But her mother didn’t seem to mind. Gently, she pulled Ellie’s hands away from her face. “You can fix her,” she whispered.
Pain shot down Ellie’s legs right to her feet and back up again to her heart. This was so stupid. Neither Ellie nor Addi could fix a damn thing. Nothing. They were useless. She had no strength, no power.
“You know why I think that?”
Ellie shook her head. She held the afghan so tightly between her fingers that they ached.
“Because you fix me every day. You might not be able to save me, or your Queen. But you fix us all the time, my heart. All the time.”
She didn’t. She couldn’t. Only one person had that kind of connection with Mom. “You have to make up with Aunt Mariana.”
Her mother started to speak, then coughed. She’d been doing more of that lately. “This is about you and me, Ellie.”
“But you and her are more important.”
Her mother looked surprised. “What?”
“She’s your sister.”
Frowning, her mother said, “You’re my daughter.”
Ellie needed her to know it was okay. That she understood. “You two have been together since birth. I get it.”
Her mother rocked backward, pushing her hair out of her face. “Do you somehow . . . do you think she’s more important to me?”
The tears burned again, and Ellie took a choked breath. “No.”
“Is that the truth?”
“Yes. Maybe. I don’t know.”
“Oh, baby. Oh, no. It’s different.”
Ellie knew it was different. It was fine. It really was.
“Ellie . . .”
Great, now she’d made her mother cry. Good work. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to—”
“Ellie, you’re the reason I’m alive. When I first . . . God, this is so hard to say, but . . . when I was first diagnosed, I thought about killing myself. I thought about it a lot.” Her mother’s voice cracked, dry. “Mariana would have been okay, with enough time. She would have understood, I think. You, though. I couldn’t do that to you. And more selfishly, I wanted more of you. More time with my baby. If I didn’t have you—honey, if you weren’t here? There would be no point. To anything. Ever again.”
The words were like water falling on parched earth. Ellie felt herself soak them up and wanted more, but that would be selfish, and it wasn’t true anyway. She should be angry that her mother had thought about suicide, and later she probably would be. But at that moment she couldn’t help saying, “Really?”
“Really. My sister is part of me. We came into this world as a package deal, and that has pros and cons, just like anything else. But you are you. You’re totally yourself, standing on your own two feet, totally perfect, and all I want to do is to be near you. Wherever you are. No matter what.” She took a deep breath and Ellie echoed it, drawing in the same air. “And no matter where I am, no matter where that is or what happens to me, I’ll be near you.” Tears slid slowly down her mother’s face. “I promise.”
Ellie leaned against her mother’s shoulder. She didn’t fit like she had when she was a child. But she still fit. Her breath felt easier in her lungs. “Make it right. With Aunt Mariana.”
“I made her really mad, chipmunk. I thought I knew her and I didn’t, and that was my fault. I wasn’t looking. I assumed she was just like me, and I was really wrong about a lot of things.”
“So fix it.”
Mom’s arms tightened around her. “Sometimes we can’t fix everything.”
“Yes,” said Ellie with every bit of stubbornness she’d ever possessed. “We can. We’re Glasses. Remember lemon and honey? Use that.”
“Tea? I should make her tea?”
“Whatever. Do something that shows you mean it. That you didn’t mean to hurt her.”
The kiss her mother pressed to her forehead felt like agreement.
Ellie closed her eyes and drank her mother in. At the same time, she thought, Ctrl-H, ctrl-H, ctrl-H. Addi was a Healer, but Ellie was the one who gave her those powers. If anyone could heal, she could. Ellie was her mother’s. She belonged to her. And more—her mother belonged to Ellie.
They were together.
They were each other’s.
Chapter Sixty-seven
“Your sister’s at the door.”
Mariana looked up from her computer. It took her a moment to focus on the words. “No.”
“I’m not sending her away.”
“You have to.”
“Just go to the door.”
“That’s your job. You’re the man of the house. You protect me from people trying to sell me crap.”
Luke rolled his eyes. “I put her in the living room.” He wandered down the hall, saying over his shoulder, “I’ll make coffee.”
“She can’t have any.”
Luke ignored her.
“Thanks for nothing,” she yelled at his back.
Mariana sighed.
The living room was the most tasteful room in the house (a long, low, red couch that cost more than any car she’d ever bought herself, a piano that neither of them played), and they never used it. The room didn’t match the rest of the rooms in their well-lived-in home. Everywhere else, helmets rested on marble countertops. Bike leathers draped over ottomans in the TV room, and one could as easily find a wrench in a bathroom drawer as a tube of toothpaste. Luke was the one who insisted on keeping the living room nice. Pristine.
It was perfect now. Exactly the right place for someone like Nora.
“Mariana.” Nora leaped to standing. At her feet were two Trader Joe’s paper bags.
“Is Ellie okay?” It was her first thought. Her very first.
“Yeah. Of course. I came over to . . .”
Mariana folded her arms and waited.
Nora looked at the ground. “It seems stupid now. I should just go. Fuck.”
“What’s in the bags?”
“Lemons.”
Mariana shook her head. “What?”
“I tried to make marmalade. With the lemons from the tree in our backyard. You know how Ellie loves them. I thought it would be nice to make a ton of it for her Christmas present. But I screwed it up. I can’t do it by myself. You know, marmalade lasts . . . a long time. Indefinitely.”
A long time.
She couldn’t just waltz in. Not after the fight they’d had. Mariana had said some harsh things, but they were all true. Nora was the one who hadn’t seen any of it coming—Nora was the one whose eyes had been closed for years. For so long.
“How did you get here?”
Nora said, “Uber.”
“From Tiburon? How much did that cost?”
“Sixty dollars.”
“Wow.” Here was where Mariana should say, You should have called me. I would have come to you. But she didn’t. “That’s a lot.”
“I need you.”
Oh, hell no. She couldn’t just pull this, couldn’t just turn and do the dance and tell Mariana she was needed and make everything better.
“What do you want?”
Nora, her eyes tight like she might cry (god, Mariana would kill her if she did), said, “I want you to make the marmalade with me. With Ellie’s lemons. For her.”
“Why me? I can’t even cook. You’re the famous domestic goddess, not me.”
“I can’t read.”
Mariana said, “Excuse me?”
Pulling out a piece of paper from the bag, Nora said, “Some days I can. Some days I can’t. Today is one I can’t. I can only get through the first few sentences and then the words start to run around. I can almost see them moving on the page. I don’t get it. I don’t get what it’s saying.”
“Jesus.” What would that be like? Words were Nora’s tools. Her superpower.
“
Please help me.” Nora’s eyes met hers and Mariana felt an electric jolt right through to the soles of her feet.
“Damn it.” She turned. “You have to do the hard parts. I’m just your narrator.”
In the kitchen, they worked in near silence. Several times Mariana considered turning on music, but she didn’t know what she’d play. Any love song would be fraught; any happy tune would be difficult to bear.
Instead, she sat on a stool at the counter and read the instructions to Nora. “Wash the lemons well.”
No one was better at washing fruit than Nora. Mariana usually rubbed an apple on her shirt before chomping into it, but Nora believed in making sure there were no residual pesticides, no leftover germs from shipping and handling, no toxic wax spray coating. The lemons had come from her very own tree, and still she washed them with a soapy sponge, rinsed them well, and dried them on a tea towel she got out of one of her bags.
As if Mariana didn’t have tea towels. She did. (Nora had given them to her. They had T. rexes on them. T. towels. Mariana didn’t get them out of their drawer.)
“Cut the lemons in half and juice them, reserving the juice.”
She watched Nora handle the knife. Was she careless in her motions yet? Would she stay focused enough not to hurt herself, to slip, to cut her finger off? When would Nora not know how to handle silverware?
What would that time be like?
“Slice the lemon shells crosswise thinly for a smoother marmalade.” She looked up. “What the hell is a lemon shell?”
Nora held up a juiced rind. “This.”
“How do you know?”
“What else would it be? It’s not the juice and it’s not the pulp. It has to be the rind.”
Mariana scowled at the paper. “You sure this is a good recipe?”
“No. I told you. I couldn’t read it very well. It had a lot of stars, so I printed it.”
Mariana tasted acid in her mouth, as if she’d sipped the lemon juice out of the bowl.
Luke came in the kitchen. He kissed Nora on the cheek. She looked up at him gratefully. “Hi, big guy.”
“Hey, Nora. Glad you’re here.”
“Luke . . . ,” warned Mariana. He wouldn’t—couldn’t—fix this one.
Fixers.
For the first time, Mariana realized she surrounded herself with them. Had she always done that? Nora, ever, always Nora. Every boyfriend she’d ever had displayed a penchant for taking care of things. Grant, at the office, who read her mind daily. For god’s sake, Luke fixed things as a profession. He was a mechanic. Or, he was, until he’d inherited the dealership and became the boss, but he still came home most days with a black line of grease under his fingernails because he couldn’t resist helping, making things better.
Luke said, “Why lemons? Is this lemon jam? Is that a thing?”
“Marmalade,” said Mariana. She waved the page at him. “I’ll let you know how it goes.” Code for keep moving.
But Luke poured himself a cup of coffee and leaned on the refrigerator. He would want to help. That’s what he did.
Jesus. She’d been dating Nora. All these years. Maybe she’d been looking for her sister in every relationship she’d ever had.
Holy shit. It was so obvious. It felt like stubbing her toe on a huge, hard rock made of truth.
“What next?” Nora’s face was as open and sweet as a blown tulip.
“Cover the lemon slices with cold water in a big pot.” Had Nora done the same thing? Max, Nora’s first boyfriend, had been a sweetie but a major pothead. Nora’s second boyfriend, Elias, had lost three jobs in the year they’d dated. Jonas had crashed two cars while he was dating Nora, and when he’d borrowed her Civic, he’d worn out the brakes and had never given her a dime to get them fixed. Fuckups. All of them. Even Harrison, when she thought about it. Most of the women he’d brought home over the years weren’t smart enough to find their way out of the cul-de-sac to get home. He was smart and good, but emotionally, he’d never had his shit together, which was ironic, since his job as a therapist was to help people figure their own shit out.
The thing he did best was love Nora.
Just like Mariana.
Her sister was staring at her.
The paper shook in Mariana’s hands. “Boil. Ten minutes. Then drain and rinse.”
Nora smiled. “Just like pasta.”
And Paul, of course, was the biggest fuckup of all. He found things, kept them for a while, and then left, littering them behind him as he went. According to Nora, he’d driven two roofing companies into the ground since he moved into the valley, each time coming up with new funding, new branding. His new wife had given him two kids, and Mariana would bet everything she had that he ignored them completely, too. She’d bet that if he wasn’t out yet, he’d be gone before the kids hit high school. Though she had no evidence, she wouldn’t be surprised if he was already cheating on Bettina now. Paul had essentially abandoned the best girl in the world, Ellie, the most wonderful girl, the special one. Mariana felt her temperature spike and her fingers, holding the recipe, went sweaty. Over her dead body would that man have a say in Ellie’s future. Not when he’d ignored her past.
Luke said, “Hey, both of you. I’ve been working on the bedroom upstairs.”
What was he talking about? Mariana stared.
“Wanna come look?”
Nora smiled and wiped her hands on her apron. “Okay.”
They followed Luke up the staircase. Mariana felt a sense of heaviness deep in her stomach, as if she’d eaten bricks for breakfast. “What is—”
“It’s a surprise.” Luke turned and winked at her. “Be surprised.”
The bedroom at the end of the hallway was a catchall, a storage space for his boxes of bike magazines and her bins of clothes she couldn’t quite decide whether or not to donate. It was a repository for broken things—the outdoor umbrella that had ripped, old computers that hadn’t had their hard drives wiped yet.
He opened the door.
Inside stood . . .
Mariana’s throat clenched and she couldn’t swallow. Next to her, Nora gasped and covered her mouth.
Inside stood a white bed. Simple, with a dark wooden frame. Two brown bedside tables, with lamps made from what looked like tree branches. The only piece of art on the newly painted blue wall was a glass mosaic of the city skyline.
A white desk was under the window. Next to it perched a red wood chair. The old mirrored closet doors had been changed to white slatted ones, and they stood open. Empty.
Luke said, “I’ve been doing this when you’ve been at the office.”
Mariana couldn’t think of one thing to say. It felt like her brain had been scooped out and replaced with something much more delicate, something that trembled with knowledge she couldn’t know yet, knowledge that hovered just over there, just out of her line of sight.
Nora stood frozen on the threshold.
“Go in,” urged Luke.
“I can’t,” Nora said.
“You should.”
One step. Then another. Then all three of them were in the space. The clean, welcoming, happy, hopeful space.
“Ellie will like it, I think,” said Luke simply. “When she needs it. I’m going to let you both look around.”
And he was gone, down the hall, whistling.
Mariana wanted to race after him. When Ellie stayed the night, she always stayed in the guest room. What was wrong with that? She wanted to slap Luke. And she wanted to thank him for being the only good man she’d ever found, the only good man she’d ever loved. But instead, she reached out and took Nora’s hand.
A guest room wasn’t good enough. Ellie deserved her own room, and Luke had known that without asking.
Mariana and Nora sat on the edge of the bed. Mariana could feel a pulse fluttering in her fingertips and di
dn’t know whose it was.
They looked straight forward, out the window that faced the pink and purple Victorian across the street.
“She’s always adored that house,” said Nora, pointing. Her voice shook. “She’ll love looking at it before she goes to sleep. And seeing it when she wakes.”
“Nora, I didn’t know.”
Her sister dipped her head as if her neck hurt. “I know. I can tell.”
“But . . .”
“I know.” She gestured to the skyline mosaic. “Look. He used beach glass. For us.”
Beach glass. She couldn’t believe Luke had . . . Unbreakable, even broken.
Mariana had to say it. Just once. “I’ll take care of her.”
Nora met her eyes. This moment.
This one.
“I know you will,” Nora said.
Together, they went downstairs and cooked the lemons till they were sweet and thick. It wasn’t enough. Of course it wasn’t. But after they’d transferred the hot lemon-sugar mixture to the hot jars using the wide funnel, after they’d boiled the jars again, after they’d subjected them to the heat that would kill every single harmful thing, after they washed most of the dishes, they stuck their spoons into the leftover bit at the bottom of the pan.
It was creamy and sweet, with a sour, perfect bite.
Mariana didn’t feel forgiven and she wasn’t sure she forgave Nora. Not just yet. Open hands cling to nothing. She felt herself breathe, the way she told her subscribers to. From the bottom up, a breath that filled. Next to her at the sink, she heard Nora’s steady breathing, too.
There would be lemon marmalade later. And it would last for a long, long time.
Chapter Sixty-eight
Nora sat next to the Christmas tree, her legs splayed, her back aching, furious that she kept losing words.
“It’s not that hard,” she said in abject frustration. “It shouldn’t be.” She knew she’d lost words when she’d been explaining to them how to make the necklaces—she’d forgotten the word for “pliers,” and when she’d tried to laugh it off, Ellie had become unreasonably upset with her, telling her she’d been stuck again. “For ten minutes, Mom. We talked to you for ten minutes, and you just stared at us.” Ellie’s voice sounded like a child’s, plaintive and needful.
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