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.
It was obvious to our father that none of his older children were in an especially good place. Harrison had already declared his intention to leave as soon as he was—his word—allowed. Sally could barely look at Lewyn. And Lewyn, the most agreeable of his kids, seemed deeply on edge. He did not know why they were this way any more than he’d ever known. Hostilities might be at a peak, but they weren’t new; from the very start his children had turned away from one another. Maybe now, at least, they would come together in support of Johanna and the baby, even at the cost of his own good relationships with them. Not that he had good relationships with them, but perhaps that, too, could change. He had not been a good husband for the same reason he had not been a good father: because he had not known how to love another person. But he was learning now.
American Airlines, in its wisdom, had selected “In the Hall of the Mountain King” as its hold music. Maybe it was their way of punishing people who bought their tickets at the last minute, but all he wanted was to give them his money and he already knew the Boston flight he wanted, the first he could get to after the first flight from the Vineyard. Even so, it had already taken ninety minutes to speak with not one, not two, but three American Airlines employees, two of whom would ask for and be read, slowly and deliberately, his American Express card number. By the time they were finally through with him, the afternoon was nearly gone.