Splinters of Light
Page 1
PRAISE FOR THE NOVELS OF RACHAEL HERRON
Splinters of Light
“An awesome book that grabs the reader by the heartstrings and wrings emotions from the soul in the form of tears as she expertly slices up the reality of life as seen through the eyes of a teenager, a mother, and a sister.”
—Carolyn Brown, New York Times bestselling author of Long, Hot Texas Summer
“With this profoundly moving, compelling tale of a woman who is on the verge of losing everything, Rachael Herron will break your heart and then mend it again, leaving you stronger than before. Reading Splinters of Light is a bit like watching a trapeze artist dance nimbly across a high wire: You’re left gasping in wonder at her grace and daring. And when the artist makes it safely to the other side, you cheer and want to see her do it all over again.”
—Holly Robinson, author of Beach Plum Island
“Beautifully written and heartbreakingly real, Splinters of Light is a compelling examination of how the bonds between women—sisters, mothers, daughters—are tested by tragedy. The Glass family women will have you smiling in recognition and then grieving, laughing, and (consider yourself warned) sobbing along with them right up to the heartfelt ending.”
—L. Alison Heller, author of The Never Never Sisters
Written by today’s freshest new talents and selected by New American Library, NAL Accent novels touch on subjects close to a woman’s heart, from friendship to family to finding our place in the world. The Conversation Guides included in each book are intended to enrich the individual reading experience, as well as encourage us to explore these topics together—because books, and life, are meant for sharing.
Visit us online at www.penguin.com.
“Rachael Herron has written a tenderly crafted story, compelling the reader to examine some difficult issues—single parenthood, family dynamics, and the heartbreaking realities of early-onset Alzheimer’s—and handles each one with sensitivity and compassion. But the beauty of this novel lies in the strength and resilience of the love between two sisters. I closed the book and held it to my chest, full of gratitude.”
—Kimberly Brock, author of The River Witch
Pack Up the Moon
“Don’t forget Pack Up the Moon when you’re packing your bags—it’s the perfect vacation or staycation read. It’s filled with fiercely honest emotion, a celebration of the power of love to heal even the most broken of hearts.”
—Susan Wiggs, #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Beekeeper’s Ball
“A superlative architect of story, Rachael Herron never steers away from wrenching events, and yet even moments of deepest despair are laced with threads of hope. . . . Herron is an inexhaustible champion of the healing power of love.”
—Sophie Littlefield, national bestselling author of House of Glass
“A heartbreaking story of loss and family that achieves an optimistic feel in the end. . . . The language [is] poetic and moving at many points.”
—RT Book Reviews
“An emotional roller coaster. . . . If you are in need of a heartfelt, highly emotional story, then look no further!”
—Dwell in Possibility
“The novel is remarkable in its poignancy and style. . . . Herron writes beautifully about the love between a parent and child. . . . Pack Up the Moon is a wonderful weekend read about love, loss, forgiveness, and family that leaves readers feeling grateful for their dear ones—and reaching for the tissues.”
—The Gazette (Montreal)
“A touching, emotional story based around really realistic characters who people can completely relate to. . . . It’s beautiful and haunting and it’s perfect.”
—Sunshine and Mountains Book Reviews & More
“It’s almost impossible to put down; Herron weaves such a poignant story, you find yourself caught up in the characters’ lives and are just simply drawn to their hopes, dreams, sorrows, and secrets. . . . I can’t recommend it highly enough.”
—Minding Spot
“The author geniusly takes the reader from the past to the present to show why Kate is the woman she is now and maybe the woman she could become. . . . The writing was just magical. I fell in love with both the characters and the setting for this book.”
—Kritters Ramblings
“Rachael Herron has created a work of intense beauty in Pack Up the Moon. Here is love and fear, hope and deep longing. Here are people trying their best, and falling short, and trying again. Here is unthinkable loss, and its aftermath. Herron’s beautifully rendered novel boldly shows us people at their lowest and then makes us fall in love with them.”
—Cari Luna, author of The Revolution of Every Day
“Heartfelt and uplifting . . . this is a book I could not put down and am sad that it is over. I have no doubt that it is a book I will reflect on often and will stay with me for a long time.”
—A Novel Review
“Pack Up the Moon is about parenthood, secrets, and grief, and the many permutations that each can take in a lifetime . . . an interesting read with some characters that have stayed with me in the days since I closed the book.”
—Every Day I Write the Book
PRAISE FOR THE OTHER WORKS OF RACHAEL HERRON
“A warmhearted hug from a talented author. . . . The story will stay in your heart long after the last page is turned.”
—#1 New York Times bestselling author Susan Wiggs
“Rachael Herron seamlessly blends romance, friendship, and laughter.”
—Barbara Bretton, USA Today bestselling author of A Soft Place to Fall
Also by Rachael Herron
Pack Up the Moon
NAL Accent
Published by the Penguin Group
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New York, New York 10014
USA | Canada | UK | Ireland | Australia | New Zealand | India | South Africa | China
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A Penguin Random House Company
First published by NAL Accent, an imprint of New American Library,
a division of Penguin Group (USA) LLC
Copyright © Rachael Herron, 2015
Conversation Guide copyright © Penguin Group (USA) LLC, 2015
Excerpt from “Beasts” by Carmen Giménez Smith copyright © Carmen Giménez Smith
Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.
REGISTERED TRADEMARK—MARCA REGISTRADA
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA:
Herron, Rachael.
Splinters of light/Rachael Herron.
p. cm.
ISBN 978-0-698-14801-7
1. Twin sisters—Fiction. 2. Mothers and daughters—Fiction. 3. Domestic—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3608.E7765S69 2015
813'.6—dc23 2014038529
PUBLISHER’S NOTE
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
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Contents
Praise
Also by Rachael Herro
n
Title page
Copyright page
Dedication
Acknowledgments
Epigraph
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-one
Chapter Twenty-two
Chapter Twenty-three
Chapter Twenty-four
Chapter Twenty-five
Chapter Twenty-six
Chapter Twenty-seven
Chapter Twenty-eight
Chapter Twenty-nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-one
Chapter Thirty-two
Chapter Thirty-three
Chapter Thirty-four
Chapter Thirty-five
Chapter Thirty-six
Chapter Thirty-seven
Chapter Thirty-eight
Chapter Thirty-nine
Chapter Forty
Chapter Forty-one
Chapter Forty-two
Chapter Forty-three
Chapter Forty-four
Chapter Forty-five
Chapter Forty-six
Chapter Forty-seven
Chapter Forty-eight
Chapter Forty-nine
Chapter Fifty
Chapter Fifty-one
Chapter Fifty-two
Chapter Fifty-three
Chapter Fifty-four
Chapter Fifty-five
Chapter Fifty-six
Chapter Fifty-seven
Chapter Fifty-eight
Chapter Fifty-nine
Chapter Sixty
Chapter Sixty-one
Chapter Sixty-two
Chapter Sixty-three
Chapter Sixty-four
Chapter Sixty-five
Chapter Sixty-six
Chapter Sixty-seven
Chapter Sixty-eight
Chapter Sixty-nine
Chapter Seventy
Epilogue
Conversation Guide
About the Author
In honor of Alice Figueira, and the inspiring organization named for her, Alice’s Embrace. And for Diane Lewis, who loved her mother like I loved mine.
Acknowledgments
While writing acknowledgments for any book, I’m always overwhelmed at how many people make a book. My deepest thanks go to my editor, Danielle Perez, for knowing what needed to be stripped away to make my characters truly come to life. Thanks as always to Susanna Einstein, one of my favorite people and the best agent in the world. I promise I’ll try not to make you cry like that again. Thanks to Dana Kaye, for being the best publicist ever. I thank the crew at Zocalo, who keep me going with coffee and grins: Evelyn, Tom, Winnie, Cathy, Kat, Buddy, Ed, and everyone else. Thanks go to A. J. Larrieu, who knows her epigenetics from her heritability (any errors in science are mine alone). Thanks to one of my favorite firefighters, Lucas Hirst, who gave me lots of info I chose not to use, and thanks to my coworkers/friends at the firehouse, who, when I have to go do writing business, cover my shifts for me without complaining (within my earshot, anyway). Huge thanks to Rebecca Beeson, who endured many twin questions and is a beautiful writer herself. To Sophie Littlefield, thank you for propping me up so much during the writing of this book that I should probably build you a flying buttress or something. To Cari Luna, thank you for loving me even after I stole your rocks. To Lala Hulse, always, my love and gratitude for everything—I couldn’t do any of this without you, not one single little bit. And to my sisters, Christy and Bethany Herron, who are and always will be my two best friends. You are the ones I will never let go.
Some days the rock I keep in my pocket feels like comfort. Other days it feels like a weapon.
—Cari Luna
The lesson:
memory, which once seemed impermeable, had always been a muslin, spilling the self out like water, so that one became
a new species of naïf and martyr. And us, we’re made a cabal of medieval scholars speculating how many splinters of light
make up her diminishing core, how much we might harvest before she disappears.
—from “Beasts” by Carmen Giménez Smith
Chapter One
EXCERPT, WHEN ELLIE WAS LITTLE: OUR LIFE IN HOLIDAYS, PUBLISHED 2011 BY NORA GLASS
New Year’s Eve
When Ellie was little, she and I changed all the rules. After my husband left, it was just me and my little girl (and my twin sister, but she’s implied in everything I do). The cozy insularity of our little nuclear family became something to be feared overnight. Members of the PTA looked at me as if my husband’s abandonment were something catching. If Paul had died, we would have received condolence calls, hamburger casseroles, and brownies made from scratch. But because he moved fifty miles east with Bettina the blond bookkeeper, because he started a new roofing company and a new family all at once, all we got were pitying looks in the school parking lot and small, halfhearted waves.
So we changed all the rules, starting with the hardest part: the holidays.
This is how we do New Year’s Eve at my house. We don’t go out. I’m scared of driving with all the drunks on the road after midnight, and besides, why would you start a New Year anywhere but in your own home, where you feel the safest, the most loved? (Once, when she was eight, Ellie begged to be allowed to spend New Year’s Eve at her friend Samantha’s house, but she didn’t even make it till nine p.m. before calling me to come get her. “Lemon and honey, Mama,” she said. “They don’t do that here.”)
We get to do whatever we want on New Year’s Eve. There’s so very little left of the year to damage that we figure if we spend the evening watching the entire Die Hard series, no one will mind. We eat what we want, too. Sick of holiday candy and chocolate by that point, we choose things at the grocery store like fancy pickles and ham poked with rosemary sprigs. We like ropes of salty black licorice that we get at a candy store on Tiburon Boulevard. The girls behind the counter always wince when we ask for half a pound, and once one of them admitted we were the only ones she’d ever sold it to. I make a sweet, fruity bread similar to German stollen that’s supposed to be eaten for breakfast, but we eat it for dinner instead, sliced thinly, served cold, and slathered thickly with butter. I can eat six pieces before I start to feel sick, and Ellie, as small as she is, can pack away even more.
We also get to wear whatever we want. One year Ellie wore a blue two-piece bathing suit with a pink tutu. I wouldn’t let her get too close to the fireplace for fear a spark would set her entire acrylic ensemble ablaze. When she got cold, she wrapped my black terry robe around her thin shoulders and trailed the length of it behind her like a vampire cloak.
In more recent years, we’ve taken to having a pajama party. New pajamas are de rigueur, carefully bought with the New Year in mind. Last year mine were dark blue, covered with grumpy-looking sheep wearing sweaters. Ellie’s were green flannel with cowboys roping monkeys.
When the time grows near, we don’t watch the prerecorded ball drop in New York. Even at a distance, it’s too much of a party for us homebodies, my daughter and me. Instead, we keep an anxious eye on the clock, as if it might not get all the way to midnight if we don’t watch it carefully. Both of us pretend no one else has slipped into the New Year yet. Ne
w Zealand hasn’t already celebrated. New Yorkers aren’t already in bed. In our snug home above Belvedere Cove, we are the first in the whole world to greet the early seconds of a newly minted year.
Then my Ellie goes to the front door and, with great solemnity, opens it to let the year inside. We make our tea, and this is the most important step.
It springs from a New Year’s Eve when Ellie was sick with the flu, sicker than she’d ever been. She was four. Paul had left us a month before. I’d hoped Ellie would sleep through the night so I could cry alone on the couch at midnight as I watched happy couples kiss in Times Square.
But instead, she woke and came out of her room. She stumbled over the long feet of her favorite bunny-footed pajamas, coughing so hard she sounded like a dog barking.
I had a cooling cup of mint tea in front of me, and I had an idea.
I carried her onto the back porch, where, under a full moon, she picked a lemon off our tree. We squeezed the whole thing into the mug, and then I let her add a big spoonful of honey to it.
“Lemon,” I said, “because the New Year might be a little sad, like a lemon is sour.”
“Because of Papa?” Her eyes were wet with another coughing fit. They were Paul’s eyes, so bright green it hurt to look at her sometimes. “Because he doesn’t want to be with us?”
“With me, honey. You know he wants to be with you. Papa loves you.” Paul, though, was too busy then soothing his very pregnant new wife to have any real time for his daughter, something that made me mad enough to spit acid in the direction of Modesto. “But we add honey because the year will be sweet, too.”
She was asleep ten minutes after drinking the tea, her breathing easier in her chest. Mine was easier, too, knowing she hurt less.
I didn’t think she’d remember it, but the next year, when she was five, she put on the same footed pajamas, even though they were by then too small, and tucked her body into her favorite corner of the couch. She looked up at me. “Lemon and honey?”