Splinters of Light (29 page)

E
llie had said she’d be home late.

Nora lay in bed, staring up at the black outline of the fan she never used above the bed. When she’d asked Paul to put it in for her, she’d had the idea of menopause someday in mind. She’d lie next to him, bearing her hot flashes quietly, her naked, wet body stretched on the sheet below the turning blades. If Paul rolled over and noticed, maybe he’d bring her a glass of water. A clean, dry T-shirt, maybe.

She’d never turned the fan on. Not once.

Now she probably never would.

What had Ellie meant by
late
? Why hadn’t Nora thought to clarify?

Nora checked her phone for a text. Maybe she’d spaced out—that’s what she called it to herself now; she’d needed a better term for getting stuck—and hadn’t heard the ding of a message received.

Nothing.

She checked Facebook. Seventeen friends had posted inspirational messages on their boards, but nothing for her, nothing from Ellie. Kids didn’t use Facebook, anyway. She clicked onto her secret account on Instagram, the shameful one. Candi Wells. She’d opened the account with a fake Gmail address, using the name of a girl Ellie had gone to school with in first and second grade. Candi had moved to Texas, and as far as Nora could tell by a pretty in-depth Web search, didn’t have an Instagram account or even a Facebook page. She’d heard a rumor through the mom mill that the Wells family had become ultrareligious and had seven more children and that Candi was either close to getting married or actually wedded with a kid of her own.

Ellie had accepted the friending on Instagram within minutes. She’d sent a sweet message about one of the houseboating pictures Nora had attached to the account, a picture full of generic-looking kids she’d pulled randomly off the Internet. The ruse allowed Nora to look at Ellie’s pictures, which she did, more often than she liked to admit to herself.

As usual, Nora’s throat got tight as she flipped through the photos. It felt as if she were about to cry, but it was from shame, not sadness. Ellie was a good kid. No, she was a
great
kid. The kind of kid who said no when Nora had asked if they could be Instagram friends, but the kind of kid who wouldn’t have put up a fight if Nora had insisted on access to her pictures. She would have just shrugged and allowed it. Ellie wasn’t the type to open a secret account to hide it from her mother. Nora had Ellie’s computer password written down in her desk, just in case she ever needed it. Ellie hadn’t seemed to mind overmuch giving it to her. She wasn’t devious.

No, that kind of sneakiness belonged to her mother.

Her throat so tight it felt hard to breathe, Nora checked the most recent photos, posted tonight.

A sob snuck up on her, painful, like a hiccup gone wrong. There was a gorgeous shot—beautiful, really—of the three Glass
women outside the restaurant. Harrison had taken it with Ellie’s phone while Nora, Ellie, and Mariana had grouped themselves around the life-sized pirate wench holding the ashtray. Ellie was pretending to stub out an imaginary cigarette, Nora was standing at attention, smiling in a way that she’d hoped didn’t make her look as tired as she felt, and Mariana—she saw now—was tweaking the pirate’s nipple with a leer. A light from a tiki torch illuminated their hair so they all looked somehow radiant.

Blessed.

Well, goddamn it, she hadn’t meant to cry tonight. That hadn’t been on the agenda.

She slid the photo off the screen, and the next one populated. Again Ellie was lit from above, her hair shining golden brown, as she kissed Dylan. Obviously a selfie, the shot was a little crooked, and both of them were smiling. It was the kind of kiss you gave someone you really liked. Loved. The kind of kiss where your teeth clacked against each other’s and you just laughed. The photo was two hours old, taken at eleven p.m.

Candi Wells “liked” the photo.

Nora was about to turn off her phone and stare back up at the motionless fan when a text message bounced onto the screen.

I’m going to stay out tonight.

Nora coughed. She would have typed back but she was too angry to move her thumbs. She needed to breathe, to recover.
Stay
out.
She was seventeen and about a minute, not an adult. Yeah, it was a Friday night, but that didn’t mean anything. Staying out? All night? In
Oakland
?

If that’s okay,
came the next text.
I’m still in the city. With Dylan.

Nora knew she was with him. Of course she knew that.

We’re at a hotel.

This, at least, she knew how to answer as a mother.
Which hotel? Address.

Hyatt. Embarcadero.

Jesus. It felt as if Nora had taken off her helmet in space, all the air vacuumed out of her lungs.

We did it.

And at those words, with that admission from her baby girl, Nora could breathe again. This wasn’t boasting, though Ellie probably thought it was. This was her girl reaching out to say,
Is this okay? Am I doing this right?

Is he asleep?

Yeah.

She could let her daughter think that.
Are you okay, chipmunk?

No response.

Maybe she wasn’t a chipmunk when she was naked in a man’s bed. Fair enough.
Ellie? It doesn’t have to be good. Remember we talked about that? Most first times don’t go that smoothly.

It was kind of . . . okay.

Good. Was that good?

You’re not mad at me?

Nora wasn’t. Not at all. She was glad to her very bones that they had this moment, this exact one. There was no one there but
the two of them
. It’s always me and you, chipmunk.
She didn’t text it. Instead, she thumb-typed,
Of course not. I’m glad you texted.

You’re not mad I’m not coming home tonight?

Oh, that. The sex thing had thrown her off the not-coming-home thing.
Yeah, you’re in trouble for that.
Trouble. What did that even mean anymore?

The response was immediate.
Love you, Mama.

As Nora fell asleep, she kept her phone in her hand, a new kind of rock to hold. If she needed it, she could swipe the screen to unlock it and stare at that last text from the girl she loved.

That word, “Mama.”

That word was blood, was power, was strength. That word was memory. It was life.

T
he next day, Nora had a normal Saturday, as normal as she could, anyway, while she lost more of her mind and Ellie—home at ten a.m. and sleepy eyed—pretended she wasn’t watching her like a hawk. As usual, Nora felt nauseous for an hour after she took her Aricept, and she curled into the big chair in the living room with a book she felt too queasy to look at. Ellie played her game from the couch. The mantel clock (always a bit fast) chimed, and Nora was surprised to hear the three o’clock bongs. Where had one and two gone? Had they been in the living room the whole time? Was that why her back hurt? She smelled banana and peanut butter. On the coffee table was a peel, a peanut-buttery knife resting on it. Nora didn’t remember which one of them had eaten it. She checked her mouth for the taste and caught Ellie watching her. She pretended she was yawning.

That night, she and Ellie would probably argue about doing the dishes after dinner, and maybe Mariana would come by and
watch a movie. Nora would send Harrison overly flirtatious texts and maybe go sit on his porch for a while and ache with the need to feel his arms around her. She’d leave before he tried and then after she was sure Ellie was sound asleep, she’d cross the lawn silently and they’d fuck standing up in his laundry room—it was still easier to pretend to everyone including herself that he was still a secret even though he was so much more.

But it was still Saturday afternoon, and she was with her daughter.

Her daughter, who wasn’t a baby anymore. Not after last night.

Maybe right now—this moment—would be the closest she’d ever be to Ellie again. Maybe they’d drift further and further apart as Nora’s brain cells ran into one another, leaving pileups and traffic jams and twisted pieces of metal wreckage behind.

Then maybe Nora wouldn’t care, and that was the worst, hardest, darkest part of all.

But right now, she cared with all her heart and soul and mind. Nora burned this memory—
this
one—deep into herself, as if she were branding her flesh with it. She’d write it down, before she forgot. She’d put it into her journal in her own handwriting that she’d recognize later (wouldn’t she?) so that she could read it again and again.
Ellie’s big eyes as she stares, the way she tucks her fist under her chin when she’s worried.

“What’s wrong, chipmunk?”

“Did your mom have it?”

Nora didn’t expect the question, but it was easier to face than she thought it would have been. “We don’t know. The car crash was when she was my age.”

“Could your dad have had it instead?”

It had to have come from somewhere. They’d probably never know, though. “Maybe.”

Ellie closed her computer and tapped the top of it. “I want to get tested.”

Nope. Still no. Nora couldn’t—wouldn’t—allow her daughter
to ruin her life that way. To find out how she would die . . . Impossible. Unless—maybe she could steal a sample of Ellie’s blood (the old chemistry set came back to her, the slides, the finger pricks that hurt so sweetly) and get it tested, and then, if it was negative, only then would she tell Ellie she was safe, she would live, she would
live
.

Nora steepled her fingers, as if considering it. Then, “No.”

“I’m not giving up on this.”

“Fine.”

Then Ellie made a face at her, crossing her eyes and opening her mouth in a silent scream, and Nora laughed, unexpectedly. Ellie laughed, too, and then pulled another, even better face, sticking out her tongue, bulging her eyes.

Moments like this. Moments of grace, that’s all they were. Nora didn’t deserve them, but she got them anyway. She had to thank someone, if she could just figure out who that was. It certainly wasn’t any god she’d ever read about. Maybe she could make up her own now—wasn’t that a sick-person prerogative?

“Don’t leave.”

Nora’s knees jerked. “What, baby?”

Ellie closed her eyes and kept her fingers on the top of the computer resting in her lap. “Don’t just go. Don’t chicken out and run somewhere. Or . . .” Her eyes stayed closed. “Or do anything else. Anything worse.”

Everything was implied in those words. Nora’s chest ached. “Oh, honey. Sometimes I wish . . . Wouldn’t it make it a little easier for you? If you didn’t have to . . .”

Ellie’s eyes flew open and took on that enraged look—the one she’d gotten when she’d read the end of
The Diary of Anne Frank
, when she’d learned what the Ku Klux Klan was. “It would make my life hard
forever
. That’s what you would be doing.”

“I’m not going anywhere, Ellie-belly.”

The corners of Ellie’s mouth twitched. The old nickname fit perfectly in Nora’s mouth, like a sweet marble.

She thought about telling Ellie about Clive Wearing, the British man with one of the worst cases of amnesia ever observed. He could only remember new information for thirty seconds or less. Everything behind was a black void, everything in front of him was darkness. He knew what someone was saying and could understand the words—he could even respond—but during the time he uttered his answer, he’d forgotten the question. He had semantic memory—he could walk and talk, though he couldn’t have told anyone how he knew these things. To him, it felt as if he’d just woken up from blackness. Every thirty seconds, he experienced it again—once more waking up from nothingness.

But he remembered two things. He’d been a musician and could still play the organ, sing, and conduct.

The second thing he remembered was his love for his wife.

Every time saw her, he was delirious with happiness. He’d been in the darkest void, for years, and here she was, the love of his life, the literal light in his darkness. “Oh, look who’s come, oh, darling! Oh, wonderful! Can we dance?” Every time, one hand went to his wife’s cheek, the other behind her head as he drew her in for a long, overjoyed kiss, from which he would draw back each time with a laugh full of relieved delight. “Oh, look who’s come!”

And if his wife walked into the next room, his face would go slack, and they could play the game all over again.

In the videos Nora had found, no one had asked his wife, Deborah,
How badly does it hurt? To be forgotten over and over again?
Did being the only person the patient loved make up for that? Would that make it better or worse?

Ellie was still staring at her.

Nora repeated herself. “I’m not going anywhere.” What a happy, perfect lie. It felt soft and comfortable, and Nora wanted her daughter to have as much comfort as possible. In every way.

“Fine,” Ellie said, finally. “You better not.”

Nora wouldn’t be like Clive Wearing, forgetting everyone but his wife. Nora wouldn’t forget Ellie or Mariana. It was absolutely impossible. She would know Ellie anywhere, at any age. It had to be true. And Mariana. Mariana
was
her. She didn’t have to worry about forgetting her. She couldn’t.

“It’s just like death,” Clive Wearing said in the video, over and over again. “No thoughts of any kind, no dreams, no difference between night and day, no sight, no sound, no taste, no touch, no smell, exactly like death.” He babbled, perhaps because it grounded him, perhaps because it was something he could participate in. He repeated himself, like a record. They were, of course, new thoughts to him every time. “It’s been like death. I’ve never seen a human being before, never had a dream or a thought.”

Ellie was saying something now about a school Samantha was thinking about applying to, but Nora couldn’t focus. She tried. She really tried. She nodded along with Ellie’s words, and said things like, “Really?” and “Why’s that?”

She reached into her pocket and tumbled the three pieces of beach glass she’d taken from the bowl that morning. Two more than usual. They were warm from her body heat. They clicked against one another, tumbling just right. A family of glass, broken and perfect.

What if their roles were reversed? What if Mariana was sick and Nora wasn’t? If a day came when her sister didn’t recognize her, when their eyes met with no history . . . it would be the same as death.

Nora would, she knew, want to die.

There was only one solution (Nora had the solution, she’d always had the solution, it was what she
did
, what she was known for—she couldn’t lose that now), and the solution was so simple she didn’t know why she hadn’t gripped it before now:
I will not forget these two.
She would hold tightly every memory of them. She would do it with gritted teeth and brute force and ignore the niggling voice that said maybe the choice wouldn’t be hers at all.

Nora
couldn’t
be wrong.

“Are you listening to me?”
Mama, watch
.
Watch me!

“Yes,” said Nora, bringing her gaze back to her daughter’s bright eyes. “Sam losing her UCLA app. Hey, Ellie. I love you.”

Ellie focused. She looked right at her, into Nora’s eyes. Suddenly Nora could smell the Bath and Body Works peach soap Ellie used. “I know.”

Nora said, “I will always love you.”

“I know.”

“Don’t forget, chipmunk.” This, then, would be the journal entry she wrote for Ellie tonight. No how-tos, no you-shoulds. She would tear out the whole journal, all the Ellie entries. They were all wrong. Ellie would find her own way. There was just one thing to write to her daughter. Just
I love you I love you I loved you then and I love you now and I will love you always with everything I ever was. I will love you for so much longer than forever, I will love you so long forever will be done before I stop.

Ellie took a sharp breath and said, “
You
don’t forget.”

“Okay, then.”

“
Okay
, then.” What Ellie meant was
I love you
. Nora could see it on her face, hear it in her voice.

“Okay.” What Nora meant was
I promise you this: I love you I love you I love you I will love you so long forever will be done before I stop.