“Well, not your room,” Sally said. “’Cause you had a Mormon roommate.”
Her brother nodded. Then he frowned. Had he told his sister that his roommate was Mormon? He tried to remember, but there was nothing there.
“Wait,” said Harrison, “you had a Mormon roommate?”
Beside him, Sally let out a breath. It was only ten in the morning with the rest of the day to get through, somehow, without showing her hand. Or exploding from sheer stress.
“Yes. Very nice guy. We got along great.” Even to himself, he sounded defensive.
“Great with a Mormon,” said Harrison. “That makes sense.”
“What do you mean?” Johanna asked him. “You think your brother’s like a Mormon?”
“No!” Lewyn said, perhaps too quickly.
“Are you?” said Harrison.
“No!” he said again. “But there’s nothing wrong with being a Mormon. It’s no stranger than what we believe.”
“I believe nothing,” said Harrison. “I believe people are idiots with a pathetic need to feel special. Apart from that…”
“Well, that’s not nothing,” Sally observed.
“You know what I mean.”
“Do you not have a pathetic need to feel special, Harrison?”
“Sally,” said her mother.
“I’m going for a walk,” said Sally, and she left the kitchen and went down the old log steps to the beach and began to plow furiously west, grinding her bare feet into the sand. There was a knot of people at Gilbert’s Cove but apart from that she was alone, her thoughts churning. For the first time since waking up that morning, she thought about the fact that she was now nineteen, perilously close to an age without a “teen” at the end of it, and what would that be like? Incontestably an adult, no mitigation of youth available (or tolerated), no excuse for the kind of unmistakably bad act she was about to commit against her brother, who—she hardly needed to remind herself—totally deserved it. She moved even faster, losing her breath to the wind, putting more and more distance between herself and them. One final year of “teen” and then beyond to the open country of adulthood, where she would be, at last and forever, without the brothers she loathed and that baby she had not enough feeling for even to pity, without deceitful Salo or countdown-to-hysteria Johanna—our parents in their pointless facsimile of family life. Liberated at last. She was terrified.
Johanna shushed her when she made it home; the baby, apparently, was asleep. Our father was still in his little office upstairs, and the boys (she was nonchalantly informed, as if it weren’t a colossal deal) had borrowed her car to go to the Katama General Store in Edgartown.
“I’m sorry, what?” Sally howled.
“Quiet!” her mother said. “I told you, she’s sleeping!”
She’s sleeping. Dad’s in his office. Harrison and Lewyn took my car.
“You let them take my car? I told you, it’s my employer’s, not mine, and I gave her my word no one else would drive it.”
This was not true, but it might have been true!
“They won’t be long,” said our mother, as if this were the relevant point. “I thought I might need the Volvo.”
“Mom!”
She imagined the elderly Ford blowing a tire on a stone in the road, or just giving up the ghost at some random traffic light in Edgartown: a line of Mercedes going wild on their horns, a Vineyard cop requesting the registration and some irate hedge funder calling up Harriet in Ithaca to berate her, all of which was bad enough.
Rochelle’s ferry was due in ninety minutes.
“Relax,” said Johanna. “They know how to drive.”
“Perfect,” Sally said, with extravagant sarcasm.
“Could you come out and talk with me for a bit?”
Johanna meant the full-court press: more coffee on the back porch, in Adirondack chairs painted gray to match the ubiquitous gray of Vineyard shingles and relentlessly uncomfortable to sit on. The porch overlooked the beach she had just steamed up and back, trying—and failing—to exhaust her nerves.
“What is it?” she asked. She had sixty minutes to reclaim her car and pick up her roommate before Armageddon. “I had some things I wanted to do later. I mean, if I get my car back.”
“I thought you and I might take Phoebe over to the carousel,” said our mother. “We talked about that, didn’t we? On the phone?”
“Sure,” Sally nodded. “But not today.”
“Why not? I can come with you on your errands. Give us a bit of girl time. Do you need anything for school? There are a couple of new shops in Edgartown.”
Sally winced. It had been a full year since the last time Johanna had tried to take her shopping. “Mom, no.”
“Well, there are some antique stores. I’d be glad to buy you something nice for your room. I love that you’re getting interested in beautiful things.”
“That’s okay. The place I’m living in is furnished.” (Like Historic Deerfield, she nearly added.) “But maybe tomorrow?”
By tomorrow, who knew whether anyone in her family would still be speaking to her. The thought of it filled her with a kind of horrified giddiness.
“Maybe. Also, I need you to come and sign some papers. There’s an attorney in Edgartown who works with our firm in the city. I just need for you to sign them while you’re on the island. Lewyn took care of this back in the spring.”
Sally looked at Johanna. “What kind of papers?”
“Well, guardianship for your sister, in case anything happens, God forbid.”
She felt, suddenly, very cold. “That’s what you want? Me?”
Johanna nodded, but she seemed reluctant to look Sally in the eye. “Yes, of course. Who else?”
“Well, you might have asked. I mean, I wouldn’t choose me to take care of anyone.”
“This is not anyone. This is your sister.”
She could be anyone, Sally thought. “What about Uncle Bruce and Aunt Debbie?”
“What about them? They barely know her. They even asked me not to bring her to Passover last spring. They said they weren’t set up for a baby. You’re her sister. Harrison and Lewyn are her brothers.”
“And you want all three of us to take care of her? That’s insane, Mom.”
“Well, it’s not desirable,” our mother said tersely, “but these aren’t things you leave to chance. You can’t do that with a baby. You have to dot the i’s and cross the t’s. I don’t know why I’m always the only one thinking ahead. The rest of you just waltz along without ever once considering our family. Just sign the fucking papers, Sally. For me.”
Sally looked at her. This Johanna was not the same Johanna she had left behind, only a year before.
“Mom? Are you okay?”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” said our mother.
“Just tell me, why the urgency to do this now? You aren’t planning to hand over our sister and disappear, are you?”
The “our sister” was a gift to Johanna.
“Wouldn’t you take care of her?” our mother said.
I’m in college, was all Sally could think to say in response, but her heart was beating so fast, she could barely follow her own thoughts:
Is this my responsibility?
Is this mainly my responsibility, because I’m the girl?
Are you making Harrison promise, too?
Where was our father in all this?
But she knew exactly where he was. He was somewhere else, with someone else: a beautiful woman with a lovely back who had once—it was unbearable to remember—overwhelmed her with kindness in a museum bathroom. For years she had carried the burden of our father’s secret. She might have shared it with her brothers at any point, she might have wielded it against both parents as a powerful weapon, but she never had. Perhaps the satisfaction of not telling had been one tiny bit greater than the satisfaction of telling. The thought of it now, though, nearly made her explode.
“And what about Dad? I mean, if something should happen to you, shouldn’t he be the one to raise his own daughter? I mean, you have a child together!”
“We have four children together.”
“You don’t have to stay,” she told Johanna, and it was only when she heard it out loud that she thought she might finally understand what this conversation was about.
“I know that,” Johanna said, confirming it.