Splinters of Light (13 page)

“T
his is Dylan,” said Ellie. She was way more nervous than she’d thought she’d be. She’d imagined it a thousand times.
Mom, Aunt Mariana, this is my boyfriend.
It would come out as an inarguable fact.

Instead, she amended her first statement with “He’s my friend.”

She sounded like she was four, introducing her first playground pal. In a moment, she would arm-wrestle him and then they’d race for the sandbox where they’d avoid the cat poop and throw plastic shovels at each other.

“Who?” Her mother looked even blanker than she had been lately.

“Dylan,” Ellie repeated, as if that would clarify it. They didn’t know she’d stayed up late with him almost every night for the last month, talking in Addi’s hut about everything and nothing at all. They didn’t know she’d gone to meet him in Oakland when she’d said she was at Samantha’s, and they
really
didn’t know her first kiss from him had been in the back of a dimly lit bar
located on a street her mother would have grounded her for being on at any time of day, let alone midnight. They didn’t know that she was in love (probably) for the very first time and that he—with his skinny face and wide eyebrows and long fingers—made her feel special and pretty and completely—utterly—unique.

“Hi,” said Mariana, leaping to standing from the blanket. “I’m Ellie’s aunt. Nice to meet you.”

“Oh,” said Dylan. “You two really
do
look like each other. Wow.”

Ellie’s mother, still seated on the picnic blanket, said, “We’re twins.” Her voice was as flat as her expression.

“Yeah. Ellie said fraternal but . . .”

“Mom.” Ellie didn’t know what to say next. She’d assumed her mother would take over with her normal welcoming and polite questions.
Where are you from? Do I know your parents, maybe? What do they do? You look hungry, here.
She’d press a sandwich into his hand, and Dylan would be charmed by her. Everyone always was, even Ellie’s friends.

“But
who
are you?” Nora’s lips smiled, but warmth didn’t reach her eyes.

“Mom!”

“Sorry, honey. But I don’t understand. We had something to tell . . . I don’t get it. Why is he here?”

Anger clawed at Ellie’s throat and she made a strangled noise.

Her aunt stepped forward and motioned them to sit on her side of the blanket. “Make yourself comfortable. Would you like some Limonata? Or a Coke?”

Dylan said, “I’m fine, thanks. I just ate.”

“With your family?” said Ellie’s mother.

“Nah. With some friends.”

“But it’s Mother’s Day.”

Dylan shrugged and stuck a leg out onto the grass. He actually moved like Dyl did in the game, with a loose swaying of
limbs as if he were a marionette, his arms and legs tethered to strings. “Yeah. I called her.”

“You called her.”

“And sent her flowers.”

“A big bouquet?”

Dylan dipped his head. “The biggest I could get for what I had in my bank account.”

Ellie saw her aunt smile.

“It was Addi’s idea—I mean, Ellie’s idea. The flowers.”

“Addi?”

Dylan grinned. “I met her as Addi first, and it keeps coming out when I talk.”

“So you talk about her a lot?”

Ellie was going to die. Right here, she was going to have a heart attack and stop breathing. If she didn’t die on her own, she’d kill herself, hang herself with the playground swing’s chain.

But Dylan didn’t seem to mind. Did
anything
fluster him? Is that what his extra three years got him?

“I do. I like her.”

Ellie’s mother blinked. “So do I, as a matter of fact.”

“So we have that in common.”

“Eat.” Her mother thrust the container of chocolate cookies at him.

Mariana grabbed the plastic tub and set it on the blanket. “Sorry. You don’t have to eat. Nora’s congenitally programmed to offer food. I think what my sister is trying to ask is how did you two meet? Online, is that right? That’s why you call her Addi?”

“Addi Turbo,” said Ellie’s mother in a quiet voice.

“That’s it!” Dylan shot an invisible gun at her with a
chhk
noise. “Addi Turbo. Such a great name.”

“It’s a knitting needle.”

“Nora?” Aunt Mariana looked confused.

“She’s right,” Ellie hurried to say. “It’s a brand she uses. Even
when I was kid, I thought it was a cool name. Like a superhero or something. It’s what I call my Healer.”

“You’re a kid now. Still.”

No, she wasn’t. Not anymore. “I’m sixteen. Almost seventeen.”

“You’re not seventeen for five more months.”

“Stop it.”
They were the only words Ellie could grab out of her whirling brain.

Her mother turned to face Dylan, her eyes still as fiery as Queen Ulra’s. In a moment she’d spit flame and toast Dylan like a marshmallow, and none of Ellie’s powers would be able to stop her. “How old are you?”

Dylan, for the first time, paused. “I’m . . .”

“You’re over eighteen, right?”

They’d agreed what Ellie would say. It was important to her. Dylan had said he wasn’t a good liar and wouldn’t be able to back her up, but Ellie had said she’d handle it. She said, “He’s almost eighteen.”

Her mother didn’t even look at her. “Care to tell me that yourself?”

Dylan stuck his finger in a hole at the edge of his jacket. “I’m nineteen,” he muttered.

“Fantastic. Are you two having sex? Because that’s
illegal
. I assume that’s why you were going to lie about it? To avoid potential jail time?”

Ellie jumped to her feet. “We’re out of here.”

Dylan stood more slowly.

Then her mother stood. To anyone watching, they must look like they were playing a jumping-up game. “Why did you ask him here? Today?”

The question caught Ellie flat-footed. “Why not?”

“Because it’s our day. We do this together.”

“We can’t change anything? In the future, it all has to stay the same?”

The vein that jumped in her mother’s temple stood dark against her pale skin. “Yes.”

“Why? When are you going to realize we have to move forward? Out of the past? You treat me like a kid because you’re scared of the future.” It was the first time she’d thought of it, but Ellie knew it was true the moment the words left her mouth.

“I treat you like a kid because that’s what you are.”

“Come on, Dylan.”

“Where do you think you’re going?”

Ellie slung her backpack over one shoulder. “He’ll drive me home later.”

“You do
not
have permission to leave.”

“Then stop me.” Ellie felt something catch at the back of her throat. Her breath, perhaps, or something even more important. She’d had plenty of fights with her mom. Tons. Weekly. Sometimes daily. But she’d never taken off like this, never openly defied her. It felt like the ground was about to open up, revealing a sinkhole that would dump her onto a winding pregreased slide directly to hell.

Instead, though, her mother didn’t try to stop her.

She did the opposite.

Her mother turned and walked away.
She
left.

“Mom?” No answer. “Are you
kidding
me?” Childishly, Ellie wanted to chase her mother down, pulling at her hand until she took it. Instead, though, she hurled the words, “Well, you sure showed me!”

Her mother heard it—her back stiffened, and it looked as if she almost stumbled on the bouncy fake asphalt of the playground.

Aunt Mariana just stood there, her mouth open.

“It’s okay. You can go. Choose her. She always chooses you, right?” Ellie’s voice was so acidic her throat ached. She hiked her backpack higher on her shoulder till her neck hurt. Dylan didn’t say anything. He just stayed next to her, his eyes surprised, his hands hanging open and loose.

“Ellie. That’s not true.”

How could her aunt say that with a straight face? Her whole life, when Ellie had heard those riddles—who would you save in a sinking boat if you could only save one: the old man with the wisdom of age or the child with the promise of youth—she’d thought of her mother and her aunt. “If the three of us were in a boat, you’d save each other.”

Mariana looked mystified. “What are you
talking
about?”

Her mother had Mariana. Her father had Bettina. Even her half sister, TeeTee, had her terrible cousin Roxy, the awful one with teeth as bad as her attitude. Ellie, though, she’d always been alone. One summer, she’d played so many games of solitaire her mother had bought her a book of a hundred and fifty of them. And she’d played them
all
.
Ellie thudded her toe against a clod of grass. With enough kicking, she’d be able to dig it up with just her shoe, no shovel required.

“She’s . . . got something she needs to tell you,” said Mariana.

Ellie froze, her foot still lifted. “What?”

Mariana closed her eyes the way Ellie’s mother did when she was about to lose it. “I—can’t. No. Not without her.”

Ellie lunged forward and gripped Mariana’s wrist. “What is it? Is she sick? Was I right?”

“You . . .” Mariana looked desperately over her shoulder. Ellie’s mother was almost to the car in the parking lot now. “You have to talk to her.”

“No.” Icy terror flapped its way across Ellie’s shoulder blades. “You told me you’d tell me. You
promised
.”

Mariana looked at Dylan. “Maybe you should take her home after all. It’ll give me a chance to calm her mom down.”

“But I didn’t
do
anything,” said Ellie. Her mother was going to punish her for nothing by keeping the truth from her? How was that an acceptable thing for a mother to do?

Lifting one eyebrow, Mariana said. “He’s nineteen? You didn’t think she would flip out?”

“You’re not flipping out.”

“Oh, chipmunk. You have no idea.”

The space between Ellie’s shoulders and neck ached. Just a few minutes ago, when she’d walked over here with Dylan, his hand in hers, Ellie had felt light and open with happiness. She had imagined introducing him and then taking him over to the slide, where she’d make out with him at the top, not caring if anyone—even her mother!—could see. Dylan was a good kisser, an
excellent
one, no limp-noodle tongue, no sloppy dog licks. She’d kissed only two boys before, and both of them had been her age. Dylan was different. He was a man, and he made Ellie
feel
something different. When he’d kissed her inside the bar, he’d had . . . expectations. Not that he’d asked her to meet them. Dylan wouldn’t ask that. Not yet. But that expectation had lit something inside her, something that felt liquid and quaked nervously in a place she could identify only late at night, when she thought about doing more with him. If she kept dating him, she’d sleep with him. She would. She wasn’t even sure she was ready to, but what did that matter? Ellie did lots of things she wasn’t ready to do. She hadn’t been ready for calculus but she had the second-best grade in class. She hadn’t been ready in swim class to go off the diving board, but when she had—free-falling through thin air—she’d felt a freedom she’d never felt before. She’d joined the dive team the next day, the water polo team the next week. Sex would probably be just like that.

Hopefully.

Dylan leaned sideways so that his upper arm brushed her shoulder. She felt braver then, under Mariana’s gaze. “I’ll be home by eleven.” Her curfew was ten, and she knew Mariana knew it.

Her aunt’s mouth opened once and then closed. She gave a nod and then made that angry face that meant she was sad.

That face scared Ellie more than anything else had so far. She held her breath for a second too long and then felt light-headed. “Please,” she said. “Go get Mom. I’ll be fine.”

Mariana scanned her face, then turned and ran after Nora.

Ellie took Dylan’s hand. Overhead, dark clouds gathered, rolling over Mount Tam like she’d summoned them with her will.

She stayed in place, watching Mariana catch Mom by the shoulders. Their hands flew, four arms rapidly arguing about something—about
her
.
Or about something worse?

Dylan said, “Come on. Let’s go fight evil.”

Ellie tightened her grip on his fingers and took a deep breath of the wet air. “Well. When you put it that way . . .”

N
ora waited on the couch. She’d thought about calling her friend Lily to see if she was free, if she’d come over and knit with her. But she wouldn’t be able to explain why she was like this, why she was so desperately jangled, why she must seem like she was seconds from flying apart.

She’d given up pretending to read an hour ago. She’d picked up her notebook and pencil and had doodled under her list of things to do tomorrow (check drain, buy shampoo, recover completely). She found the doodle becoming words: sex, love, flirt, man, boy.

HOW TO FLIRT

People will tell you it’s about how you touch your lower lip, how you pull your hair forward or push it over your shoulder. Some say flirting is how you touch his arm, how you laugh at what he says, how you’re just a little standoffish until the
moment you’re not. But flirting has very little to do with the body. It’s about your hearing, and your sight. It’s about watching his face as he talks, thinking about what he says, and asking him the one question he wanted someone—anyone—to ask. It’s not hard. It should never be difficult. If it is, you’re trying it with the wrong person. Find someone prettier, or uglier, or more interesting, or less so. Throw your best joke at them and see if they laugh. Picture them crying with laughter and then make it your goal to see it happen. Flirting is simple: it’s connecting with one other person directly, deliberately, as the rest of the world spins on, unnoticed.

She should have known about Dylan. Before. Nora stared into the fireplace. She didn’t know how long she’d been sitting there, and after a while, she didn’t care. Hours after the rains had begun in earnest, the storm blowing up the way she wanted it to, Nora finally heard Ellie’s key in the iron security door.

“It’s past midnight,” said Nora, proud of how even her voice remained. “It’s pouring out there.” When Mariana had confessed to telling Ellie the fact that something was wrong with Nora (and nothing else, she swore, nothing else), Nora had insisted Mariana leave, cross the bridge and go home. “I was wrong. This is something I have to do by myself.”

“But we were going to tell her together.” Mariana had looked desperately hurt. “You shouldn’t have to—not without me—”

Nora had been furious with her sister but had no solid ground on which to stand. That made it so much worse. She
should
have told Ellie a month ago. Two months ago. The minute the first diagnosis came in from Dr. Pretty Susie.

Now, looking at her daughter’s perfectly still face, the face she knew better than her own, better even than Mariana’s, Nora said, “Come sit with me?”

“Mmm.”

Was this what the rest of her daughter’s teen years would be like? Tissue paper–thin veiled hostility masked by icy politeness? A hotel concierge who hates you but has to wish you good evening in order to get a tip?

“Come here.” Nora pulled her feet up onto the couch. In the old days, Ellie would have laughed and hurled herself at the middle cushion.

“Tired.” Ellie put her hand on the banister.

“You’ve never broken curfew before.”

“Well.” Ellie kept her eyes straight ahead, focused on the stairs in front of her. “Not that you knew of, anyway.”

“Excuse me?”

“You heard me.”

“You’ve been sneaking out?” The idea of it ached—another nail in the signboard that advertised her subpar mothering ability.

“When I feel like it.”

She didn’t believe it. “Ellie, come on.” It wasn’t fair, this part. Nora should be telling her truthfully what the future would hold. Nora should be comforting her daughter. No one knew how to dry Ellie’s tears better. No one knew how to pet her until she fell into sleep, rubbing her shoulders in small round circles. It had worked from the first moment she’d laid baby Ellie in the hospital bed next to her, and it worked now. Even on really rough days—the ones when Nora couldn’t say one damn word right to Ellie, the days of slammed doors and exasperated eye rolls and sighs so heavy they required handcarts to remove—if she went into Ellie’s room after her light was out and rubbed her daughter’s shoulders in those small circles, she would hear Ellie slip into heavier breathing, unable to hold any grudge all night.

It was the best sound in the whole world.

Right now, though, Ellie felt so far away. Miles, not just fifteen paces. She was three steps up the staircase. Ten to go. Ellie stared straight ahead, her face paper blank. “Anything else?”

It was childish, and god knew Nora should be trying her
hardest to be the parent here. But she couldn’t help asking, “You don’t want to know?”

Eyes still resolutely forward. “Know what?”

“Mariana told me she started—”

“No. I don’t want to know. Keep your private life private.”

And stay out of mine
. Even unspoken, the words were loud and clear. “Honey, this can’t be private.”

“Just don’t have
twins
—can I at least ask you that much?”

Nora spluttered, “What?”

“I know you’re pregnant. Harrison’s baby. Or babies. Whatever.”

“Ellie!”

Her daughter still stared straight ahead. Nora could only see the side of her jaw.

“Harrison’s a good guy. If you want to get married, that’s fine by me. Don’t make me be a flower girl or anything, but . . .”

Nora could hear in her daughter’s tone, in the rigid set of her corded neck, that nothing was fine, nothing at all. But the truth was so much worse.

“I’m not pregnant. I’m sorry you thought I was. The truth is—”

“No!”

“We have to talk.”

“Whatever it is”—Ellie put one foot on the step ahead and dragged herself up, as if she’d gained a hundred pounds in the previous thirty seconds—“I don’t want to hear it. I don’t care.”

The blow was effective, cruel in its sharpness and thrust.
“Stop.”
It was her mom voice, the one she’d never had to use that often with Ellie. It was the “wait for the light, don’t run at the pool, watch out for that car” voice. Maybe in the future they were going to be that mother-daughter duo who couldn’t stand each other, the kind she and Ellie had always laughed about in Target, the ones who bickered viciously over what kind of dorm-room throw pillow to buy, as if tassels or cords made any kind of real difference at college.

Then the tips of Nora’s fingers ached as the realization surged through her blood again.

They weren’t going to be that duo.

They had, what, two or three more years of this teenage discomfort? She wouldn’t be around long enough to see it out, to see her daughter magically like her again, the way her friends told her she would, the friends who’d been through this teen-girl hell. Nora would be lucky if Ellie deigned to wheel her outdoors on a Sunday afternoon at whatever care home she landed in.

Anger ran her over then, like she’d once done to a possum on Highway 120. A solid
thunk
and the car rattled as if it would come apart. The thud was anger not just at the disease, not just at the fact that she had no idea what was going to happen to her, mentally or physically, but at the child in front of her who didn’t seem to give a crap about
anything
.

“I’m dying,” Nora said.

Ellie didn’t even blink. “I don’t want to talk about it.”

It was the last thing Nora had expected. A scream, a wail, maybe sobs—those she would have been able to handle. Collapsing to the staircase, falling down it, she could have understood that. “Well. We have to.”

Ellie shook her head. “I’m just super-tired.”

“Are you kidding me? I tell you I’m dying, and you need your beauty sleep?” The word “dying,” the one she thought would stop her heart the very second she said it out loud to her daughter, came easily. Gleefully. “Dying,” she said again.

“We can talk tomorrow.”

“You have school tomorrow.”

“That reminds me, I have a test in physics.” Ellie’s nose went higher, something she always did when she refused to listen.

Nora wanted to threaten her with something, anything.
Turn out your light. It’s after midnight. No studying. You blew it, going out with that boy instead of coming home. You should have been home talking to me. You’re grounded for the rest of your life. No, for the rest of my life.

But there was nothing she could say. It was selfish, and truly, if she could have spared her daughter ever knowing, she would have. She’d fantasized about suicide, leaving Ellie behind without a conversation, a note on the counter the only clue.
I love you. I’m sorry
. Then she would die (pills? gun? where? how? what was the kindest, easiest method?) without ever having to talk to her daughter about it.

Nothing was right, nothing at all. The anger left her in a rush, leaving a burned-out husk seated on the couch she’d picked out by herself after Paul left. “Okay, sugar. Good night.”

Okay, sugar. Good night.
How many nights had she said that? She could get out a calendar and add up the numbers, get an approximation of the total amount. What Nora couldn’t do was estimate the number of times she had left to say it to her daughter. After she was gone, who would wish her girl sweet dreams? Because Paul—it could never be Paul. Even if Paul wanted to take care of his daughter, he’d fail. The one summer Ellie had gone to stay with them—
once—
Ellie had been back inside a week. Paul had left her at home, twice, while the rest of the family went to dinner and a movie. He’d blamed his wife, that she felt threatened by Ellie. But Nora knew—and Paul knew—it was him. He’d never asked his daughter back, just saw her when he came through town on business, never more than an hour at a time. When he’d left his first family, he’d left them for good. Paul couldn’t have Ellie. He wouldn’t want her, and that was utterly heartbreaking in and of itself. It would have to be Mariana. Nora’s brain stalled, caught in the pain, still watching her daughter standing—seemingly stuck—halfway up, halfway down the stairs.

Wouldn’t it have to be Mariana?

Ellie didn’t look at Nora. Her chin just went higher in the air. “What is it, the thing you have?”

If Nora told her, Ellie would google it in her room. She would learn that EOAD ended badly. Worse than that, she’d learn that
she herself had a fifty percent chance of having it. Nora couldn’t say the words, not with her daughter halfway up the steps.

But she couldn’t
not
answer. That would be the cruelest thing of all.

So she said it. “It’s called early-onset Alzheimer’s.”

Ellie gave a terse nod and then continued up the stairs, her spine ramrod straight.

Her strength was what terrified Nora the most.

She drank the glass of wine she hadn’t let herself have while she’d been waiting for Ellie to get home from god knew where. She sipped it slowly, the unshed tears a solid mass of pain behind her eyes.

A careful, deliberate fifteen minutes later, she went upstairs. She knocked on Ellie’s door once, gently, before opening it.

The light was off in her daughter’s room, a faint white glow coming from where the covers were bunched around Ellie’s face.

Ellie dropped the phone, and then Nora could see nothing but her daughter’s huge green eyes, as gorgeous as they’d been the day they’d handed her baby to her in the hospital.

“Mama,” she whispered.

Nora pulled back the covers and slid in. Then she held her baby as the storm passed overhead.