Splinters of Light (34 page)

B
y four o’clock, when Nora heard Mariana enter, Ellie was on the couch again, playing her game. But that was okay. Ellie had cleaned up the whole turkey mess while Nora had been taking deep breaths in her bedroom, trying to remember—trying so hard to figure out what had happened to the turkey. Ellie had cleaned up the stuffing and washed the spoon that Nora had used on it. A smell of bleach hung in the air with a toxic tang, almost canceling out the scent of freshly baked bread (Nora had gotten up at dawn to set it to rise) and pumpkin spice (ice cream cake, since no one in the family liked pie).

The smell of death was gone.

Mariana swung into the kitchen with a green shopping bag under her arm. “I got three bottles of Martinelli’s, two of wine, and one good Scotch, which Harrison and I will enjoy even if you don’t.”

Nora reached for the list she’d made of things for Mariana to pick up. “Where’s Luke?”

Mariana didn’t meet her eyes. “Where’s Harrison?”

Nora changed the game. “Where are the mashed potatoes?”

Mariana stared. “I don’t know. Where are they?”

“No, no, no. We have no turkey, we
have
to have mashed potatoes.”

“Okay.” Mariana’s voice was cautious. “I can make some for you. That’s not a problem.”

“I don’t
have
any. That’s the problem. You were supposed to bring them.”

“No, honey.” Her sister pushed her fingers through her perfectly cut layers. “You asked me to bring drinks.”

Nora looked down at the list. “And the potatoes. You make the best ones. Of course I asked you.”

Mariana shook her head, as if she were giving up.

That head shake. That was the shake Nora was seeing more and more often, from Ellie, from her sister, from the new doctor at Stanford. As if whatever they were talking about wasn’t worth arguing about anymore, as if it were better to give in to her ridiculous beliefs, as if arguing with her would break her.

Potatoes weren’t on the list she’d given to Mariana.

Mariana said, “I’ll just run to the store.”

Nora shook her head. “They’ll be out.”

“They’ll have a potato or two left.”

“They’ll be closed.”

“Safeway’s open till five.”

“We don’t have
time
 . . .” Nora’s throat closed over the words, sealing shut so that she couldn’t say the next ones.

“Nora . . .”

Out. She had to get out. She couldn’t be here—she felt like she was dying. Right there. In the kitchen she loved so much, in the jail it had become.

She was already out the door, racing across her yard, before she even knew she was moving. She pounded on Harrison’s back door and then, too impatient to wait for him, barreled through it.

He was in the upper bedroom. From the chair he sat in, he’d have been able to see everything: her throwing away the turkey, her pell-mell dash across the lawn.

He kept his eyes on the window. He didn’t turn around.

“Why are you here?” she demanded.

“I live here.” He sounded tired, as if he hadn’t slept.

“Why aren’t you at my house?”

“I could ask you the same thing.”

No, that wasn’t fair. Just because she wouldn’t let him move in didn’t give him the right . . . “It’s Thanksgiving. We always do Thanksgiving together. You bring someone who can’t do long division. We make fun of her behind her back. It’s tradition.” She heard the joke fall flat. This year the only person he was dating was her, and pretty soon, she wouldn’t remember how to do any kind of math at all.

Harrison didn’t laugh. “Tradition,” he echoed. He finally turned, and she could see that he’d been crying. There were no tears on his face, his eyes weren’t swollen—it was just there, in the set of his lips. She could tell. No one else in the world would probably be able to.

“I can’t do this without you.”

“What?” He gripped the arm of the chair. “What can’t you do without me?”

Nora’s mouth dried.

“Host a turkey dinner?”

She tried to smile. “About that turkey—”

“Or live? You can’t live without me?”

The words were stuck behind her gullet, words in eggs that would smash all over the grate of Harrison’s truck.

He went on. “What, you can’t die without me?”

Fear, frantically electric, zipped through her, leaving a white-hot burn. “Just come over—”

“And then be shuffled away? Across the lawn? Maybe you’ll
come get a quickie after dinner, after Ellie’s in bed playing her game? You think that’s good enough for me?”

“No . . . I know it’s—”

“You don’t seem to know anything. I thought you’d be better at this.”

The words were huge and completely, unutterably unfair. “At
dying
?”

“Fuck, Nora. I thought you’d be better at
living
. You’ve always been the best one at it. Better than anyone else. You’re good at everything, you make everything look easy, but you refuse to look this in the face—”

Bullshit.
What did he think she did at four in the morning? When she couldn’t sleep, when her eyes fell on the digital clock and wondered how many seconds closer she’d be to death when (if) she finally fell asleep again—did he think she was just lying there thinking about how to perfect an apple pie crust? “I look at it every day.
I
face it. Not you. You have
no
idea what I’m going through.”

“I know that!” Harrison stood and coughed. He looked older, suddenly, every year of his fifty-one. When had he become so gaunt? “And whose fault is that? It’s not mine, Nora. You shut me out, and that’s fine. I can wait for you to let me in, and I can’t imagine how hard it is for you. But for you to hide me, to hide what we have together . . .” He held up a hand, his palm creased and so well-known to Nora she could trace the lines on it with her eyes closed. “Ellie knows we’re still trying to stay hidden.”

Of course Ellie knew. “It’s just important that she doesn’t feel . . . that I’m not . . .”

“Do you want to go through this with me or without me?”

“With you.” The words were reflexive and true.

“Then let me stay with you. Or stay here. I can’t be—” Harrison put one hand backward to lean on the chair. “I can’t be in
this halfway, when it’s convenient, when you feel strong enough to be with me.”

That was irony for you. When Nora was with Harrison, naked under his sheets, his skin warm against hers, that was the only time she felt free to be weak. Did he really not know that? “I don’t want to talk about this on Thanksgiving. My day’s been shitty enough.”

“That’s your decision to make.” Harrison sat back down in his chair, his gaze out the window.

“Don’t be like this,” she said. “Don’t do this today.”

He didn’t turn his head to watch her leave the room.

When she was on the lawn, when she glanced up at the window, he was gone.

“S
pam?
Mom.
”

Mariana said, “You’re joking.” It wasn’t a question.

Nora wanted, inappropriately, to laugh. Thirty minutes ago, when she’d plated the Spam (oh, so carefully and thinly sliced, garnished with fresh cranberries and juniper sprigs), she’d sent a picture of it to Twitter with the caption, “Surprisingly and suddenly thankful for canned meat. What are you thankful for today?” Within seconds, the replies were flooding in—jokes and serious answers alike. They weren’t, in fact, the only family in America having Spam for Thanksgiving. Two families in Hawaii had replied saying musubi was on their holiday menu, and another woman said she served it with chopped pickles, something Nora couldn’t imagine.

“I don’t mean to be picky,” said Mariana, “but have you lost your mind?”

“Yep,” said Nora truthfully. She’d lost quite a lot. Losing her mind was honestly lower on her list right now than losing
Harrison. Why did she feel so cheerful? Like laughing? Was this the inappropriate response the literature said she’d feel? If so, she was in.

“Let’s go out,” said Mariana. “Restaurants are open. Come on, honey, we shouldn’t have to eat meat that cost less than forty-nine cents.”

Ellie crossed her arms. “I know you tried, Mom, but we could totally still go out. Or we could get pizza? Like that year you put in the Ellie book?”

“Do you remember that, chipmunk?”

Ellie closed her eyes slowly, and when she opened them, she looked more like Paul than she ever had. Nora remembered why she’d fallen in love with him. Those deep-sea eyes that changed color along with the sky. “Sometimes I think I do,” Ellie said.

“Good enough.” Nora pulled the white platter closer and helped herself to two pieces. “I don’t want to go out and face the rest of the world. Let’s just eat the fixings, then.” It was just getting funnier. “Minus the mashed potatoes, of course.”

Cutting herself a piece of the cold, Jell-O–like meat, Nora was about to put a bite in her mouth when her daughter interrupted her.

“We’re not even going to pray?”

Nora’s fork stilled in midair. “Pardon?”

“Grace. We always say grace.”

“Fine.” Prayer. It couldn’t hurt. “Would you say it, then?”

Ellie bowed her head and said, “No. You have to.”

Heck of a time for her daughter to find religion. Nora closed her eyes and said as quickly as she could, “Lord, thank you for this food, and nourish it to our bodies.” Would that be enough for her daughter? Because Nora didn’t think she had much more thankfulness left to give.

Mariana, though, continued it for her. “And thank you for this past year, and everything we’ve been given. Thank you for the love of family and friends, and bless the year to come.”

Nora, her eyes open again, saw Ellie nod.

“Amen.”

“Amen.”

Mariana smiled, her teeth beautiful and even. With her tongue, Nora touched her own upper left incisor. Once upon a time, Mariana’s tooth had been equally crooked. When had she gotten that fixed? Was that something that Nora had once known?

Where did the knowledge go, when it left her mind? She held out her hands and looked at the ridges that formed the whorls on her fingertips. Her body knew how to make these. But her brain didn’t know how to cook a non-rotten turkey anymore. Apparently.

“Now,” said Mariana, leaning forward, putting her elbows on the table. “Tell me why we’re eating the only foodstuff lower on the food chain than plastic bags?”

Nora poked the cranberry sauce on her plate. “I’m losing it.”

“You just need a bit more sleep. Sleep helps everything.”

“I can’t remember the date unless I write it on my hand.”

“You’ve been doing that for months, Mom.” Ellie’s eyes were worried. Ellie’s eyes should never look like that. And it was Nora’s fault.

“I want to do two things,” she said, her throat almost closing again. “And I need help.”

Mariana said, “We know. We talked about it, remember? We’re here.”

“No, you don’t know. I didn’t tell you what they were.” They needed to let her talk. It was her turn. Nora knew what she needed. She’d known for a while. It was time to say it. She put a smile on her face, and the inappropriate giggle that had been hiding in her chest burbled upward. “I want to have fun.”

She saw Mariana look at Ellie. Mariana said, “Okay. Of course . . .”

“No, really.
Big
fun. That Thanksgiving we had nothing, the year everything broke? I wasn’t fun. I feel like I’m in that same place, and I need to get out of it.”

Ellie bounced a little in her chair. “Okay! Like what?”

“Bucket-list stuff. Like, maybe the northern lights.”

“Oh!”
Ellie clapped and Nora could see her, suddenly, at every age, making that same rapturous face. At three, skinned elbows and happy eyes. At seven, gaps in her teeth but the same overjoyed expression. Now, at—Nora thought very hard—at seventeen. Gorgeous. Luminous in her body, which, please, God (Nora prayed for real this time:
please
, God), wouldn’t betray her, ever.

“And Cuba. I’ve always wanted to go to Cuba,” Nora went on.

Mariana leaned forward. “Let me pay.”

“No, no . . .” She hadn’t gotten that far, hadn’t gotten to planning the financial aspect of the trips, but it would work out, wouldn’t it? She’d sell another book—did she have time to? She could—

“I have the money.” Mariana grinned at Ellie. “I have so much money. It’s like someone opened a fire hose in my bank account.”

“You have to put that back into your business.” Nora refolded the napkin on her lap. She knew how business worked. You spent money to make money.

“I do. I have been. And I’ve paid Luke back. And I’m
still
making bank. And nothing”—Mariana covered Nora’s hand with her own—“would make me happier than taking the three of us around the world.”

Would that be okay? Was it allowed? Nora searched her brain for the rule book, but in the jumble she couldn’t find it. She tugged the napkin harder.

Ellie said, “Can we go on an Alaskan cruise? I want to see a fjord.”

“Yes,” said Mariana. “And Antarctica.”

“Penguins! I want to see penguins! Oh.” Ellie stopped wriggling. “What about school?”

Nora let hope grow inside her. The tendril of it wrapped around the jagged edges inside her chest and grew stronger,
taller. “We’ll go when you’re on break. I would very much love to see penguins myself,” she said. Then she added, “Because I’m dying.” She said it on purpose, knowing the small green growing thing inside her would fail, knowing she had to do it anyway.

A dark cloud passed over Ellie’s face. “Don’t.”

Mariana said, “Not now.”

Nora opened her hands and laid them on the table, face up. “Now is all I’ve got. We have to be realistic.”

“Please don’t, Mama.”

Oh, Nora hadn’t planned for that one. The sneak attack, the child’s voice coming from Ellie. That wasn’t fair. She felt pain bloom behind her brow. “We have now. Right now. Let’s make a list, right here at the table. A happy list of the things we all want to do—” Lists were good. Lists would fix . . . Okay, while she was facing things, Nora could admit they would fix nothing. But they sure helped. Crutches weren’t what cured a broken leg, but they made things easier. “I’ll start. Penguins. The Great Wall of China. The gondolas in Venice. What do you want to see?” She would live her life not without fear—never without it—but in spite of it. Fear would be the spice, the salt of adventure.

“Mom,” said Ellie with patience in her voice. “School?”

“Screw school,” Nora went on with a bravado she didn’t quite feel. “School can wait.”

“No, it can’t,” said Mariana.

Nora stared at her sister. “What?”

A quick shrug. Mariana reached for another helping of sweet potato hash. “I mean, this year isn’t really optional. Not with college coming up.”

A prickle of discomfort ran along Nora’s forearms. “What do you know about it?”

“Not much. I just know Ellie has to be there.”

“She could do independent study.” That option would have been over Nora’s dead body at this time last year, but this year was different, and her body wasn’t dead yet.

“And be satisfied with just a GED?” Mariana shot a quick smile at Ellie. “That doesn’t sound like our girl.”

Ellie smiled and reached forward, taking a small, unasked-for sip of Mariana’s wine. As if they were in cahoots.

Our girl? Ellie was
hers
. All hers. Anger, so quick to start lately, so impossible to let go, flashed up Nora’s arms from her fingertips straight to her heart. But she wouldn’t argue. Not at the Thanksgiving table. “I need to talk to you in the kitchen, Mariana. Now.”