In the school pictures of Ellie that hung farther down the hall, chronicling her most awkward ages, she was alone. Just like she was now.
In her room, Ellie set her closed computer on her desk. She tried to rub the muscle in her neck that ached, but she couldn’t quite reach it.
Automatically, she brought up the Queendom forums page. She could plunge into talk about the game, and that would make her feel better. It always did. She wouldn’t be alone if she were in the computer, bouncing Healing recipes off other people, helping newbies figure out how to transform.
Ellie looked down at her hands, the fingertips poised on the enter button.
For the first time in months, she turned the game off. She didn’t need the game to take care of her, just like she didn’t need her mother to be home or her aunt to watch out for her. She could handle it on her own. She’d sleep with no music tonight, with no soft glow from her Healer’s hut to bathe her. Ellie pulled up the covers and shut her eyes resolutely, as if she could will herself to rest. Maybe when she woke in the morning she’d feel different. Stronger. Older.
Maybe she’d feel less alone.
She crossed her fingers again even though they didn’t have a good track record and squinched her eyes more tightly closed.
Chapter Sixty
Nora said, “Shit,” the word deep and completely heartfelt.
The turkey was rotten. The goddamned Thanksgiving turkey was rotten to its core.
“Shit, shit, shit.” The word was also an apt description of the way the turkey smelled. She’d put the turkey in four hours before and she’d been smelling something bad for two. She’d blamed Ellie’s shoes at first. Seventeen-year-old girls normally smelled like many things—Abercrombie perfume and Maybelline Baby Lips—but Ellie had legendarily bad-smelling sneakers. She didn’t seem to care, either. When she was Ellie’s age, Nora had been horrified by the very idea of any natural smell emanating from her body. She’d fought her underarms with the spray deodorant from the dollar store and, with her babysitting money, she’d bought extra cans that she tucked in her school locker and kept in the bottom of her backpack. Both Nora and Mariana had argued over the baby powder in the mornings before school, tipping it into their plastic flats, hoping that that day would be the day it worked. Instead, they’d only left sweet-and-sour white footprints on the locker room floor as they padded to the gym showers they pretended to take.
Ellie, since she’d gotten old enough to fight body odors, had seemed blithely unconcerned. “Mom! Smell my feet! Aren’t they rank?” She would take off her shoes when her feet got hot whether she was in the Prius or in the kitchen. Nora knew that Samantha and Vani teased her mercilessly about it, and still Ellie just smiled and shrugged. The Odor-Eaters Nora bought her sat encased in plastic on her desk.
Even on the days Ellie forgot to wear deodorant—which were more days than Nora could honestly understand—she seemed strangely thrilled with her animal scent. “Can you smell me, Mom? I’m so foul. I smell like this guy in my seventh period named Jim Wells on a hot day after he’s done lacrosse and basketball practice.”
The Thanksgiving turkey smelled like Ellie’s feet and old roadkill and cat shit and, possibly, Jim Wells.
And apparently, a smell that offended her daughter did exist. Ellie entered the kitchen with her blue scarf pulled up around her face.
Her voice was muffled. “What is that, Mom?”
Nora hadn’t been prepared to admit that it was the turkey. It couldn’t be. Not this year. “I thought I’d used too much rosemary . . .”
“Rosemary smells nice. Whatever this is”—Ellie made a one-handed gesture in the air—“is toxic. I think it might kill me.”
Nora snapped, “Then get out of the kitchen.” She heaved the turkey out of the oven, appreciating its heft. She’d spent almost forty dollars on this freaking thing. “Maybe the egg in the stuffing is bad. Or maybe it was the bread I used?”
“What did you do?”
Nowadays it was always her. It was always Nora screwing things up. This time it wasn’t her, though. “No, it has to be the stuffing.”
“But I helped you make that. It didn’t stink.”
What Ellie meant by helping was that she had stood near her mother, her cell phone in her hand, texting furiously to Samantha while she snacked on the toasted focaccia Nora used to start the stuffing. Some things didn’t change.
Ellie pulled the scarf tighter around her face. “It smells like death.”
Nora bit her lip and, with it, the retort she wanted to spit at her daughter. It was death—that was the point. Americans celebrated being thankful for life by butchering something, cutting it down in its full-breasted happiest prime. “It can’t be the bird,” she said. “I won’t let it be.” Surely she’d be able to pull out whatever the offending thing was and throw it away. “Oh! Maybe I didn’t pull out the giblets.”
“You did.”
“No, I don’t think I did.”
“Remember? You said you wished we still had Buster so you could give him the heart.”
“I did?” Nora felt a spasm of fear low inside her. She set the turkey carefully on the wooden cutting block of the island. “Sure. Right. But maybe I didn’t get it all.”
“Are you sure you didn’t leave this on the doorstep for, like, a week?”
“Don’t be silly.”
Ellie’s voice was softer. “No. Really. Did you . . . maybe . . . buy it last month? Or something?”
Nora held up one oven-mitted hand. “Just stop. Let me figure this out.” She hated that she couldn’t remember when she’d bought the turkey. Or even where she’d bought it, for that matter. She knew how much she’d paid . . . or was that last year’s bird that she remembered? Shit.
Ellie hopped up on the counter next to the sink, even though Nora had asked her approximately seventy thousand times not to—the tile would get weak eventually—and watched. “I don’t know why I’m even staying in here,” Ellie said through her scarf. “But it’s like I can’t turn away. I have to know the disgusting end of this. This is worse than when you hit that mama bird with the car. Remember?”
Of course she remembered. Not of course. Never of course, not anymore. “You are not helping.” Nora took her biggest wooden spoon and jabbed it into the bubbling, noxious cavity. “It’s got to be the stuffing.”
“If it was the turkey itself, wouldn’t you have noticed after you defrosted it? Like, it wouldn’t go into the oven and just start stinking.”
Nora closed her eyes. She couldn’t remember defrosting it. Goddamn it, she was good at this part of being a mother. The home-baked cookies and the healthy banana bread with the flaxseed oil snuck in and the caramel apples at Halloween and birthday cakes in any and every shape—Nora was good at doing it and good at helping other people to do the same. Thanksgiving was her high holiday, the most holy of all shined-silver days.
Not this year. The stuffing was in a large yellow bowl, reeking of bloody mayhem, and the stench was only getting worse.
Nora’s eyes watered, and from her perch on the counter Ellie choked.
Taking her favorite, sharpest knife from the block, Nora held it over the bird’s breast. This was a moment to be savored at a table where your loved ones were gathered around you. Carving was the best part of Thanksgiving—the moment that everyone watched, salivating in appreciation. She should carve into the meat at the long dining table, candles flickering, wine sparkling in her wedding crystal.
Not under the compact fluorescent glare of the kitchen lighting. Not while her daughter gagged.
She held the knife for a moment in the air and then plunged it into the bird.
The turkey fell apart with a wet groan. The breath of it rushing out was enough to make Nora stagger backward.
“Oh, no! Mom!” Ellie’s scarf was almost wrapped around her head now and she pulled her kne
es to her chest.
“Get your feet off the counter!” The demand was automatic.
“Jesus. Do you have a nose? How are you not dying right now? Who cares about my feet? My toes smell like roses compared to that nightmare.”
“You’re right. You’re totally right.” Nora picked up another oven mitt and picked up the pan, all twenty pounds of bird and metal. She nodded to the kitchen door. Ellie hopped down and opened it for her.
Outside, the afternoon was warm, one of those gifts the Bay Area doled out liberally in the late fall. The big-leaf maple that hung over the backyard had turned a glorious red and orange, seemingly overnight. Through the wooden fence Nora could hear her other neighbors—the not-Harrison neighbors—enjoying their three-o’clock gin and tonic, in which they indulged every day, holiday or not. The familiar clink of ice in their shaker didn’t calm her—the sound just rattled her nerves more.
“Get the garbage can lid,” she said.
Ellie, still barefoot, danced around her to open it. While she held it open, Nora dumped the whole thing.
“You’re not even saving the roasting pan?” Ellie said incredulously.
“We can buy another one.”
Then, without a single word, Nora walked back inside the house and slammed the door, leaving Ellie outside alone. She had to get used to it sometime.
Chapter Sixty-one
By 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.
Chapter Sixty-two
“Spam? 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.
Splinters of Light Page 34
