In the opposite direction, she heard a bicycle on the street, and before she turned she knew already that it would be Charlie. He came to a small rise in the road and stopped there. To see him here, without his Hartwell uniform—his shawl collar, his necktie, his ever-present cigarette, his sneer, his phone, his camera—momentarily startled her. His bicycle was tiny, something built for a child, a relic, probably, from the last time he had lived here full-time.
“I heard you were coming,” he called out.
She turned around to find her father, but he had walked down the street far enough that she could not see him.
Charlie got off his bike and walked with it. She put her hand up. “Don’t get any closer.”
“I was under strict orders to stay clear—”
“Stop fucking walking toward me.”
He stopped. “—because I guess your dad’s on some mission to have me strung up and hanged.”
“Who says it’s just my father’s mission?” she said.
“I guess he wants me locked up.”
“I want that, too.”
Charlie moved forward a few steps.
“I told you, don’t you fucking come any closer,” she said.
He stood beneath a streetlamp. He brushed back his hair, hooking it behind his tiny ears. This hair: the first hair of any boy she had touched or admired, and certainly the first hair she had ever deigned to tuck behind someone’s ear. Acne had bloomed in an archipelago on the soft ridge of his chin, purple as a bruise, picked at already, proof of stress, maybe, or guilt. Evidence, perhaps, of a soul.
“So you met my parents?” he asked, turning to look at the house. “Pretty wonderful and kind people, right?”
She said nothing. She looked down the street, hoping for her father.
“Should explain why I am the way I am,” he said.
Again she didn’t answer. Behind her the motion-detecting lamp went off and then on, brightening one of the lions’ hides and the pavement between her and Charlie.
“I don’t know how to get it down,” he said. “The picture. It’s not like I didn’t try.”
“You’re a liar,” she said.
He kept getting closer.
“Stop walking,” she said.
“Let’s just talk,” he said.
“Stop fucking walking.”
He got closer. Light marked the dark spot of his pupils.
She turned. “Dad!” she called out.
“Are you okay, at least?” Charlie asked.
“Did you seriously just ask me that?” she said.
He took yet another step toward her. His face was calm, his eyes wide. The look, she knew, was a perfectly crafted replica of what a concerned person looked like. He took out a cigarette. “You want one?” he asked.
She took a step away.
“You never answered. I want to know if you’re okay, Lydia,” he said. He was trying to sound sweet. The effort from him appeared so obvious now. “Are you? I hope you’re okay.”
“Yes, I’m doing terrific, Charlie,” she said. “Really fantastic.”
Just then the brass gate to the Perlmutters’ house closed, the lock clicking into place.
“I feel bad,” he said. “You know what I’m saying? It got out of hand, I guess is what I’m trying to say.”
Finally her father walked up the street. He had his head down and his car keys out. Years from now she would think of this moment—her father on the street, Charlie on the street, two stone lions watching them—when she heard, finally, that Charlie had been arrested, not for anything he’d done to her, but for something with a different woman altogether. Lydia looked for a sign from her father, some hopeful motion of his hand to say that, yes, he’d done it, and that, yes, someone was coming for Charlie. Her dad lifted his head and must have seen her standing in the middle of the road and Charlie standing behind her, because he stopped. She heard sirens then, and it wasn’t a moment until she saw the blue lights of a police cruiser flickering behind her father on the tree bark and the houses. She turned back to Charlie, still in the middle of the road, smoking, his hair having fallen in his eyes. She allowed herself a smile. The sirens grew louder. She turned back just as the first police car came into view, speeding, its sirens deafeningly loud. Then the second car. Her father, she thought, had done it. She stood off to the side, expecting surely that they would come to a stop here, beside her.
When the police passed, the first car rushing, and then the second going even faster, she threw up her hands, confused.
“What’s happening?” she cried out. “Come back!”
Behind her Charlie had changed his tone. “I don’t know why it had to be this way,” he said, but she had stopped listening. Why had the cops passed by? Why weren’t they stopping?
“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 s
ee. 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.”
32.
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.”
The Inseparables Page 27
