I looked down at the ruin of my plate. I couldn’t remember eating it all. I couldn’t remember being hungry.
“I was an unpleasant little teenager,” my sister said. “I just thought about myself. But now I think about Mom, and what that must have been like for her. Three adolescents dying to leave and a husband who’d already checked out? Gruesome. But I was too angry at him to think about her. I was angry at him till the day he died. In fact, I told him…”
Her throat caught. She spread her hand out on the table: white fingers, dark brown wood.
“What?” I said.
“The night before he died, I told him I knew. I said I’d known for years. I was very not nice about it, either. I said he was a terrible father. And that’s the last thing I ever said to him. How lovely is that?”
“Sally. You didn’t know it was the last thing you’d ever say to him.”
“No. But I’ve known every day since. It’s been a bit of an issue for me, in therapy. Years with one of Ithaca’s finest!” She smiled.
“Well. Okay. I’m glad you have that.”
We sat together in silence. I got up to take my plate to the sink.
“I named you,” Sally said. “Did anyone ever tell you that? She wanted a P name, for her father, because he’d died the winter of that year. I suggested the name Phoebe. I was thinking: Phoebe, phoenix. Maybe I was more hopeful than I remember being. Maybe I thought: Okay! This baby could be like a phoenix, rising out of the wreckage of our very fucked-up family. That didn’t happen, but it wasn’t your fault. You were our sister, and we all treated you like you were nothing to us. We just packed up and left you there, in all of that crazy. I feel terrible about it. I’ve felt terrible for years.”
She certainly looked as if she felt terrible. She was hunched forward, hands around her bottle, avoiding my eyes. “Well, you can stop,” I said. “I’d probably have done the same if I’d…” I searched for the words. “Been born in the first round.”
“Okay. Thanks.” Then Sally shook her head. “Well, good. That was another of my therapy goals. Forgiveness for abandoning you.”
“Fine. Now you can stop going, I guess.”
“Better not. I’ve still got a long list of shit to get through.”
The cat came trotting down the stairs and into the kitchen. Outside, now, it was fully dark.
“Did you ever wonder where he was going that day?”
I looked at her. I wasn’t at all sure I was ready, not for this.
“I was told,” I said carefully, “a business trip. To Los Angeles.”
“Okay.”
“But … what are you saying?”
“I’m saying … I think he might have been on his way to Stella. It’s just an idea I’ve always had, that she was out there and he was going to her, and it meant he was finally leaving. Not me and the boys, we were already gone. But Mom. And, I guess, you.” She looked at me. “I can hate him for you, if you want. You got so little of him, it doesn’t seem fair. I had enough, and some good things to remember. Let me hate him for you.”
I nodded, but not because I agreed, necessarily. I just had no words left.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
A Bit of Liberation
In which Sally Oppenheimer admits to having done a highly crappy thing
Jack Neubauer and his father, on an accelerated schedule and likely already en route to Hamilton, were not at my 11:00 A.M. information session at the Welcome Center, nor on the tour that followed, a New Yorker–worthy speed-walk through the endless campus. I wasn’t prepared for how much colder it was up here, only a few hours north of the city, but my sister had given me a parka to wear. I kept my hands deep in its pockets as I chased after the guide, a chirpy, backward-walking rugby player named Celeste, trying to imagine the various members of my family as students here and attempting, unsuccessfully, to “see myself” at Cornell. When Celeste bade us all farewell at Ho Plaza, I headed north on Central Avenue to the Johnson Museum, where Sally had arranged to meet me, and where, against all odds, a small selection of our grandparents’ art collection was on display.