“Oh no! Don’t go,” said Rochelle’s mother. “That’s her now, I think. That’s our car.”
And there was indeed a car, a once-white station wagon, turning slowly into the cul-de-sac and drawing nearer, and then pulling into the driveway. On the front seat, an indelible view of Rochelle, staring at them both, but especially her, in utter bafflement and dismay. Sally felt ill. She thought and for the first time ever truly understood the words: I wish I could disappear. But some other force took hold of her right hand, the one not clutching the mug of tepid tea, and waved it in the air. “Surprise!” she heard herself call, like an idiot.
Rochelle got out of the car. She had her customary red nylon backpack slung over her shoulder, and reached back into the passenger seat for a plastic shopping bag: ShopRite.
“Okay. I’m surprised,” she said.
“Your roommate came all the way from the city!” Rochelle’s mother said. Her nervousness, always discernible, had slipped some bond. It was fear, obvious fear.
“Um … from Ithaca, actually,” Sally interjected. “I mean, I was on my way home, and just, suddenly at Penn, I saw a sign for the Babylon Line and it was so poetic!”
“The poetic Babylon Line,” Rochelle sighed. She had walked over to the porch. As she approached, her mother stood to free up the seat, and reached for the grocery bag.
“I’ll take these inside!” she said brightly. “You sit with your friend.”
Sally watched her snatch the bag away and move swiftly to the front door, which she opened, a bit, and ducked around. It closed behind her. The oddness of it all came over her in a wave. Beside her, Rochelle took the vacated plastic seat. “I gotta be honest,” she said wearily. “I wish you’d asked.”
“I wish I’d asked, too,” Sally said, honestly enough. “It was very spur of the moment, at Penn. I just … I saw the Long Island Railroad, and all the names of the towns. And I saw Ellesmere and I just, I thought…” （Here she ran out of steam, because she had run out of honesty.）
“I’m not even mad,” Rochelle said, and even to Sally, who was now horrendously mad at herself, she seemed not precisely mad. Though there was something else. Definitely something else.
And she remembered then, from when her roommate had gone home suddenly, earlier that winter: Oh, it’s the house. Too boring to go into.
Without thinking, she turned and looked at it, and it looked almost completely normal, not so unlike the other houses in the cul-de-sac, at least apart from those drawn curtains. White-painted vinyl siding. Black shutters made of something that wasn’t wood. The porch had been swept—in fact, there was the broom, leaning against the little porch railing. There was a garage door, but it was closed.
“You said you needed to help out your mom, a couple of months ago. Is she all right?”
Rochelle sighed. “By any reasonable standard, no. But it’s how she’s lived for the past ten years, at least. After my parents divorced, and then my dad died, she just lost control of this one thing. It’s very difficult for her. Wait,” she said, eyeing Sally, “you’ve seen inside?”
“Inside? No. We were … she brought me some tea outside.”
Rochelle frowned. “Oh. Well, she’s ashamed, you know. You need to try to think of it as an illness. It took me years to do that, but I do, now. I had a good therapist. And I still see someone at school, of course.”
Of course? Rochelle had never mentioned a therapist, at Cornell or anywhere else.
“Oh, that’s good,” she told Rochelle. “But, what about the house?”
Rochelle sat in her own plastic armchair, hands oddly open in her lap. Across the cul-de-sac, a woman emerged from another white-and-black house with a little boy, his legs zipped into woolly boots, unzipped parka flapping over a martial arts uniform.