The Inseparables (28 page)

“Why can't you just be cool like everybody else?” he asked. “It's like you're the first fucking girl this ever happened to.”

He narrowed his eyes and tried to give her the impression that he could read her thoughts.

“You just think you're that special,” he said. “That's it. This shit happens all the time. It's happening this second, probably. Like, who really cares?”

Charlie had his phone out. The lit screen glowed white on his face. She recognized it as the same phone, the same lens and camera. He flicked at the screen. She watched him.

She turned once more. Her father had begun to walk toward her and she put her hand up to stop him.

“Actually,” she said, “do you have a cigarette for me?”

Charlie smiled. That smile. His perfect teeth. She thought of the years of orthodonture that smile must have necessitated, the countless trips back and forth to and from the dentist, ferried, so he claimed, by his parents' underlings. Everyone hoped for a perfect child. Sometimes you just got a boy with perfect teeth. He came to her. He took out the pack.

“You light it for me,” she said, trying to sound sweet.

He fumbled for the lighter.

“Do it quick,” she said, nodding her head in the direction of her father's car. “I have to go.”

He was so close.

“My stupid dad,” she said.

“Yeah,” he said.

“This is so fucking stupid,” she said. “He makes the biggest deal out of everything.”

“I know,” he said.

She could smell his breath.

“We should make up,” she said.

“You serious?” He didn't move.

“So serious,” she said. “Fucking ten thousand percent serious.”

She saw his shoulders fall in relief. “Oh, that's so good to hear,” he said. He cocked his head back toward his mansion. “So good. You have no idea.”

“First, light the cigarette,” she said.

Wind rushed down the street, and he had to flick at the lighter over and over. She watched him as he tried to get the cigarette lit, his breath quickening. She remembered that when he first explained his phobias to her—the butterflies, the salt water, the Adam's apple—she did not believe him. They were walking across the campus at Hartwell, and because it was raining she tried to fit underneath his umbrella. He kept telling her to get closer because she was getting drenched, which was true, but it was also probably true that he just wanted to touch her.
We can both fit,
he kept saying, pulling her in by the shoulder. Because Lydia was taller than him, she needed to crouch to fit beneath his umbrella entirely, and as he pulled her in, her cheek accidentally grazed his Adam's apple. She'd barely touched him, but even so, he'd flinched and shuddered so badly that he dropped the umbrella entirely.

“There we go,” he said, finally getting the cigarette lit.

She took a drag. She had never smoked before. She forced herself not to cough.

“If we're made up, maybe you could call me sometime,” he said. “You know? Or come visit.”

“Definitely,” she said. “New Jersey is so nice.”

He had gained confidence, she could see. He stood up straighter. He let the cigarette dangle on his lip. “It's not like we didn't have fun together,” he said.

She squinted. “C'mere,” she said.

“What?” he said.

They were a foot apart.

“Just come.”

She forced a smile. He was so close that his toes were touching hers.

“You have something on your face,” she said.

She reached out and put her cold thumb square against Charlie's Adam's apple. Beneath her skin she could feel the pump-and-flow pulse of his blood and a terrified rush of air charging through his trachea. She had the thought then to try to remember the way he was looking at her, the cat-quick dilation of his eyes. Did he think she was going to hurt him? He dropped his cigarette first, and then his phone, both of them landing on the pavement. Immediately she bent down, picked up the phone, and walked off toward her father's car.

In the car, her father gunned the engine. “Let me run him over,” he said, so quietly.

She shook her head. Charlie stood in the middle of the road, a streetlight on above him.

“Please let me run him over and kill him,” her father said.

“Let's go home, Daddy.”

Oona held her hand as they drove. Beneath the engine, a faint clicking sound rattled the heater. Oona squeezed every few minutes. A wordless check on her condition. They went for miles this way, her daughter holding her. The taste of Turner's mouth in hers. Hair from his head or his mustache littered her coat, a shedding. Oona had the stereo on low. “I'm bleeding,” Henrietta said, just realizing it. She held up her arm for Oona to see. After it was over, Oona had picked her up and carried her across the parking lot and in through the store and out to the street, but not before Henrietta had slammed the weathervane through the window of his car—
This is not it!
she had yelled;
This is not it.
Oona had lifted her so easily. Henrietta tried to remember the last time she had been carried like this. She must have cut herself on the glass. Oona found tissues and wet wipes and bandages in her glove box. The ready ingredients of motherhood.

They passed through all the quiet towns. The monotonous rhythm of these Yankee villages comforted her. Snow on the eaves of the Episcopalian churches. Fog in the window of a donut shop. Salt streaks on the road. Hockey nets on the frozen ponds.

“You all right?” Oona asked as they crossed into Aveline.

“No, not really,” she said. She kept wiping at her mouth, hoping the feeling, the taste, would vanish.

“Try to relax,” Oona said.

“What were you even doing there?” she asked. “One second he had his hand on my cheek like I was his long lost lover, and then—”

“I told you. I had a bad feeling.”

“I shouldn't have been in the car,” she said. “You were right. I just thought—”

“As soon as you followed him into the parking lot, I followed you.”

Henrietta shook her head. “I figured at seventy I was done with this crap.”

Oona looked over. “That creep.”

They crossed through the center of Aveline, everything clean and gleaming and new, nothing remaining from the twentieth century aside from the telephone poles and the manhole covers. This had all happened fast. The keystone on the corner of the bank bore a wholly typical date—2006, it read. If Harold were to come back to earth, he would not recognize so much of this place. In a few months the same would be true of her house. Her real estate agent had offered her the chance to see the provisional plans the development company had for her land, whatever they were aiming to do—swimming pools, clubhouses, a golfing green, tract housing—and she'd refused. Looking around at what the town had turned into, she had an idea of what was coming.

The moon emerged in the daylight, branding the dim sky. A string of crows aligned themselves in a cluster on the peaked roof of a shuttered station house. Oona pulled off the main street and onto the thin, pocked road leading to the house. Near her, in the iced-up gullies, there were paw prints. She knew them by shape. She had gotten good at this. Coyote prints. Deer prints. Raccoon prints. The prints from the neighbor's dogs. Not bad for Henrietta Horowitz of Orchard Street. The postman's prints. The county surveyor's prints. The paramedics. The priest. The mourners. The real estate people. The movers. The appraisers. Jerry Stern. Her daughter. Her granddaughter.

On they drove, down toward the house, looking worn in the bright light, and chipped, the shutters crooked, patches in the roof where storms had taken the shingles. They went past the dead birch, past the barn and the animal pen, the salt lick, the John Deere up on blocks, the hay holds, the toolshed, the propane tanks, the empty pigsty, the chicken coop, Dougie's house, the septic tank.

Before they reached the driveway, they passed the curve of the river as it emptied into Lake Patricia, and Henrietta put her hand up.

“Stop,” she said, pointing. “Park over there. By the lake.”

The thermometer on the dash registered an ungodly temperature.

“I want to go out,” Henrietta said.

“Into the weather?” Oona asked.

“Onto the ice.”

“This again?”

“I won't fall through, Oona. Stop worrying.”

“You're the one who taught me to worry.”

Henrietta searched her handbag for gloves.

“It's not as firm out there as you think,” Oona said. “We went over this. The earth is warming. And you could go under, and the ice could close up over your head—”

“My new place,” Henrietta said, cutting her off. “It doesn't have a river or a lake nearby.”

Oona said nothing.

“It has a tiny oval swimming pool. A wading pool for babies and elderly people. Three feet deep.”

Henrietta still had Harold's car keys in her purse.

“And I do like this place, you know,” she said. “This weird town. The water. The big open space.” She pointed to the meadow and the water bank, mist rising. “I think it might be nice to enjoy it before it's gone.”

“Gone?” Oona laughed. “Where is it going?”

“The house sold,” Henrietta said.

Oona smiled. “I know this.”

From here she saw only the top point on the roof. They had never put up another weathervane. Weathervanes were stuffy, Henrietta complained, and useless, and most of them, anyway, were ugly.

“They're going to knock it down,” she said.

“Oh, you don't know that,” said Oona.

“No,” Henrietta said. “I do. A company bought it. They're knocking it down. It's what they do. They're house wreckers. It's probably the name of their company.”

Oona was quiet for a while. The song changed.

“It's just a house,” Henrietta said. “Just shelter. Wood and nails and glue and dust. I keep telling myself that these are just objects. A staircase, a living room, a toilet. They have a neutral value, I know. The house doesn't have a soul. It's not a person. There are no spirits here. All that dumb bullshit people say. All the correspondingly dumb bullshit that people believe. I don't know when I suddenly stopped being able to differentiate between these ideas. Between an actual understanding of objects and a sentimental understanding.”

“You sound like a professor,” Oona said.

“Good! That's good! Finally!”

“It's natural to think those things about your house.”

“That's therapy-speak. And it's juvenile. Thinking that maybe my husband's ghost is in the house? You think that's natural? Or rational?”

“Absolutely. Natural. Human. Beautiful.”

“It's what my mother used to think. It's old-world nonsense. She wouldn't touch her father's cigarette lighter after he died, because she thought his ghost was inside it.”

Oona laughed. “Okay, that's foolish, I admit.”

“Is it any different than a house?”

“It's a home,” Oona said. “That's the difference.”

“I'm not impressed by semantics,” Henrietta said. “Tell me. Where do the dead linger? Where? In the bathroom? The kitchen?”

“Daddy? Yes. I would guess he's lingering in the kitchen.”

Henrietta closed her eyes. She stayed quiet a minute. “The thought that he might be in the kitchen is very, very hard to bear,” she said.

“Faith,” Oona said, “requires a suspension of disbelief. Not all of it. But a little.”

“If I were to believe it, Oona, it would be evidence, as if I ever needed it, that my intellect has finally vanished.”

“Smart people think this way, you know,” Oona said. “Doctors, even. In the hospital, in surgery, in
brain
surgery, you see doctors praying, you hear them say,
Oh God Oh God Oh God.
People speak openly of miracles. It's not a matter of intellect. It's the opposite of intellect.”

“Exactly.”

“But aren't you doing the same thing with the suitcase?” Oona said after a while. “You won't open it. It just sits there by the door. All this time. You won't even really go near it.”

“
That
is different,” she said.

“How is it different?”

“Because I don't actually think there's a ghost in the stupid suitcase, Oona,” Henrietta said. “It's just that once I open it, and clean it out, that's it. It's over. That's the last thing left.”

Oona sat back against her seat. Henrietta, too, leaned back. She had found herself spending all her time in the kitchen these last weeks, trying to summon if not a ghost then some phantom waft of his cooking, some remnant sensation of his presence. She had also found herself holding the handle of Harold's suitcase, standing by the door, just looking out at the path he used to take, up and down the hill. Her good sense, quite possibly, was dissipating.

In the beginning the land embarrassed her. Henrietta Horowitz, city girl, with all these acres. It was a fiefdom, she told her mother on the phone. Enough room for blocks and blocks of apartment towers and tenements. You could fit the whole neighborhood in the backyard, she told her mother. Now, she figured, it might just happen.

“The new place is very blank,” Henrietta said. “That's the word that comes to mind. Everything is cream-colored. There's carpeting. I'm allowed to have a small dog. Under fifty pounds, they told me. I don't know—maybe there's a doggy scale they bring in to see if I'm following the rules.”

“That doesn't sound awful.”

Henrietta laughed. “Is that the standard now?”

“That is the standard now, yes. Modern American life means being able to afford someplace that isn't awful.”

“I wanted to ask you to move in with me,” Henrietta said. She had rehearsed this. Another thing that embarrassed her.

“With you?”

“Like roommates.”

Oona laughed.

“Why is it funny?” Henrietta asked. “It's been nice to have you near me.”

Oona nervously zipped her coat up to her neck. “It has been nice.”

“It's hard for you to admit!”

“I'm emotionally underdeveloped,” Oona said. “What do you want from me? It's genetic.”

“You could have gone elsewhere, I know. You have the money.”

“It's not like you never saw me before all of this.”

“That's debatable.”

“I came for holidays.”

“People don't want to be around their mother. I understand. When you were the littlest girl, I knew that you would be that kind of woman. And that made me happy. But to see you every day. And to have you sleeping in my house. I've liked it. I've liked it very much.”

“The novelty will wear off. Trust me. Ask my husband.”

Henrietta said nothing. She knew the trickiness of time and language. Husband. Ex-husband. Late husband.

“So, what happens if I want to bring a man home to the apartment?” Oona asked.

“Sex? That's the first thing you think about? Are you sure you're my daughter? What happened to you, Oona?”

“Yes, that's what I think! You're my mother! You wrote the stupid book. Which I read far, far too early. Obviously sex is what I think about!”

“You misread the book, sweetie.”

“Me and apparently everyone else.”

Henrietta opened the door partway. The cold came in. “What I would like, at least, is for you to bring my granddaughter over. So I could, you know, potentially have a conversation with her before I'm senile.”

Oona grinned. “You're ruining the fun with guilt,” she said.

“I would like her to know me as a human. Especially since she'll probably read that stupid book.”

“It's a delightful book.”

Henrietta scoffed and opened her door. “Come with me,” she said. “Come out. It's great this time of year. You can walk right on it. Right on the ice.”

“How about I watch?” Oona said.

From the road to the shore was a hundred yards. Henrietta pushed through the weeds and bushes. Underfoot the leaves were frozen, which she loved, that sound your foot makes on frozen leaves. The original plan had been to give the house to Oona. Henrietta found Harold's will while she packed up the house. All his best laid plans. He had given Oona the Feast, too.
The quality of the establishment must be maintained at all costs,
he'd written. She kicked her way through a tangled mess of dead chestnuts and dogwoods. Overhead there were blackbirds. Behind her Oona approached slowly. There were patches where the tree cover stood so thick snow hadn't reached the ground yet, and autumn was visible, a few stray shards of green, October colors: red and yellow and the orange of a jack-o'-lantern.

At the water's edge, the ice looked purple. She stood there, tapped her foot against the sheet of it.

“Don't do it,” Oona shouted.

She went out two steps, closed her eyes, pushed off, and glided. After a moment she started to bellow with laughter, and when her laughter echoed across the ice, bats sprung from the trees.

“Look,” she called out. “Look.”

Oona stood on the shore, her arms crossed, with Harold's face and eyes and nose and chin. Maybe this was where the spirits went.

Henrietta spun on her heels. She swung her arms in an arc, twirling. She whistled with joy. All this childish happiness surprised her. “This is the most fun I've had in ages,” she said, pushing out, one step and then two, gliding and cutting the air and sliding while the snow brushed up over the toes of her shoes. The new construction in town threw lights up into the sky that deadened the stars, so that even very late at night you could not make out the belt of Orion in winter. She spun a second time, inexpertly, her feet leaving smooth loops on the surface of the ice.

She knew that all this talk of ghosts was just another way to talk about memories. If the dead lingered, then they were doing a poor job lingering around her. She needed help recalling her father's face. Her mother's voice and laugh were gone. Every Horowitz who had ever crowded into her mother's apartment on Orchard Street—all of them had vanished, and she could not, even when she wanted to, remember the way they were when they were living.