Splinters of Light

by Rachael Herron

  They were criminals, Nora would point out gently. They’d done things to deserve to be there.

  “But some of them were innocent.”

  Nora couldn’t deny that. Some of them probably had been.

  Ellie’s eyes would fill up with tears. “Imagine them, away from their families, so close they could hear the music from dances on the Embarcadero. I read that some nights they could smell women’s perfume if the wind was right. And they were here, alone.” Nora and Mariana would gently tease her, but they loved this about her—her tenderness. Her empathy.

  Now Ellie had that moony look again at the end of the tour, the same one she always got. “Can we stay?”

  Mariana said, “Or we could go back and get clam chowder in a bread bowl.”

  Nora’s stomach rumbled.

  “Please? The next ferry leaves in an hour, and we could wander around outside.”

  “It’s pretty dreary out there,” Nora pointed out.

  “But it stopped raining, and that’s why we’re wearing coats,” said Ellie. “Please?”

  Mariana said, “I don’t mind if you don’t, Nora. We can take our coffee out and talk.” You can tell me why you’re being weird. She didn’t have to say it for Nora to hear it.

  Nora couldn’t tell them. Not here. What had she been thinking? That she would introduce them to a brand-new personal grief in the place where so much sadness had lived for so long? “Okay,” she managed.

  At the door that led outside, a woman with a purple stripe in her black hair touched Nora’s elbow. “Excuse me. I’m sorry, but aren’t you Nora Glass?”

  Nora swallowed. “Yes.” She was. Wasn’t she?

  The woman broke into a delighted laugh. “Oh, I just love you. Johnny—that’s my boyfriend right there—hey, Johnny, I told you it was her! I told him it was you. We’re from Spokane, and I read your column every week. You look so much younger than your picture in the paper looks. Oh, my god. Is that Ellie? Johnny, that’s Ellie! From the book! Hi, Ellie!”

  With a cheery and very fake smile, Ellie waved on her way outside.

  “You’re just so funny. You know? Like that story about the stray chicken who got into your house. Remember that? Can you say something funny? Johnny, she’s going to say something funny. Watch. She’s hilarious.”

  Nora felt herself blush. “Oh . . .”

  Mariana stepped forward. “I’m the sister. Yep. The twin.” She shook hands with the woman and her boyfriend. “I know she’d love to spend more time getting acquainted but Nora here has the whooping cough.”

  Nora tried to make a coughing sound but it came out more like a manic yawn.

  “Highly contagious.”

  The woman covered her mouth with her hand.

  “So we’ll just head outside where she can breathe a little better, and hey, Happy Easter to you!”

  “Whooping cough?” asked Nora as they headed outside.

  Mariana shrugged. “I heard about it on NPR. Making a comeback.”

  Under the cold, gray sky, Nora and Mariana watched Ellie scramble on the rocks. She couldn’t go out far—people weren’t allowed out of the safely prescribed area—but she went as far as she could, and then, of course, a few feet farther.

  “She’s so tall,” said Mariana, her hands wrapped around her paper coffee cup. “Almost as tall as us now.”

  Nora didn’t answer. There was something stuck in her windpipe, something that had swept in off the bay and was choking her.

  Mariana sidled closer on the bench. Their thighs and shoulders touched. “Tell me.”

  “I can’t.” The words were a whisper.

  “I know it’s not nothing. Your eyes have that look they had . . . when Mom died. And as far as I know, no one’s died. And you’re not looking at me.”

  “I am, too.” But Nora knew Mariana was right. Since they’d met Mariana at the dock, Nora hadn’t really met her sister’s eyes. She couldn’t.

  “It can’t be that bad.”

  “It is.”

  “Oh, no.” Mariana turned and faced her. “Just tell me.”

  Nora stared.

  “Cancer,” Mariana said. “Is that it? We can’t have it. We’re too young.”

  The we was what made Nora stand up. They weren’t together in this. They couldn’t be. That was the whole point. Statistics bashed around inside Nora’s head like heavy moths trying to get out. Nora knew so much now, terms she hadn’t ever seen before: autosomal dominant, penetrance, presenilin-1, receptor binding, secretases.

  It all added up to one thing: Mariana had to get tested, as quickly as possible. With the PS1 mutation, Mariana had a fifty-fifty chance of having EOAD.

  So did Ellie.

  It was too much.

  Nora put one hand at her waist and the other over her stomach. “Alzheimer’s,” she gasped.

  Looking confused, Mariana said, “Who?”

  At the fence line, Ellie hopped from one broken chunk of concrete to another one. She crouched as if looking for tide pools, even though there couldn’t be any, not up so high.

  “Me.”

  Mariana gave a surprised yip that turned into a laugh. “Oh, my god, you just scared me so much.”

  Nora stared at her. She should have written this out. She should have had notes that she could refer to, so she could keep going. “No . . .”

  “You’re terrible.” Mariana grinned wider. “I really thought you were sick.”

  “Early-onset.”

  Mariana barely looked at her, her eyes on Ellie. “What?”

  “It starts early.”

  “Honey! I’m supposed to be the one who exaggerates problems! We’re forty-four. We forget things now. It’s normal. It happens to everyone. Deep breath.”

  “No.”

  “You worry too much.” Mariana brushed away a strand of hair from Nora’s face. “Ow.” She laughed. “That’s my own hair.”

  Anger burned in Nora’s chest. Irrational, unwelcome heat. “I’ve been diagnosed.”

  “Is this like the Epstein-Barr?”

  Nora gritted her teeth. She’d self-diagnosed with that, years ago. Her first WebMD accident. She’d been wrong, and she’d admitted that over and over again, usually as Harrison and Mariana laughed at her. “No.”

  “You’re serious.”

  “Yes.”

  Mariana’s face changed, straightened. “I’m sorry.”

  “It’s okay.” Nora twisted the silver ring Mariana had brought her years before from a trip to Mazatlán. Mariana had learned to surf there, she remembered.

  “Tell me. Is this a big deal or a little one?”

  “Not that big a deal,” Nora said. “I’ll just forget everything, including how to walk, eat, talk, and swallow. Then I’ll die.”

  Her sister stood. Without saying a word, she turned her back and headed toward the concrete steps that led to the wide doors of the entrance. She walked with purpose, the same way Ellie did.

  Ellie.

  She was still by the rocks, pulling on a piece of ice plant. Out of earshot. She looked like a child playing with rocks one moment, and the next, she looked like a teenager again, checking her cell phone. On the other side of Ellie the bay was choppy and dark gray. The city was almost obscured by the fog, the skyline murky, Coit Tower only a suggestion.

  Nora sat alone on the bench. The cold had seeped through her jeans and her bones ached with something more than the chill.

  Her sister stopped moving, twenty yards away. A guide dressed like a prison guard stationed on the top step watched them both.

  Mariana turned. She marched back. Nora stayed still.

  Then she grabbed Nora in a hug so hard that it healed her very bones, the same ones that had been aching.

  She said only one word, the word Nora needed her to say.

&n
bsp; “No.”

  It was a relief, such a clear and light relief, to hear verbalized the only word that had made any sense to Nora for weeks. No, no, NO. She said it back. “No.”

  “Good. Agreed.”

  Nora looked down and then licked her thumb. She rubbed at a dark spot on her coat that might have been coffee. “Where were you going?”

  “Dunno,” said Mariana. “I just had to get out, and then I realized there was nowhere to go.”

  I know.

  They sat in silence for a moment, watching Ellie tap something into her phone.

  “Who’s she texting?” asked Mariana, as if it were just another overcast day.

  “No idea.”

  “Think of all the trouble we’d have gotten into if we’d had cell phones. Can you imagine?”

  “How do I tell her?” How do I break her? How would Nora tell her anything, come to that? She watched her daughter’s blond hair—too long, with the layers grown out—swing as she ducked her head to look under a heavy-looking piece of broken metal. Nora imagined for a moment what she would write later. In her Moleskine, with her favorite Paper Mate SharpWriter pencil, in very dark letters: What I Haven’t Taught Ellie.

  How to . . .

  How to live . . .

  Holy crap, she had no idea. She had essays, so many of them, telling people how to do things. She’d researched and then told her readers how to make a perfect crust, how to decorate cupcakes, and how to bake no-knead bread. She’d made budgeting seem easy, something her readers could accomplish. She’d given so many time-saving tips she thought she should at some point get at least one twenty-five-hour-day as repayment.

  But what did Ellie need to know? Nora wrote for women, for working mothers, for adults. She didn’t write about how to become a woman. That was something she’d been teaching her daughter as they went. What were the things she might forget to tell her?

  HOW TO PUT ON LIPSTICK

  Swipe your top lip first, following the curve on each side. Don’t be afraid to coat thickly. Now mash your lips together three times, using the color on the top lip to fill in the bottom lip. If you need more color, add sparingly to the bottom. Use the tip of your first finger to clean the lines, to make sure that dip in your top lip (so deliciously perfect, thought Nora, remembering her daughter’s rosebud-sweet mouth; strangers used to comment on it when she was little—a Gerber smile) is clear of color. Now smile at yourself. Then check your teeth. If you’re applying for a job, check twice. If it’s a really important date, check three times.

  Such a small, tiny thing, but it matters.

  She rewrote the last line in her head again. Small things are what make a life big.

  Self-pity raked its talons across Nora’s chest, tearing open her heart, leaving it beating, but just barely. She grabbed a breath of wet salt air that scraped her lungs. A job. Ellie would have a job that Nora would never know anything about. A writer? Ellie saw the world in stories, creating them where there were none. She always had. A journalist, maybe? God, Nora hoped not. It was a difficult, poorly compensated life, although now, with the Internet, some things were a little easier. . . . At least Nora had gotten syndicated just in time, right when Paul’s alimony was going to end, right when she’d been worrying about how she’d keep the house, losing sleep thinking about what kind of second job she could possibly find.

  “How long does—?” Mariana’s voice cracked.

  Nora jerked herself back to the present. The concrete bench where they sat seemed to be getting colder under her, not warmer. She shrugged. “No one seems to know. Maybe a year. Maybe three. One guy lived eleven years after his diagnosis, but he got it at thirty-four, so . . .”

  Mariana bent at the waist as if the breath had been knocked out of her.

  “I’m sorry,” said Nora.

  “They’re wrong. Aren’t they?”

  “Maybe,” she said lightly. She could give her sister this.

  “You need a second opinion. That’s what people do.”

  This is the second opinion talking.

  “We’ll fix it,” Mariana continued. “We’ll get you fixed.” She grabbed her wallet out of her purse, as if to pay for the remedy. She peered inside. “I have . . . I don’t have much, but you can have it. All of it. But Luke has money, and . . .”

  “We don’t need his money.”

  “This can’t happen.”

  Nora felt Mariana’s fury prickle along her skin. Or maybe it was her own anger. She couldn’t tell, sometimes, where she left off and Mariana began. It felt good—something she hadn’t let herself feel yet. Rage.

  “I’m staying with you tonight.”

  Startled, Nora said, “At my house?”

  “What the hell else would I mean?”

  “What about Luke?”

  “We’re barely talking now. Not since Valentine’s Day and the ring. He’s shut me out.”

  “Oh, Mariana.”

  “Screw him.”

  “Really?”

  “No,” said Mariana. “I love him. But he doesn’t matter. You matter.”

  A thicker relief trickled down the back of Nora’s throat. “Sleepover?”

  Mariana took her hand and gripped it so hard it hurt. “Will you make me orange juice?”

  “I’ll squeeze a thousand oranges. Just for you.” She could almost taste Mariana’s thick pancakes, still liquid in the middle. Perfect.

  Ellie waved from the top of a broken piece of concrete and then jumped down lightly, as if she were folded paper. Nora’s origami girl. She shouldn’t be out in the rain.

  “We’ll tell her tonight,” said Mariana.

  Nora nodded. “Maybe.”

  Mariana squeezed her hand harder. “Together.”

  Chapter Fifteen

  We’re not telling her today. We can’t. It’s not time. Not today. Soon. When we know more. Not today. Please. Not now.

  Mariana would do anything for her sister when Nora’s eyes looked like that.

  God, please don’t let her cry again.

  She punched a pillow and turned it over. She lifted her hair so the coolness of the pillow soothed her neck, which felt rigid with knots.

  Sick.

  Sick.

  Sick.

  It was the only word Mariana would let rattle around in her brain. The other words—words that were too big, too hard—she let go of with tight breaths, breaths that should move more easily, if she could figure out how to breathe ever again.

  Open hands cling to nothing.

  They were words she’d said on the meditation podcasts how many times? Hundreds, at least. It was BreathingRoom’s catchphrase. Two weeks ago, a blogger had quoted her on HuffPo, and their Web site hits had tripled. Open hands cling to nothing.

  She couldn’t help it. She was clinging.

  She slid farther under the bedding. One breath in, one breath out, dropping the words death, alone, gone, memory, light, Nora.

  Nora.

  Another breath. Luke, if he were here, would lie in front of her. He would scoop both sides of her face in his big hands and put his mouth next to her ear. Breathe, love. She would take his breath, eating it right in front of him, accepting what he offered. She was supposed to be the Zen one, but he was the one who calmed her.

  He wasn’t here, though. He would have been, had she asked him. But they were on such uneasy footing since she’d said no to his proposal. He said he was okay whenever she asked him, but he barely met her eyes when he smiled. She worried she was losing him.

  Or she had worried about that until she suddenly had to worry about losing the most important one of all.

  Mariana put her nose under the top sheet and breathed.

  Usually these sheets against her skin—the smell of them—filled her with a contentment she didn’t find anywhere but retreat centers
. Yoga was the closest she came to it in everyday life—the tired, heavy warmth of her limbs as she got into the car Luke had bought her for her birthday and used the seat warmer on the way home. Or postorgasm, when there was nothing to do but breathe and feel Luke’s chest behind her, rising and falling. That’s how good the smell of Nora’s sheets was. Once, years before, Mariana had tried talking Nora into doing her laundry for her. She’d actually thought for a moment that Nora would do it. Of course, Mariana might have had a bit too much to drink, which had been the reason she’d stayed over that night. She was embarrassed now to think of it, the recollection a sharp poke in her mind. This was before BreathingRoom, before Mariana had to be better. “Please?” she’d said to Nora. “I need this. To smell this every night. Oh, the heaven of it. Please?”

  Sitting on the edge of the bed, Nora had looked at her with wide eyes. “Are you asking me to be your maid?”

  “No!” She didn’t have the money, anyway. “It’s just . . .” Mariana had clutched the sheets with both hands, pulling them to her nose again. “Maybe I am. I just want your sheets. Come on.”

  Nora’s gaze had been amused. “I can’t believe you’re asking me to change your bed linens.”

  She called them linens! No one was as Martha Stewart as her sister, not even goddamn Martha herself. “Please? It won’t take you more than an hour to get over the Golden Gate if you come midday. You come into the city once a week to go to the office anyway, right?”

  Nora’s chin moved from amused to cold. “Won’t you be back here soon enough, anyway?” Ice rattled her syllables, the sign to back off.

  It had rankled, that assumption her sister held that Mariana would fuck up again and have to move back in. Although, with the sun-scented sheets . . .

  “I have a life,” Nora continued, the implication that Mariana didn’t have one. “A job. Your sheets can smell exactly the same as mine. Just get a clothesline. Amazon. Twenty bucks.”

  They wouldn’t smell the same, though. Sheets line dried in San Francisco would smell of burritos and diesel, not ocean and blue skies. Nora’s sheets smelled of Tiburon and morning hikes and afternoon picnics on sunshiny Mount Tam.

  Now, her phone in her hand, the sheets over her nose, Mariana brought up a search window before she caught herself.