The Invisibles (33 page)

“That's just what I told you,” Ozzie said. “I was trying to keep things light. The cards were pretty much stacked against me at that point, if you remember. I didn't want to get any of you more riled up than you were.”

“It fits him,” Nora said softly as Ozzie started the car. “I love it.”

H
er heart was beating like a jackhammer as they drove into the Days Inn parking lot. Even the steady warmth of Elmer, who she had been holding in her hands, did not ease the building anxiousness inside. Horrible orange curtains flanked the wide front windows, blocking anything on the inside from sight, but Nora knew he was in there. She could feel it.

“You want to go in?” Ozzie had parked the car and shut off the engine. She was turned around in her seat, looking at Nora. “Just you?”

Nora paused for a moment and then put Elmer back inside his cage. He scurried toward the far corner again and rubbed his paws against his tiny eyes. And then, as she watched, he looked up at her with a steady, knowing gaze.

“Yes,” she said, opening the car door. “I do.”

H
e was standing at the far window all the way across the lobby, his back to her as she made her way inside, but he turned immediately, as if he had sensed her presence. Even from fifty feet away, she could see how tired he was, how the circles under his eyes stood out like small half-moons, how the front of his shirt puckered and bagged in the front. He was holding his suit jacket over one shoulder, the collar of it snug inside the crook of his index
finger, but his shoulders sagged, and Nora wondered if he might drop it any moment. A receptionist with pink streaks in her brown hair looked up as Nora walked past the front desk. “Hello there, ma'am! May I . . .” Her voice drifted off as Nora kept going. Theo had not moved, but she did. She moved on steady legs toward him, stopping only when she was a few feet away. Even then, she did not drop her eyes, did not bring a finger up to pull on her earlobe.

“Hi.” She was not sure what else to say just yet.

“Hi.” His voice was soft as a breath, and his nostrils flared white around the edges. He lowered the jacket from his shoulder and dropped it along the back of a yellow-and-brown-striped couch.

Was there any reason to bring it all up again? Nora wondered. Or had they already said what they'd needed to say? If she turned around and walked away right now, would she be all right? Or would she replay this scene a thousand times in the future, each one with a different verbal combination, each one creating a different portal through which they would—forever after—continue to view each other?

“I'm glad to see you made it home,” he said, shifting his feet. “New York taxis aren't always that reliable.”

“It was fine. I paid him well.”

Theo nodded.

“Are you going back tonight?” she asked.

He glanced at his watch, a heavy silver thing with a dark blue face. “Pretty soon. I haven't slept much, and Monica and I have a lot to do before the arraignment on Wednesday.”

“Thanks for bringing her. It meant a lot to me to have her here tonight.”

“You're welcome. It was the least I could do.”

She could see something dim behind his eyes, and she stepped forward, taking his hand. “Theo.” He closed his fingers around hers, pressing just the tips of them against the back of her hand. “
I
should have been the one to tell you about the pregnancy all those years ago. I'm sorry I didn't. I just didn't know how. I was so ashamed of myself, so embarrassed.” She could feel the pressure behind his fingers, the steady pull of them against her own as he drew her closer.

“Why?” he whispered.

“Because I was such a mess to begin with. Every time we tried to be intimate, I'd have flashbacks of things done to me as a kid, or things would start resurfacing and . . .” Her tears rose in her throat. “And then you broke up with me, which I don't blame you for, but it just confirmed everything about myself that I thought was broken and unfixable . . .”

“Oh, Nora.” He stroked her knuckles with the edge of his thumb. “I thought I was doing the right thing when I broke up with you. Really I did. There'd be times when I'd touch your face or kiss you and you'd seem to go somewhere inside your head. Like something had grabbed you underwater and was holding you there. And then we started sleeping together and things just . . .” He closed his eyes, remembering. “That look in your eyes, your face . . . God, I thought I was killing you somehow. I didn't know what to do.”

“It wasn't your fault.” Nora's cheeks burned. “You couldn't have known.”

“When Ozzie wrote me that letter and told me about the pregnancy and then everything after that, I almost had a heart attack,”
Theo went on. “I just couldn't believe it. Something like that had never even occurred to me.”

Nora nodded, pressing her lips together.

“I would've supported you,” Theo whispered. “Whatever you wanted to do. I would've helped you through it.”

“I know that now.” Nora pressed her forehead against his shirt. “I'm sorry I didn't give you that chance back then.”

They stood there for a moment, lost in thought, each of them unraveling the threads that had led them inside an old movie theater, atop a thick sheet of ice, beneath a set of striped sheets, and back around again. It was baffling how life worked, Nora thought, how the holes found their way inside everyone. Some were larger than others, some deeper, more treacherously sloped. But no one got off without them. No one, at the end of their story, emerged intact.

And maybe that was the beauty of it after all. Maybe it wasn't about how few holes we ended up with, but how we taught ourselves to see through them, how we learned to look at our lives from another angle, maybe discovering a light that had not been there before.

“We were so young,” Nora whispered. “Weren't we? So young and so hopeful.”

“Yes.” He nodded, pulling her all the way into him, and wrapped his arms around her. “Nora,” he said, his voice breaking. “Oh, Nora, Nora.”

Ozzie had told her once that her name meant “light.”

And it was true she thought now, as the words coming out of his mouth drifted above them like tiny stars.

It was true.

T
hat Friday, she took Alice Walker with her to see the razed building at the corner of Magnolia Avenue. It was dusk, and the air, purple and fragile, hung around them like iris petals. She stood across the street for a long time, gazing at the space where Turning Winds had once been. Except for a few small piles of rubble off to one side, the lot was empty. A small white board hammered into the dirt read
WIDEMAN'S CONSTRUCTION
, indicating the only past sign of life. There was nothing of them anymore. Nothing at all. She waited for the sadness, or maybe even anger, to surge up within her, but neither one came. She thought back instead to the past week, a series of days strung along one of the most miraculous fragments of her life, and how it had all begun on her thirty-second birthday, when the quote by Anne Rice had popped into her head:
“Once upon a time, there was a woman who discovered she had turned into the wrong person.”

But not me,
she thought now.
Not me
.

The truth was she could hardly believe how much her life had
changed. It felt limitless in some strange way now, as if she had discovered herself on the first blank page of the rest of her life. She felt a thrill, thinking of it.

And what of a first line? What would her own first line be? Maybe it wasn't something she needed to know just yet; maybe she would surprise herself one day as a string of words came to her when she least expected it. That was how they worked after all, wasn't it? Sitting there neatly in the middle of a page that one just happened to turn to? Taking your breath away? And then toeing the line, and jumping straight into the abyss, taking you with them?

That was how Nora felt now: as though she had jumped, not into the abyss but over it. It would take time to secure her footing, maybe even a while to focus her gaze, but there was nothing as green as the horizon ahead, no light above so luminous as the moon's.

F
irst thanks goes to my extraordinary agent, Stacey Glick, who believed in this book from the very beginning and remained devoted to seeing it through to the end. Words fail me, friend. You are the real deal.

Every writer on the planet should be given at least one opportunity to work with the brilliant Emily Krump, who not only created a path for me to walk down while editing this book, but remained steadfast company throughout the entire journey.

Thank you to the art department at William Morrow for creating such a beautiful cover, and for everyone at HarperCollins for contributing their talents toward this book. I am forever grateful.

I wrote this book because when I was a little girl, I belonged to a tribe of children who knew and loved me before anyone else did, much like The Invisibles. It is difficult to recall a time since when I have felt as authentic as I did then; being seen by this band of souls was, and remains to this day, one of my life's most precious treasures. My endless gratitude goes to Amy, Maria, Ruthie, Ani, Josie, Michael, Joey, Lucy, Catherine, and Mark.

It was because of you that I continued on.

It is because of you that I still do.

About the author

Meet Cecilia Galante

About the book

The Story Behind
The Invisibles

Questions for Discussion

Read on

On Books and Reading

Meet Cecilia Galante

CECILIA GALANTE
is the author of three young adult novels, three middle-grade books, and a children's chapter-book series. She is the recipient of many awards, including a NAIBA Book of the Year and an Oprah's Teen Read Selection for her first novel,
The Patron Saint of Butterflies
. Her books have been translated into Japanese, Turkish, and Polish.

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.

The Story Behind
The Invisibles

W
HILE
I
WOULDN'T CHANGE
the odd, frightening circumstances of my childhood (born and raised for the first fifteen years of my life inside a religious commune), there are a few details I wish had worked out differently. It would have been nice, for example, if someone from law enforcement had shown up one day to inquire why children were forbidden to live with their parents, or why extended, brutal punishments were an acceptable form of discipline. Since most of my novels begin with the question “what if?” I found myself imagining the answers to these questions when I sat down to write my first novel,
The Patron Saint of Butterflies
. It wasn't an accident that Agnes Little, the shy, fourteen-year-old protagonist in the novel, was born and raised in a commune similar to the one I had lived in, but her resulting escape and the agonizing decisions she made afterward (which led to a police intervention) were completely fictitious. While I was on tour for the novel, a woman asked me if I wished the end of the story had happened in my real life. Well, yes, actually. That was exactly why I wrote it. Without getting too psychological here, it was a way of reclaiming my past. Doing things my way this time, instead of being forced to follow the litanies of a madman. Or, as the great writing teacher Natalie Goldberg once said, “writing to live twice.”

I found myself in a similar situation when I first began to think about
The Invisibles
. The bonds between the children of the commune were some of the most powerful human links I've ever experienced—both then and now. Having to leave the only home I'd ever known and start over again in a new world was difficult, to say the least. But being physically separated from this child-tribe of mine was like losing an arm—two arms, actually, since most of the time we were holding one another. As I began to write, I found myself drawn to the main characters in the book, each of them inspired by a girl from my past with whom I had been raised and, because of drugs, death, and other irrevocable circumstances, I have since lost contact. It was a deep, deep loss, one that reverberated through my early adulthood, and one that still aches when I think about it now.

I started with that ache, imagining the group of us meeting up again. There was the pale, thin one I fashioned Monica after, who twirled her hair when she was nervous and was so painfully sweet that it brought tears to my eyes. Would she still clutch for my hand the way she'd always done back then, rubbing a thumb along the edge of mine until I shook it loose again? And what of the girl who inspired Ozzie—loud, obnoxious, standing up in the face of authority, even to her detriment? Would she be different? Or had time softened some of her edges, granted her a different
outlook on the world? Grace was the girl I remembered as drawing all the time, once creating an entire scene of birds out of bits of tightly rolled paper, and Nora (although not all of her) was based on me. What would bring us together? What would we say? Was I the only one who still had nightmares about the commune? Had any of them found a way to put those demons to rest, to rise above the nightmare of our childhood and not just survive, but thrive?

I knew I didn't want to set another novel inside a commune, and so I began to think of other circumstances in which similar shared relationships might blossom. The girls' home came to mind immediately. Not only was the parental void there, but the girls would have the opportunity to bond in much the same way my friends and I had inside the commune. The rest of the story is fiction, dreamed in the fluid way that is sometimes granted when you start with vivid characters. It unfolded piece by piece as I was writing, sometimes taking me in one direction and sometimes in another. Often, I found myself completely off course, and I would have to go back and start again, to try to retrace the steps these characters might have taken if they were in such a place and time.

Secretly, I hope that each of these women from my past will recognize pieces of themselves in my story. If they do, I hope they remember a time when they were mine, when as little girls, we
created a whole world unto ourselves inside another, darker one. It's why I write, after all. To connect with the things I've lost. To find a way back.

A way home.

Questions for Discussion

   
1. 
 
The book opens with Nora's birthday, which she had forgotten. What is the significance of Nora forgetting her own birthday?

   
2. 
 
One of the first lines that Nora quotes is “Once upon a time, there was a woman who discovered she had turned into the wrong person.” Do you think Nora has turned into “the wrong person”? How does she let this feeling of leading a misguided life affect her?

   
3. 
 
“
Leave it in the past
, Ozzie had said,
where it would get smaller and smaller until one day it would just disappear altogether
.” How has this pact changed Nora's life, given what we know? What do you think Ozzie was referring to when she said this?

   
4. 
 
Why do you think Nora is so hesitant to welcome the old friends she's missed back into her life? Why does she continue to resist opening up to them about her past and her life?

   
5. 
 
As an adult, Nora still clings to her love of the moon and first lines of books. What does this signify about her development into adulthood? Why do you think she still looks to the moon for guidance?

   
6. 
 
The girls decided on the name “The Invisibles” for their group. In what ways do you think each of
them felt invisible in their lives as teenagers? What about now as adults?

   
7. 
 
The novel moves between the past and present. What does this structure reveal about the characters? How does it affect your interpretations of them both then and now?

   
8. 
 
Nora reveals that she broke off both of the longest relationships she had as an adult and afterward turned down most offers to go on dates. She also has few friends. Why do you think she's so hesitant to let new people into her life?

   
9. 
 
What do you think happened to change Ozzie from the fierce girl she had been in high school to the woman she is now? How do you think reuniting with her old friends will affect her?

 
10. 
 
We find out that Nora's mother had tried to contact her after Daddy Ray died. Why do you think Nora never wanted to confront her mother?

 
11. 
 
In what ways is Ozzie's determination to find the rabbit's mother significant? How about Nora's refusal to give up the baby rabbit, despite numerous demands from Ozzie to do so? What might the baby rabbit represent to her?

 
12. 
 
Why do you think Nora shows such resistance to going back to Turning
Winds? What makes her different from the other women, who are eager to go back?

 
13. 
 
In what ways are the women still the same people they were as teenagers? In what ways are they different? Do you think they've changed for the better?