The Inseparables (14 page)

“See? I'm fine! Really. I played football in high school. I'm used to banging my head. I have a hard skull.”

She stopped. She realized that she knew nothing important about him. “Football?” she said. “You?”

He shook his head, as if trying to lose water from his ears.

From across the meadow she heard her mother's laughter. The floodlight on the barn switched off.

For a long while, Lydia had tried to decide which of her parents' letters was better. At night, in bed at Hartwell, she reread them by flashlight. She figured it was distasteful to do this, but each had included its own rationales and arguments, both in the same envelope, as if begging for her to intercede. Her mother's letter was typical of the woman she was, which is to say typical of a doctor well practiced in the art of diagnosis and remedy. Here is the problem: love has vanished. This is the solution: I'm moving out, we are divorcing, the future for me is wide open. Her father had written longer—two sides of yellow legal paper, in big, blocky black ink, everything disjointed, sentences running into one another, sentiments disguised by complaints. Lydia was conditioned to mistake the intensity of emotions for importance, and in this way, for days, she had reserved a small glimmer of hope that he was right when he'd written,
I don't think this is the end for us, I really don't. I'm positive your mother still loves me.

Lydia thought of this as her mother issued her two discreet instructions, both of them in the dim stairway that led to the attic, family photographs still hanging on the walls around them, pictures in which everyone was young and thin and happy.

The instructions were these:

A moment earlier, they had successfully deposited Paul on a tuft of pillows in the attic. Downstairs, her grandmother and her father were calling for her mother. In light of the last few minutes, her father's letter seemed to have been written in another, earlier, even prehistoric era in which hope had not yet gone extinct from the earth.

“I need to go,” her mother told her. “Just make sure he doesn't try to leave.”

“You absolutely cannot go.”

“I'll be back in a half hour.”

“A half hour with this guy?” she whispered. “He still has the leather gloves on.”

“He's not a hit man, Lydia. I promise.”

“So keep him prisoner, you're saying.”

“Just keep him here.”

“Here. Imprisoned.”

“Lydia, just stay with him here for thirty minutes. That's all. Then I can figure out a way to get him out of here.”

A moment ago, she had watched her mom quickly clean Paul's moderately small head wound and then put him through a concussion test, having him follow the beam of a penlight while she inspected the dilation of his pupils. Sometimes she forgot about her mother's considerable medical talents. The fact that she could slice open a person's leg and drill titanium rods through that person's shattered femur had always struck Lydia as a kind of superpower: the ability to endure gore, but also the exact knowledge of how brittle the human body really was.

“Look, he's going to want to slip out and go home,” her mom said. “I know it. And I can't have your dad see him. That, I promise, would be awful.”

“He's clearly not hurt,” Lydia said. “He passed all your tests.”

“We don't know that yet. Brain trauma can arrive—”

“There's not even that much blood.”

“If the injury is in the brain”—her mother put her hands on her head—“then the brain will swell, and if the brain swells, and pushes against the lining of the skull—” She stopped. She looked down at Paul, and saw, probably, exactly what Lydia saw, which was that he was fine. “Like I said. I can't have your father see him.”

“Have Paul just say he's a friend of Grandma's. Dad won't know the difference.”

Her mother winced.

“Oh,” Lydia said. “He knows this guy, doesn't he?”

“Kind of.”

“Kind of?”

“Maybe he was our couples counselor,” her mother said, nearly at a whisper.

Lydia took a moment. She repeated the words aloud to make sense of them. “
Maybe
he was your couples counselor?”

Her mother took a deep breath. She spoke slowly. “This is really not the proudest moment of my life, Lydia.”

The revelation that her mother had a new man, or a secret life, or just something other than the monotonous grind of the hospital felt exciting at first.
Go, Mom!
But whatever misplaced enthusiasm she'd maintained for this new future in which her mother was single and fabulous, and poised to meet an equally single and fabulous new partner, had quickly vanished, erased by the fact that she had a tiny droplet of blood from her mother's boyfriend/therapist on the sleeve of her sweater. Perhaps Lydia should have known when her parents separated that her future might involve moments like this. You were inseparable and then you were separated and then there was blood. This was the side effect of insisting on your burgeoning maturity and adulthood and of your being admitted to a school for gifted psychopaths: you discovered information that you could not entirely process. How exactly did one go, really, from sitting beside one's spouse in a downtown office tower while a therapist yammered on and on to having that therapist here, readied for a date, smelling especially woody, bloodied in the head, and hiding in the attic?

“Don't worry, Mom,” Lydia said, not entirely convincingly. “I can handle this.”

When her mother left, Lydia sat alone in the attic with Paul, both of them wrapped in old Pendleton blankets. Quickly she doubted herself. She had her copy of
The Inseparables,
and she'd also brought up a stack of some of her grandparents' old reading material: ancient issues of
Cuisine Gourmande,
copies of
Redbook
dating back to when Julia Roberts left Kiefer Sutherland at the altar. For a while she and Paul both read. The windows here were bad, and the wind came through the cracks with a whistle. This was the oldest part of the house, and the creepiest. Old trunks full of clothing, marked with stickers from long-extinct railways, formed a partial buffer against the breeze.

Every few moments he looked over and grinned and she had to ask if he was okay and if he felt as though he was going to fall asleep. And by “fall asleep,” she knew that he knew that she meant,
Do you think you might die on me here?
Because she could not handle death. Or anything close to a death. After the funeral, she had found her grandmother weeping alone upstairs in front of her grandfather's closet, and when her grandmother saw Lydia, all she wanted to do was tell her about how it had felt standing over him after he fell, watching him breathe and his head swell and swell some more, and it had all felt a little too precarious to Lydia—being alive, being able to walk and talk and kiss the people you love, and then to so quickly lose that ability. It was no wonder her mother had reacted the way she had when Paul fell.

Eventually she took out her phone. Since the last time she'd looked, she'd received a half dozen more messages. She kept accounts on every social media network. Her phone pinged whenever anything came through. Even on a normal day—a day during which her naked body was not multiplying across the Internet—the pinging was endless. The comments she got were a combination of the ludicrous and the abusive. She'd thought about showing them to everyone at Hartwell who was in a position to do something about them or help her. The headmistress, the assistant headmistress, the various deans and assistant deans of student ethics and student behavior. But every message was either anonymous and untraceable or linked to a dummy account with a fake name. She knew nothing would be done.
Too bad she's gone,
someone had written in a mass post that she was, for some cruel reason, attached to.
What?
someone had posted.
She's gone?
She scrolled.
Don't worry,
another comment read.
There's always more where this came from.
She felt herself close to shaking. She scrolled more, searching for another picture, something else, some other discrete invasion of herself. What else could that mean?
More where this came from.
Were there more pictures? She scrolled and then saw more photographs in the post, more torsos that were not hers, torsos borrowed and pasted from the Internet's general trash bin of nudity. More anonymous taunting. More passionately happy comments.
Yes! I love the sluts at this school!

She got up. “Are you okay?” she asked Paul.

“You keep asking. Are
you
okay?”

“I'm fine.”

“You're shaking,” he said.

She looked down at her free hand, which, indeed, was shaking. “It's cold up here,” she said. Then: “I have to make a call. I'm going to be right outside the door.”

Paul nodded.

Lydia turned back. “I guess I meant to say, you can't leave. So don't leave.”

She went to the edge of the stairs that went down to the living room and found Charlie's entry in her contact list. She tried to imagine him at home in New Jersey, lounging on his bed. She had gone back to his dorm that night because he had told her, in full voice, that he wanted her to. His explicit desire felt romantic.
I want to kiss you,
he told her as they walked by the reeds and the ducks on Lake Rose. He was short, maybe five five, smaller than she was, small enough that she could almost wrap the entirety of her hand around his thigh, which she did while they kissed. He claimed that his small stature had something to do with his kidneys not working the right way, or his thyroid not functioning correctly. Which, knowing him, was probably bullshit. He'd been the head of his own group of students, a bandleader. His lack of height forced him to accrue an outsized combination of charisma and magnetism. Everyone called him Chucky, but she called him Bonaparte, which he loved maybe a little too much. At the end, with his cold hand on her stomach, and then under her skirt, on her chest, he bit down on her lip too hard. She wanted to go slow because she had the odd idea that she might want to remember this—forever.

His voice came across the line. “Is this who I think it is?” he asked. He had the same accent everyone at Hartwell had if they were there long enough: a broad Continental thing, half New England, half London, entirely fake.

“It's Lydia,” she said, knowing that he'd entered her into his phone as
Basic Boston Bitch.
“You know it's Lydia.”

“I didn't expect this,” he said. He laughed, and behind him, in the background, other people laughed. She did not know what kind of town he came from. What his people were like. Everyone at Hartwell was wealthier than she was, and had gone to grammar school in places like Dubai or Davos, and had parents who knew Madeleine Albright and Boutros Boutros-Ghali. Charlie was high, she knew. She could tell by the languid oafishness in his voice. It was something different every month at school. Pills, synthetics, powders. Whatever came up through New York by way of Shanghai or Bogotá. Most people used the drugs to study longer, better, and then, after they were finished studying, mixed those same drugs with better drugs to get higher.

“Yeah,” she heard him say. “It's that girl I was telling you about.” More laughter and static and a snippet of that awful hip-hop song everyone was obsessed with. It sounded as if the phone was being passed around.

“What do you want, Lydia?” he said, his voice far away.

“Do you have any other fucking pictures of me?” she asked. She was trying to keep her voice down.

“I can't hear you,” he said, although she was sure he could.

“I asked, do you have other fucking pictures of me, you creep?”

He laughed more. “I don't know. Do I? Have you taken any other pictures of yourself?”

“I was on some fucking sick message chain and I saw some cryptic comment about how there are more pictures.”

“Reading Internet comments about yourself is not a good idea, Lydia,” he said.

She turned back and looked to the attic door, hoping Paul was not listening.

“The fact that you took that picture got me expelled,” he said. “I shouldn't even be talking to you.”

“You deserved it. You stole that picture.”

“Yeah,” he said. “She's still on. This is hilarious. I don't know how to put it on speaker. Which button? This button?”

“Don't you put me on speaker,” Lydia said. “Don't put me on speaker, you little fuck.”

She hung up then. The phone felt hot against her skin, a not-so-subtle reminder that these things were radiating energy and waves that probably weren't all that great for you. She looked down at it, the glassy eye of the camera glaring back at her. There were ways, she remembered him telling her, to turn on a person's camera remotely, without the person knowing. “Assume that someone's watching you all the time,” he'd said. This was at the beginning, before she realized that these kinds of things were not jokes, but were something like the confessions of someone who couldn't help himself. She vacillated between wanting to vomit and trying not to vomit. She dialed him back. She couldn't help herself. His voice mail picked up.
This is Charlie Company,
the message went, something she'd begged him to change the first time she heard it. He thought it was funny. “You're a real motherfucker,” she said at the prompt. “Fucking speakerphone? Are you fucking kidding me? You're the worst motherfucker, Charlie Perlmutter.” Her breath exploded into the receiver. “Are you fucking watching me, you creep? Are you?” she yelled. “Listen to me,” she said, dropping her voice. “I hope everything for you in the future is awful. Everything.”

For a while she sat at the top of the stairs, trying not to weep or scream, and when she went back into the attic she tried to bury herself in the copy of her grandmother's book, hoping that if she did in fact burst out sobbing, she might be able to hide behind the hardcover flaps.

After a minute, Paul cleared his throat. “Is it a man?” he asked.

He'd startled her. “What did you say?”