Splinters of Light (37 page)

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.

“Y
our 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 didn’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.

N
ora 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.

This was Christmas. Today should be perfect.

The lemon marmalade had been a bright, sweet start, but only that. Nora needed Christmas to fix the rest. And she had hoped that it would be the day Ellie finally accepted that Nora wasn’t going to get better (but that she would never love Ellie less, never, never, never any less, more with every minute that passed).

Instead, they were seated uncomfortably around the coffee
table on the floor, all three of them staring at the bowl of beach glass that usually sat next to Nora’s bed, none of them wanting to make necklaces out of the pieces, not even Nora herself.

She was an idiot for thinking this would work. Knowing that didn’t make her feel less stubborn, though. “Ellie, you’re close. If you use the
pliers
”—she had the word back and she wouldn’t let it go—“to wind off that last piece of wire, you’ll have it, I think. Look at mine.” She held her piece of wire-wrapped green glass. “God, this is ugly.”

Mariana snorted. Even though it was a derisive snort, Nora held on to it like it was a kiss. Mariana had barely said a word since she’d arrived. She’d seemed almost . . . shy. She’d sat on her hands and, while she didn’t refuse to try making a necklace, she certainly didn’t try very hard. Soon it would be dinnertime. (Nora had bought the meal online and had gotten it delivered, a precooked roast and potatoes and the fanciest kind of vegetable dishes Andronico’s had. Good enough was good enough now.) Luke would arrive soon, and then Harrison would walk over from his house, and it wouldn’t be just the three of them anymore.

What if this was the last Christmas she would have with her sister and her daughter—the last one she would be truly present for?

The wire drew first blood, jamming itself under her thumbnail. “Well,
dang
it.”

“Mom, come on. Seriously. Who are we making these for? Do you think we’re really going to wear them?”

“Not if it looks like this pile of crap, we’re not.” On Pinterest, where she’d gotten the idea, Nora had found beautiful images of cloudy green and blue wrapped delicately—ornately—in silver wire, hanging from shining chains. Her beach glass looked like it had been crammed into a temporary steel cage, and it looked bulbously obscene hanging from the leather strap she’d attached it to. She’d made a bully necklace, something destined to hurt the wearer, to attack any friend who dared to go in for a hug.

It was just one more thing to add to the growing list at the back of her Moleskine of things she couldn’t do (that was, when she could make out what letters meant).
Drive. Cook at temperatures over 400.
She’d write
Craft with hard objects
at the bottom of the list, but she should probably just write
Craft
. The knitted sock, Ellie had recently pointed out, had gotten so long that it was now an unending tube. Nora had run out of yarn twice. She’d just attached another ball, so the “sock” changed from green to yellow and then to red. She’d laughed and told Ellie she’d changed her mind, that she was making a skinny stoplight scarf, but the truth was she’d forgotten how to bind off. She could look it up on YouTube, of course. But then she was pretty sure she’d forget how to cast on, or even to cast on at all. And her hands needed something to do. She loved her sock-scarf. It was something she could do, something that showed forward progress, even if that progress was technically wrong.

“Screw this,” said Nora. She swept all of it—the pliers, the metal snips, and the leather—into the box it had all come in. (Thank god for Amazon. On days she could read, she could still buy whatever she needed, and the mailman brought it to the house, right to her. It was practically like receiving gifts, since every second or third time she had no idea what she’d ordered. A few times she wasn’t even sure she
had
ordered what she’d received—an egg spatula, a laser cat toy even though Oscar had died when Ellie was ten—until she went into her order list and confirmed that, yes, the command to send her these things had come from her computer.)

Sometimes it felt like being a blackout drunk. Every time she came to, she had to hope she hadn’t done anything embarrassing, that she hadn’t danced on a tabletop or stripped off important pieces of clothing while in inappropriate places.

At other times, it felt like nothing at all. Everything was normal, except that now Harrison slept in her bed at night and was usually to be found somewhere inside her house, puttering around in exactly the same way he did in his own house. The morning
after he’d stayed all night for the first time, Ellie had asked Harrison, “Are you living here now?” She’d been at the table, eating cereal. There’d been nothing angry in her voice, just curiosity.

Nora had watched Harrison freeze, the glass he was washing hovering in midair. Nora could have jumped in and answered for him (
I gave him a toothbrush, a red one, he forgave me and believed me and got me one for his house, in yellow, we have two homes now
), but Ellie had asked him the question, not her.

“I still live next door, but your mom and I want to spend more time together. Is that okay by you?” Harrison said it like he would have gone back home and stayed there if Ellie had told him that it wasn’t all right.

Ellie had nodded without looking up. “Sounds good to me.” She hadn’t said it with relief or even surprise. It seemed like it might, actually, sound good to her.

Nora had asked Harrison to give them this time before dinner, time for the Glass women to craft together using the beach glass they’d collected over the years. Now she wished he was there. He would make them all laugh. He would use his pliers to make a snowflake out of the wire and tell them the glass deserved to be what it was, just pretty. It didn’t need to be something bigger, better.

He’d be right.

“Let’s do presents,” she said. “No more of this crap.”

Ellie got her worried look. “Weren’t we just supposed to make one present each for each other? I thought that’s what we agreed.”

“We did,” Nora said.

“Well, you said presents. Plural.”

There are three of us, that makes it plural.
But she didn’t snap it like she wanted to—Nora held her tongue.

Mariana nodded and stood, reaching for her bag. “Let’s get it over with before the guys get here.”

“Speaking of the guys,” Nora tried to say casually, “is Dylan coming?”

“No,” was all Ellie said.

That’s what she’d thought. Ellie hadn’t been playing her game at night; she’d been watching TV with her instead. It had been nice, catching up on Netflix shows, and Nora had tried not to remark on the novelty of it for fear of chasing her away. One weekend they’d binged on a
Gilmore Girls
marathon, something that had made her heart so hopeful it actually hurt. “Do you want to talk about it?”

“No,” Ellie said again.

“Are you okay?”

Ellie finally looked up. “Yeah,” she said. “I am.”

“Good.” Nora took a deep breath. “Okay, who’s first?”

Mariana, still sitting on her hands, said quickly, “Not me.”

“Me, neither,” said Ellie.

Nora tamped back irritation. It was
Christmas
. She had Bing Crosby on the stereo and a fake fire snapping on the flat-screen. She’d made mulled cider, but Mariana had refused a cup and Ellie hadn’t begged for one (she’d been prepared to say yes). She’d decorated the tree by herself the week before while Ellie did homework, saying she was behind in English.

A rush of grief that made her chest ache was followed just as quickly by the landslide of happiness of being here, with these two.
These
two.

“Okay, I’ll go. I kind of have to explain both of them, though.” She handed a flat box to each of them. Mariana’s was heavier. Both were intricately wrapped, with shiny bows that she’d made herself. She could still remember how to do
that
.

Mariana eyed hers suspiciously, as if it would bite her.

“Go on, open it.”

Inside was a photo album. Mariana opened it to a random page in the middle, and there was a picture of the two of them in college, sitting in that crappy little convertible Mariana had bought with the money she’d made at the coffee shop. They were both grinning at whoever was taking the picture of them. They looked identical. Nora herself had to look at their earrings
to figure out that she was the one on the left. “You loved that car. That was the first car you ever bought.”

Mariana looked up. “It’s a photo album of us?” They had those already. Twin books. Nora had made them before.

“Keep looking. It’s a photo album of
you
.” She reached forward and flipped to one of her favorite pages. “Look. It’s all the postcards you sent me from India. And here’s the first place you taught yoga. Remember, this was your studio on Fourth, that tiny place you had. And this, this was from the day you came up with the idea of the BreathingRoom app when we were in Dolores Park. Look how big your smile was, like you couldn’t fit all your teeth in your head.” She turned more pages. “And over here, look. Remember that news show you were on two months ago? I got this still from them. Remember how nervous you were? And here, screenshots of the app. With quotes from users.”

Mariana shook her head. “I don’t get it.”

It was her apology. It was Nora’s way of saying,
I see you. I know how amazing you are. You’re not a fuckup. I know you’ve been taking care of me.

Nora flipped to the front of the book. “Look. You and Mom. I hadn’t seen this one in forever. And here’s one of you and Ellie . . .”

Mariana stared. “Where are you?”

Fine. If Nora had to say it out loud, she would. “It’s to show you how amazing
you
are. In everything you do.”

“But where are you?”

“What?”

Mariana flipped the pages rapidly. “Besides that picture of us in my car, you’re not in here.”

“It’s not about me. This is about
you
.”

“But I need . . .” Mariana reached forward and touched Nora’s wrist. “But I need you.”

Nora felt heat hit her cheeks. “Oh.” Christ, what a stupid gift. “I’m sorry. I didn’t think of that.”

Mariana blinked and smiled, though it was weak. “It’s okay. It’s fine. Okay, moving on. Ellie, how about you open yours?”

Nora turned to Ellie, who was slipping off the bow. God, if she screwed up both of the presents . . . “This is . . . I’m not sure of this one.”

“I’m sure it’s very nice,” said Ellie politely.

Inside the slim box was a simple piece of paper. In a page she’d torn from her journal, Nora had written, “I, Nora Glass, give my permission for my daughter, Ellie Glass, to be tested for the PS1 gene mutation.”

Ellie gasped. She put her hand to her stomach.

God, was this wrong, too? Had Nora lost the ability to read emotion as well as keep track of time?

“Mom.”

“I know it’s what you wanted.”

“It is.”

“Now you can.”

Ellie’s eyes were huge. “Now I don’t know if I want to.”

A tide of relief swelled inside Nora’s chest. “Then don’t.” Goose bumps rose on her arms. “But you can think about it. You can make the decision for yourself. It’s not mine to make for you anymore.”

“I’m scared.”

Nora felt a sob swell in her throat, and she met Mariana’s eyes. Her sister raised her chin, as if reminding her to do so. Nora raised hers to match. “Me, too, Ellie.”

Ellie hugged her, a brief sharp grasp, and then she let go again. It was enough.

“I want to go next,” said Mariana. “Me next.”