The Inseparables (3 page)

As Abernathy wound the cart up the path, climbing a small hill, Lydia spied the parking lot down below.

“Did the dean call my parents?” she asked, trying to disguise what had become an obvious panic. She could not imagine what exactly their response would be, what mixture of horror and anger she'd be met by.

Abernathy nodded. “I think the headmistress called them.”

“Both of them?” she asked. “Or just one? Because they're splitting up.”

This was the first time she'd said it aloud. The sureness of the statement surprised her. Admitting it verbally felt like a test against its reality. She said it a second time. “They're divorcing. Or something. I don't even know. It's shitty. You know?” She saw Abernathy's head lowering in sympathy. Or maybe she was just imagining this.

He slowed the cart. They were outside the administration building, which was white and modern and sterile-looking in the bright sun. Abernathy cut the engine. Down below, class was out. Streams of navy and white poured from the library. She was supposed to be in science class. As she began to walk up the front step, she saw, out across the lot, Charlie Perlmutter standing in front of a line of suitcases, waiting to be picked up. Involuntarily, she gripped the folds of her coat together. When he noticed her, he cocked his head, smiled, and blew her a kiss.

Oona and Spencer sat silent as their car cut a straight line through the white foothills south of Mount Thumb. This was February in Vermont and the sky was simultaneously white and sunless. They had left right away. She had not slept in almost two days. Every few miles they passed through a small town built against the hillsides. Or cows in a herd huddled at the nose to keep warm. Eventually the road narrowed to one lane and the pavement gave way to dirt. On the driver's dash the GPS reflected the way ahead as a red line against a blank white field. On and on they went, the blinking, the slow progress, the snow. The daylight moon strung up above the tree line. Woodsmoke in through the vents. Deer print in the snowdrift. Out in the gray thicket, bird's nests left in the oak tops.

“We're close,” Oona said. It was the first thing she'd said in hours.

She always got these calls; the mother always did. Whole days at the hospital, or in surgery, and if something went wrong, she got the message. Never mind that her soon-to-be ex-husband was almost always stoned and had been jobless for the past fourteen years, and was, because of these facts, home and freely available for parental emergencies: Oona always got the call. The headmistress at Lydia's school was a German woman with beautiful English, but even so, Oona had needed to ask her to repeat herself. She was, even now, turning the words over in her head.
Compromising photograph. Illicit nude photography.
The headmistress had said that the picture was circulating around campus. Like a flyer, or influenza. Across the line, something had cracked. Static. Exhaustion. Impatience.

It was a four-hour ride from Boston. They were in Spencer's car, an enormous blue Toyota. She'd bought it for him just before the split. It was a foolish car but at the time a wellspring of guilt had compelled her to do something nice for him. Apparently this was the way her marriage fell apart: misplaced guilt and an inappropriately timed automobile purchase. She'd had it delivered to the driveway with a big white bow on it, just as they did in the television commercials. He had thought this meant that their troubles were over, that their twice-a-week couples therapy had succeeded, or that their latest emergency weekend away in the Caribbean had done what they had hoped. She had thought of the car as the first piece of a nice severance package.

Snow was falling. They were in the mountains. Hawks began to glide overhead.

“Look, I need your opinion on this,” Spencer said as they crossed beneath a rail truss. He had been a lawyer before Lydia was born, and thought they might need to argue their case with the headmistress, that there was still hope. “You haven't said anything. I have no idea what you think. You've just been silent.”

“What I think,” she said, speaking slowly.

“Yes: what you think. Do you think anything?”

“What else is there to think, Spencer? I'm horrified. I'm nauseated. I'm panicking. I'm very, very worried.”

They were trying. This was the official story. Once, she had loved him. In the beginning he was strong and full of confidence and so well-read and so convinced of the purpose of his life that just to be around him, in his presence, on his sofa, was to experience the world the way a king must: endowed with clarity and certainty and optimism and convincing opinions on global affairs. Then graduate school ended.

“We'll be blamed for this,” Spencer said. It was less of a question and more of a whining protest. “Just to prepare you.”

“So this is our fault? Our daughter exposes herself and that's our fault? Somehow that's on you and me?”

“Absent parents. Too busy to check in. Too willing to outsource responsibility.” He fluttered his fingers against the steering wheel. “If I had to guess.”

“She's at boarding school,” Oona said. “All the parents are absent.”

Oona worked too much. This was one of Spencer's numerous complaints. Their couples therapy had devolved into an exchange of grievances. She was never home. She had abdicated too much of the parenting. Lydia missed her. Why else would their daughter beg to go to boarding school unless she felt that the family unit was already degraded? This was his opinion. She saw it a different way. Her daughter was brilliant and independent and sure of herself and had the smart idea to get the hell out of Crestview a few years early. And besides, wasn't medicine an important and noble calling, worthy enough of the long hours, the privation, the sleeplessness? Weren't people still drinking too much and then drunkenly driving their Jeeps across highway medians and destroying their bones? And if so, didn't she need to be there when they were wheeled into orthopedics so that she could hammer the titanium pins into their femurs? She had hoped the therapy would result in some divine solution—the Camp David accord of marital distress. Quickly, their hope proved futile. The woman he fell in love with didn't exist any longer. He said this after their last session. The Real Oona was gone, he had told her. They were standing in the driveway of their house, beside this car, in full view of the neighbors.

“If the Real Oona is gone, then who the hell am I?” she demanded.

They'd met twenty years ago this month at a party in Tribeca, introduced by mutual friends who were so sure that they would find each other irresistible that a photograph actually existed of them shaking hands for the first time. In the picture they were both laughing. He was basically a boy then: twenty years old, gangly still, with a trace of acne on the bridge of his nose. On their first date, he told her that he had just broken up with his girlfriend. And by “just broken up,” he meant to say that he had gone home after meeting Oona and told his girlfriend that they were finished. Hearing this, Oona blushed. They were eating at Veselka on 2nd Avenue. Steamed pierogies. Black coffee. The place where, in the future, they would come to plot out their most important decisions. New York or not New York. Children or no children. A membership to a secular humanistic synagogue or yoga classes. She remembered that at the end of dinner he paid with his mother's credit card. For the longest time they each carried a copy of this picture in their wallets. His young face, his full head of hair, his long-forgotten pierced ear; her stonewashed denim, her Hillary Clinton headband, the Real Oona. Neither of them could remember what they were laughing at in the picture.

Oona dug her cell from her purse. Lydia occasionally sent short emails updating her on school.
Dissected a cow's heart today. Equal parts fascinating and vomitous.
She swiped hopefully at the screen. This action, this small press and swipe, had become a neuromuscular reflex, as indispensable to her biorhythms as blinking or breathing. Because the hospital could call at any time, and because bones were always breaking, the phone accompanied her when she slept. It was like a faithful pet in this way, or an unshakable case of night terrors. Mostly, though, the phone served to convey how badly she missed her daughter. On the home screen was a picture of Lydia when she was three, when her favorite thing to do was perform the entirety of “So Long, Farewell” from
The Sound of Music,
complete with move-for-move choreography and admirably fine pitch and, generally, just a heaping shitload of cuteness. These last few weeks Oona had started to transfer all the old pictures onto her phone so that she could do what she was doing now, which was to flip randomly, at light speed, through the first thirty-six months of Lydia's life. This—three years old, singing, obsessed with Julie Andrews—was as far as Oona had gotten. She thought it was crucial to remember that such a deliriously optimistic time had ever existed.
The oblivious years,
she called them. Often Oona tried to summon every important fact of that era. Lydia's first piece of solid food was carrot. Her first tooth came in February. Her first movie was
Singin' in the Rain.
Oona marveled at her infant daughter's enviable fascination with all the things that Oona, to be honest, did not pay attention to anymore. With dogs, with the moon, with grass, with wind, with eyelashes, and with dandelions and with little insects with wings! Her baby had reminded her that the world really was a wonderful and glorious place. This was a welcome revelation. They had very little furniture then. Because who really cares about furniture when you have each other? She and Spencer actually used to say this to each other, she remembered.
The oblivious years.
In couples therapy, they had agreed that it was the best time of their lives.

“Nothing?” Spencer asked. “No word from her?”

Oona put the phone down.

Spencer grimaced. “You hot?” he asked. “I'm hot.” He reached to fiddle with the mess of buttons on the car's dash. The car was a toy. There were buttons everywhere. The only people who drove this car were seventeen-year-olds and people who wanted to be seventeen again.

They'd been apart the past six months. He lived in the house they'd built together in Crestview. Four bedrooms, wall-to-wall walnut flooring imported from China, more than one chandelier—an undeniable McMansion. She had moved in with her mother so that she could look after her, although with Henrietta Olyphant, you couldn't just say something like that aloud.
I worry about you being alone.
Or:
Your sadness scares the shit out of me.
Or even:
I love you.
Even the most innocent acts of generosity were liable to be misunderstood by her mother as a political statement. They were the sort of family that kept their declarations of affection silent, or at least repressed them and disguised them as the typical ingredients of mother-daughter-granddaughter dysfunction: guilt, conflict, shame, cookies. All of these, you were to understand if you were an Olyphant, were an acceptable stand-in for love.

“This is all my fault,” Oona said.

Spencer looked over. “That's just something to say. You don't mean that.”

“I got her the phone. The phone has the camera. It seems pretty obvious that it's my fault.”

“We don't even know if any of this is true,” he said, in a perfectly lawyerly tone. It was always like this with him—his need to see proof and evidence.

“All of this seems fairly obvious to me,” she said. “We begin to crack, you and me, and then she begins to crack. It's textbook.”

He put a cool hand on the back of her neck. “Just breathe, okay? Close your eyes. Breathe.” Then he seemed to remember that they were no longer touching. He took back his hand. This was the first time they'd seen each other since she'd left. She'd done it on a Tuesday morning, with what was likely the least amount of pyrotechnics ever managed in a separation. “I'm going,” she had said, two suitcases with her, and he merely nodded and said, “I see that.” They'd already exhausted themselves arguing. It was not a coincidence, Oona thought, that they had been separated exactly as long as Lydia had been away at school. Once Lydia was gone, they had no purpose as a “unit.” This was the term he preferred. He used it frequently. They had discovered this, too, in couples therapy.

Signs on the roadside signaled them to a slow crawl. The Hartwell colors were navy and white, and as they drove, small pennants strung up on telephone wires flapped in the mountain wind. Oona flipped down the mirror to look at herself. She had tried with makeup to make something pop that would never pop. She hadn't known what to wear to retrieve her suspended, exhibitionist daughter, and so she'd gone with the only nice clothes she had in her closet. She was in scrubs every day of the week, but there was this: the same black dress she'd worn at her father's funeral eleven months ago.

“Do I look too severe?” she asked. “I think I look too severe.”

He turned. “You look like you.”

“I mean, what are you supposed to look like in this situation?”

He sighed. “Pissed, I think.”

They passed through the gates. Blond students in cable-knit lounged in Adirondack chairs smoking smuggled cigarettes. From here the campus at Hartwell was shaped like a human eye: land on the top and on the bottom, with lashes ringing the perimeter in the form of old-growth oak, and in the middle a small, dark island of grass and granite and untended maple. Everywhere else there was the opaline water of Lake Rose. The boys lived on the south of the eye in two stone houses. On the north stood the girls' campus, everything in ridiculous shades of purple and yellow, like a cupcake shop. The headmistress had the top western corner of the administration building.

Oona and Spencer parked in the lot. They lingered a moment, girding themselves.

“I want to sue,” he said.

“Sue who?”

“The school. Every person who forwarded the picture. The headmistress.”

“Litigation isn't a substitute for genuine concern,” she said.

He tried repeatedly to button his cuff, over and over, fiddling and fiddling.

“What are you doing?” she asked. “You look crazy. We need to project normalcy.”

“I'm really worried,” he said. “This isn't good, right? Normal people don't do things like this.”

“No,” Oona said.

“You send your kid to a school for gifted people, that means this doesn't happen, right?”

“Obviously it does,” Oona said.

He scoffed. A familiar sound. The sound track of their last year together. “She's probably on drugs,” Spencer said. “I mean, that would explain it, right? The picture, for one. Lydia would never take a picture of herself naked. Ever. And then all this business with the butterflies? It's drugs.”

“Drugs? That's rich, coming from you.”

This was her biggest reason for leaving. She detested everything about his smoking so much pot: having to smell the weed on his coat, or on his breath; having to worry about his being arrested in the parking lot of Crestview's Methodist church for buying from a nineteen-year-old; and, most of all, having to endure how dull he became once the THC reached his bloodstream. Because he remained under the adolescent impression that marijuana was not addictive, Spencer hesitated to think he was chemically dependent. She'd expected him to quit when they were engaged, and then, definitely, after they were married. When that didn't happen, she thought he'd certainly quit when he graduated from law school, and then when he started work at Bigelow. When he kept on getting high, she thought he'd quit when they moved out to Crestview, and then, again definitely, when Lydia arrived. Or when all the weed finally rendered his dick useless without the help of some pharmaceutical hardening product. Nothing, however, had made him stop.