in my Walden education). At the beginning of September, I flew to the Vineyard to help our mother get things ready.
The woman I found when I got to the cottage was a person I had not yet had the pleasure of meeting: her hair was longer, her clothes were looser, and there was an utterly unfamiliar look of calm on her face. The hug she gave me when I got out of the taxi was entirely without agenda, as far as I could tell. Somewhat to my own surprise, I hugged her back.
“Are you thirsty?” Johanna said. “I made some iced tea this morning. With PG Tips.”
“Wow,” I said. “Thank you.”
There was a pile of yarn in a basket on the floor beside the staircase that looked as if it wanted very much to be a sweater of some kind. “Is that…” I said, gobsmacked.
“I’m taking a knitting class in Edgartown,” Johanna said, picking it up. “This sweater was going to be for me, but something’s gone wrong, and it’s going to end up tiny. I’d better give it to Rochelle.”
I could only gape at her. “Well … that’s…”
“Oh I know, I know,” my mother laughed. “Don’t worry, I’m fully aware. It’s just fun. ‘Stitch and Bitch,’ they call it. And the group’s only about half summer people.”
She said “summer people” as if she weren’t one, herself.
“That’s cool, Mom. I think Rochelle will be really touched.”
“And then I’ll make one for you! You’re going to need something warm in that ridiculous place, while you’re milking the goats.”
She had not lost her disdain for Roarke, she’d been very clear about that. “Great,” I said.
I took my things upstairs. My room was the one at the end of the corridor, the one our father had once used as an office. There was still a desk from Salo’s time, but Johanna had cleared everything else out one July when I was away at camp, and I’d returned to the current arrangement of yellow calico bedspread and a pair of squat pink armchairs. It wasn’t attractive, necessarily, but it was summer.
“Phoebe,” Johanna called, “I’m out on the back porch.”
“Okay,” I yelled back.
It was around three in the afternoon. From my window I could see a mother and a little kid far down the beach, both of them slathered with white sunblock, standing about ten feet above the waterline. Every time a wave came in the two of them went bouncing down to touch it, then turned and ran back to the same spot. The wind and the water took away the sound of their laughter, but I watched them do it again and again, the activity somehow every bit as entertaining the tenth time as the first. Then I finished stacking my books on the bedside table and stowed my bag in the closet and went downstairs.
My mother had the tea out, a pitcher and a glass of ice. She had the book section of the Times open on her lap, and was on her phone, typing with her thumbs. “It’s sweetened, just a little,” she said.
“Thank you,” I said, surprised that she remembered not just what tea I liked, but how I liked it. I poured myself a glass and sat in one of the old Adirondack chairs. The chairs had always been there, in exactly the same spot. They were as hard and unpleasant to sit on as ever.
“Sorry, just need a sec,” Johanna said, without looking up. “The florist wants to know how we feel about black-eyed Susans.”
“Oh. Well, how do we feel?”
“I think we feel okay. The only thing Rochelle asked me was nothing red. She doesn’t like red. Well, I don’t like red, myself. Okay.” She finished and set down her phone. “I think we got lucky with the flowers. The florist is the sister-in-law of the woman who runs the knitting shop.”
“Oh,” I said. “Well, that’s good. Rochelle must have a lot of faith in you.”
“I think it’s more likely she doesn’t much care about wedding minutiae in general. She’s not doing a lot of overthinking. She’s wearing her mother’s wedding dress, you know.”
I nodded. I’d personally seen Rochelle’s mother’s wedding dress come out of a Tupperware container last fall. That it was wearable might say a great deal about the enduring genius of Tupperware, or it might say something else about the value of a good dry cleaner. But mostly it said something about Rochelle.
“Would you like to stay in for dinner?” Johanna asked. “I have some salmon and some corn. Or we could go out.”
“Oh. Either,” I said. I couldn’t remember the last time my mother had cooked for the two of us. This seemed so noteworthy that I decided to say it aloud.
“When’s the last time you cooked for the two of us?”
Johanna frowned. “A long time, I suppose.”
“Like, a really long time. Did you cook when the triplets were growing up?”
“Well, some,” Johanna said. “We had Gloria full-time then, and she cooked. She made wonderful lasagna. I know you think you missed out on a lot of important stuff, but don’t worry, you didn’t miss much with my cooking.”
I smiled. I could feel the late sun on my legs. A not-unpleasant moment passed that way. Then I heard her say: “Did you ever wonder why it took us so long to have you? You never asked about it.”
Well. I took a breath. It occurred to me that I ought to be paying very close attention now. This remarkable opportunity—already I understood that it was an opportunity, and it was remarkable—might not come around again.
“Was I supposed to ask? Or were you just supposed to, you know, tell me?”
My mother didn’t respond right away. She was holding up her misshapen knitting project, examining some dropped stitch or knot in the wrong place.
“Look,” I finally said, “if this is it, if this is going to be the big reveal, you can spare yourself. I know it already. There were four of us. Dr. Lorenz Pritchard, of sainted memory, randomly picked the others to get born and me to go into the freezer. Seventeen years in liquid nitrogen. I guess I ought to thank you for remembering me.”
My mother was staring at me. “Which one of your siblings told you that?”
I shrugged. “It was kind of a joint effort. And in case you’re wondering, I know why, too. I’m pretty sure I know everything. And it wasn’t We might as well, either.”
“‘We might as well’?” Johanna said, mystified.
“I heard you say that, to Aunt Debbie. You were in the living room together. I think you’d had a root canal or something. We had the embryo, we could afford it, why not? Frankly, Mom, and I wanted to say this to you at the time, We might as well is not a good enough reason to bring a child into the world. But of course, as I eventually discovered, it happened to be completely untrue. So we never had that particular talk.”
Johanna, maddeningly, did not respond.
“I heard you say it. Not making it up.”
“Oh, I believe you,” my mother sighed. “People say things. It doesn’t make them true. And there are plenty of things I haven’t seen fit to confide in my sister. We were never close, you know. And I was never close to my brother, either. They both saw me as utterly irrelevant to their lives, which wasn’t a great start.” She thought for a moment. Then she said, “I just realized, that doesn’t even hurt anymore. I seem to have gotten past it. I wonder when that happened.”
I just looked at her.
“I’ve tried to understand it all. Not a job for the faint of heart, I can tell you.”