Splinters of Light (17 page)

EXCERPT,
WHEN ELLIE WAS LITTLE: OUR LIFE IN HOLIDAYS,
PUBLISHED 2011 BY NORA GLASS

Fourth of July

When Ellie was little, her favorite thing was fireworks.

It was to be expected, since Paul was the biggest fan of fireworks there ever was. He loved the noise, the light, the flash, the
grandeur
of the presentations. He was never good at shooting them off himself—he got nervous even lighting sparklers—and I think it was because they were so important to him. Besides, he always wanted to be in the middle of the action, to be directly underneath as they exploded overhead,
not in charge of the not-very-important small arms that popped and sparked on surface streets.

The first big show we ever took Ellie to was in Sausalito, on the water. She wasn’t even a year old yet, and I’d argued that it would frighten her. Most children were terrified of fireworks. I’d read this in a magazine. (Everything I read I spouted at Paul with the surety that motherhood gave me. All mothers are like this. Even if they act like they’re not sure what they’re doing—they are. They’re one hundred percent sure they’re right and that the other person is wrong. This would be good for new fathers to note.)

My husband ceded most decisions to me. I was the one who decided on cloth diapers even though we couldn’t afford a service and I had to rinse them in the toilet, gagging every time. I decided how to swaddle her, and god help Paul when he didn’t do it tight enough. I knew what every look on her face meant (even when I didn’t), and confidently, I told him, “That’s gas,” or “She’s hungry,” or “She won’t like fireworks.”

But he insisted on this one. “We’re doing this. We’re going tonight. By we, I mean Ellie and me. You can come if you want to, but we’re going.” It was so unlike him to press his hand that way that I gave in. I can confess it now though I’m still ashamed of it—I wanted to be right. I wanted Ellie to scream. I wanted her face to go plum with howls of fear. I wanted to comfort her and I wanted Paul to be wrong and sorry about it. (Don’t judge. I hadn’t slept in eleven months.)

The crowd was terrible. We drove as far as we could get, but the traffic was terrible and we had to park a mile away from the shore. We followed the hordes of people on foot ahead of us in the dusk. I rehearsed how right I would be later and cheerfully carried the bag that held a bottle of wine and half a pizza.

Night fell. We sat on the salt-eroded grass at the water’s edge and watched the bay expectantly. Far, far away, in San Francisco, the first show started. Muffled thumps traveled
over the water. I watched Ellie expectantly. She sat up. In the baby backpack on Paul’s back, her eyes focused on the blips of lighted color. She looked startled, just as I’d known she would.

Then overhead, our Marin show started. Rockets exploded. Gunfire thumped my chest and I worried that the percussion could damage Ellie’s tiny internal organs. I was about to insist we leave—about to grab her out of the backpack and run, never admitting what I’d just realized for the first time, that I was the one terrified of fireworks—when Ellie burst out laughing.

She’d been a quiet baby up till then. Her chortles at home were low and satisfied but never loud.

This was different. She howled with laughter. Other families looked at us and laughed at her joy. Every time a mortar went off, shaking us with impact, she laughed from deep in her belly. She laughed so hard that the tears streaming from her eyes jiggled on the way down her fat face. At one point, she fell over sideways in the baby backpack. “Is she crying now?” he asked, suddenly worried he’d been wrong, that he’d scarred her for life.

I could have lied—her laughter almost sounded like crying then. But it wasn’t. It wasn’t hysterical or out of control. Ellie was simply laughing in joy, as hard as she could, hiccuping between giggles, and I had honestly never seen anything as beautiful or as funny in all my life.

“No. She’s perfect.”

Our tiny family turned our faces up to the explosions bursting in air. Ellie hiccuped and laughed, and we laughed with her. We watched, the three of us delirious, as happy as the men whose job it was to set the sparks to the fuses.

“O
kay.” Dylan ducked his head and pushed back the heavy brown lock that always flopped over his right eye. “You said you wanted to see a dive. This place is a
fuckin
’ dive.”

Merchants Tavern, in downtown Oakland, was the type of place Ellie would never have set foot in six months ago. Even if she’d been with someone cool—like her aunt or something—even if she’d been dared to go inside to use the restroom, she would have declined, not caring if she looked chicken.

But things had changed (so much had changed, with Mom and school and college coming up), and Ellie was a lot older now. This gorgeous guy
liked
her. Not only was he her friend, but he thought she was hot. It made it way easier to go with him into the bar.

Inside, the space was long and narrow, dark and humid. Men with high round bellies pressed tight against the wood, not even looking up when the door slammed behind them. In their ball caps and dingy sweatshirts, they looked as if perhaps they’d grown there, tired fungi growing straight out of the barstools.

“Back here.” Dylan took her hand and led her around three pinball machines, past the open door of the smallest, dirtiest bathroom she’d ever seen. It was so small the sink was stuck in the small hallway as an afterthought. She just wouldn’t drink much. No matter how bad she had to pee, she wouldn’t be using that. The whole bar smelled like piss, anyway—the bathroom was obviously just a suggestion.

To the right, the space opened up into a wider, taller room. The walls were covered in graffiti, from the floors to the beams along the ceiling. It smelled of cold dirt as well as urine. The air itself felt muddy and sticky. Without thinking, Ellie leaned against the wall while Dylan ordered them drinks. She had to peel the shoulder of her shirt away when they moved.

She coughed. Almost every person in the bar had a cigarette hanging from their lips, dangling from their fingertips, or resting in an ashtray on the bar. “I thought you couldn’t smoke indoors in Oakland.”
Or in all of California.

Dylan pointed at the glass elephant next to the tip bell. “If you smoke, you chip in. That’s how they pay off the fines.”

Ellie frowned. “You’d think that with enough violations, they’d eventually shut the place down.”

“Nah,” Dylan said. He turned and handed her something that looked way more fancy than a simple beer. It was clear, and it was served in the kind of glass her mother served at her book club when it was at their house.

“What’s this?”

“Martini.”

She took a sip. It
burned
. The burn crawled up into her nose and singed the tip of it. She wanted to swear, or spit it out, or both. But she wasn’t a baby, so she didn’t. She steeled her face to remain as still as possible and tossed back another swallow. She blinked once, hard enough to clear her eyes of the tears that wanted to rise. “I like it.” Her voice came out almost normal.

Dylan grinned and leaned his shoulder against hers briefly.
“Knew you would. Come back this way.” He smelled good, like mint.

The big room held a shabby stage that looked as if it was held together with plywood and black duct tape. Two pool tables stood in puddles of dirty yellow light that dripped from ancient beer signs overhead. The guys playing seemed to be making the old tables work in their favor, taking their shots so the raised pieces of torn felt played into their bank shots.

“Maybe we’ll play a game,” said Dylan.

“Totally,” said Ellie, lifting her chin. That was just about the last thing she wanted to do.

Dylan introduced her to a younger group at the second table. Ian, Holly, Vinyl, and Toast. The last two were his roommates, and she’d met them briefly at the cop-bar gig. She’d been sober that night, terrified of how she was going to get back to Tiburon—her mother had thought she was watching movies with Vani that night, but she’d still had to get home before curfew.

Tonight, though, she hadn’t told her mother a damn thing before leaving. They’d had a fight, a huge one. That morning, her mother had given her money and asked her to pick up four chicken breasts on the way home from Vani’s house later. She’d said she wanted to barbecue chicken and have Harrison over and watch the fireworks down in the marina from the backyard.

Chicken. Her mother had said chicken.

When Ellie’d brought the chicken into the kitchen, her mother had
lost
it. She’d wanted to know where the pork chops were. She’d been very clear, she articulated with her teeth visibly gritted, that she wanted pork. Pork chops with applesauce.

But her mother had asked for chicken. Ellie had even
clarified
—breast, not thigh—but apparently having pork chops was, like, the most important thing in the whole universe because Mom had slammed a bowl full of some kind of spice mixture into the sink. The bowl, a blue one with a yellow rim that Ellie knew her mother loved, had cracked when it hit the porcelain. A
small dust devil of spice had risen into the air, and her mother had turned toward Ellie, a storm of rage clouding her expression, making her into someone else, someone with Mom’s hair but not her face.

Ellie had stumbled backward, smacking her hip on a chair. “You said chicken,” she’d insisted.

“Pork!”

“Remember?” Ellie started. “I think you forgot, that’s all. I asked if you wanted thighs or—”

Her mother slapped her.

Right across the face.

The sound of it was as loud as the bowl had been when it hit the sink, but thinner. The crack hung in the air, and Ellie—before she could help herself—moved into her protective stance, the one she’d learned from the self-defense class her mother had made her take. She bent her knees slightly, and her hands went up, open, palm out.

The next thing she would do—the terrible thing she almost did—was a nose thrust with the heel of her palm. She was less than a second away from doing it without thinking. And if she had, she would have broken her mother’s nose. If her mother had slapped her twice, she would have been startled into doing the heel-palm-thrust strike automatically—she could
feel
it.

Her mother cried out, but the noise wasn’t a word—it sounded more like a strangled animal stuck in her vocal cords.

Ellie’s breath was caught somewhere in the pit of her stomach and she couldn’t get air. Mom looked at her hands—they’d taken the class together. She knew the strike as well as Ellie did. She knew what Ellie had almost done.

“Mom—”

Her mother turned. She ran from the room, right out the back door. Ellie stood in place, her hands still in front of her, breathing so fast the pepper in the airborne spice blend grabbed at her lungs, choking her.

She’d gone upstairs, back into the game. Breathing hard, she tried to ignore the pain in her cheek. She texted Dylan. He responded almost immediately.
Jack London fireworks? I know a guy with boats. I can come pick you up.

Yes.

Then she’d waited until she heard her mother clattering in the kitchen, tossing the pottery chunks into the trash, running the garbage disposal. While the water ran and cupboard doors slammed, Ellie had simply walked out the front door. She’d stood by the mailbox until Dylan pulled up; then she’d gotten in Dylan’s car. She’d silenced her phone when they hit the on-ramp to the bridge and then tucked it into her back pocket, resolving to not look at it again until she got home. Whenever that was.

Mom had
hit
her. She’d never hit Ellie before, not ever. Not even a swat on the butt, as far as she could remember.

Maybe she’d wanted to. Maybe in the past Ellie had been such a pain in the ass that her mother had wanted to but hadn’t thought she’d get away with it. Maybe her mother was
using
her sickness as a way to get what she wanted. It was a terrible thought. Ellie hated that she’d had it. But once she’d had it, she couldn’t
stop
thinking it. Not that Ellie wouldn’t use the sick card if she had it in her pocket. Hell yes, she would. She’d drop out of high school and write an amazing novel about the pain of life and the glory of love or something. There had been a kid named Walter at her school who had died—actually
died
—of lung cancer, but before he kicked the bucket, he got everything he wanted, up to and including a Camaro. The kid could barely breathe or move, but his Camaro came fitted with a steering wheel with button controls. He got a ticket for going ninety-five on the freeway. He got his wish, and good for him.

At the bar, Dylan had driven onto the sidewalk and parked next to the wall.

“Is this legal?” As soon as the words came out of her mouth, Ellie regretted them. How juvenile could she possibly sound? It
was a miracle she’d swallowed the words she’d almost said:
What about wheelchair access?

Dylan grinned and said, “The bartender doesn’t mind, and OPD’s
way
too busy tonight to fuck with anything as stupid as parking.”

“Right?” she’d said, nodding hard. “Totally.”

And now she was drinking a martini in a bar.

She could tell Toast and Vinyl had obviously been drinking for a while. Both of them were sweating slightly even though the iron-barred windows were open to the wet night air. Holly and Ian were one of those annoying and probably new couples who couldn’t do anything without sticking their tongues down each other’s throats first. “Hi!” They dove into a slobbery kiss before she could respond. “So you live in Marin, huh?” Back into another kiss so wet Ellie wanted to put a bucket at their feet so their drool didn’t rise over her ankle boots.

As a gust of smoke blew past Ellie’s face, she caught her breath, choking on her own saliva. A man spit on the floor behind her. It was the mouth-drippiest place she’d ever been. She turned sideways and spoke quietly to Dylan. “Are you sure we’re not going to get in trouble here?”

“Dude, we’re all underage. Except Holly. She was, like, twenty-one last month. Nobody at this place cares, not if you’ve been here before or if you came in with friends.” He waved at a man sitting on the stairs who was smoking a joint the width of a carrot.

“That old guy keeps staring at me.”

Dylan looked over his shoulder.

“No! Don’t look,” she hissed.

“You mean Jasper? The bald one?”

“Yeah.”

“He’s cool. He’s the one with the boats. Come on. I’ll introduce you.”

Jasper didn’t seem cool—when she shook his hand, his skin
was clammy. But he smiled, and when Dylan asked if he had space on the boats, he said, “Hell yeah, there’s room. Chug that.”

“What?”

When he smiled, Ellie saw he was missing important molars. “Chug your drink so we can go.”

Everyone was watching her by then, so she did. Her eyes teared again.

“Let’s go.”

Dylan bought two huge cups of beer from the bartender and then poured them into the empty Snapple bottles. “Smart, right?”

She didn’t know if she’d call it smart. Smart was stealing the tapers of war, smart was breaking into the metalsmith’s shop while he slept, smart was using her Maker tokens to create a steel box to hold the tapers so they didn’t burn through Addi’s bag when she ran. Smart was getting into your first-choice college and finding enough scholarships online to pay for it all. No, smart was as simple as knowing what your first-choice college
was
. Carrying beer in a Snapple bottle—that was only kind of high school–level smart. But when Dylan grinned and kissed her, his mouth sweet from the Life Savers he kept in his jacket pocket and bitter from the cigarette he held in his left hand, Ellie nodded. “Super-smart,” she said.

As a group, they fought their way through the crowd to the marina, weaving their way through families carrying kids who were already tired of waiting for the night to start. One man had a child on his shoulders and was pushing two more in a baby carriage, and all three of the children were screaming. The man looked like he might join them.

“Wait till the bombs start going off overhead,” said Dylan. “It’ll get worse. Kids hate that shit. Fireworks terrified me when I was little.”

“Not me,” said Ellie. But no one seemed to hear her.

“This way,” Jasper yelled over the mariachi band as he led them past two mediocre jugglers. “Past the boats.”

She’d thought they were going
to
a boat of some sort, so Ellie was surprised when Dylan pointed out the kayaks. “Isn’t this great? Jasper has, like, five of them.”

“I don’t know how to do that,” she said. Her mother had tried to get her out on the water in a kayak, touting the wonders of a night ride through the estuary, but Ellie had always been a little too worried about what could be underneath them. It wasn’t like whales came into the bay and knocked over kayaks, and as far as she knew, sharks weren’t really known for attacking big pieces of plastic in the water, but what if she overturned and fell out? What then? Anything (a crocodile, an alligator, a homeless junkie) could grab her and take her down, especially at night.

“You’ll be fine.”

Ellie felt dizzy with fear. She dug her balled fists deeper into the pockets of her sweatshirt. She wanted to say it again, louder.
I don’t know how to do this.
Just one more thing she didn’t know how to do, how to navigate. But he was already walking down the ramp. So she followed.

Jasper seated her in her own pale blue kayak.

“I don’t know how to do this,” she gasped, but Jasper and the man next to him—a tall redheaded guy wearing a Grateful Dead T-shirt—lifted her boat with her inside it, sliding first the front, then the back end of the kayak off the wooden dock and into the water. The kayak splashed and bobbed and she screamed, a girly noise that she hated. Behind her, the men laughed.

Fuckers.
Fuck them. She wanted to flip them off and paddle away, stealing the kayak, but she didn’t know how to paddle and she’d never managed a good flip-off in her life. Sam and Vani always laughed at her when she accidently threw “I love you” or “Hang loose” instead of getting the bird right up there.

So Ellie just smiled as hard as she could until it felt almost real. Dylan was next to her in his own kayak. “Look. Ellie, check it out.” His face was kind. “It’s going to be okay. I’ll be right next to you. I won’t leave you.”