Splinters of Light (25 page)

Ellie was sixteen. She was going to be having sex with a boy. Naked. With a man. Nora’s immediate reaction to the thought was to feel a protective rage, an anger that started under her fingernails and raced through her blood to her heart. Impossible. Not her daughter, not
her
Ellie. She was too young, so young.

Then Nora took a breath and thought about what she wanted her daughter to know most of all. If she could tell her only one thing.

Slowly, she wrote the words,
When you love, love. It’s all that matters.

Now, in the kitchen, Nora rummaged in the cabinet. Somewhere in here, next to the defunct phone book that she kept around just in case . . . “I have some nail polish remover right here. It’s bad for your cuticles to do that.”

“It’s fine, Mom.”

“Your nails will break.”

“Not the end of the world.”

They weren’t talking about the nail polish remover.

“I’m sorry,” said Nora.
For everything.

Ellie said, “I know.” She accepted the nail polish remover Nora thrust at her.

Then, awkwardly, Nora held out the beach glass she’d put in her pocket that morning. It had been a simple Coke bottle at one time, probably, but now it was warm amber, clear on one side, occluded on the other. Ellie didn’t say anything, but she took it. Then, in a move that took Nora’s breath away, Ellie leaned forward and kissed Nora’s forehead.

It was just the way Nora had always kissed Ellie.

Just exactly the way.

L
uke was made for camping. Mariana watched him drive another tent stake into the ground with his boot—one solid backward heel thrust. He looked like the kind of man who could build a cabin from trees he knocked down himself with his two bare hands.

He looked up and grinned at her. “This a good place for it, baby?”

“Great.”

Meanwhile, Ellie and Dylan were arguing. It was kind of adorable, actually. Ellie didn’t know how to argue with a boy—a man—she liked yet. She’d learn. For now she was still stuck in the passive-aggressive mode of sweetly suggesting ideas. “Is that maybe a little too close to their tent?” What she meant was,
If we go in your tent to fool around, I don’t want them hearing us.

“Nah, this is fine. It’s super-flat here,” Dylan said obliviously.

“Does the fly maybe go the other way? With the point to the back?”

Dylan kept doing it his way, ignoring Ellie.

Maybe he was good for her.

Mariana wondered if they’d already had sex. She would have asked Nora, but . . . And she would have asked Ellie, but every time she’d seen her in the last week or two, Dylan had been tagging along behind her like an eager groupie. Good. At least Ellie wasn’t the one tagging along behind a guitar player, the way Mariana had done so many times. That never went well.

She helped Luke unfold the third camping table. Nora was busy unpacking the kitchen supplies, and Harrison had taken one of the cars to go buy the specially treated firewood the campground required them to use.

“We shouldn’t have come.”

“It’ll be fine,” said Luke, but he wasn’t listening to her. She followed his gaze.

Nora stood still, looking down into the blue plastic bin that held the camp cutlery and plates, her body rigid, thrumming with contained energy, her face slack. Rigid tension and abject looseness held in one body, a space too small for both.

Mariana felt fear knife its way through her guts.

“Shit,” Mariana said.

“How long does she do that for?” Luke’s knuckle was bleeding from putting up the tent fly. He sucked it absentmindedly. Mariana knew if she asked him how he’d hurt himself, not only would he have no idea, but he’d be surprised to see the blood.

“Ellie said it’s going for longer now.”

“Like an hour?”

“No! No.”

But truthfully, Mariana had no idea how long Nora would stay frozen in that glazed position.

Ellie rolled her eyes at something that Dylan had just said, something about how to properly light a fire. Mariana waited to hear Ellie’s smart-assed answer. She’d been the master of lighting their fires for years now. She had the touch. She’d even taken a
weekend class last year on survival living and could start a fire with nothing more than two dryish sticks and a determined glare.

But instead, disappointingly, Ellie got her eye roll under control and nodded along as Dylan showed her how to find kindling, as he explained the concept of tinder.

Oh, girls. Mariana called, “Hey, Dylan, did you know that Ellie can start a fire with two sticks? She doesn’t even need a match.”

Ellie’s face fell. Mariana wanted to suck the words back in. Such a jerk move.

“Oh,” said Dylan, dropping the stick he held onto the pile of kindling. “Oh, never mind, then.”

“I was just—,” started Ellie. She glared at Mariana. “Everyone does it differently. I liked hearing your way.”

Dylan brightened with the soft eagerness of a nineteen-year-old boy. Mariana’s heart ached, and she glanced at Luke, now stringing up the hammock Nora always insisted on bringing, the one they never put up because they didn’t know the knots.

Luke knew the knots. All of them. She wondered, as she had many times before, what he had been like at eighteen. She could imagine him, just like this, but thinner, gawkier. Eager to please, and eager to laugh.

He was still like that.

Mariana went to him, threaded her arms as far as she could reach around his thick rib cage, and kissed him.

He pulled back and looked at her. “What was that for?” he asked. But then he kissed her again. “I’m not complaining, mind you.”

Mariana pressed her forehead into his neck.

He held her tighter. “What?” he whispered. “You all right?”

She nodded. “I’m good,” she said. “I’m just glad you’re here.”

I
t was a full-time job, having a boyfriend along for the camping trip. Ellie took a walk to the big bathroom near the lake just to get away from him for a minute. She only had to pee, but she made it last, sitting on the cold toilet seat until it warmed up. She dragged the toe of her sandal through the dirt on the concrete floor, making swirls and curlicues. She walked back through the campground the long way, waving at families who’d been camping here as long as they had. There were always strangers, of course, tourists who managed to grab a spot on Labor Day weekend, but most of the campers were familiar to her, as familiar as kids at school, the kids in other grades. She might not know their names, but she knew what they looked like as they laughed, how they fought with their brothers and sisters.

Each campsite had a theme, and she walked past Camp Pig Out, checking to see if they’d brought the full-screen TV back. They had—she could see it through their open RV door.
What’s
the point?
her mother always said.
Why bring the indoors with you? The point is to get away, not bring it with you.
The next camp was Camp Rainbow Song. The group was big and loud and cheerful, always in the middle of something that looked like a fun project. Today it was tie dyeing. Three kids were dunking pieces of fabric bound with rubber bands into buckets of gray-blue water. Two shirtless guys who had matching scraggly beards strummed guitars, and a woman wearing red cowboy boots played a ukulele.

Back at camp, Dylan had crashed out in his tent. She peered in the open door flap to see him openmouthed on his sleeping bag, softly snoring. She could smell weed and hoped to hell her mother couldn’t smell it, too.

Boring. Sleeping was boring.

All
of this was boring.

Her mother and aunt were sitting at the long picnic table, playing rummy, wineglasses at their elbows.

“Are you drinking?” Ellie hated the tone in her voice, but she’d just read that excessive drinking could accelerate the symptoms of Alzheimer’s. Then again, another article had suggested the opposite, so what was anyone supposed to believe? Better safe than sorry, though, right?

“Honey,” said her mother. “It’s just a glass of wine.”

“You shouldn’t be drinking. I thought we talked about that.”

Mariana laughed. Her mother’s eyes flashed to her sister’s, and then she looked back at Ellie.

Ellie felt herself flush. “What?”

“Oh, chipmunk, she’s not laughing at you.”

“Yes, I am!” Mariana said, still giggling. “You sound like you’re twenty years older than we are.”

Well, it wasn’t like she
wanted
to be the mother. She hated it. She just wanted to be a kid again. Simple. Uncomplicated. Really, was that too much to ask? She was seventeen—almost—and she was having to live her life like she was thirty or something.
She was supposed to be figuring out how to take care of herself, wasn’t she? Vani’s mom was teaching her how to cook on nothing but a hot plate, so Vani would be able to feed herself healthy food while living in a dorm. Moms took care of their children until their children could take care of themselves. It wasn’t supposed to be this way. “You have no idea what it’s like. To have to watch her. All the time.”

The card her mother was laying down snapped to the table and then skittered sideways and off the table into the dirt. “What?”

Mariana sat up as if tugged by a wire. “What are you talking about?”

“Nothing,” said Ellie, fear moving through her like wind. “I didn’t mean anything.”

Her mother swung her legs sideways and stood. “Ellie.”

“No,” said Ellie, backing up, her hands palm out.

Her mother’s voice was small. “Is it worse than getting stuck?”

Ellie maintained silence.

“Is it bad?”

Mariana said,
“Ellie.”

“No. Uh-uh.” She wasn’t going to tell anyone. It was going to stay locked inside her until she needed help, but she didn’t need help. Not yet. “I just play my game. As long as I can play my game . . .”

Mariana cast a wild glance at Ellie’s mother. “What is she talking about?”

Her mother stayed quiet now, fixing her with a look that made Ellie ache inside. “What is it, sugar? What’s going on?”

You go away and no matter what I do I can’t make you come back. I lose you.
“I just meant I play my game around you now.”

“I don’t understand what you mean.”

I have to be near you.
“You know how I told you I like to use my laptop downstairs better than in my room?”

“You said it helped you think. To be out of your room with all its distractions.”

Her mother had believed it, then. “Yeah . . .”

“What?”

Ellie couldn’t say it. To say it out loud would be a betrayal. To her, to her mother, to her aunt . . .

But her mother got it. She wasn’t
stupid
. “You have to watch me.”

“That’s not . . .” But she’d never been good at lying to her mother.

“You think you have to take care of me.”

She didn’t
think
so. She knew so.

“Oh, god.”

“Mom—”

“Have I done something? Something that scared you?”

“Not . . . You’re just different. You lose track of things now. And you never used to.” Ellie was furious at the tears that threatened to rise in her eyes. “I just worry.”

Her mother reached for her arm, to touch her, but Ellie’s anger grew. “No! Don’t! You don’t get to soothe me now. You don’t get to tell me it’s going to be okay. It’s not.”

“Sweetie—”

Ellie had a visceral memory of what it felt like to lie on the ground and have a tantrum. The feel of the dirt on her arms, the way the ground thumped as she beat at it. She couldn’t remember what her last tantrum had been about, of course, and she was sure it had been something stupid. Probably about the last bite of cotton candy or whether she could have pizza for breakfast, a five-year-old’s problem, solved with empty calories or a hug.

She hadn’t known then that there would be such huge things to rail against. It wasn’t
fair
. To have a mom like this. To have this happen to her. To have this happen to
Ellie
. They were so sad, her mother and her aunt. They had given up, and that was fucking bullshit. As if they weren’t going to fight. As if they weren’t going to at least
try
to stop the disaster that was lurching toward them. She hated them for a dark moment, a feeling that
was more familiar now. The sunlight draped through the pine canopy above them, dappling her mother’s face, making her look so goddamned
normal
.

“I just want to play my game.”

“Here?” Her mother looked confused again. Great. Just like always. “I think you could borrow electricity from the Pig Out camp, maybe. They have all the other electronic stuff going . . .”

“No. I just want that to be my biggest worry. Whether or not I’ll save Queen Ulra. Why is that so hard for you to understand?”

“I’m so sorry—”

Her mother’s hand went out again. Ellie dodged.

“Don’t touch me. I shouldn’t have come.” She looked toward Dylan’s tent. “We shouldn’t have come. We should have stayed at the house and”—she wanted to say
fucked
but she couldn’t get the word out—“had sex the whole time you were camping.”

“Ellie!”

She threw herself at the opening of Dylan’s tent. She scrabbled at the zipper until she remembered it wasn’t closed. She fell forward and landed on top of Dylan, who awoke as cheerfully as he’d fallen asleep. He didn’t ask questions. He just wrapped his arms around her and pulled the end of the sleeping bag around her lower legs. She could feel his erect penis against her stomach, and she pushed against him. A promise.
Soon.
Soon, when she needed to forget everything. Wasn’t that the way sex worked? In the movies, in books, people had sex to escape.

She felt him take a breath to speak and dreaded the words that he’d say.
Are you okay? How’s your mom? You want to talk about it?

Instead, he said, “If the Queen leaves the castle, you know the Incursers will run her to ground. She’s not strong. Do you think we could change that? She trusts you. You think you could write that for the game?” His voice was sleepy. This
was
all he had to worry about.

Ellie clutched the fabric of his T-shirt and felt a low-grade happiness flow over her like music. It wasn’t trustworthy—when she woke up, it might not be there. But for now, it felt good to drift off, talking desultorily about the game while the top of the tent rocked slightly in the soft wind.