Splinters of Light

by Rachael Herron

  Her mother looked interested. “They let you write? In the game itself?”

  Ellie nodded and made Addi take a small jump for no reason.

  “Does everyone write in it? I don’t remember anyone saying that when I was researching it.”

  “Most people don’t, actually.” She gave a quick glance at her mother, who looked too pleased. Great, this was going to start her on a whole You’re such a good writer, you could write, like me . . .

  She didn’t look at the keys but typed as quietly as she could. My mother . . . I don’t know what . . .

  The response was instant. Isn’t Father’s Day your thing with her? Tell her you love her.

  It was a good idea and she was ashamed she hadn’t said it yet. “Love you, Mom.”

  Mom swallowed and leaned her cheek against the doorjamb. She looked thinner at the waist—or did she look heavier around the jaw? Ellie felt like she’d never seen her mother before. She was a stranger, visually. Nora was pretty, Ellie realized with a jolt. Other people might think so, too. It was an odd thought to have.

  But then her mother said, “You, too, chipmunk,” and her mother was just her mom again. Normal hair, normal eyes, standing in the normal hallway like normal mothers did when busy helicoptering.

  Ellie went back into the game. Dyl was ahead of Addi, swinging his secondary ax at the top of a flower that looked like a collection of fuzzy plates. She wanted to pick the flower, roll its leaves up tight, and put them in her pocket. Thanks, she said.

  Moms. Everyone has one.

  Not everyone. For one long second, Ellie tried to imagine a world without her mother in it.

  But she couldn’t. Her brain wouldn’t do it. It was like walking to the edge of her own, real world. The ground shivered and pixelated, her own bed glitched, the pillows behind her juddering as they struggled to remain solid. Ellie knew, if she kept walking that way, that the walls would artifact so wildly she’d fall through them into nothing. It was so much safer to push ctrl-fn-F and make Addi run so fast she passed Dyl, so fast no Incurser could hope to keep up. Her leather boots creaked below her, and the violins sped up into a low bass thudding. Her heart finally eased.

  Catch me if you can!

  She hoped he could.

  Chapter Twenty-nine

  There were always tests. Always. Something more to come in for. There was always a doctor she hadn’t met with yet, someone else with an amazingly clickable pen who wanted to weigh in on her diagnosis. Someone else with a great idea. And Nora bought it every time, bought into the hope they folded into their charts and tucked into their computers while they pecked at keyboards and stared at computer screens, looking for answers. Sometimes she wondered if they were just googling, doing the same thing she did late at night. She wondered if they were looking for the same thing.

  Hope.

  Stubbornly, like daffodils planted on freeway medians, hope was what kept springing up over and over again. Hope that they were wrong, hope that something had changed. Sometimes Nora woke with the startling belief that a cure had been found. Somewhere—maybe Sweden, wasn’t that where they were always doing something amazing with medicine?—somewhere far away, overnight, a young medical professional had stumbled over it, the one thing that would selectively lower levels of amyloid-beta 42 and make all the difference. The one chemical with innumerable syllables that, mixed with the other seventy-two necessary substances, would fix Nora, would bring her back to where she was supposed to be.

  Every day, as she jotted notes of things to remember, to do, to keep, one word kept coming up, doodled in the margins, drawn in bold at the bottoms of the pages of her journal: “Hope.”

  It was a song. Hope, hope, hope.

  She had it. It seemed more important than anything else she wrote down, more important than other worthwhile words like “fortitude” and “courage.” “Resilience” and “strength” were good, too, but none were as necessary as “hope.” She looped the H and drew out the last breath of the E, over and over.

  One late spring morning, while she sat in the backyard watching the hummingbirds swarm the honeysuckle, Nora remembered with sudden clarity her very first diary. It had been small and pink, with a white and yellow spray of jonquils on the front. Her mother had bought it for her ninth birthday. Nora had been thrilled with everything about the locking journal, especially with the tiny brass key that fit so satisfyingly in the book’s strap, opening with an almost soundless click. She wanted to swallow the key to guarantee she wouldn’t lose it. She pictured the key deep inside her belly, safely stored away, safe from Mariana’s curious fingers and eyes.

  Mariana, for that birthday, had gotten exactly what she’d asked for—a box of Fashion Plates with their gorgeous colored pencils and snapping plastic pieces that each depicted one-third of a perfect woman’s body. Talons of jealousy pierced Nora’s soul. No doubt Mariana would accidentally crumple the paper and carelessly break off the tips of the pencils. Their mother had warned Mariana when the paper had been stripped off the box, “Remember, if you break these, I can’t afford to get you another set. This is it.”

  “I know,” said Mariana, her voice filled with flop-over-and-die joy. She’d clutched the white cardboard box to her chest. “I know, Mama.”

  Nora felt the clawing pain of jealousy again. The only things she and Mariana were good at sharing were the bedcovers. At night after they crawled in together, Nora pulled the afghan close, and Mariana used her feet to wind the bottom sheet around them both. There was enough room for both of them. Their hair wound around each other’s and their fingers entwined. Sometimes they thought they had the same dreams. They shared the space, the very air.

  Most other things they fought over.

  That birthday, Ruthie sat back, looking pleased with how the gifts had been received. “Honey, I’m sorry your diary’s pink. I know you like green better. But you said you wanted it to lock and that’s all they had—I’m still not sure the lock is a good idea.”

  “It’s perfect, Mama,” said Nora. “I love it.”

  Her mother’s mouth twisted. “But . . . the lock, I’m just not sure . . .”

  “You can use the key whenever you want to,” said Nora. She’d never lied harder in her life. The key was hers, no one else’s. She’d wear it on a piece of string around her neck until she died. She knew it was what her mother needed to hear, though. “You can even write in it, Mama.” She couldn’t; only Nora’s newly learned cursive letters would fill the book: all her dreams, her fears. All her hope.

  “Oh, sugar,” said her mother happily. “I would never ask to do that, but it’s sweet of you to say.”

  Mariana got the look she got when Nora got the bigger piece of cinnamon toast. “I can write in it, too, can’t I?”

  “I’m sure your sister won’t mind,” said their mother, already moving toward her bedroom to change for the second half of her split shift. “Share, both of you. Happy birthday, girls.”

  Nora slipped the diary under her shirt, the metal lock cold against her stomach.

  “You have to share with me,” said Mariana, her voice chilly. “Mama said.”

  “She did not.”

  “She did. I have to share my Fashion Plates with you, and I don’t want to.”

  Nora sensed a power play in the air, a way she could turn this to her advantage. “I really want to draw some dresses.” She did.

  “I know you do,” said Mariana in satisfaction. “I’ll let you. If you do what I say.”

  “But if you promise not to write in my diary, I won’t touch your Fashion Plates.”

  Mariana glared suspiciously. “But you want to color.”

  Nora made her eyes wide with need. “I do. But I won’t, if you leave my journal alone.”

  “You’ll never use them once? You won’t sneak in and make a Fashion Plate while I’m in the bathroom or something?” />
  Nora gave up her thought of being sneaky and getting around the promise. There was nothing—usually—that she didn’t have to share with Mariana. From jeans to hair bands to the rare chocolate bar, everything got used up between them both. Nora was so tired of sharing. The journal—it could be filled with secrets. Secrets that Mariana wouldn’t even know, couldn’t even dream of. Secrets that were hers, Nora’s, alone.

  “Deal,” said Nora. “I promise I’ll never use your Fashion Plates, ever.”

  Still looking distrustful, Mariana stuck out her hand. “Deal.”

  “And you won’t ever look in my diary.” She should stop talking. Nora knew she should. A better plan would have been to pretend she’d never use it, didn’t care about it, but she hadn’t thought of it in time.

  “Okay.”

  They shook hands, and it felt official. A business deal between the sisters.

  It hadn’t worked, of course. Within a week, Ruthie had needed a piece of paper to make the weekly shopping list and had popped the lock in order to rip out a sheet. To Nora’s brokenhearted wail, she’d assured her, “I used a bobby pin to open it. It’ll still lock—don’t worry.”

  The fact that the tiny cunning key still worked was beside the point. The safety was gone. Nora wrote in big block letters at the top of every page, STAY OUT, but then she found seven diary pages used for Fashion Plates stencils—women with blue eye shadow and incredibly short skirts—shoved under a couch cushion. In a fit of sheer rage, Nora found her mother’s thick black marker, the one that gave off fumes she knew she wasn’t supposed to breathe (thereby making inhalation terrifying and thrilling). She struck out every page in the journal.

  If she couldn’t find privacy there, in the locked book, then no one would.

  She was hit by remorse the very second she ruined the last page. She should never have done it—she’d ruined everything.

  Again.

  Nora wiped tears off her cheeks and looked up to find herself in her office.

  In her home. She was in her Herman Miller chair, the one that had taken years of paid writing to justify to herself. She looked out the round window in front of the desk, down to the top of Harrison’s kitchen roof.

  Hadn’t she just been in the garden? Watching the brilliance of the tiny green hummingbirds as they zoomed blurrily past? She’d been lost in the birthday memory for how long? When had she walked upstairs? Her phone said four o’clock, but she couldn’t remember what it had said the last time she looked.

  Her own Moleskine journal was open on the desk in front of her. No lock. Nothing to keep anyone out.

  Where am I?

  The words were in her handwriting. She didn’t remember writing them. The page wasn’t dated. She’d left herself no clue.

  In an online New Yorker article she’d found, Oliver Sacks had said, “Though one cannot have direct knowledge of one’s own amnesia, there may be ways to infer it: from the expressions on people’s faces when one has repeated something half a dozen times; when one looks down at one’s coffee cup and finds that it is empty; when one looks at one’s diary and sees entries in one’s own handwriting.”

  Carefully, she wrote the date at the top of the next page. June 30. It felt good to write because it was true and verifiable by her online calendar and the fact that it matched the smudged date on her wrist, which rested above the word of the day, “obstreperous” (which had almost too many letters to fit on her skin—the smug O almost met the sinuous S). Every morning, first thing, she wrote the date along with the day of the week. Every day, she flipped open the pocket-sized Merriam-Webster she kept on her bedside table next to the bowl of beach glass and picked a word. She wrote it on her wrist under the date. She tried to pick a word she didn’t usually use in conversation so she wouldn’t accidentally run across it in daily use. She had to try to think of the day’s word: “cellulose,” “fulvous,” “prototype.”

  Throughout the day, she said the word to herself. Today: obstreperous, obstreperous.

  But Nora didn’t know what to write next in her journal, and she always knew what to write next. She couldn’t remember what she’d come up to her office to work on or if she’d even had a plan at all. She’d finished the column on the dementia village in San Luis Obispo. She’d turned it in to Benjamin. She knew that. But for the life of her, she couldn’t remember her next column idea. She popped open the lid of her computer and searched her calendar for Benjamin’s name.

  Ah. The piece, due in a day and a half, on mothers who smoked through pregnancy.

  That was all it took, really, Nora thought with satisfaction. A careful methodology. With the tools available nowadays, she could orchestrate a way to not forget things. An iPhone reminder app and her Google calendar plus lots of notifications—set minute by minute if that’s what it took—and she wouldn’t put anyone out. It would be fun, actually. It would be a really important game. And that, perhaps, was the best hiding place of all for hope. Hope lived tucked in the base of one question: If Nora played this vicious game against herself, even if she always lost, didn’t it mean (since she was both the player and her own opponent) that she also always won?

  Chapter Thirty

  EXCERPT, WHEN ELLIE WAS LITTLE: OUR LIFE IN HOLIDAYS, PUBLISHED 2011 BY NORA GLASS

  Fourth of July

  When Ellie was little, her favorite thing was fireworks.

  It was to be expected, since Paul was the biggest fan of fireworks there ever was. He loved the noise, the light, the flash, the grandeur of the presentations. He was never good at shooting them off himself—he got nervous even lighting sparklers—and I think it was because they were so important to him. Besides, he always wanted to be in the middle of the action, to be directly underneath as they exploded overhead, not in charge of the not-very-important small arms that popped and sparked on surface streets.

  The first big show we ever took Ellie to was in Sausalito, on the water. She wasn’t even a year old yet, and I’d argued that it would frighten her. Most children were terrified of fireworks. I’d read this in a magazine. (Everything I read I spouted at Paul with the surety that motherhood gave me. All mothers are like this. Even if they act like they’re not sure what they’re doing—they are. They’re one hundred percent sure they’re right and that the other person is wrong. This would be good for new fathers to note.)

  My husband ceded most decisions to me. I was the one who decided on cloth diapers even though we couldn’t afford a service and I had to rinse them in the toilet, gagging every time. I decided how to swaddle her, and god help Paul when he didn’t do it tight enough. I knew what every look on her face meant (even when I didn’t), and confidently, I told him, “That’s gas,” or “She’s hungry,” or “She won’t like fireworks.”

  But he insisted on this one. “We’re doing this. We’re going tonight. By we, I mean Ellie and me. You can come if you want to, but we’re going.” It was so unlike him to press his hand that way that I gave in. I can confess it now though I’m still ashamed of it—I wanted to be right. I wanted Ellie to scream. I wanted her face to go plum with howls of fear. I wanted to comfort her and I wanted Paul to be wrong and sorry about it. (Don’t judge. I hadn’t slept in eleven months.)

  The crowd was terrible. We drove as far as we could get, but the traffic was terrible and we had to park a mile away from the shore. We followed the hordes of people on foot ahead of us in the dusk. I rehearsed how right I would be later and cheerfully carried the bag that held a bottle of wine and half a pizza.

  Night fell. We sat on the salt-eroded grass at the water’s edge and watched the bay expectantly. Far, far away, in San Francisco, the first show started. Muffled thumps traveled over the water. I watched Ellie expectantly. She sat up. In the baby backpack on Paul’s back, her eyes focused on the blips of lighted color. She looked startled, just as I’d known she would.

  Then overhead, our Marin show started. Ro
ckets exploded. Gunfire thumped my chest and I worried that the percussion could damage Ellie’s tiny internal organs. I was about to insist we leave—about to grab her out of the backpack and run, never admitting what I’d just realized for the first time, that I was the one terrified of fireworks—when Ellie burst out laughing.

  She’d been a quiet baby up till then. Her chortles at home were low and satisfied but never loud.

  This was different. She howled with laughter. Other families looked at us and laughed at her joy. Every time a mortar went off, shaking us with impact, she laughed from deep in her belly. She laughed so hard that the tears streaming from her eyes jiggled on the way down her fat face. At one point, she fell over sideways in the baby backpack. “Is she crying now?” he asked, suddenly worried he’d been wrong, that he’d scarred her for life.

  I could have lied—her laughter almost sounded like crying then. But it wasn’t. It wasn’t hysterical or out of control. Ellie was simply laughing in joy, as hard as she could, hiccuping between giggles, and I had honestly never seen anything as beautiful or as funny in all my life.

  “No. She’s perfect.”

  Our tiny family turned our faces up to the explosions bursting in air. Ellie hiccuped and laughed, and we laughed with her. We watched, the three of us delirious, as happy as the men whose job it was to set the sparks to the fuses.

  Chapter Thirty-one

  “Okay.” Dylan ducked his head and pushed back the heavy brown lock that always flopped over his right eye. “You said you wanted to see a dive. This place is a fuckin’ dive.”

  Merchants Tavern, in downtown Oakland, was the type of place Ellie would never have set foot in six months ago. Even if she’d been with someone cool—like her aunt or something—even if she’d been dared to go inside to use the restroom, she would have declined, not caring if she looked chicken.