“Don’t do that,” said Lewyn. “We can talk.”
“We can’t talk. We’re not going to talk. Jesus Christ, Lewyn, what is there to talk about? You have a lot of shit to work out, obviously. And it’s not that I don’t sympathize, because I do. I think you’re a sweet, wonderful person, but there’s a seriously big hole in you, and if you don’t figure out what that is you’re just going to start stuffing it with, I don’t know, a crazy religion or some other bullshit.”
“That’s not true,” he said. Though he suspected it was.
“What crazy religion?” Harrison said with what sounded like actual interest.
None of your fucking business, Lewyn thought.
“I’m not discussing this with you,” he said. “I need to talk to Rochelle.”
“No. No.” She actually held up her hand. Then she walked over to Johanna and said, with bizarre politeness, “It was nice meeting you, albeit briefly. You have very interesting children.”
Harrison, on the far side of the feast, guffawed.
“And you, Mr. Oppenheimer,” said Rochelle, picking her way over the sand to him. “I’m sorry we didn’t get a chance to talk. Or, actually, meet.”
“Me, too,” said Salo. He took her hand and shook it. “Who are you, exactly?”
Rochelle, unaccountably, laughed. “I’m the complete idiot who’s been living with your daughter and in a relationship with your son.”
Sally wouldn’t look at her. Sally had, at some point, gone down on her knees in the sand and was holding her own arms so tightly that her wrists ached. She was still in the terrible loop of what Rochelle had said to Lewyn, and Lewyn to Harrison, and Harrison to every person here, from our mother and father to the four members of the Lobster Tales catering crew. Now each of them knew something about her that no one else had known, until a moment ago.
Never, never, never.
Whoosh.
“Good-bye, Sally,” said Rochelle Steiner, and she plowed on past, her short legs nobly struggling through the deep sand.
“Wait!” Lewyn rushed after her. “I need to…”
Rochelle didn’t even turn. Away she went up the log steps to the house, with Lewyn flailing behind her.
“Most entertaining!” Harrison said brightly, after a moment.
“You are such an asshole!” Sally exploded.
“Sally,” our mother said pointlessly.
“How could you say that!” she howled.
“Say what? You don’t have to be ashamed, Sally. It’s 2001! Nobody cares.”
I care, she wanted to say.
I wasn’t ready, she wanted to say.
I didn’t know, was what she really wanted to say, but not to him. That would only make it worse.
“It’s none of your fucking business. Anyway, never mind. I’m leaving in the morning, and I hope you have a lovely life. Go play with the white supremacists in Virginia. But stay away from me.”
“You don’t know the first thing about what I’m doing,” Harrison said. “You have no concept of what’s going on in this country.”
“Very likely,” Sally said. “But I have a super clear concept of what’s happening right here. I never want to see you again.”
“Oh, Sally,” Johanna said. She was crying. Phoebe, in her arms, was also crying, but likely not for the same reason. “Please don’t say that. He’s your brother.”
“He came out of a petri dish!” she howled. “So did I. So did that.” She flung out her hand toward Phoebe, propelling a handful of sand that fortunately did not reach either parent or child. “I don’t think that constitutes a bond. I never did!”
“Don’t talk to your mother like that,” said Salo, who had stepped closer to Johanna.
“Oh for Christ’s sake,” said Sally. “As if you have any authority here.”
“I beg your pardon,” our father said, more angry than she had ever seen him.
Sally hauled herself up, dripping sand, then she stepped close to him and said, very quietly: “Please tell me you don’t think I’m that stupid. You are a terrible father. And I’ve known for years.”
“What did you say?” Johanna said.
“What did she say?” Harrison said.
Salo, the only one who knew what she’d said, said nothing.
And for a long, excruciating moment no one moved or spoke again.
“Right,” said Sally at last. “I think that’s everything. I’m out.”
“Sally, don’t leave!” our mother cried.
“Been nice knowing you,” said Harrison, with glee, and Sally wanted to tell him what an appalling person he was, too, but someone had blocked her exit, and he did it first.
“Harrison,” said Lewyn, from the bottom of the log steps. He looked terrible, deflated, obviously devastated, but somehow not yet through with either of them. “That was a horrible thing to do.”
“Oh, please. You don’t need any help from me, fucking your life up. Either of you.”
“I meant about Sally. Why did you have to tell everyone that?”
“Why did you have to tell me that, Lewyn?” Harrison said cruelly.
“I shouldn’t have,” he said.
“No, you shouldn’t have,” said Sally. “In case you want to put this all on him. He’s a cruel bastard and always has been, but I might have expected more from you. Or is this radical truth some part of your religious conversion?”
Lewyn turned to her.
“Because you’re not the only one Rochelle confided in, you know. I mean, could you not have picked a less asinine thing to want to be than a Mormon?”
“Yow!” said Harrison. “That shit actually rubbed off on you? From the roommate?”
“What are you saying?” It was Salo. He hadn’t moved or said a word since Sally had leaned close to him and spoken. “What does he mean, you want to be a Mormon?” And when his son said nothing, he looked at them all, one by one by one: the weeping wife and toddler, the trio of flailing young adults. Not one of them would ever know what he was thinking, though much time would be spent, and considerable pain derived, from wondering.
They went back inside, the triplets into their bedrooms, where they commenced not speaking to one another, and it was nearly silent on the upstairs floor of the cottage apart from a whimpering Phoebe Oppenheimer, who was nobody’s immediate priority, and the hushed scene unfolding in Salo Oppenheimer’s office as a marriage of twenty-five years jolted to its end.
For the record, he did apologize. He said that our mother had not deserved this. He said that she would have whatever she needed, for the rest of her life, and the kids, too, of course. It wasn’t like that. In fact, he honored her and every one of her choices. Every one. But he had an early flight: 6:20 from the Vineyard to Boston, 7:45 from Boston to LAX.
Outside on the beach, the caterers waited for nearly an hour after the last Oppenheimer had departed and failed to return. Then they began packing all that food into plastic tubs. Johanna, who would remain for hours in Salo’s office, long after her husband had gone to bed, could hear them downstairs in the kitchen, and for years she would associate those sounds—the suck of the Sub-Zero door being dragged open, the smack of it closing—with the worst night of her life, itself a mere prologue to the worst day.
A cab picked him up early, and the only person he might possibly have said good-bye to was the only one who was awake. I’ve always been an early riser, and I have believed in that, in the thought of him in my doorway, holding his bag and looking down at me with love, for my entire life, but the truth is that I can’t rake up a single shard of real memory, not of him and not of what happened after. In the morning, all three of my siblings would also try to leave, but only Sally was out early enough to make it off the island. She caught the last ferry before they shut it down, and disembarked at Woods Hole into a new world, by which time our father was dust over lower Manhattan.
PART THREE
The Latecomer
2017
Chapter Twenty-Six
We Might as Well
In which Phoebe Oppenheimer makes an unsettling discovery