The Inseparables Read online

  Crossing the room, Oona gave off a small, quiet sigh at the mess the house had become. Boxes cluttered the whole first floor, as well as the barn and the garage. Now that Harold was gone, Henrietta needed to move. The intricacies of her financial distress were not complicated. The accounts were drained. The credit cards were at their limits. She had not saved enough. She was underinsured. She had come perilously close to bankruptcy. Death, it turned out, was very expensive. Because of this, she had packed everything these last few weeks, put forty years into boxes, watched as her husband’s closets were emptied, his sock drawers discarded, his car sold, every trace of their life together dismantled and put away. So many rooms were crowded floor to ceiling with cardboard that the windows were blocked and the light could not get in. Bit by bit the house began to feel less like a home and more like a gloomy, light-starved storage locker. Oona wanted to help, to pay, to write checks, to rent her an apartment, and whether it was maternal pride or some deeper stubbornness, Henrietta cut off the discussion whenever it came up. With Oona it was more complicated. With your children it was always this way.

  Coming back from the kitchen with a tall cup of coffee, Oona noticed a black suitcase wedged in between two large boxes.

  “What is this?” Oona said, not as a question, but as an accusation. She put her hands on her hips. “I can’t believe you still have this, Mom.”

  “Can we skip this part, please? Can we go back to when you were excited about my awful book? When you were spinning and talking about cults and pubic hair and bone dust?”

  Oona flung the suitcase up onto the counter and began to unzip it.

  “Please don’t,” Henrietta cried. “Please.”

  Before Harold died, they had a vacation to Barcelona planned. They were set to leave a week after he passed, and for some reason he had already packed, and put the suitcase by the back door, which, for the past eleven months, was where Henrietta had left it, despite Oona’s constant protests. This kind of behavior, Oona kept telling her, was unhealthy and emotionally damaging, not to mention wholly atypical of the kind of woman Henrietta had always prided herself on being, which is to say not the kind of woman who kept her dead husband’s packed suitcase still intact all this time.

  “This is not okay,” Oona said, which was probably the hundredth time that Henrietta had heard her say this.

  “I’m aware, honey, that you don’t consider this to be the most emotionally restorative thing to do,” Henrietta said, using a phrase her daughter had popularized in the house these last eleven months.

  “Oh, it’s far from emotionally restorative,” Oona said.

  “As are most things in life,” Henrietta said.

  “Why don’t you let me take you to therapy? We can go together,” Oona said.

  Henrietta smiled. “That sounds like a recipe for a delightful and productive afternoon.”

  “Or let me bring you some books to read,” Oona said.

  Her daughter was a surprisingly avid devotee of self-help literature. This had been a secret until Oona moved back in, and Henrietta had discovered the considerable library she’d amassed over the years. Books on so many varied subjects—on nutrition (The Last Diet Ever, Part Two), on leaving your husband (A Workbook to Regain Dignity), on grief and death (Believing in Heaven but Not in God). None of this should have stunned Henrietta as much as it did. Oona had always distrusted abstraction and gravitated instead toward the simple fix. This was what made orthopedics so attractive to her: you cut, you repair, you close the body. “I have my own books,” Henrietta assured her.

  “But your books are all probably about the depravity of mankind and the imminent cultural apocalypse.”

  “They are very good books.”

  Oona rested her hands on the suitcase. “I don’t know what to do with you,” Oona said.

  “You shouldn’t feel the need to do anything with me. It’s just a suitcase, Oona. Eventually I will get around to opening it. And eventually, after that, I will get around to finding some restorative balance, or whatever you call it. I promise you.”

  Oona took a large breath with the same theatrical flair she’d used as a toddler, fuming over whatever was wildly unfair in her life at that time—going to sleep or bathing or being deprived of cake. The fact was that Henrietta had pretended months ago that she’d opened this suitcase, and had told Oona that she’d reckoned with the mundane things that were inside it before packing it all away. Afterward, they’d split two bottles of wine and had a wonderful and sad evening together in which they were united miserably in their grief. They had listened to an entire Leonard Cohen record. Oona had told her the next morning that she was proud of her, saying so without a trace of condescension or self-help sappiness.

  “But you told me you opened it!” Oona said. “Remember?”

  “I do remember.”

  “What happened?”

  “What happened is that I lied to you.”

  Henrietta knew what was coming: Oona liked to console her by relaying some grievously awful story from the hospital, as a way to let her know that she was familiar with the trauma of death, and also with the loving family members of dead people whom she and her colleagues had to comfort in the waiting areas of their emergency room. As far as Henrietta could tell, this was either a woeful attempt at tough love or a terrible advertisement for Oona’s hospital.

  “Last week at the hospital—” Oona started.

  “Please don’t tell me something horrible.”

  “—we had a young woman in the emergency room. She had overdosed on cocaine and had done so, for some stupid reason, at the top of a staircase.”

  “I know you see death all the time,” Henrietta said, her voice cracking.

  Oona stopped. “You really don’t want to hear the rest of it?”

  “Let me guess,” Henrietta said, her shoulders falling. “At the end of the story, she dies.”

  Oona nodded. “Yes,” she said, sounding only a little disappointed. “She does die.”

  “See? This is not helpful. These stories of poor cocaine addicts are not helpful for me.”

  Oona had two hands on the suitcase. It was a small black thing, bought for thirty dollars at a discount store, nothing great. She had thought it was ridiculous that Harold would have packed so far ahead of their trip, especially considering that he was a famous procrastinator, always leaving these most crucial tasks for the last moment.

  “I’m afraid to open it,” Henrietta said. “That’s why it’s still here.”

  Henrietta thought she saw Oona readying a response, something typical for her. “Afraid? But why?” Oona might say. “What could possibly be inside that you would be afraid to find? It’s probably just what’s normally in a suitcase. With Dad, it’s probably just, you know, an extra pair of underwear. Or, at best, a boring book about the history of butter.”

  Instead, Oona walked across the room and hugged her.

  It wasn’t what was probably inside, Henrietta felt like saying. It was what was potentially inside. This was an important distinction. All this time she had allowed herself to think that there was something special, or something surprising that had made Harold pack it up two weeks early. At first, after he was gone, she figured he did it because he was bored. With the restaurant closed he was home with nothing to do, so why not pack up early? But Harold did not do these kinds of things. Her Harold—the same Harold who that last year had grown a white beard, who had attempted to teach himself Ancient Greek, and had expressed an interest in learning how to play the banjo—this Harold simply was not practical enough to have done something like this. And so she’d begun to think that there must have been a different reason why he’d done it.

  The coffeemaker chimed. Oona poured herself a cup, drank half of it, and then refilled it just as quickly.

  Henrietta shook her head. “How long have you been awake straight?”

  Oona looked at her wristwatch. Usually she worked nights. Now that she was in the middle of a divorce she
worked days and nights. “Many, many hours,” she said.

  “How much caffeine have you had?”

  “Tankards’ worth,” Oona said. “Gallons, probably.”

  “You need to sleep. It’s not good for you to—” Henrietta stopped herself. She had fallen back into this recently. Motherhood for her had always been a conflict between proper concern and far too much worry. Widowhood had only made this worse.

  Oona looked down at the suitcase. “Maybe we could open it together.”

  Henrietta took a deep breath.

  “Just let me know, Mom. I can do it with you. Whenever you want. I can help.”

  Across the room, Oona’s phone began to ring. She gave off an exhausted sigh. “One sec, Mom,” she said. Over these last six months Henrietta had learned that the noise of her daughter’s phone corresponded with another human’s injury. This was how it went: someone’s bones broke, the phone rang, and then Oona rushed off to repair the mess. Oona walked slowly toward her phone, which was on a table across the room. It was an old house and it loudly bore the weight of every step inside it. Henrietta used to be able to differentiate between her daughter’s feet and her husband’s. From the living room she watched Oona take the call. Dr. Olyphant, she said. She had turned forty years old this year, a number that was difficult for Henrietta to consider. For the occasion, Oona had allowed a white streak to emerge in her hair, running from the point of her widow’s peak back across her head, like a skunk’s tail. Henrietta wondered whether it was because of the death or the divorce or both. She sat on the sofa, waiting. The fact was that Henrietta did not want to move without her daughter. She had thought to suggest that they get a place together, like roommates, like friends, even, but found that she didn’t have the courage to ask.

  “Yes,” Oona said.

  Henrietta noticed the alarm in Oona’s voice.

  “Yes,” Oona said again. “She’s my daughter.”

  2.

  It was Monday, not that it mattered, rain falling, weak light through the dead trees on Mount Thumb. Lydia sat in the back of a golf cart the color of persimmon, driven by a member of the school’s disciplinary staff, a man in a faintly militant peacoat, his collar propped up. The iron arched gates of Hartwell Academy passed overhead, rusted and bearing a carved Latin inscription that meant either Truth and Wisdom in Learning or something like Forget What You Thought: This Is the Place Where You Will Truly Actually Learn to Feel Deep Shame and Humiliation About Your Body. This place. She took a very deep breath.

  She had been here since September. A boarding school in southwestern Vermont advertised for gifted students, Hartwell Academy had looked vastly more promising in its brochures than the public school she’d attended at home in Crestview, with its legions of boys lingering near their lockers in expensive jeans and enough Abercrombie cologne to fumigate a basement. Or: those same boys in the parking lot after seventh period with their hundred-millimeter Kools and their cell-phone porn. She had found Hartwell online, after prompting Google with the phrase “Are there any normal schools anyplace where everyone isn’t a pervert or a criminal?” If she had a sense of humor about this past week, it was possible she might find it amusing that she’d ended up here.

  From the back of the cart, Lydia had to scream over the din of the motor to be heard.

  “What about everyone else?” Lydia called out. They were passing the long line of brick dormitory houses where the boys lived, and as they went by she saw faces in the window peering back at her, pale and blond and aggressively well groomed and very likely sinister. For days it had been like this. “What about everyone else harassing me? Every other single human on this campus! Do they need to do this, too?”

  The driver turned around. His name was Abernathy. Officially he worked as an assistant to the dean of students, but in reality he was a recent college graduate whose job it was to shuttle students around this large campus. “I don’t know about anyone else,” he said. “I only know about you.”

  Given everything, this was the single most unsettling thing he could have said. A week ago a nude picture of her had begun spreading around the school. At this point, it was difficult to say which was worse: the embarrassment or the ridicule. The fact was, everyone here had seen her naked, or was about to, and evidently at Hartwell being naked was cause enough to endure a hellacious torrent of harassment. Forget the strenuously constructed veneer of high culture this school prided itself on: the instant her nipples began popping up on people’s phones all hell had broken loose for her.

  Lydia slumped in her seat. She was dressed in layers, hoping that all the wool and cotton she had on—the long johns, the tightly wrapped scarf, the big parka zipped to the top—would create a kind of armor. All week she had suffered the urge to discover a way to vanish.

  Abernathy offered her a kind smile. “If you want my advice, don’t bring your phone in with you.”

  She looked up. She was exhausted. She had not slept. She was fifteen years old. Her makeup, she knew, probably could not cover her new, fledgling paranoia.

  “Because they’ll search you,” he said, conspiratorially. “And if they find it, you’ll get extra time. Especially with this. You don’t have your phone on you, do you?”

  Technically speaking, phones were not allowed on campus. Digital technology ran afoul of the school’s stated ambition to create in its student body what it called a “linear brain,” which was its term for a brain capable of reading the printed word, or negotiating around basic algebraic functions and maintaining the ability to do things like find Iraq on a map without losing one’s train of thought. Cellular technology apparently interfered with this. Screens equaled distraction, as they put it, and distraction equaled a future of subpar earning potential and disappointing contributions to the alumni fund. Until this week, however, when everything blew up around her, the rule about the phones had gone largely unenforced. Or at least Lydia had thought.

  “The phone’s on my desk. Back at the dorm,” Lydia lied. With everything happening, she was not about to leave her phone around for her roommates to scrutinize. There had already been far too much scrutiny.

  Abernathy took a phone from his jacket pocket. “So you’re saying if I call you right now, your phone won’t ring?”

  “I swear,” Lydia said.

  “I’m just saying: none of this happens without the phone. None of it. Am I right?” He pointed up ahead to the headmistress’s office, which was where they were going. “That’s what the headmistress is going to say. Trust me.”

  Thirty minutes ago she’d been pulled from her Intro to Cinema class, right from the middle of a group discussion about Leni Riefenstahl’s influence on Star Wars and the commodification of fascist symbology. These kinds of discussions, she’d learned, were typical of a place like Hartwell, where everyone was mandated to wear the same gender-neutral uniform—blue slacks, white oxford, brown leather shoes—and where everyone had apparently digested the entire canon of Western civ prior to reaching puberty. For the first time in her life, Lydia fell to the bottom of the class. Abernathy had come to the door right at the soaring, demented crescendo of Triumph of the Will, interrupting the führer’s speech, to announce her name.

  Even before Abernathy ushered her into the school’s spartan, cold disciplinary office, she knew she was being suspended. Walking behind him in the hallway outside her classroom, she saw in his hand the telltale pink file folder that signaled a suspension. At first she met with the dean of students, an older man who sat in front of a window that overlooked the chapel. Abernathy stood at the door, like a prison guard.

  The dean began by telling her how alarmed everyone was. “I’m alarmed,” he told her. “The headmistress is alarmed. We are all very, very alarmed at this.” He paused to allow Lydia the impression that this meant he was serious. “Like I said, we’re all alarmed.”

  She was given only a moment to offer a defense, which she stumbled through.

  “This is not my fault,” she managed. �
�None of this is my fault.”

  The dean leaned forward across his desk. “But it is you in the picture, isn’t it?”

  When she said, reluctantly, that it was, he opened the pink folder and wrote in it for a few moments. “Abernathy will drive you to talk to the headmistress,” the dean said, looking up. “But before your parents take you home, we think it might benefit you to talk to some of our counselors on staff.” He took off his eyeglasses. He rubbed at his eyes. “We have great people on staff who have experience with these situations.”

  Lydia felt momentarily grateful to hear this, thinking it was a subtle nod to the uproar of this last week—the endless catcalling and bullying. But she was wrong. School administrators, the dean told her, were so alarmed about the existence of her picture that they’d begun to worry that something else was at work aside from what Lydia had already explained was the simple fact that Charlie Perlmutter had asked her for a photograph of her topless, and then eventually a photograph of her topless began to spread around school. Lydia understood all of this to be code for their worry that she was being abused, or had been abused, or that something equally awful or unspeakable had happened to her. “We want to make sure you are okay,” the dean told her. “Your well-being is the most important thing.” Which was why she was here, in the back of what everyone on campus called the paddy wagon, a stout electrified vehicle used to ferry delinquent students up to the administration building.

  “First off, I’m normal,” she said as they drove. “Perfectly normal. And I never sent the picture. Not to him, not to anyone. He stole it from my phone. You were there. I told the dean this.”

  Abernathy turned. “I’m not in charge.”

  “But do you believe me?” she asked.

  He shrugged, as if to say, It doesn’t matter what I think.

  “Why doesn’t anyone believe me?” she cried. All of this was exactly what she’d wanted to say earlier, in the dean’s office, but hadn’t. As they went up the hill, she thought she detected a hint of a smirk on his face. This was how it had been these last few days. The onslaught of public shame. Someone’s extended finger reaching out to mockingly tease the delicate skin of her earlobe. What did it matter whether this man, or any man, believed her? She had seen this elsewhere, at her old school in Crestview, certainly. The existence of a naked picture automatically worked to discount whatever academic or personal currency or dignity a person might have earned by, say, being alive. Every innocent gesture assumed a sexual intimation. Laughter followed her. She was branded now.