Back at the train station, she persuaded Rochelle to go home: no harm, no foul, no worries! She would head on into the city and her own house, with her parents, and maybe even the weirdo brother from the two-year college in New Hampshire would be home for spring break, and it was fine, it was all fine. She gave her roommate an awkward hug and again insisted she not wait, though the next train was at 8:10, nearly forty-five minutes away. The station was locked and the coffee place opposite was closed. Sally sat on a bench, by the track, thinking and thinking. She wondered what mystical objects were behind the door Rochelle and her mother had slipped around, scattered over the floor or rising up to the ceiling. Jars of wishbones and old chicken carcasses and every single thing she herself might have thrown away. She imagined going inside, extracting an object and carrying it out, liberating a tiny space within. Then she thought of Harriet Greene’s house, its rooms jammed with furniture and the plastic bins stacked high in the kitchen, objects also liberated from crammed and filthy houses, but only to be hidden away again.
She hadn’t actually told Johanna she’d be coming home for the break. She’d thought vaguely she might turn up after her visit to Rochelle in Ellesmere, perhaps with Rochelle herself in tow （though the chance Lewyn would also be there cast a definite pall on that scenario）， but now the idea of returning to Brooklyn Heights made her almost physically sick. And so, as she sat on the dark and quiet platform, she took out her phone and composed a long text to our mother about an exciting opportunity to intern with a local antiques dealer, which was maybe the right thing for her to be doing at this peculiar moment, anyway, not that she’d ever once raised it with Harriet Greene. But in fact people did stay on campus during the breaks—not everyone disappeared to be waited on at their parents’ houses or to party on the beaches of Florida! They remained behind to work, to decompress, and some, she supposed, because they had projects to undertake and viable things to explore, as she had apparently begun to explore her own viable thing, her project: that little glimpse of a way to be alive in the world that actually made sense to her.
And when the train arrived, she followed her own breadcrumbs all the way back: to Penn Station and Port Authority and the wait for the bus to Buffalo, which stopped in Ithaca at 3:37 the following morning. A long night’s journey into day.
Chapter Twenty
Revel and Dread
In which Lewyn Oppenheimer enters the netherworld of “in love,”
and learns something important about his sister
By the time the chartered bus had departed the island of Manhattan, he was cataclysmically in love. It wasn’t merely that he had never experienced “in love” before; the truth was that he’d never quite believed the state not to be mythical, something solely evoked on a Grecian urn or a Hallmark card, or rapturously on a stage or a screen. But when in love happened to him, Lewyn recognized it at once for precisely what it was. Lewyn Oppenheimer, an ordinary guy with an apparently common last name （God!） and a whole lot of things he suddenly, desperately wished not to reveal, was in love with Rochelle Steiner—so wondrously sharp, and funny, so outgoing and energetic, so full of plans and intentions! Not, perhaps, conventionally “beautiful” or “pretty” but a dynamo of adorability, magnetism, and attractiveness （at least in the sense that she attracted people to her） whereas he had always understood himself to be … whatever the opposite of that was.
For the first time in Lewyn’s life, his physical body was utterly alive, its myriad parts wondrously interconnected, and he walked and climbed steps and lay down at night to rest with a feeling of deep health and a hum of energy he had never before experienced. His brain, also, was alive, not only to Rochelle （though she was ever at the forefront of his thoughts） but in class and even now in the populated human world of the university beyond his fetid little room in Clara Dickson Hall. When he walked the walkways, fed himself with an art book open in front of him （or Rochelle Steiner across from him!）， stopped to greet acquaintances （hers, nearly always, but sometimes, as the spring term wound on, also his own）， he felt alive, energetic, engaged, and free from care. He might still lack the laser focus of his Cornell contemporaries—already thinking ahead to their shiny professional lives—but he was no longer without purpose. His purpose was Rochelle Steiner, and to be happy with her, always.