Lewyn, who was sadly the only one of my siblings I spoke with on anything like a regular basis, had returned to Brooklyn Heights when I was seven and installed himself across the landing in his old room. He was a total stranger, a depressed twenty-four-year-old who, for a long while, seldom left the house, and I tiptoed around him like my own private Boo Radley. Eventually, though, he emerged from his eddy and moved all the way down to the miniwarren of rooms in the basement, with its own small kitchen and separate entrance.
One thing that didn’t escape me, even when I was really young, was the fact that none of my triplet siblings seemed to enjoy the company (let alone value the counsel) of any of the others. Lewyn, for example, could barely tolerate being in the same room as Sally, and he actively loathed Harrison (who was, to be fair, not all that difficult to loathe). Harrison treated Lewyn with disdain and seemed to have forgotten Sally’s existence. Sally had taken herself away from all of us, and only appeared for family events of unassailable gravity—the funerals, mainly, of significant Hirsches and Oppenheimers. Obviously, I still lived with our mother, but apart from me only Harrison intentionally spent time with her. Once, I knew, there had been a semimandate that all three should gather on their birthday, but Johanna seemed less and less committed to enforcing this as the years passed and the three of them declined to soften toward one another in the slightest. Every time I climbed the staircase I had to watch the three of them grow up in those annual birthday photographs, but then the photographs ran out and that version of our family—Oppenheimer 1.0, I’d privately named it—had run out, too. Oppenheimer 2.0 consisted of me and our widowed mom in a huge empty house, those others far apart from one another in fixed orbits. Harrison lived on the Upper East Side but traveled constantly on his noxious mission to make the world awful. Sally was far away in Ithaca and Lewyn was downstairs. Of the three of them, only Lewyn seemed to regard me as an actual sister rather than, say, the subject of a documentary they had each happened to watch. It was all very regrettable and unfortunate, but weirdly I also understood that it had little if anything to do with me, personally. Like everything else of any note in our family, these rifts and obstructions seemed to have predated my arrival.
Lewyn wasn’t handy, but he did design the basement space himself, out of a big room that had once, apparently, been a play area for my older siblings. There was a work space and a long living room and then, behind the galley kitchen, a bedroom that opened onto the Esplanade-side garden. He’d maintained, since his return from Utah a decade earlier, some form of facial hair, and if his biweekly appointment at the old barber shop behind Borough Hall represented the extent of his grooming and self-care routines, it was a vast improvement on the brother who moved back in when I was seven. Now, at thirty-five, Lewyn was generally fit, generally upbeat, and finally single again after an aimless couple of years with a woman he’d met in his master’s program, about which I could not help but feel some relief. He didn’t seem all that unhappy about it, either.
He opened the door with a phone at his ear and beckoned me inside with his other hand.
“Yes, I know,” my brother was in the middle of saying. “No, Hans, I’m not telling you no. I’m telling you we’d need to take more care this time. A lot more care.”
He listened. He looked at me and gave a flicker of a smile.
“No, I understand that you want it. I understand it’s central to what you’re doing. That’s why I’m not saying no. But what I am saying is that you’re going to need to put a better handling protocol in place this time.” He listened again. Then he walked to his desk, jotted something on a Post-it, and held it up for me to read: Moron.
I smiled.
“Hans. A hole. There was a hole in that Diebenkorn, do you recall? Perfectly round, like from a pin. Surely you can understand why I’d be reluctant to send you the Marden or anything else without a very strong commitment to its transport and care. In writing.”
I sat in one of the chairs and picked up a Sotheby’s catalog on the table beside it, waiting for him to get rid of Hans in the other room. When he finally did, he picked up his laptop and typed a note.
“Wallraf-Richartz Museum in Cologne,” Lewyn announced, when he was done. “Great museum, but the last time they requested a painting, it came back damaged.”
“From a pin?” I asked. “What were they doing, playing pin the tail on the Diebenkorn?”
“Oh, who knows. I try not to get paranoid about these things. I actually didn’t end up restoring it, but I made them pay for all the consulting. He never admitted responsibility, though. Which I don’t appreciate.”
“Hans,” I said.
“Yes. Hans.”
“The moron.”
“Well, not really. You down here to vent?”
I laughed. “Not this time.”
Venting was our typical thing. It was good to be able to talk about our mother, her many vicissitudes and shortcomings. Here, it was a low-stakes topic, and often highly enjoyable.
“School okay?”
“Except for bio, yeah.” The truth was, I had done badly on that quiz, and it mattered. Walden had somehow persuaded the admissions officers at the nation’s best colleges that it was special enough to forgo the usual grading and ranking of its students, but the elaborate academic profiles it provided in lieu of a transcript might just mention that I was struggling this fall. Of course, if I got in Early Decision somewhere it wouldn’t matter much, but that was obviously not going to happen if I didn’t actually apply anywhere.
“Well. Bio. I don’t think you’re headed for STEM. Do you?”
“No. No STEM. Strictly a humanities girl.”
“How’s Mom?”
Well. Mom. Mom was Our Lady of Perpetual Entertainment, usually. I ought to have come down with a tidbit already at hand, but that hadn’t been on today’s agenda. I had to think for a moment.
“She said this weird thing, earlier. Not to me. To Aunt Debbie, but I overheard. She said they had me because they thought, We might as well. I mean, holy shit, right?”
“Seriously?” said Lewyn.
“My entire existence. We might as well! What does that even mean?”
He looked at me. Then he said, “Wait, are you really asking that? Because we could talk about it. If you want.”
I felt a little chill then. It hadn’t been a real question when I’d come down to Lewyn’s apartment. It wasn’t what I was here to talk about, except that now, apparently, it was. “What don’t I know? I mean, I had a surrogate, because Mom was too old. I know that. I met her a few years ago. Tammy something.”
“But the rest of it. Mom never said?”
I crossed my arms. “Lewyn, Jesus, just spit it out. I know I’m not adopted. I look just like her.” I did, too, far more than Sally, for example. I couldn’t remember our father, of course, but there were plenty of photographs in the house. I didn’t look like him at all.
“Okay. I can’t believe I’m the one telling you this, Pheeb, but you’re, like, completely our sister.”
I burst out laughing, but noted, even as I did, a strong surge of unease.
“Duh. Well, I would hope.”
“By which I mean, the exact same age as the rest of us. Just born later.”
“Sure,” I said. But it still wasn’t getting through, clearly. Then I said: “What the fuck?” It was a phrase that seemed to fit so many occasions.
Lewyn sighed. “I’m going to have a glass of wine. Would you like one?”
He went to the kitchen and I heard him open the fridge and take out the bottle. Clink and clink as the two glasses hit the countertop. Squeak as the cork was wiggled loose. He returned and handed a glass to me. Then he sat down beside me on the couch.
“I could kill Mom,” was the first thing he said. “I mean, this should be coming from her. I speak with no authority about anything. I was your age at the time, and not paying much attention to either of them. All three of us were applying to college, and working through the leaving home stuff, which I think in retrospect had to be a big part of why they did it.”