Splinters of Light

by Rachael Herron

  “Yeah.”

  “You’re going to Smith.”

  “No.”

  “But you applied to Smith College.” Nora was getting used to the feeling of not quite keeping up, but Mariana had the same look on her face, a frowning concentration, as if, if they just listened harder, they could make the words make sense.

  “No. I applied ED to Mills instead. That’s where I’m going.”

  Nora slid backward and ran into the couch behind her. She scrambled up it. Good. Now she could look down on her daughter and tell her what was really going to happen. “I haven’t saved all that money for Smith for nothing. I know we can talk to the registrar, we can explain what happened—”

  “You can do whatever you want,” said Ellie evenly. “But I’m going to Mills.”

  Nora could feel the hot pink of her cheeks had moved to flare over her whole face and neck. “No way. You’re going to the school you want to go to. I won’t allow you to stay here and take care of me.”

  “You can’t really stop me.”

  “I won’t pay for it.”

  “Then I’ll get a loan.”

  “That would be perfect. Start your grown-up life financially strapped to loans you’ll never be able to afford to pay.” Nora searched her mind desperately for another argument. “Well, you can’t live with me. Not when you’re supposed to be in a dorm in Massachusetts.”

  Her daughter just smiled, as if she’d expected this. “I’ll just wait till you forget you said that.”

  “Jesus!” Nora had a split second of admiration for this creature she and Paul had made. “You ornery little thing. You’re a horrible person.”

  “I know,” said Ellie. “I got it from you.” She appeared satisfied.

  Next to her, Mariana laughed and then gave another sob followed by a hiccup that sounded so much like one of Ellie’s.

  “You’re crying,” said Nora in wonder. She couldn’t remember when she’d last seen Mariana cry. Maybe after their mother had died, during that twenty-four-hour period they’d stayed in bed before they started organizing the funeral. Even then, though, Nora could remember Mariana turning her face away.

  Now she wasn’t doing that. Mariana just sat there, letting the teardrops roll off her cheeks to her gray silk shirt, where they darkened as if in emphasis.

  “I’m still so angry at you,” said Mariana.

  “I know.” And then Nora said, “You’re not a fuckup. You’ve never been one.”

  Mariana shook her head. “Stop.”

  “I’m so sorry. I wish I could take it all back, everything I said. I’m so sorry I hurt you. For so long.”

  “You didn’t know me.” Mariana’s lower lip trembled, slick with tears.

  “I’ve always known you.” From the first moment she could draw breath, she’d known no one else.

  “But you didn’t see me.”

  That part was true. “I’m so sorry.” Nora had thought she would cry, too, apologizing, but strangely, with Mariana weeping, she didn’t feel like she had to. “I listened to your app last night.”

  “You did? You always said you couldn’t do that.”

  “I thought it would be too weird to hear your voice, but it was wonderful. You’re amazing.” Nora had left the earphones in while she lay in the bed next to Harrison, her sister’s voice telling her to breathe the last thing she remembered hearing. It had felt like being embraced by light.

  The doorbell rang.

  All three of them jumped but none of them moved toward the door. It would be Luke, since Harrison always came in through the kitchen. Mariana laughed through her tears, rubbing her face with her hands. “Oh, god. Wait. I need something from you.”

  Nora bit her bottom lip. Everything depended on this moment. She felt Ellie slide her hand into hers, and she wasn’t sure who was consoling whom. She wasn’t sure it mattered.

  “I need . . . ,” Mariana finally said, her voice breaking. “I need help knowing how to turn off the waterworks. Since I started”—she pointed at her cheeks—“they just won’t stop. I’ve been doing this for weeks. Literally.”

  Nora felt the light from the night before fill her again. It occupied the lining of her lungs, enveloping her soul. She knew the answer to this. She might not know much but she knew this. “You just open your arms.”

  Another laugh. “That’s all?” Mariana held her arms out wide. “I can do that.”

  Then Nora, with her daughter and her sister, formed a ball, holding one another so tightly that later they’d be bruised. The doorbell rang again, but the outside world could wait. For that moment, there was no one else in the world but the Glass women: occluded, battered, transparent, but beautiful.

  Stronger than almost anything else in the world.

  Epilogue

  APPLICATION ESSAY, MILLS COLLEGEELLIE GLASS—TIBURON

  My mother is a storyteller. You might know her: Nora Glass. She’s famous. Specifically, she’s famous for writing about me and her divorce from my father. When I was a kid, I hated it. I absolutely abhorred that the way I lisped my esses was something strangers knew about. People would come up to me at book readings and touch my hair, reminiscing about the time I chopped off my right pigtail, leaving the left one long. I knew nothing about them or their lives, but they knew how I couldn’t sleep in the dark after my dad left. It didn’t seem fair.

  But recently, I’ve learned what my mother already knew: that power lies in the storytelling itself. If you choose to share the information, you own it. You’re in charge of it. If you go through a bad breakup and you tell yourself, “I’m heartbroken,” then you’ll cry yourself to sleep every night. But if instead you tell yourself, “I’m better off without that loser,” then you pat yourself on the back (rubbing in small circles, like my mother does, but you probably already knew that) until you fall peacefully asleep.

  The strange thing is: stories with different endings can be true at the very same time. I can be brokenhearted about a boy and also happy to be by myself again. I can be terrified of losing my mother and excited to go to college in the very same second.

  I’d always wanted to go to Smith College (you’re probably not supposed to say that in a college essay to a rival school, but it takes quite a bit to scare me lately, and this doesn’t). When my mother got sick, I still wanted to go. Honestly, I wanted to get as far away from her as possible. Maybe then it wouldn’t be true.

  But what I learned in my most recent favorite online game, Queendom, is that only by protecting yourself can you protect anything that you love. I couldn’t take care of my mother until I learned to take care of myself. I had to figure out the answer to: What do I want the most? I want so much in this world. I want to play video games and save the Dragon Queen all by myself. I want to write stories like the ones I make up in my games. I want to be successful enough to be able to afford to buy any car I want. I want to be happy. I want to be loved.

  Mostly, though, what I want to be is a strong Glass woman who will make the other Glass women proud.

  There’s a beach near Mendocino where you can lie on your stomach and dig your chin into the sand and watch the ocean through millions of pieces of storm-churned beach glass. The world looks different, fractured but beautiful, and you realize that you’re not looking through a kaleidoscope: you are the kaleidoscope.

  Fractured but beautiful—isn’t that a good thing to aim for?

  I want to go to Mills so I can be near my mother even though she thinks she would be fine if I left. I want to go to Mills to learn how to be a successful storyteller, and then I want to tell the stories that will break people apart, fracture them into splinters of light and color and sound, and then put them back together again in their own kaleidoscope of beauty.

  I want to be a storyteller, like my mother. I want to be a keeper of truth, and when necessary, an inventor of it. That is, after a
ll, how we keep going.

  I learned that from my mother.

  A Conversation with Rachael Herron

  Q. How did you get the idea for Splinters of Light?

  A. A sensitive, appropriate answer to how I got the idea for this book would be that I had a loved one suffering from early-onset Alzheimer’s disease. An understandable answer would be that I’d watched someone struggle through it, that I’d wept at their side, that I’d held their hand as they listened to their prognosis, and that my heart was further broken when the cure wasn’t found before they died. If this were something I’d actually experienced, this book would be my way of having closure. But it isn’t.

  The actual, true answer is more prosaic and much gentler. I was sitting on my couch, my feet up on the coffee table, the cat on my stomach, reading a People magazine that featured an article about a teenage boy who was taking care of his forty-six-year-old mother as her EOAD progressed. He managed her medication and his schoolwork. He took care of planning for her safety and for his future.

  That boy’s story—that glossy page-and-a-half write-up—was something I couldn’t let go. I’d flip over in bed in the middle of the night, wondering if he was also awake, worrying about filling out an insurance form. While I was at the grocery store, I imagined the mother getting lost in the aisles she’d been up and down a thousand times, unable to find her son’s favorite treat or even to remember what it was.

  In addition to being a writer, I’m a 911 dispatcher. Every shift, I hear a dozen stories that are life altering and, very often, tragic. I let go of most of them. Occasionally, an event will shake me up, bringing me to sudden tears over the coffeepot at home, but that happens rarely. I’m able to forget most tragedies I hear. This poor memory is a required feature in dispatchers, as important as the ability to multitask and to drink cold coffee.

  I couldn’t get that teenage boy and his mom out of my head, though. I began to play with ideas, slipping them around in my mind much the same way Nora does with the sea glass in her pocket. A mother and son . . . no, a daughter. I’ve always loved writing about the mother-daughter relationship. And who would raise a young woman as her mother slowly slips away? A sister, of course. A close sister. A twin.

  After the idea took hold, it seemed as if every other call I took at work was about someone with dementia in some form or another. We get the calls of the wanderers, the ones who left on foot, going somewhere. (I always wondered where they thought they were going. Did they head out the door with a destination in mind, or was it just the desire to move again with long strides, crossing whole city blocks, not just hallways?) One woman with Alzheimer’s wandered a hill close to her home for three days in summer heat, only found after a massive grid search. A rescue dog found her wristwatch; then the dog found her. She lived. Another few hours outside, she might not have made it.

  She lived. She mattered.

  Every day, new advances are made in Alzheimer’s treatment. And every day, the disease comes closer to us. To me. To you. Someone you love already has been or will be affected.

  As this book took shape in my mind, the characters became real, and the plotline began to twist its way through my imagination like a river twists to the sea. At the same time, I was deeply aware that I had to get it right. I was entering a conversation that I needed to be part of—that we all need to be part of—and I didn’t want to do it wrong. The truth is that we are the ones responsible for raising awareness for Alzheimer’s disease, and this book is my method of doing that, of opening the dialogue.

  How will you answer?

  Q. Are you a twin?

  A. No, I’m not a twin, but I have a younger sister close enough in age to me that there was never a time I didn’t remember her being with me. Maybe that’s why I’ve always been fascinated by twins. Or is it a universal fascination? Perhaps we all want that closeness, that ultimate representation of togetherness. We’re born alone and we die alone, and honestly, that’s an awful lot of aloneness. Coming into the world with someone sounds a lot better. I was always vaguely irritated with my mother that she hadn’t pulled that off for me (and slightly annoyed that I hadn’t made it happen, either, that I hadn’t forced my own wee zygote to split by sheer dint of will).

  My mother-in-law is a twin. Jeannie and Janie still like to dress the same, and they sit close together on the sofa. Their words intertwine, their soft Texas drawl the same exact pitch. In the kitchen, they slice carrots, both of them humming tunelessly. I don’t think they’re aware of the contented noises they murmur to each other. Identical twins, they have the kind of quintessential relationship we all think of when we hear the word.

  A friend of mine has a different kind of bond with her sister. While writing the book, I took her out to dinner to pick her brain about it. Over sushi, she told me about the times—long months—she didn’t speak to her sister. They were too close and pushed each other away, over and over again. There were misunderstandings, small ones, that blew up disproportionately, and enormous wounds were glossed over and covered up for much too long. My friend loves her sister more than anything else in the world. But sometimes she doesn’t like her very much.

  This was far more interesting to me than the Bobbsey Twin relationship I’d always thought of when I thought of twins. Twinship didn’t only mean a built-in best friend, then (though it could include that); it also meant that you’d always only be considered half of a whole. There existed another part of yourself that you couldn’t control, one that you had no say over. You couldn’t read your twin’s mind, and maybe you wouldn’t even want to if you could.

  Nora and Mariana started so far apart they couldn’t see who the other one really was. Bringing them back together was so difficult, sometimes I thought they wouldn’t make it. For the first time in my life, I was grateful not to have a twin. I was thankful my two sisters were well adjusted and strong, completely their own people.

  Finally, though, Nora and Mariana made it. Now they stand together, two wholes, facing the same direction, holding hands.

  Q. In your previous novel, Pack Up the Moon, you tackled the topic of childhood euthanasia and closed adoption. In Splinters of Light, you chose to write about a terrifying disease. What draws you to these darker topics?

  A. There aren’t many sure things in life, are there? But I know one thing for sure. In everyone’s life, there will be times of pain, and there will be times of joy.

  That’s it. That’s what we get. Placed starkly in a sentence like that, it doesn’t sound like much, and it’s easy to stick on the terrible part of it. Yeah, you’re saying that life sucks, and then we die. Thanks for that.

  But that’s not what I’m saying. I believe that no matter how low life tugs us, the lifting force of hope is greater. I love the balance of it, how even in the darkest moments, we can be jolted by an unexpected belly laugh rocking through us. We shouldn’t laugh, we think. How can we possibly laugh at a time like this? Then we surrender to it and laugh harder.

  That’s humanity. Human bodies are frail, but the human spirit is amazing in its strength. Oh, god. I think I just said that laughter is the best medicine. That’s not what I meant to say (although sometimes I think it’s true, as trite as the saying is).

  To be quite honest, my editor said Splinters of Light—in its first draft—was just too sad. I’d gone so far into studying EOAD I couldn’t see a bright spot. Joy? What joy was there in such a tragic disease? What hope could possibly exist?

  Then I remembered that I wasn’t writing a treatise on dementia. The only medical training I have is my emergency medical dispatcher certificate. I know how to tell people to do CPR, how to staunch a gunshot wound, and how many aspirin to take for chest pain. No one wanted to read my book on early-onset Alzheimer’s disease. I was no authority on medicine and never would be, no matter how many books I read.

  What I am an authority on is how hard people can love each other.


  In my revision, I went back to that. I told the story of Nora and Mariana, twins who had drifted apart but still held the hope of being together again, always. I rewrote Ellie, a girl who loved so frantically she could barely imagine the fact that she was loved equally hard back.

  My story wasn’t about a disease; it was about them.

  Multicolored light started to gleam at me as I revised, the beach glass I put in their pockets winking back at me.

  Hope, in my books (and in my heart), always has the last word.

  QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION

  1. How are Nora and Mariana similar as the book opens? How are they different? How do their arcs change as the story unfolds?

  2. Nora sleeps with Harrison for the first time before she’s diagnosed. Why do you think it took so long for them to get together, and what changes after her diagnosis?

  3. What is the relationship between Mariana and Ellie like at the beginning of the book? By the last page, how has this changed?

  4. This is a book about the relationships between female family members. What is the role of men in Splinters of Light?

  5. Nora spends time writing lessons to her daughter (about lipstick, flirting, responsibility). What did she leave out? What would you want your own daughter to know?

  6. What do you think Mariana believes most about motherhood?

  7. Ellie wants to, and does, have sex during the course of the book. How is this part of growing up for her? How much does it mean to her?

  8. At Nora’s darkest moment, she almost loses her sister. What does Mariana’s revelation to her about their relationship mean to how the sisters will work together in the future?

  9. Do you think Ellie should be tested for the disease her mother has?

  10. Beach glass is a central metaphor in Splinters of Light. Is there something in your own house that you could consider a similar metaphor?