Splinters of Light (9 page)

“E
n arrivant à Alcatraz, on donnait chaque prisonnier une carte de bibliothèque et une liste de livres disponibles.”

The library was Nora’s favorite part of the Alcatraz tour—it always had been. She loved standing there, listening to the narrator talk about the prisoners who had read behind the most infamous bars in the nation. The high ceiling above her, the narrow shelves, the complete lack of seating sans one hard wooden bench—all of it made it real. For the men in Alcatraz, if they’d read in the library, there would have been no lounging on a couch, feet up on extra cushions, a glass of hot tea at hand. Nora thought longingly of her own living room.

Nora wandered with the group, looking up to where the grenade blast was still visible in the ceiling from when the jail was taken over by six prisoners. She’d heard the audio narration so many times that last time she’d gotten the Spanish version. This time, French.
“Les prisonniers pouvaient emprunter des magazines aussi, cependant on déchirait les pages avec les nouvelles de crime,
et les journaux étaient interdits.”
She wasn’t very good at either language, but she caught a lot of it. Mariana, still fluent from the two years she’d lived there, had chosen German. Only Ellie had gone with the tried-and-true English version.

This was Ellie’s trip, really. It had been her turn to choose what they did for Easter, and she’d always been fascinated by Alcatraz. “I like thinking about them,” Ellie would say, “because most people don’t think about them anymore. I can’t get them out of my mind, those men sitting in solitary confinement in D Block, watching the lights of the city.”

They were criminals, Nora would point out gently. They’d done things to deserve to be there.

“But some of them were innocent.”

Nora couldn’t deny that. Some of them probably had been.

Ellie’s eyes would fill up with tears. “Imagine them, away from their families, so close they could hear the music from dances on the Embarcadero. I read that some nights they could smell women’s perfume if the wind was right. And they were here, alone.” Nora and Mariana would gently tease her, but they loved this about her—her tenderness. Her empathy.

Now Ellie had that moony look again at the end of the tour, the same one she always got. “Can we stay?”

Mariana said, “Or we could go back and get clam chowder in a bread bowl.”

Nora’s stomach rumbled.

“Please? The next ferry leaves in an hour, and we could wander around outside.”

“It’s pretty dreary out there,” Nora pointed out.

“But it stopped raining, and that’s why we’re wearing coats,” said Ellie. “Please?”

Mariana said, “I don’t mind if you don’t, Nora. We can take our coffee out and talk.”
You can tell me why you’re being weird.
She didn’t have to say it for Nora to hear it.

Nora couldn’t tell them. Not here. What had she been thinking?
That she would introduce them to a brand-new personal grief in the place where so much sadness had lived for so long? “Okay,” she managed.

At the door that led outside, a woman with a purple stripe in her black hair touched Nora’s elbow. “Excuse me. I’m sorry, but aren’t you Nora Glass?”

Nora swallowed. “Yes.” She was. Wasn’t she?

The woman broke into a delighted laugh. “Oh, I just
love
you. Johnny—that’s my boyfriend right there—hey, Johnny, I
told
you it was her! I
told
him it was you. We’re from Spokane, and I read your column every week. You look so much
younger
than your picture in the paper looks. Oh, my
god
. Is that Ellie? Johnny, that’s Ellie! From the book! Hi, Ellie!”

With a cheery and very fake smile, Ellie waved on her way outside.

“You’re just so
funny
. You know? Like that story about the stray chicken who got into your house. Remember that? Can you say something funny? Johnny, she’s going to say something funny. Watch. She’s hilarious.”

Nora felt herself blush. “Oh . . .”

Mariana stepped forward. “I’m the sister. Yep. The twin.” She shook hands with the woman and her boyfriend. “I know she’d love to spend more time getting acquainted but Nora here has the whooping cough.”

Nora tried to make a coughing sound but it came out more like a manic yawn.

“Highly contagious.”

The woman covered her mouth with her hand.

“So we’ll just head outside where she can breathe a little better, and hey, Happy Easter to you!”

“Whooping cough?” asked Nora as they headed outside.

Mariana shrugged. “I heard about it on NPR. Making a comeback.”

Under the cold, gray sky, Nora and Mariana watched Ellie
scramble on the rocks. She couldn’t go out far—people weren’t allowed out of the safely prescribed area—but she went as far as she could, and then, of course, a few feet farther.

“She’s so tall,” said Mariana, her hands wrapped around her paper coffee cup. “Almost as tall as us now.”

Nora didn’t answer. There was something stuck in her windpipe, something that had swept in off the bay and was choking her.

Mariana sidled closer on the bench. Their thighs and shoulders touched. “Tell me.”

“I can’t.” The words were a whisper.

“I know it’s not nothing. Your eyes have that look they had . . . when Mom died. And as far as I know, no one’s died. And you’re not looking at me.”

“I am, too.” But Nora knew Mariana was right. Since they’d met Mariana at the dock, Nora hadn’t really met her sister’s eyes. She couldn’t.

“It can’t be that bad.”

“It is.”

“Oh, no.” Mariana turned and faced her. “Just tell me.”

Nora stared.

“Cancer,” Mariana said. “Is that it? We can’t have it. We’re too young.”

The
we
was what made Nora stand up. They weren’t together in this. They
couldn’t
be. That was the whole point. Statistics bashed around inside Nora’s head like heavy moths trying to get out. Nora knew so much now, terms she hadn’t ever seen before: autosomal dominant, penetrance, presenilin-1, receptor binding, secretases.

It all added up to one thing: Mariana had to get tested, as quickly as possible. With the PS1 mutation, Mariana had a fifty-fifty chance of having EOAD.

So did Ellie.

It was too much.

Nora put one hand at her waist and the other over her stomach. “Alzheimer’s,” she gasped.

Looking confused, Mariana said, “Who?”

At the fence line, Ellie hopped from one broken chunk of concrete to another one. She crouched as if looking for tide pools, even though there couldn’t be any, not up so high.

“Me.”

Mariana gave a surprised yip that turned into a laugh. “Oh, my god, you just scared me so much.”

Nora stared at her. She should have written this out. She should have had notes that she could refer to, so she could keep going. “No . . .”

“You’re terrible.” Mariana grinned wider. “I really thought you were sick.”

“Early-onset.”

Mariana barely looked at her, her eyes on Ellie. “What?”

“It starts early.”

“Honey! I’m supposed to be the one who exaggerates problems! We’re forty-four. We forget things now. It’s normal. It happens to everyone. Deep breath.”

“No.”

“You worry too much.” Mariana brushed away a strand of hair from Nora’s face. “Ow.” She laughed. “That’s my own hair.”

Anger burned in Nora’s chest. Irrational, unwelcome heat. “I’ve been diagnosed.”

“Is this like the Epstein-Barr?”

Nora gritted her teeth. She’d self-diagnosed with that, years ago. Her first WebMD accident. She’d been wrong, and she’d admitted that over and over again, usually as Harrison and Mariana laughed at her. “No.”

“You’re serious.”

“Yes.”

Mariana’s face changed, straightened. “I’m sorry.”

“It’s okay.” Nora twisted the silver ring Mariana had brought her years before from a trip to Mazatlán. Mariana had learned to surf there, she remembered.

“Tell me. Is this a big deal or a little one?”

“Not that big a deal,” Nora said. “I’ll just forget everything, including how to walk, eat, talk, and swallow. Then I’ll die.”

Her sister stood. Without saying a word, she turned her back and headed toward the concrete steps that led to the wide doors of the entrance. She walked with purpose, the same way Ellie did.

Ellie.

She was still by the rocks, pulling on a piece of ice plant. Out of earshot. She looked like a child playing with rocks one moment, and the next, she looked like a teenager again, checking her cell phone. On the other side of Ellie the bay was choppy and dark gray. The city was almost obscured by the fog, the skyline murky, Coit Tower only a suggestion.

Nora sat alone on the bench. The cold had seeped through her jeans and her bones ached with something more than the chill.

Her sister stopped moving, twenty yards away. A guide dressed like a prison guard stationed on the top step watched them both.

Mariana turned. She marched back. Nora stayed still.

Then she grabbed Nora in a hug so hard that it healed her very bones, the same ones that had been aching.

She said only one word, the word Nora needed her to say.

“No.”

It was a relief, such a clear and light relief, to hear verbalized the only word that had made any sense to Nora for weeks.
No
, no,
NO
. She said it back. “No.”

“Good. Agreed.”

Nora looked down and then licked her thumb. She rubbed at a dark spot on her coat that might have been coffee. “Where were you going?”

“Dunno,” said Mariana. “I just had to get out, and then I realized there was nowhere to go.”

I know.

They sat in silence for a moment, watching Ellie tap something into her phone.

“Who’s she texting?” asked Mariana, as if it were just another overcast day.

“No idea.”

“Think of all the trouble we’d have gotten into if we’d had cell phones. Can you imagine?”

“How do I tell her?”
How do I break her?
How would Nora tell her anything, come to that? She watched her daughter’s blond hair—too long, with the layers grown out—swing as she ducked her head to look under a heavy-looking piece of broken metal. Nora imagined for a moment what she would write later. In her Moleskine, with her favorite Paper Mate SharpWriter pencil, in very dark letters:
What I Haven’t Taught Ellie.

How to . . .

How to live . . .

Holy crap, she had no idea. She had essays, so many of them, telling people how to do things. She’d researched and then told her readers how to make a perfect crust, how to decorate cupcakes, and how to bake no-knead bread. She’d made budgeting seem easy, something her readers could accomplish. She’d given so many time-saving tips she thought she should at some point get at least one twenty-five-hour-day as repayment.

But what did
Ellie
need to know? Nora wrote for women, for working mothers, for adults. She didn’t write about how to become a woman. That was something she’d been teaching her daughter as they went. What were the things she might forget to tell her?

HOW TO PUT ON LIPSTICK

Swipe your top lip first, following the curve on each side. Don’t be afraid to coat thickly. Now mash your lips together three times, using the color on the top lip to fill in the bottom lip. If you need more color, add sparingly to the bottom. Use the tip of your first finger to clean the lines, to make sure that dip in your top lip (so deliciously perfect,
thought Nora, remembering
her daughter’s rosebud-sweet mouth; strangers used to comment on it when she was little—a Gerber smile
) is clear of color. Now smile at yourself. Then check your teeth. If you’re applying for a job, check twice. If it’s a really important date, check three times.

Such a small, tiny thing, but it matters.

She rewrote the last line in her head again.
Small things are what make a life big.

Self-pity raked its talons across Nora’s chest, tearing open her heart, leaving it beating, but just barely. She grabbed a breath of wet salt air that scraped her lungs. A
job
. Ellie would have a job that Nora would never know anything about. A writer? Ellie saw the world in stories, creating them where there were none. She always had. A journalist, maybe? God, Nora hoped not. It was a difficult, poorly compensated life, although now, with the Internet, some things were a little easier. . . . At least Nora had gotten syndicated just in time, right when Paul’s alimony was going to end, right when she’d been worrying about how she’d keep the house, losing sleep thinking about what kind of second job she could possibly find.

“How long does—?” Mariana’s voice cracked.

Nora jerked herself back to the present. The concrete bench where they sat seemed to be getting colder under her, not warmer. She shrugged. “No one seems to know. Maybe a year. Maybe three. One guy lived eleven years after his diagnosis, but he got it at thirty-four, so . . .”

Mariana bent at the waist as if the breath had been knocked out of her.

“I’m sorry,” said Nora.

“They’re wrong. Aren’t they?”

“Maybe,” she said lightly. She could give her sister this.

“You need a second opinion. That’s what people do.”

This is the second opinion talking.

“We’ll fix it,” Mariana continued. “We’ll get you fixed.”
She grabbed her wallet out of her purse, as if to pay for the remedy. She peered inside. “I have . . . I don’t have much, but you can have it. All of it. But Luke has money, and . . .”

“We don’t need his money.”

“This can’t
happen
.”

Nora felt Mariana’s fury prickle along her skin. Or maybe it was her own anger. She couldn’t tell, sometimes, where she left off and Mariana began. It felt good—something she hadn’t let herself feel yet. Rage.

“I’m staying with you tonight.”

Startled, Nora said, “At my house?”

“What the hell else would I mean?”

“What about Luke?”

“We’re barely talking now. Not since Valentine’s Day and the ring. He’s shut me out.”