Across the island in Vineyard Haven, Sally watched Rochelle Steiner walk off the ferry, a small person further dwarfed by the overstuffed red LeSportsac duffel slung over her shoulder. Sally’s resolve, which might on another day have evaporated at the sight of her friend and roommate, did not even falter. All afternoon she’d been stewing at the bickering of her brothers, Johanna and her cataclysmic neediness, and Salo so maddeningly absent. The whole house was humming, not with reunion or connection or, God forbid, family love, but with intractable individual agendas. Well, she had one, too, and if it hadn’t been subjected to a high degree of internal examination, and if it hadn’t risen to the level of any real self-awareness, well that was just too bad. She had a quiver full of Fuck You’s and enough spleen to send each and every one of them on its merry way.
The ferry hadn’t been crowded. It was a Monday in early September and the great island exodus had been underway for about a week, with scores of families departing for home and their Vineyard houses closed for the season. Sally had spotted Rochelle right away, walking briskly behind a pair of teenaged boys she vaguely recognized from Cronig’s, and waved when Rochelle spotted her. Then she went forward to greet her guest and ask the usual questions—Was the journey hard? Was Rochelle tired? She barely listened to the answers. Now that the thing was actually in motion, now that Rochelle Steiner of Ellesmere and Balch Hall was actually here, walking beside her up Beach Street toward the Oppenheimer Volvo, it was as if some injunction had been lifted and the rest of the prospect suddenly illuminated. How firmly should Sally try to steer what happened now? And what, exactly, was she aiming for? Sally couldn’t decide whether it would be better for Rochelle to encounter Lewyn alone or with the rest of them. She couldn’t decide whether to unleash the full force of her own intentionality, her planning, her design, or maintain a very plausible deniability. How was she supposed to know that Rochelle’s boyfriend and her own enforced lifelong companion, Lewyn Oppenheimer, were one and the same? You’d think one or the other of them might have provided her with that detail! But wait—hadn’t her brother, who actually was in possession of all the relevant information, failed to disclose it to his own sister and actually lied outright to poor Rochelle Steiner? If anyone was responsible for tonight’s inevitable unpleasantness, it was Lewyn! If anyone was culpable for the unfortunate collateral damage to Rochelle herself, it was also Lewyn!
I didn’t realize Oppenheimer was such a common name!
News flash: it wasn’t.
For such a smart person, Rochelle ought to have been smarter, Sally thought unkindly. She did not expect their friendship to survive the evening, which was certainly a shame. But she had signed up for that.
Wait … you mean … this is your boyfriend? But this is my brother Lewyn!
Rochelle would look at Lewyn and possibly even cry.
Lewyn would definitely cry.
Her thoughts ran through scenario after scenario. She saw herself watching mildly, letting the two of them figure it out, or not, and the farther she traveled down the rabbit hole the less she cared which of them would be more wounded or incensed than the other. She could turn her back right now and walk away from them both.
Rochelle, at any rate, was not in a rush to get going. She wanted to buy a T-shirt at The Black Dog. She wanted to pick up a house gift of some kind for Sally’s parents. A candle? A book? Sally patiently walked her up and down Main, as the harbor behind them turned orange in the sun’s last light. She helped her friend select a bottle of wine with a pretty label.
“Can we drive past that carousel?” asked Rochelle as they climbed into the car. She had read about the carousel somewhere. Sally experienced the briefest wave of remorse, but it passed.
“Of course,” she said. The Flying Horses was still running, if sparsely occupied with children and toddlers and their parents, the scene unaltered from the younger Oppenheimers’ own years of rides. She saw her personal long-ago favorite mount, painted the same palomino shade as the others yet distinguishable to her by the slightly deeper red of its saddle. She’d always insisted on waiting for that one, stubbornly sitting out a turn if some other child had already claimed it, even as the boys competed to get mounted first, even if her pickiness meant everyone would have to wait for her. She didn’t care about the brass rings, extending in their dispenser from the wall, just out of reach. Harrison always managed to grab one more than Lewyn, probably by placing himself strategically as the ride began, and Lewyn always suffered, pathetically wounded at having been beaten, again, every time. They were ridiculously competitive when they were small, before Lewyn had simply conceded inferiority in all things: intellectual, physical, interpersonal.
This was when it occurred to her that Lewyn might well have told Harrison he had a girlfriend. He would not have let that opportunity pass.
Good, she thought.
“Let’s go,” said Sally.
“Okay. Maybe we can come back tomorrow and ride it.”
“Sure,” said Sally, but even knowing nothing else, she knew that wouldn’t happen.
Chapter Twenty-Five
Illumination Night
In which plans are made for an earlier departure, and either
a farce or a revenge tragedy reaches its inevitable conclusion
Our father, who had finally decided that morning to leave his marriage, spent much of his afternoon on hold with American Airlines. From the window of the upstairs room they all referred to as his office, he had watched the movements of his family: his daughter leaving for the beach and returning, his sons taking off in that risible car Sally had arrived in, the appearance of the truck from Lobster Tales, the catering company. He’d heard, but hadn’t seen, his wife and the baby as they squawked through the rooms. Nobody bothered him. It was almost as if they understood the metamorphosis taking place behind this door.
Wednesday had been the day they were all supposedly departing—Harrison back to New Hampshire, Lewyn and Sally back to Ithaca, and Salo himself, with Johanna and the baby, home to Brooklyn, but that morning Stella had called him from the beach in Santa Monica and held up her mobile phone to the sound of the boy’s laughter, and something inside him just broke open. And he understood: it was past time, and it would never get easier than today—or, to be more precise, tomorrow.
This was what he wanted, but he wasn’t gleeful about it. He had appropriate sadness, appropriate regret, and even appropriate guilt. Johanna, he absolutely understood, had devoted her life to him and to their children. She had been loyal, even single-minded, in her devotion, and he had no wish to devalue her years of kindness and comfort, though they had brought him no nearer to forgiveness than he’d been on the day they met, at the funeral of that girl our father had killed. She had done everything within her power to salve his wounds, but there had only ever been one person capable of forgiving Salo Oppenheimer, and it wasn’t his wife. Poor Johanna, he thought now. It was the great flaw in her life that she had met him afterward, when everything was set in stone, and while it was also true that she had forced a late child into the world and their lives, he could see that the baby was good: full of life and sharp as a tack, and Johanna would have the purpose of raising her, and that was also good. Of course it was sad that Phoebe wouldn’t grow up with married parents in a so-called intact family, but she would have the boy, who wasn’t much older than she was. This, Salo would absolutely require. After the dust cleared, all of his children were going to know one another. After this, he would never again partition his life, not under any circumstances.