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
For most people, a Primal Scene happens when they open the bedroom door and Mom and Dad are making weird noises in their bed. Not me. I don’t remember my father, of course, and my mother has been a nun since the morning of September 11, 2001, though not because I ever asked her to be. Also, for reasons far beyond my control, my so-called Primal Scene would call for certain high-tech adaptations and a level of personal maturity I wouldn’t attain till my teens. If, that is, you can ever really be ready for the version I got.
I was seventeen and a Walden School senior when I found out—ready or not!—on a late afternoon in October, post–school day, post–track practice, post–walk home, and post–collection of the family mail, which was not my job, strictly speaking, but which had become my habit. Of course, by 2017 there was less and less mail being sent in the old way, but this being my twelfth-grade year （and having, if I may humbly note, scored not too badly on the previous fall’s PSAT） the haul from the mailbox was nearly all for me that fall. Mainly it consisted of glossy college brochures, many from places I’d never heard of, sometimes with baffling attributes: Christ-Centered Performing Arts! Computer Sciences Aligned with a Progressive Outlook! I wasn’t sure how they found me, these places. I certainly wasn’t asking to be found.
In fact, I might have been the only one in my grade who hadn’t gone over the cliff with this admissions thing. Most of my classmates had been vibrating with anxiety for years, one hundred–plus teenagers triggered by the words “application,” “deadline,” “essay,” and even, impractically, “college,” driven to herd panic by their panicky parents （who naturally, this being Walden, all insisted they were completely chill about the whole thing）。 For some reason it just hadn’t hit me yet. When I thought about where I would be in a year’s time, I thought of one thing only, and it wasn’t a destination. It was simply: not here. That was terrifying enough.
Here’s the embarrassing truth: I wasn’t at all sure I was ready to leave home, in spite of the fact that home wasn’t such a party at the moment. （Or, indeed, had ever been.） So while I might be circling the drain of my time at Walden, and time with my classmates, many of whom I loved, I had zero idea what I was doing, collegewise, and less than zero about the exciting and fulfilling life I was supposed to live after that.
Our house was on the Esplanade overlooking New York Harbor and, on clear days, New Jersey. It was old and beautiful but way too big for Mom and myself, though I had been expanding my range of possession for years. The room I slept in was the one my sister Sally once occupied, but I’d converted the room across the hall, which had belonged to my two older brothers, into a lounge and study space. I also had solo access to the mother my three older siblings had theoretically been forced to share, which meant that I was privileged, but zero access to the father the three of them had known, because he had died on the country’s bloodiest day since Antietam, which meant that I was also tragic.