Splinters of Light (8 page)

Ellie groaned. “Do you really need to say that?”

“I just enjoy talking about condoms with my sixteen-year-old. What mom doesn’t?”

“God.”

“Happy Valentine’s Day. I love you.”

It was like her mother always wanted to
make
her say it back. “You, too.”

The door shut silently, surprising Ellie. Her mother normally left her door open, and it was always on Ellie to get up and close it again.

Are you still there?
Ellie felt as if she should apologize for her mother even though Dylan couldn’t see her.

Is the Intruder dispatched?

She’s gone. She just wanted to offer me condoms.
There. If that wasn’t hard-core flirting, she didn’t know what was. He was gorgeous. He was a gamer. He lived across the bay. And he liked her.

Or at least he liked Addi the Healer, and that was a pretty good start.

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

Easter

When Ellie was little, we hit a turkey with the car on Easter.

The phrase is funny, isn’t it? We hit a
turkey
. Who the hell hits a turkey in the Bay Area?

We did. We were on our way up the coast, headed to Glass Beach. It was just the two of us—my sister was out of town. Ellie was eight that year, and I thought we’d do something different for the holiday. We’d eat at a fancy restaurant in Mendocino. And Glass Beach, well, that was something special we’d done for years. It was, obviously, our beach. How tickled Ellie had
been when she realized she and the tiny spit of sand shared a name. (How glad I was that I’d kept my last name when I married Paul, that I’d insisted that Ellie take mine when he left. Glass was bright and clear and so strong that not even the ocean could remove its brilliance.)

Located below what used to be an old glass-bottling factory, the sand at Glass Beach was literally made of beach glass, all the sharp edges smoothed away. From a distance, it looked disappointing. Just another gray shore. But if you lay on your stomach on the cold stones just as the sun dipped into the water, if you carved out a place for your chin in the glass sand, you could watch the sunset through pieces of cloudy, jeweled color, splinters of light, a homemade kaleidoscope made of glass and water.

In Petaluma, not even halfway to Glass Beach, we ran into trouble in the shape of Benjamin Franklin’s favorite bird.

I was still driving my beat-up old Civic I’ve mentioned so many times in my columns (the floorboard fire! the brake failure! the radiator explosion!), and by then it didn’t like going up hills much. I gave it as much gas as I could, so busy pouring my own futile mental energy into the old engine that when the flapping thing dove toward my grill in the heavy traffic, I didn’t have time to swerve, not without endangering Ellie. With a thump as loud as a clap of thunder, the windshield was covered in blood and feathers and gelatinous goo.

Ellie screamed. I’m sure I did, too. I pulled over as quickly as I safely could. I told her to stay in the car, but she didn’t. “What
is
that, Mama?” She pressed her head against my side and then peeked again. The traffic was a blur next to us. No one stopped, or even slowed.

“I think it was a turkey.”

“You killed it.”

“I did.”

“On
Easter
.”

“At least it wasn’t a pig.”

“What?”

“Ham? Oh, never mind . . .” I wished for my sister desperately. Mariana would have been hopeless with the cleanup, but she would have made me laugh. She always made us laugh. “Bad joke. Sorry, honey.”

“What do we do now?” Ellie’s voice was a wail.

I knew what I wanted to do: I wanted to walk forward on the highway, one arm around my daughter, the other arm thumbing a ride. I wanted to wail, too. I wanted to leave the car behind us, leave the carnage and blood, and go on with our lives as if it had never happened. I wanted a kind older man to pull up in his farm truck and offer us a lift to town, where he’d give us the old car he’d fixed up for his daughter before she married a car dealer. “Don’t worry about the pink slip,” the tenderhearted old farmer would say. “I have a friend at the DMV—she’ll take care of everything.”

What really happened was something I know you mothers will recognize: I rolled up my sleeves, literally. I got out the paper towels I kept in the trunk. While Ellie insisted on watching (and crying), I mopped dead turkey guts off my windshield, blood off the grill, and something even worse off the hood.

“I don’t get it, Mama. Those look like eggshells.”

They were. I’d just been hoping she wouldn’t notice.

But of course she did. “They
are
. They’re
eggshells
. The turkey was
pregnant
, Mama? You killed a pregnant turkey on Easter?”

I wanted to yell at her. I wanted her to understand I hadn’t aimed for the bird, that it wasn’t my fault, that I hadn’t planned on getting turkey gore on my jeans that day. I certainly hadn’t aimed for a turkey matriarch. I would have swerved around it if I could have kept her safe.

Instead, I had to hold my tongue. I had to clean up the mess.

That is, on many days, the only thing a mother can do.

Then, in what felt like a small miracle, the car started even though the engine had a new, worrying rattle. We made it to the coast. We blew off our Easter dinner reservations and ate McDonald’s cheeseburgers on Glass Beach.

At the very last minute, right before the sun slipped into the water, Ellie and I threw our bodies onto the sand and dug holes for our chins. We scooped the bigger pieces of glass up into small piles so that we watched the sunset from behind a barricade of refracted color. The sand underneath pulled the warmth from our bodies, and when we sat up—the sun gone—we were both happily shivering.

In a motion that felt very much like grace, Ellie threw herself in my lap even though she was eight and perhaps almost too old to do so anymore. She hugged my neck. I thought she would say something smart, something that made me reflect on life, as she so often did. Something about the strength of the broken, worn-down glass, the way our last name was just as strong, just as hearty and beautiful.

Instead she said, “You stink like rotten baby turkey eggs.”

I hugged her back. “I’m sure I do.”

W
hen Nora planned the Easter Alcatraz jaunt, she hadn’t planned on the rain. Riding the ferry to the defunct jail was usually a pleasant crossing of famous waters. When they’d gone in the past, they’d always remained on the top deck of the ferry, no matter how strong the wind or thick the fog. But with the miserable damp that ranged from drizzle to downpour, they had to stay in the main cabin, packed inside, competing for room with tourists who jousted with elbows like padded swords as they attempted to get lousy photos of the city through breath-misted glass. The smell of sodden wool and wet dog wrestled with a cloud of cologne and fading excitement. “I thought no one would be here,” Nora said in astonishment as they’d looked at the line of people trying to buy coffee at the inside counter. “It’s a holiday. No one’s supposed to be here.”

At least Nora, Mariana, and Ellie had managed to score three seats together. All Nora had seen when they’d boarded was a mass of people circling like chum. Her boarding stub pressed
against her palm like a tiny knife. Mariana said, “We’ll never get to sit together.”

“Yes, we will.” Nora wasn’t at all sure of this.

“Whatever.” Mariana had that giving-up sound in her voice, the tone Nora hated the most. Ellie was the sixteen-year-old, not Mariana.

So Nora, who’d always been the one good at scoping out the overview of a situation and summing up what needed to be done, led them confidently to a section where two seats were available. A small child played on the edge of the third, hopping between it and his mother’s lap. As gracefully as she could, Nora slid her purse onto the seat of the chair while the child scrabbled on his mother’s shoulders between leaps. “You don’t mind, do you? This is my sister and my daughter. Oh, isn’t your son a
cutie
? You see, Mariana?” she said triumphantly. “Plenty of room.”

“Sit by me, sit by me,” said Ellie to Mariana, the same way she had as a child. Ellie had always loved her aunt, from the very first moment.

Well, not the
first
moment.

Mariana hadn’t been there for that. She’d been in India for the second time (this time she’d communicated by e-mail at least), studying yoga and her third eye. She hadn’t made the flight back home, the one Nora had booked and paid for, the one that would bring her twin back to her for the most important moment of her life, the moment Ellie entered the world.

A taxi problem, Mariana had said later. “Lost one tire, then another. I rode to town on the back of a motorcycle to grab another cab, but it was a tiny town, and the other cabdriver had died the week before. We had to wait for the guy’s uncle to come back. It was kind of a big deal.”

Nora had been in the middle of a much bigger deal, she’d been pretty damn sure. Ellie had gotten stuck and she’d almost needed a cesarean. She could hear her sister’s voice when Paul held the phone up, but Mariana wasn’t
there
. It didn’t count. When
Ellie was finally bundled and passed into her arms, it had hurt to hold the baby without being able to show her to her sister. Ellie looked exactly like they had as a child: bright slapped red with a shock of black silky hair that stuck straight up. Sending the first video via e-mail to her sister wasn’t the same. Nora found she couldn’t even push the send button. She made Paul do it.

When Mariana had finally come to meet her niece, a whole three days late, Ellie’s birth-pale eyes had already darkened. Angrily, Nora hadn’t wanted to hand her sister the baby, who’d been crying most of the day. Most of her
life
, it seemed. Mariana didn’t deserve to hold this bundle, this part of herself.

Finally, Mariana snapped, “I’m sorry I missed her birth. All right? I’ll keep saying it if it makes you happy. Is that what you want? You know I would have done anything I could to be with you, and I couldn’t and it wasn’t my
fault
.”

“You’re just . . .” It was never Mariana’s fault. Nora looked at Ellie’s face, covered in angry tiny bumps. Her mouth was wide, busy with furious hiccups. Her hands were clenched in fists. “Sometimes . . . you’re careless.”

“Careless?”

“Not sometimes. You’re always careless.”

“You’re worried I’ll break your baby?”

Mariana broke lots of things. It was something to worry about.

But finally Nora said, “Here.” She thrust Ellie at her twin. “Knock yourself out.” Ellie would scream—she always did when taken from her mother’s arms, not that she didn’t do it in
her
arms, too.

Mariana’s face had shifted, softening. Ellie immediately quieted and stared upward, as if trying to figure out the differences between this new woman and the woman who normally held her. “Oh,” said Mariana. “Hello, my wee chipmunk.”

Mariana’s whole body held Ellie, not just her arms. A sudden earthquake could have tossed them all to the ground, and Mariana would have held up an unscathed Ellie seconds later,
Nora knew, taking the entire hit herself. Ellie was as safe in Mariana’s arms as she was in Nora’s. Safer, perhaps, without the mother’s baggage, which came complete with a roll-aboard of concern and a carry-on of guilt.

Ellie calmed.

Cooed.

Her face smoothed, the red turned to pink, and her little fists relaxed into starfishes.

It would have been unbearable if it hadn’t been Mariana.

Instead, it was gorgeous.

It was still like that, even now, on the ferry. Ellie leaned comfortably against Mariana’s arm as they both looked down at something on Ellie’s cell phone. Her daughter never did that casual lean anymore with Nora. They used to cuddle on the couch at night with their feet tucked under each other’s. Now any physical contact was rare. Ellie ducked Nora’s hands, which moved to smooth her hair, scooting out of hugs too quickly. Nora wanted to clutch but knew she couldn’t; it would only make it worse. She remembered the feeling of ducking their own mother, of desperately wanting the hug offered and at the same time feeling like she might stop breathing if she had to take it.

Knitting might help. She took out the green sock she’d been working on for months. What she lacked in skill, she made up for in enthusiasm. Or at least she hoped her enjoyment of knitting would help hide the two holes she’d already left behind, one in the toe, the other at the heel. She was knitting them toe up and would stop eventually, when they were long enough. Her friend Lily had said they were ugly. “Puke green, that’s what that is. That yarn should be illegal.”

Lily. She’d almost told her. Almost spilled the diagnosis a few weeks before when they’d met at a coffee shop to knit together. “I know you’re hiding something,” Lily had said. Her nimble fingers made the lacework she was doing look easy.

Nora had held her sock in progress crumpled in her fist. She’d
gotten as far as, “I . . . ,” before her voice stopped as if she’d swallowed a cork.

She and Lily had met two years before, when Nora had shown up at a stitch-n-bitch. Nora herself knitted a little bit, just like she quilted and crocheted and scrapbooked. She knew how. These women were different—knitting was their language, how they moved through the world. They recorded what they believed by the yarn they held. Nora’s recorder on the couch next to her, her notebook on her lap, she’d attempted to divine from the knitters what it meant to them—this yarn-as-life movement.
Is it a reclamation of the domesticity of the hearth?
she’d asked.
Does it bring you back to your roots? Were your grandmothers shepherdesses? Do you feel wisdom in the fiber?
Lily had pushed down her oversized black glasses and said, “Cut the shit. We just like to drink wine together. This is more fun than a damn book club. Put your recorder away, huh? Just knit with us.” They’d been close friends since that moment.

But that morning, a few weeks ago, Nora hadn’t been able to tell her. Lily had known something was wrong, but she’d just waved her ice blue yarn in her direction. “Just knit, darlin’. Tell me if you want to. I’m here. Till then I’m going to tell you how I found not one, not two, but
three
vaporizers in my son’s room. I would think if you had one, you wouldn’t need another one, right? How much weed can one eighteen-year-old smoke? Or vape, or whatever it is they’re doing these days.” She threw her yarn over the needle with a sigh. “Be glad you have a girl. Boys are the
worst
.”

Nora had gone home, the destructive secret still caught inside her. She couldn’t believe she’d even considered telling Lily before Mariana. Before Ellie. If she said it out loud, it might make it true, it might make her believe it, and while she was
almost
there, it still wasn’t real. Not quite yet. When she told Mariana, it would be true. When she told Ellie, she might stop breathing forever.

The Alcatraz boat rolled with a wake and Nora felt her stomach answer. Ellie giggled and pointed happily to something on her screen. Mariana nodded and said something Nora couldn’t catch.

Suddenly Nora couldn’t remember the last time she and Ellie had slept in the same bed. Ellie always used to want her to climb in bed with her. God, could it have been two years? Was she fourteen the last time they fell asleep listening to each other’s breathing? Or thirteen? Was this the disease? Or just a misplaced memory that anyone could have lost?

Nora missed Ellie desperately, and she was only a chair away on the other side of her twin. How much worse would it get? The balls of Nora’s feet ached with longing. If only she could just reach around Mariana and wrap a tendril of Ellie’s hair around her finger. For that matter, she wanted to grab the edge of Mariana’s wool coat and dig her fingers in and hold on, long after the ferry docked and the tourists departed. They’d be the last three on the boat. Nora would be wrapped in and around Mariana and Ellie, her feet hooked around their ankles, her hands clutching whatever part of their clothing she could grab. The people who worked on the boat would come to move them along, kick them out to join the tour, and Nora would put her head back and scream and not let them rip her from the two people she needed most.

Mariana noticed, of course. “Is something wrong?”

“Nah,” said Nora. She flapped the end of the sock.

“You’re never going to finish knitting that thing.” Mariana drew back as a child raced past. “And I don’t believe you.”

Nora smiled at her sister. “It’s nothing. Nothing much. Tell you later.”