Splinters of Light (16 page)

A
ddi was getting closer to finding the Dragon Queen’s clutch of eggs. She and Dyl, unknown to his group of Incursers or her group of Healers, had been leaving the game play every night to explore the outer edges of the
Queendom
Hinters.

It was her idea—Dyl hadn’t believed her.
If we walk that way, won’t the game just push us back into play?

The only correct answer to that was,
Can’t hurt to try. We write the stories here
—and by that she meant
she
wrote the stories
—why can’t we tell it that way?
Out there?
The Hinters wouldn’t be mysterious if they knew the terrain. And if they were assigned there later in the game, then they’d be experts already.

When she was with Dyl, Addi was fearless. She leaped, swung, tore, raced, climbed, and jumped. She sailed carelessly off cliffs, landing in low waters with a laugh. She cursed, liking the way the game took her swear words and made them automatically into asterisks and exclamation marks. She even killed sometimes (but only when totally necessary).

When she was with Dylan the boy—no, the man—Ellie was three parts wreck, one much smaller part confidence. When he kissed her, his mouth strong and hot, she kissed him back with abandon, forgetting the brick wall they were leaning against, or if they were in his car, not feeling the emergency brake in the middle of her back. But as soon as his hands moved south, she tensed—every inch his fingers crept under her shirt or into the waistband of her jeans felt like another year of worldliness traversed backward. The first time he’d put his hand inside her underwear, she’d giggled like a freaking baby.

She was almost seventeen.

Mentally, she was good with it. Ready for sex, and specifically, for sex with him: Dylan. The flatness of his wide hands excited her, and she wanted to push his face down her body until she felt something . . . new.

Why, then, did she close like a poppy at sunset when he tugged at various pieces of her clothing? She wanted him to, so it didn’t make sense.

It wasn’t a question she could ask Samantha. Sam was remaining “chaste” for her someday husband. (It didn’t stop her from going down on Randall Watson behind the ceramics classroom, something she and Ellie had argued about. It counted as sex, Ellie said. Sam said no penetration equaled no sex, and they hadn’t spoken for a week after the argument. When they made up, they called it their Clinton fight.) She could ask Vani, who had no problem talking about sex, but Ellie felt the same shuttering of self when she was around Vani, too. She turned young again. Soon she’d sit in the middle of the floor and bang on a xylophone like a two-year-old while the rest of them had amazing grown-up lives.

She wanted to ask her mother.

And she couldn’t. Her mom was sick.

Ellie thought she was supposed to have had wrapped her head around it, but she hadn’t. It didn’t make sense.

Sick was sick. Other people were sick. Mrs. Hill, her fourth-
grade teacher, had gotten thinner until she disappeared and died. The librarian with the angry eyes had ovarian cancer and a seriously bad attitude—she was so mean she’d never die. Her mom didn’t have cancer. The Internet said early-onset Alzheimer’s was bad. Ellie couldn’t google it a second time. She hadn’t told Sam or Vani. She’d tried to tell Dylan twice, but both times she’d tried to type out the words, she’d erased them at the last minute. She didn’t know what to say, and besides, maybe the diagnosis was wrong. Mom had said she was going for more opinions and that she was going to try all the treatments available. She’d said that Ellie could ask her anything she wanted.

Ellie didn’t want to ask her anything. Mom got that look—that awful one—and besides, Ellie was busy. She had finals, and Mr. Lippman was no fucking joke. If she didn’t figure out
The Sound and the Fury
soon, she was doomed. Her SATs had been good, thank god, and she’d listed Smith College to send them to, but she didn’t know if she was supposed to hear back from them or just wait until admissions opened in December. And then there was Dylan. . . .

For the last few weeks since the Mom Catastrophe at the park, Ellie had begged off seeing Dylan in person. Instead, they’d been creating a story in
Queendom
. Inventing it as they went along.

The Hinters were beyond amazing, as if that part of the world had been designed for them. Being with him in-game every night until three or four in the morning sometimes—her mother never checked after she said good night as long as Ellie left her door open—was almost as good as being with him in person. Maybe . . . maybe it was even better, since she didn’t have to decide how far to go with him physically. Online, there were just the boundaries of her screen and their imaginations.

Okay, her imagination. Every night he typed,
Tell me a story.
Then she would write. She told the story as it came to her. Sometimes she held up her hands, staring at them, wondering where the words came from. When she wrote papers for school,
each word weighed seven pounds. But when she was telling stories in-game, the words came easier than breathing. She ran through the game, inventing it, Dylan at her side.

Now Dyl jumped across a river full of thrashing eels and held out his hand to help Addi. His text scrolled across the screen.
I get that last bit, about protection, but she could protect them anywhere, right? Like, she’s the most powerful. Why do you think her eggs are out here, anyway?

Doesn’t it make sense?
she typed back.
She has to hide them somewhere, to escape extinction. She’s dying, and this is her only hope. The last clutch was found by Incursers, and they not only broke each egg, but they roasted the tiny broodlings on spits in the Queen’s Square.

With his sword, Dyl lopped off a branch of a magical Islan tree. Addi picked it up, tucking it into the herb satchel at her waist.
Thanks.

Dyl typed,
I remember that.

Did you take part in it?
She wanted to know if he’d been one of the celebrants that night.

I was . . . otherwise occupied.

Out loud, Ellie said, “Oh, my god!” Her fingers paused before she typed the command to race to the next HectaRock. She got to the top, protecting it so he couldn’t join her.
You had another Queendom girlfriend!

Just for a little while.

Who?

You don’t know her. She doesn’t play anymore.

Why not?

Her husband found out about us.

Ellie’s jaw felt stiff.
Wow.

She was forty-two. With three kids.

Holy crap.

Dyl ran around the HectaRock twice, as if playing ring-around-the-rosy.

You know, if you do that ten times counterclockwise, you find an Easter egg.

Now you’re shitting me.

You’ll never know till you try, will you?

Addi sat with crossed legs on top of the giant rock, watching with great satisfaction as Dyl ran ten times around it. His sword kept striking the back edge of it and falling to the ground with a metallic clatter. He didn’t even have time to type about it—he just kept running.

After eleven circuits, Dyl stopped, taking up his normal avatar swaying motion.
You’re so full of it.

Ellie laughed so loud it echoed against the pale peach walls of her bedroom.
Gotcha.

Oh, man, you’re going to get it, Ellie.

She wriggled farther into the pillows behind her. It was
dissonant and super-hot when he used her real name in the game. Anyone could wander into their field of vision at any point—it was dangerous, this flirting where any member of the Revolution could see them, read their words. Yet no one would. They were alone in their land, the one she wrote and made and owned. Addi jumped so far off the rock it looked like flying for a minute.
I intend to make sure I do,
she typed. Her keystrokes felt bold.
And I’m going to collect interest, too.

Dyl strode to stand in front of Addi. If she pushed her avatar close to him, his body pixelated, fragmenting before it pieced itself back together behind her. She walked through him. Then he walked through her, trying the same thing.

You know what blue balls are?

Ellie laughed again.
They’re bull crap. You’re not going to die.

Feels like I am.

I don’t feel sorry for you.

You wound me, Addi Turbo.

She drew the short blade she carried and parried a thrust in his direction.
No. But I could. We haven’t checked the northwest quadrant of that copse of trees yet. She could have hidden them there.

What do we do if we find them, anyway?

Ellie hadn’t stopped to think that far ahead. But she knew, instantly.
We guard them. With our lives.
Dyl, an Incurser, had one job—to kill dragons and their broodlings. Queen Ulra was failing, and there was no guarantee that after this last clutch of eggs
there would be any more. The next queen might be in an egg, right now.

His reply was instant.
I will guard them with you.

It might cost your life.

Not too high a price, I think, to bring you joy.

Goose bumps rose all over her body.

This really might be love.

Ellie’s mother stuck her head in the door. “I’m going to bed. Need anything?”

“Nope.”

“Thanks for my gift certificate. I love it.”

That morning, Ellie had sent her an Amazon gift certificate for Father’s Day, a riff on an old joke. Years before, when she was eight or nine, Mom had taught her how to ride a bike. Dad had been saying he’d teach her, but then he hadn’t shown up four times in a row. Her mother running behind her while yelling directions hadn’t gone well, and there had been a lot of tears and more than a little road rash, but once Ellie had gotten the hang of it, it had felt like she was soaring. “You’re a better dad than Dad,” she said, and while her mother had looked a little horrified when Ellie had said it, she’d also looked amused. That year, Ellie had given her a Father’s Day gift (gumballs in a glass jar, obviously meant to share), and she’d given her something every year since. The gift card this year was easy—she’d cobbled it together from the amount she’d had leftover from her Christmas gift cards. A couple of clicks, the typed words, “To the best dad ever,” and hit send. She’d heard the ding from the kitchen as it had landed in her mom’s in-box, and she’d felt like an ungrateful child suddenly, something she hadn’t meant to be. She still meant the sentiment. Sure, she’d call her dad later, but chances were he
wouldn’t answer—he rarely did. But Mom was the one she should be talking to, hanging out with, instead of playing
Queendom
, and instead, Ellie had sent her a gift card with money her mom had given her in the first place.

But her mother was still smiling, still looking grateful.

“You’re welcome.”

Ellie should have at least made her a card or something, like the ones she’d loved when Ellie was a kid. It hadn’t mattered if the lettering was crooked or the doilies were mashed; Mom had treated the cards as if they were made of solid gold, carrying them with her all day, admiring them loudly whenever Ellie looked her way.

A pause. Her mother said, “You okay in here?”

The music on the game turned slow and sad—violins again—Addi and Dyl walked across a dark blue desert under the two three-quarter moons. “Yeah, I like it. I get to . . . I get to tell stories.”

Her mother looked interested. “They let you write? In the game itself?”

Ellie nodded and made Addi take a small jump for no reason.

“Does everyone write in it? I don’t remember anyone saying that when I was researching it.”

“Most people don’t, actually.” She gave a quick glance at her mother, who looked too pleased. Great, this was going to start her on a whole
You’re such a good writer, you could write, like me . . .

She didn’t look at the keys but typed as quietly as she could.
My mother . . . I don’t know what . . .

The response was instant.
Isn’t Father’s Day your thing with her? Tell her you love her.

It was a good idea and she was ashamed she hadn’t said it yet. “Love you, Mom.”

Mom swallowed and leaned her cheek against the doorjamb. She looked thinner at the waist—or did she look heavier around the jaw? Ellie felt like she’d never seen her mother before. She was
a stranger, visually. Nora was pretty, Ellie realized with a jolt. Other people might think so, too. It was an odd thought to have.

But then her mother said, “You, too, chipmunk,” and her mother was just her mom again. Normal hair, normal eyes, standing in the normal hallway like normal mothers did when busy helicoptering.

Ellie went back into the game. Dyl was ahead of Addi, swinging his secondary ax at the top of a flower that looked like a collection of fuzzy plates. She wanted to pick the flower, roll its leaves up tight, and put them in her pocket.
Thanks,
she said.

Moms. Everyone has one.

Not everyone. For one long second, Ellie tried to imagine a world without her mother in it.

But she couldn’t. Her brain wouldn’t do it. It was like walking to the edge of her own, real world. The ground shivered and pixelated, her own bed glitched, the pillows behind her juddering as they struggled to remain solid. Ellie knew, if she kept walking that way, that the walls would artifact so wildly she’d fall through them into nothing. It was so much safer to push ctrl-fn-F and make Addi run so fast she passed Dyl, so fast no Incurser could hope to keep up. Her leather boots creaked below her, and the violins sped up into a low bass thudding. Her heart finally eased.

Catch me if you can!

She hoped he could.

T
here were always tests. Always. Something more to come in for. There was always a doctor she hadn’t met with yet, someone else with an amazingly clickable pen who wanted to weigh in on her diagnosis. Someone else with a great idea. And Nora bought it every time, bought into the hope they folded into their charts and tucked into their computers while they pecked at keyboards and stared at computer screens, looking for answers. Sometimes she wondered if they were just googling, doing the same thing she did late at night. She wondered if they were looking for the same thing.

Hope.

Stubbornly, like daffodils planted on freeway medians, hope was what kept springing up over and over again. Hope that they were wrong, hope that something had changed. Sometimes Nora woke with the startling belief that a cure had been found. Somewhere—maybe Sweden, wasn’t that where they were always doing something amazing with medicine?—somewhere far
away, overnight, a young medical professional had stumbled over it, the one thing that would selectively lower levels of amyloid-beta 42 and make all the difference. The one chemical with innumerable syllables that, mixed with the other seventy-two necessary substances, would fix Nora, would bring her back to where she was supposed to be.

Every day, as she jotted notes of things to remember, to do, to keep, one word kept coming up, doodled in the margins, drawn in bold at the bottoms of the pages of her journal: “Hope.”

It was a song. Hope, hope,
hope
.

She had it. It seemed more important than anything else she wrote down, more important than other worthwhile words like “fortitude”
and “courage.” “Resilience” and “strength” were good, too, but none were as necessary as “hope.” She looped the
H
and drew out the last breath of the
E
, over and over.

One late spring morning, while she sat in the backyard watching the hummingbirds swarm the honeysuckle, Nora remembered with sudden clarity her very first diary. It had been small and pink, with a white and yellow spray of jonquils on the front. Her mother had bought it for her ninth birthday. Nora had been thrilled with everything about the locking journal, especially with the tiny brass key that fit so satisfyingly in the book’s strap, opening with an almost soundless click. She wanted to swallow the key to guarantee she wouldn’t lose it. She pictured the key deep inside her belly, safely stored away, safe from Mariana’s curious fingers and eyes.

Mariana, for that birthday, had gotten exactly what she’d asked for—a box of Fashion Plates with their gorgeous colored pencils and snapping plastic pieces that each depicted one-third of a perfect woman’s body. Talons of jealousy pierced Nora’s soul. No doubt Mariana would accidentally crumple the paper and carelessly break off the tips of the pencils. Their mother had warned Mariana when the paper had been stripped off the box, “Remember, if you break these, I can’t afford to get you another set. This is it.”

“I know,” said Mariana, her voice filled with flop-over-and-die joy. She’d clutched the white cardboard box to her chest. “I know, Mama.”

Nora felt the clawing pain of jealousy again. The only things she and Mariana were good at sharing were the bedcovers. At night after they crawled in together, Nora pulled the afghan close, and Mariana used her feet to wind the bottom sheet around them both. There was enough room for both of them. Their hair wound around each other’s and their fingers entwined. Sometimes they thought they had the same dreams. They shared the space, the very air.

Most other things they fought over.

That birthday, Ruthie sat back, looking pleased with how the gifts had been received. “Honey, I’m sorry your diary’s pink. I know you like green better. But you said you wanted it to lock and that’s all they had—I’m still not sure the lock is a good idea.”

“It’s perfect, Mama,” said Nora. “I love it.”

Her mother’s mouth twisted. “But . . . the lock, I’m just not sure . . .”

“You can use the key whenever you want to,” said Nora. She’d never lied harder in her life. The key was
hers
, no one else’s. She’d wear it on a piece of string around her neck until she
died
. She knew it was what her mother needed to hear, though. “You can even write in it, Mama.” She
couldn’t
; only Nora’s newly learned cursive letters would fill the book: all her dreams, her fears. All her hope.

“Oh, sugar,” said her mother happily. “I would never ask to do that, but it’s sweet of you to say.”

Mariana got the look she got when Nora got the bigger piece of cinnamon toast. “I can write in it, too, can’t I?”

“I’m sure your sister won’t mind,” said their mother, already moving toward her bedroom to change for the second half of her split shift. “Share, both of you. Happy birthday, girls.”

Nora slipped the diary under her shirt, the metal lock cold against her stomach.

“You have to share with me,” said Mariana, her voice chilly. “Mama said.”

“She did not.”

“She did. I have to share my Fashion Plates with you, and I don’t want to.”

Nora sensed a power play in the air, a way she could turn this to her advantage. “I
really
want to draw some dresses.” She did.

“I know you do,” said Mariana in satisfaction. “I’ll let you. If you do what I say.”

“But if you promise not to write in my diary, I won’t touch your Fashion Plates.”

Mariana glared suspiciously. “But you want to color.”

Nora made her eyes wide with need. “I
do
. But I won’t, if you leave my journal alone.”

“You’ll never use them once? You won’t sneak in and make a Fashion Plate while I’m in the bathroom or something?”

Nora gave up her thought of being sneaky and getting around the promise. There was nothing—usually—that she didn’t have to share with Mariana. From jeans to hair bands to the rare chocolate bar, everything got used up between them both. Nora was so tired of sharing. The journal—it could be filled with secrets. Secrets that Mariana wouldn’t even know, couldn’t even dream of. Secrets that were hers, Nora’s, alone.

“Deal,” said Nora. “I promise I’ll never use your Fashion Plates, ever.”

Still looking distrustful, Mariana stuck out her hand. “Deal.”

“And you won’t ever look in my diary.” She should stop talking. Nora knew she should. A better plan would have been to pretend she’d never use it, didn’t care about it, but she hadn’t thought of it in time.

“Okay.”

They shook hands, and it felt official. A business deal between the sisters.

It hadn’t worked, of course. Within a week, Ruthie had needed a piece of paper to make the weekly shopping list and had popped the lock in order to rip out a sheet. To Nora’s brokenhearted wail, she’d assured her, “I used a bobby pin to open it. It’ll still lock—don’t worry.”

The fact that the tiny cunning key still worked was beside the point. The safety was gone. Nora wrote in big block letters at the top of every page,
STAY OUT
, but then she found seven diary pages used for Fashion Plates stencils—women with blue eye shadow and incredibly short skirts—shoved under a couch cushion. In a fit of sheer rage, Nora found her mother’s thick black marker, the one that gave off fumes she knew she wasn’t supposed to breathe (thereby making inhalation terrifying and thrilling). She struck out every page in the journal.

If she couldn’t find privacy there, in the locked book, then no one would.

She was hit by remorse the very second she ruined the last page. She should never have done it—she’d ruined everything.

Again.

Nora wiped tears off her cheeks and looked up to find herself in her office.

In her home. She was in her Herman Miller chair, the one that had taken years of paid writing to justify to herself. She looked out the round window in front of the desk, down to the top of Harrison’s kitchen roof.

Hadn’t she just been in the garden? Watching the brilliance of the tiny green hummingbirds as they zoomed blurrily past? She’d been lost in the birthday memory for how long? When had she walked upstairs? Her phone said four o’clock, but she couldn’t remember what it had said the last time she looked.

Her own Moleskine journal was open on the desk in front of her. No lock. Nothing to keep anyone out.

Where am I?

The words were in her handwriting. She didn’t remember writing them. The page wasn’t dated. She’d left herself no clue.

In an online
New Yorker
article she’d found, Oliver Sacks had said, “Though one cannot have direct knowledge of one’s own amnesia, there may be ways to infer it: from the expressions on people’s faces when one has repeated something half a dozen times; when one looks down at one’s coffee cup and finds that it is empty; when one looks at one’s diary and sees entries in one’s own handwriting.”

Carefully, she wrote the date at the top of the next page. June 30. It felt good to write because it was true and verifiable by her online calendar and the fact that it matched the smudged date on her wrist, which rested above the word of the day, “obstreperous” (which had almost too many letters to fit on her skin—the smug
O
almost met the sinuous
S
). Every morning, first thing, she wrote the date along with the day of the week. Every day, she flipped open the pocket-sized
Merriam-Webster
she kept on her bedside table next to the bowl of beach glass and picked a word. She wrote it on her wrist under the date. She tried to pick a word she didn’t usually use in conversation so she wouldn’t accidentally run across it in daily use. She had to
try
to think of the day’s word: “cellulose,” “fulvous,” “prototype.”

Throughout the day, she said the word to herself. Today:
obstreperous
,
obstreperous
.

But Nora didn’t know what to write next in her journal, and she
always
knew what to write next. She couldn’t remember what she’d come up to her office to work on or if she’d even had a plan at all. She’d finished the column on the dementia village in San Luis Obispo. She’d turned it in to Benjamin. She knew that. But for the life of her, she couldn’t remember her next column idea. She popped open the lid of her computer and searched her calendar for Benjamin’s name.

Ah. The piece, due in a day and a half, on mothers who smoked through pregnancy.

That was all it took, really, Nora thought with satisfaction. A careful methodology. With the tools available nowadays, she could orchestrate a way to not forget things. An iPhone reminder app and her Google calendar plus lots of notifications—set minute by minute if that’s what it took—and she wouldn’t put anyone out. It would be fun, actually. It would be a really important game. And that, perhaps, was the best hiding place of all for hope. Hope lived tucked in the base of one question: If Nora played this vicious game against herself, even if she always lost, didn’t it mean (since she was both the player and her own opponent) that she also always won?