“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.”
“Did what?” I said. “I mean, could you be any more annoying right now?”
“Well, they sat us down one day. Senior spring. And said, basically: Yay! Your baby sister is on the way. You were being born in Florida somewhere, in the summer. We were all in shock, obviously. I can’t speak for Sally and Harrison, but I can tell you I assumed it was an adoption. So I said, ‘You’re adopting a baby?’ and Mom said, no. There’d been four of us, at the beginning. Four … I guess, embryos. But you didn’t put four embryos into a uterus at the same time. It was too dangerous. So the doctor had one frozen and the other three … well, were us.”
I stared at him. I couldn’t form words, and even if I’d been able to, what was there to say? The revulsion of having to think about our mother’s uterus was bad enough, but imagining yourself in a freezer, for years, was otherworldly.
“You had no idea,” Lewyn observed.
I shook my head.
Until that moment, the great, impenetrable drama of my life had been those planes, hurtling into conflagration, rendering our father only a tiny part of so much sudden nothingness, but also, appallingly, in the same abhorrent instant, somehow a party to the mass murder of others. The unspeakable act, or series of acts, had transformed us, the four Oppenheimer children—but especially my infant self—into human repositories of this great American tragedy, and tragedy had accompanied all four of us from that day forward. It was obvious to me already that I’d missed the best time of our family. I’d missed the young parents, the parents energetic enough and interested enough in young children to get down on the ground with them and shake maracas in Music Together class, or cheer from the sidelines of some game in the park. I’d missed the full house on the Esplanade, its rooms lively with arguing or laughing kids and grown-ups. I’d missed the full dinner table （and the actual food cooked for it）， and the paternal grandparents with their massive Manhattan apartment. I’d missed a dachshund called Jürgen and the end-of-summer birthday celebrations on Martha’s Vineyard, in a house likewise full of kids and food and noise and summer books and summer board games, at least as our mother described it. What I got instead of all that was a widowed mom, so much older than the mothers of my friends, bowed down by understandable grief and not remotely capable of solo parenting a toddler, child, or teenager. I also got a single living grandparent in New Jersey who never looked at me （or even at our mother, her own daughter） with recognition, a large empty house with myself and my mom in separate rooms on separate floors, and meals that arrived in plastic containers packed in plastic bags and hung from bicycle handlebars. And naturally, not a single actual memory of our father, Salo Oppenheimer. It wasn’t fair.