Splinters of Light (24 page)

N
ora found herself writing a list of all the ways Mariana had let people down over the years. It was a terrible list, one she’d never show to anyone, and it was one she couldn’t keep herself from writing.

They still hadn’t talked. Her cell phone had stopped ringing, and Mariana had switched to sending e-mails. She sent those dorky Hallmark e-cards, the ones that sang and bounced around the screen. She sent a picture of her and Luke, both of them making faces. She e-mailed a list of ways she sucked (
I’m too loud, too careless, too quick to throw out glass instead of putting it in the recycle bin. I got way drunk at that Christmas party you had five years ago. I forgot to pay the PG&E bill and we only found out when the lights went out
). Each e-mail Nora read melted her anger. Her rage was now just dirty slush, but it was still there. She loved her sister. She loved her daughter. How—and where—did those intersect?

Nora needed to make her own list. She’d always thought they were a perfect circle—all three of them living within the
same diameter. Now she imagined they were a Venn diagram, with her own crooked, broken circle draining, becoming more and more empty as theirs filled with colors she couldn’t compete against.

She took out a yellow sheet of legal paper and a red pen she’d dug out of the bottom drawer of her desk. Normally Nora didn’t use red ink. She didn’t like its accusatory nature. When she was catching her thoughts for her columns, she needed blue or black ink in her Moleskine journal, or even better, her soft, dark pencil.

But for Mariana’s sins, she needed red pen.

Eddie.
The goldfish they’d shared in high school. They’d argued so badly about whose turn it was to feed him that finally their mother—exasperated—had ordered them to divvy the chore. Nora got the even months, February and April. Mariana got the odd ones, January and May. When it was Nora’s month, Eddie got his pinch of food every morning at seven a.m., even on the mornings they didn’t have school. Nora would roll out of bed, feed the fish, and roll back into bed, pressing herself up against Mariana’s warmth. But during odd months, Eddie sometimes got skinny and pale. One November morning, Eddie didn’t move. Nora had thought fish went belly up when they were dead, but it wasn’t the case with Eddie. He’d been in the same position for days—Nora had noticed but thought it was just chance that she’d managed to see him always sleeping in the same spot in the bowl. It wasn’t until one of his fins had broken off and floated next to him in the water that they’d noticed he was all the way dead. Mariana hadn’t fed him in two weeks.

Timothy.
Against Nora’s better judgment, they’d adopted Timothy when they moved into their first college apartment. He was black and small and very, very stupid. They called him Antonio Banderas, because even with all his faults, he was pretty. He stayed inside because if he’d been let out, he would have rolled in front of the first dog he saw, begging to play. One night while
Nora was at work at the college paper (putting out a piece on the Persian Gulf cease-fire), Mariana got wasted with two girlfriends. They drank cheap vodka and smoked a joint and left the window in the hallway open. Timothy, curious as always, jumped on the ledge, fell out the window, and died, proving once and for all that not all cats landed on their feet.

College.
In their last year—only six months before graduation!—Mariana had disappeared with Raúl. She sent Nora postcards from places like Thailand and Bangkok, finally ending up at the ashram in India. Nora didn’t think she’d ever been more angry at her sister. Nora had hauled Mariana to class, sometimes almost physically when she didn’t want to get out of bed, and she’d tutored her (even though Mariana usually did better on the tests than Nora did), and then Mariana had given it all up. For nothing. Raúl had jilted her, Mariana said when she walked back into the apartment without even a phone call of warning, her eyes bright with something that made Nora wonder if Mariana wasn’t in recovery for more than just a broken heart. But she’d been so
furious
with her, for throwing
everything
away, that she hadn’t talked to her, hadn’t said a word when Mariana asked, “How’s tricks?” Nora had left the room without a hug or a kiss of greeting. She’d slammed her bedroom door and locked it behind her.

The next day the doorbell rang. Nora stayed in bed, her door still locked. She didn’t care who’d come by. Mariana could handle whatever it was. Nora was done handling things. A few moments later, Mariana knocked on her bedroom door. Then she banged. Then she started screaming something Nora couldn’t understand, hurling her body against the wood. Nora was still too furious to open it, and it felt good to hear the franticness in Mariana’s voice. How could she have
left
her?

Then the door crashed down. Not open, but
down
. Mariana had rammed her body against the door so hard that it came off its hinges and ripped off the latch, collapsing inward, the door and
Mariana thumping to the ground to the sound of both of their screams.

“She’s dead,” shouted Mariana to Nora. “That was a cop. At the door. He told me. She smashed her car. I yelled for you. I screamed for you! Why didn’t you come
out
? Mom’s dead.”

Every muscle and every cell in Nora’s body froze, turning into sudden ice. She was a floe, adrift. She pulled back the blanket and Mariana crawled in. They spent the next twenty-four hours doing nothing but eating frozen burritos and sleeping wrapped around each other like week-old spaghetti, impossible to pull apart without breaking. They’d left the door where it was on the ground, and when they stood the next day on shaky legs to plan their mother’s funeral, they stepped on and over the door like it was nothing more than a rug.

Antonia.
Mariana’s friend Kim asked her to be her baby’s godmother. What Kim was really looking for was a babysitter who couldn’t say no, which she got, but when Mariana managed to lose Antonia at the zoo one rainy afternoon (the child was safely turned in to lost and found), her godmotherly rights (and the friendship) were revoked.

Every houseplant God ever made.
When Mariana moved into her first San Francisco apartment (the first time they ever lived apart, both of them stubbornly taking leases on tiny spaces that could barely be called studios and were only two blocks apart), Nora bought her a pothos. It was black within a month, which was probably some kind of world record. Next, Nora got her a ficus. That one took six weeks to kill, its brown leaves spiny and brittle on the floor. When Mariana managed to kill six geraniums within three months, Nora gave up and just brought her orchids in bloom from the grocery store (a tip she’d recycled for a column about what to give people with black thumbs). When the blooms fell off and the stalks withered, Mariana quietly threw them out, the space remaining clear until Nora gave her another one.

Every feeling ever.
This wasn’t fair. Nora’s fingers cramped. She scratched out the words three times and rewrote them again a fourth. When Nora had a strong emotion, Mariana evaporated like mist. Tears could chase Mariana out of a room faster than pepper spray. How she made a business of catering to thoughts, feelings, the inner workings of human beings all around the globe, Nora could barely fathom. It wasn’t fair.

But none of this was fair. None of it. It wasn’t fair that she was going to have to leave her daughter to the care of someone who couldn’t take care of a geranium. (The fact that it wasn’t fair that she’d have to leave her daughter—period, full stop—wasn’t something Nora could face yet, and she still didn’t know when she’d be able to. It wasn’t something to write down. Ever.)

Nora folded the yellow sheet double, then triple, until it wouldn’t bend any more. She stuck it into her pocket and then looked out the window. Harrison was reading under the willow in that old ripped hammock he liked so much. It was Thursday, his light day. The heat had broken, and it was seventy-five degrees out there. Perfect for a nap outside. On Thursdays she usually tried to finish her writing early, too, so both of them could work in their gardens, calling back and forth to each other before sharing their glass of wine.

She knew Harrison was upset with her, upset that they were still sneaking around, upset that she wasn’t taking him seriously when he said he wanted to help. At some point, he’d want more. Or worse, he’d want to give her more while she could only give him less and less.

She’d never do that to him. Besides, she told herself, what guy didn’t want a casual, easy hookup every once in a while? Nora would sneak over, they’d have amazing, mind-blowing sex, and then she’d sneak back before Ellie got home from wherever she was for the night. There was no harm in it.

Nora almost believed it herself.

He was coming on their camping trip, like he always did.
Nora realized she had no idea how to spend that time with him. On previous trips, he’d always been cast in the role of friend. She wasn’t sure he’d allow himself to be placed there again.

Her hands were cold even though the sun shone through the window. She held up the piece of paper that held her sister’s faults and tore it into tiny pieces. She couldn’t think this way about Mariana. Not anymore. Nora had to get over it, get over the fact that Mariana had screwed up by not bringing Ellie home that night. There would be a night when Ellie would have no home to come to.

Ellie had to have someone to look after her. Paul, since that terrible conversation she’d had with him, a phone call in which he accused her of making up her illness just to get some time off from being a mom, wasn’t in the running. Even if she’d wanted him to be (which she didn’t), he wasn’t. When he’d left them, he’d left them so thoroughly there was no door leading back in, no cracked window for him to squeeze through. The occasional ice cream cone wasn’t enough and Paul would never want to be more than that to Ellie; he’d made that
perfectly
clear on the phone. And even though he hadn’t been a real father to Ellie since she was three, Nora had wanted to kill him again, for the first time in many, many years. It was one thing to leave your little girl in the care of her mother. It was another entirely to essentially orphan her when that mother was dying. Unforgivable.

Some high school senior girls were old enough to take care of themselves. Nora saw them at Ellie’s water polo matches. They drove like adults; they reasoned as full-grown women. Some of the girls in Ellie’s class had been working since the age of fourteen. Those girls’ mothers were housecleaners who had started working at the same age. They were in the same high school in Tiburon but they were part of a different world. They didn’t socialize with Ellie’s group, the richer, whiter group. Nora was ashamed that Ellie’s core group of friends was made up of kids whose parents made enough to lease a new car every year, but what could she do?
Go
make friends with the poorer students.
She couldn’t say that. But if Ellie had counted among her confidantes girls who worked nights and weekends, girls who had to weigh paying for a movie with buying a meal that would otherwise be skipped, wouldn’t that in turn make Ellie more grateful for what she had?

The yellow scraps of paper littered her desktop like judgmental confetti. She typed her sister’s name into Google and scanned the first results. “Life changing. Powerful. Transformative. An up-and-comer to watch. You need this app. Redemptive.”

Her sister was redemptive?

Of course she was.

How many times had she redeemed a day for Nora in their lives? How many times had the only good, only real thing been the moment Nora saw her sister? Until Ellie, Mariana was what Nora knew of love. Falling in love with Paul had been wonderful and good and it had brought her her daughter, and when he’d divorced her, he’d left a massive, moon-sized crater. She’d never seen the crash coming, and the dust of it had darkened the skies for a long time.

But dust settled. Craters got filled.

The only thing she wouldn’t be able to recover from was losing Mariana, the only true love of her life. Or Ellie, who was her very soul.

She had to face this. Head on. With truth, or at least as much of it as she could manage.

Nora was going to die.

Worse than that (funny, that there was a worse), Nora couldn’t protect Ellie from everything—or really, from anything. She couldn’t protect her from Mariana’s carelessness. She couldn’t even protect her from herself, not anymore.

Nora picked up her cell phone. She hit speed dial number one.

Mariana answered, and her voice was so happy when she said, “Nora?” that it made her burst into tears. “I’m sorry,” Nora said.

“You
should
be,” said Mariana. “You know I hate it when you cry.”

For the next hour, they said words that would have made sense to no one else, babbling at the same time, a twinspeak made of regular, common words tumbling over one another like rocks, like beach glass, like love. Each word meant the same thing:
I need you.
Each response meant the same thing:
I’m here.

P
acking for the Labor Day camping trip to Yosemite had been easier in years past. It had been simpler. Tent, sleeping bag, water bottles, some food in a brown paper bag, hibachi and long fork to hold first the hot dog, then the marshmallows. That was about it. Ellie always packed her own clothes and picked out the games. Mariana always brought nothing but a backpack for her clothes and usually a bottle of Scotch. Harrison had come on the trip for years, and he was good for bringing handy things Nora never thought of as essentials: Kosher salt and vermouth and toothpicks. This year, probably, Luke would come and with him bring his box of tools, which always came in handy. A heavy hammer could do a lot for a tent stake.

Nora used to enjoy packing for the trip. Now it felt epic, like her own personal video game. For every item she found and corralled into a box, she should get a
ding
or a
tweet
or a
bong
in reward. Remember the citronella candle?
Ding-ding-ding!
Pack the toasting fork,
zipzipzipBAM.
She had a camping packing list that
was a full two pages, printed in ten-point type. There were categories and subcategories, moved and augmented as the years had passed and become more complicated. She had a kitchen box and a washing-up box. A bathroom box (tampons, wet wipes, toilet paper, shovel) and a sleeping box (eyeshades for the early sun, earplugs for the silly but now unshakable spider threat). Nora had a plastic storage bin full of quarter-sized spice jars. Every spice she had in her home kitchen was also available at her camp kitchen. Her propane stove had three—not two—burners. She could make the pancakes, heat the syrup, and boil the cowboy coffee at the same time.

Nora had not only a patch kit for the inflatable beds, but also an extra bed just in case one tore so badly a repair wouldn’t work. As she shoved the air pump into the bin she kept the tent supplies in, Nora remembered that the first night in the backyard in Tiburon, they hadn’t even put a tarp under the tent. They’d slept in their sleeping bags with only the thin ripstop fabric between them and the ground below.

Now they had beds in the wilderness, beds with their own fitted sheets. She had three down duvets—one for each of them, Mariana, Ellie, and her—that she used only for camping.

It was ridiculous, Nora knew. But she loved her list, as complex as it was (“double-check cumin level, don’t forget six extra quart-sized ziplock bags, enough ChapStick?”). She drew comfort from printing it out every year before their Labor Day trip. Crossing each item off it made the muscles in her neck release.

This year . . . Well, the list felt even better in her hand this year.

Efficient. That’s what she was. She had this down to a science.

Nora stared at the list, trying to figure out what she’d been planning on packing next.

“Mom?”

Nora whirled. She hadn’t heard Ellie getting up from her nap . . . She hadn’t even thought out her afternoon snack. Maybe peanut butter on an apple . . .

But Ellie was so tall, and she wasn’t dragging the Cal sweatshirt behind her—she was wearing it. No, no . . . Nora closed her eyes for a moment and thought. That wasn’t the same binky . . . It couldn’t be. No. This was the sweatshirt they’d bought together at the college bookstore last spring. They’d laughed about it being the same color as that long-ago disintegrated sweatshirt Ellie had loved.

“Mom,” Ellie said again, her voice quieter. “Are you okay?”

“Fine.” Nora brushed at the air in front of her face. “Just packing.”

“You’ve been staring at that piece of paper for, like, ten minutes.”

“No, I haven’t.”

“I was in the living room. Watching you. You didn’t move.” Ellie’s voice was tight.

“I was just thinking, honey.”

“You got stuck. Again.” Ellie’s voice was a mixture of concern and faint but undeniable disappointment. It embarrassed Nora as much as if she’d caught a whiff of her own body odor.

“Maybe,” said Nora. “Maybe I did just for a second.” It was a game of freeze-tag, only Nora was the only one tagged. In this round, anyway. She tried to make her eyes bright, tried smiling with a twinkle. “What’s up, chipmunk?” Ellie still wanted permission to get tested. They’d had the fight twice already. For their second round, Ellie hadn’t talked to her for two days. That was fine. That was easy. Denying her that permission with every fiber of her body, with every neuron of her still-functional mind, was as simple as breathing. Until she checked out completely, Nora would keep refusing it. She steeled herself to hear the question again.

“I’m going to sleep with Dylan.”

Nora felt her bare toes curl slightly into the cool tile and understood, for the first time, the phrase “caught flat-footed.” “Oh,” she managed. “When? On our camping trip?”

“Ew! Gross. No.”

Relief swamped her. There was no way in hell Nora would have been able to take listening to her daughter make sex sounds two thin pieces of tent material away from her. “He’s got his own tent.”

“Yeah. I told you that.”

“You’ll sleep in my tent, though?” Nora couldn’t help asking hopefully, even though Ellie’d had her own little two-man tent for years now.

“No.”

“What are you saying, then?”

Ellie yanked open the junk drawer and rummaged through it. Then she slammed it closed. “I don’t know.”

Did she want approval? Nora could try to understand it, but she couldn’t approbate. “What are you looking for from me?”

“Why? Would you even know where to find it?”

The stark, unclothed vitriol of Ellie’s words turned the hope stubbornly lodged in Nora’s heart into anger. Her blood felt heavy with it. She couldn’t contain her words, and she didn’t think she should. “Are you this mean to me because you’re scared? Or is it that you just don’t like me? Because what I’m getting from you is that you think I’m a fucking terrible person.” She leaned back against the counter and crossed her arms. She rarely swore, and the word felt heavy and appropriate. She didn’t want to take it back.

Ellie’s eyes widened.

Nora went on. “And honestly? I’m sick and tired of it. I’ve given you a pretty generous pass because I’m sick and I know the world is a terrifying place to consider without your mother. I’ve been there, believe it or not. But I’m here now. Packing this goddamn box for this goddamn camping trip that you’re not acting happy about going on at
all
, and I’d really like to get a signal from you as to how long I have to put up with your attitude.”

Ellie looked as shocked as the moment Nora had hit her. Her mouth opened, but no sound came out. Ellie’s face was exactly
the same as it had been that moment—as pale as paper. Nora could almost see the pink stripes she’d left across her daughter’s face, as if she’d hit her a second time. Had she truly apologized? Had she? “Ellie. I’m so sorry I hit you that day. God, I’m so sorry, baby.”

“Mom.”
It came out as a gasp.

“I’m so sorry.”

“You’ve said that.”

Nora pressed her hands to her cheeks. She didn’t remember. “I have?”

“When Aunt Mariana brought me home. And two weeks after that. Remember?” Ellie’s eyes looked desperate.

Nora couldn’t remember. It wasn’t there. Was there something even worse about the disease, something that hadn’t shown up in her research, something that said heightened emotion made you lose things faster? How could she have forgotten apologizing for physically attacking her daughter?

How could she trust herself?

And how the hell could she be trusted?

“Do you . . . ?” Ellie’s voice was soft now, all traces of anger gone. “Anyway. We’ve done that. I said it was fine. I meant it. I know you didn’t mean to. You told me. Let’s just talk about the other thing, okay?”

Sex.
Of course. “Okay,” Nora said as lightly as she could. “So . . . sex. You’re not looking for my blessing, I take it.”

Ellie tucked in her lips and shook her head.

“No. You’re seventeen in two weeks?” At least she wasn’t lost on dates. Not yet. Today was Thursday. She glanced at the clock. In two hours they’d be on the road, and she still had so much to check off, to make sure got done. Then she looked at the list on the counter. Everything was checked off. Even the cumin.

She didn’t remember checking the spices. God.

“In eleven days.” Nora corrected herself quickly. “In eleven days, you’ll be seventeen. You don’t need my permission. Oh, I
guess technically you do, don’t you? After all, he’s over eighteen and you’re not. Obviously, that’s statutory rape.”

“Mom—”

“If I chose to pursue that. Which I never would.”

Ellie’s slim shoulders dropped a good two inches.

Nora went on. “But why are you telling me, then? Why not just do it and tell me later? Or do it and never tell me? Isn’t that the way kids do it nowadays?” She was thinking out loud, something she caught herself doing more and more lately. “Sex is casual, no big deal.”

Ellie ducked her chin. “It’s a big deal to me, all right?”

“I’m sorry,” said Nora. “Talk to me.”

“No.”

Well, then, why had Ellie brought it up? She just wanted to present it as a fait accompli?

“Okay. You’re going to have sex with Dylan. Do you love him?” Lord Jesus, please, every deity that ever was,
please
don’t let Ellie have already told her, don’t let Nora have forgotten something that important—that would be unbearable, completely unthinkable.

But Ellie’s face softened. No, they hadn’t already had this talk, then. “Yeah.”

“And he loves you.”

Her daughter nodded.

“He told you?”

Ellie nodded again. “How old . . . ?”

Nora waited. She moved her toes again, touching the tile with first her big toe, then the little ones. She couldn’t get stuck if she could feel herself moving, if she kept track of herself.

“How old were you?”

“The first time? Eighteen.”

“Oh.” Ellie’s voice held disappointment. “How about Aunt Mariana?”

“She was earlier. Seventeen when she had her first real
boyfriend.” Mariana had beat her in the race to devirginization. But she’d told her everything, every single detail, sparing nothing, so that Nora could picture the boy’s freckled thighs and the way his penis smelled of Drakkar Noir. They’d laughed for weeks over that, the way he’d put cologne on his balls.

“What was his name?”

Nora poked around in her mind, but it was gone. It was a fair thing to lose. He hadn’t been her boyfriend. “I have no idea. Nice. Very blond. Skateboarder, I think?”

“No,
your
first.”

“Oh. His name was Max. I actually considered marrying him.”

Ellie gave her a flabbergasted look, her hands open at her sides. “Why didn’t you ever tell me this? About him?”

“What, I should have told you I had a pregnancy scare right after graduating?”

“You did?”

“That’s all it was. A scare. But I was a week late, and I was terrified.” Funny, back then she’d thought nothing in life would ever be scarier than the thought of herself with a baby.

“I could have had an older brother or sister!”

“That’s what you get from this story? Nothing about safe sex? Contraceptives?” Nora bit her bottom lip and took a breath. “Do you want to go see Dr. Rimes?” She was the pediatrician Ellie had always gone to, and at seventeen, Ellie was about to age out of her practice. Dr. Rimes, though, adored Ellie and had said she could come to her as long as the insurance company didn’t throw a fit.

Ellie looked down at her fingers and picked green polish from a peeling nail. “I went to Planned Parenthood.”

It hit Nora then. “You’re on the Pill already.”

Ellie nodded.

“How long?”

“Two months,” muttered Ellie, scratching at her nail harder.

Nora covered her hand with her own. Ellie’s skin was cool. So familiar. “Nail polish remover.”

Her daughter jerked her hand back. “I like peeling it.”

Funny, just last night before she went to sleep, Nora had written in her journal; she could barely see the paper in the dark, but she didn’t need to see well. Her hand knew the letters, knew the space of the margins.

Sex is a big deal,
it began.
You have to . . .

No. The point in these notes to Ellie was to be honest. Totally. She scratched it out.

Sex is a big deal. You have to . . .
Sex isn’t as big a deal as everyone makes it out to be. That might surprise you coming from me. I’ve always been the heavy when we have those talks that make you roll your eyes and pretend to gag. “Just wait,” I’ve said. “Save it for when you know it means something.” And I meant that, but what I didn’t say—what I didn’t know how to say—was that it doesn’t matter that much in the long run. The first guy you have sex with likely won’t be the one you end up marrying.

At eighteen, Nora had sex with Max, a nineteen-year-old classical pianist who had the most amazing hands. She’d chosen to lose her virginity to him because he was sweet and handsome, and she thought she would never see him again after that night. She’d failed, though, at being a one-night-stand kind of girl. She and Max had fallen in love and for a little while she’d thought they’d be together forever. It seemed silly now, but it had felt so real then.

Nora balanced the pen in her fingers in the dark. She’d forgotten to teach her own daughter the most important thing about sex—that it could be good. She’d kept their sex talk dry, sterile.
This is a tampon. This is a condom. This is how herpes is
transmitted.
How the hell had that happened? Had she been PTA’d into it? Responsible, professional women didn’t teach their daughters how to have sex for fun. Only irresponsible hippie mothers with too much sexual confidence did that.

God, she’d failed in so many ways, she couldn’t count them anymore.

Ignore what I’ve told you in the past. Have fun. Be safe (I can’t not say that—there’s a strain of gonorrhea nowadays that can’t be killed by antibiotics. I know you know that) and know that it’s your choice. Whatever you decide to do is right. Enjoy yourself when you get to that point in your life.