When they arrived on the afternoon before the wedding, she was fairly swiftly deposited with the bridesmaids: eight women of Spellman plus Wendy Rudnitsky, the only sister of Joshua and Michael, the groom. This was hugely uncomfortable as far as Johanna was concerned, not because she was white （the bride and bridesmaids were gracious and welcoming） but because the women were mostly familiar and affectionate with one another while her own connection to the event was so very tangential. She tried to at least peel off for the rehearsal dinner, but they insisted on bringing her along to the Inn at Lambert’s Cove, and that was the place she recognized Salo Oppenheimer, a person she had sometimes thought of in the years since that terrible funeral. After the toasts, as the older family members began to drift off, and only the bride and groom and their friends remained chatting around a long table, she saw him outside, leaning on the porch railing with a glass of Champagne. Our mother went to him and reintroduced herself, extending, for the second time, her hand.
“I’m sorry to have to tell you where we met before,” she said.
Our father turned to look at her. “Oh,” he said, after a moment. “Daniel or Mandy?”
Daniel must have been the other one, she realized. The friend.
“Mandy. I knew her.”
“She was such a good person,” said Salo.
“Yes. I’m Johanna. I’m here with Michael’s brother. Joshua.”
“Oh,” Salo said. “I thought Joshua was homosexual.”
Incredibly, this was when the meaning of It isn’t you, it’s me finally reached her.
“We’re just friends,” our mother said, having already expunged whatever notions she’d held （and, let’s face it, till that instant maintained） for the brother of the groom. From this moment forward it was all going to be about our father, and the great purpose of her life would be to love him enough to relieve him of his great burden, and to free him from that one, terrible shard of time in which he was so unfairly trapped, and to salve at last that wound of his, that one that wouldn’t heal. It didn’t occur to her, and wouldn’t for years, that she wasn’t the one—the only one—who’d ever be capable of doing that.
Chapter Two
The Stendahl Syndrome
In which Salo Oppenheimer tumbles and Johanna Oppenheimer begins to understand
what she’s dealing with
When our father’s Jeep lost contact with the earth, its tether of gravity stretching, stretching, then suddenly, irredeemably gone, I imagine a rasping sound of breath all around him, then a weirdly graceful tumble through the tumbling space inside: four bodies coiling and snapping in a fatal ballet. The feeling would have been bizarrely not-unpleasant if one could manage to excise the actual physical sensations from a broader understanding of what was happening, and it would never leave him. Sometimes, awake or asleep, he might find himself looking into Mandy’s surprised eyes, or hearing Daniel Abraham’s weirdly pleasant “Hey!” from the back seat, or sensing that fourth person, the invisible girlfriend, somewhere behind him in the confused air: a shadow passing darkly across his right wrist. And all that contributed to his new and very specific and lifelong challenge, which was how to continue drawing breath after having caused the deaths of two people.
He never told us, not one of us, what he’d done. He never gave any of us an opportunity to understand him.
Even before the accident, our father had been a practiced dissembler, routinely allowing significant falsehoods—such as the fact that he was engaged to, or even in love with, Mandy Bernstein—to go unchallenged. Before he killed her the main reason for this was that he did not want to hurt Mandy’s feelings; after he’d killed her it was to try not to compound the pain of her family. Also, it was far easier to simply agree when people made certain assumptions, and everybody made the same assumptions, for good reason; Mandy had not only been devoted to him but had been willing （indeed, happy!） to have sex with him in his college dorm room （this was the early ’70s, after all, when a lot of nice girls wouldn’t do that）。 And actually, it wasn’t at all impossible that the two of them would have stayed together, married, and made a wonderful go of things. Why not? You only had to look around to see men who’d settled for far less than Mandy Bernstein! But in love, as he himself and at least some of his own children would later experience that—no. The truth was, he had never felt such a thing, and half disbelieved anyone who claimed to have done so.