It was unfair to blame Charlie for this, she knew, but at times she could not help herself. She was short with him when she should have been kind. She was confrontational about the impending war in Iraq. Look! Nora wanted to say . . . about everything. But Charlie had no idea that there was anything he needed to look at, anything he didn’t know that might threaten what the rest of their lives together would turn out to be. When, increasingly, he withdrew, spending evenings with his nose in a book or listening to music two and three centuries old, it made Nora more, not less, angry with him, less able to remember the ways in which they had once made one another happy.
Still, she was genuinely distressed about Iraq, enraged by the blatant attempts of the media to bring emotions to a fever pitch in service of the President’s determination to go to war. The lurid stories about Saddam’s lairs, his brutal sons, his crazed followers leaving the voting booth, index fingers raised – red with their own blood that they’d touched to the ballot to show the depth of their devotion. The news that whole divisions of tanks had disappeared from Europe and allegedly had been spotted atop transport trucks in Kuwait; Special Forces had arrived in Iraq to probe defenses; F-16 fighters sat on an airbase in Turkey, locked and loaded, ready for action.
She wondered if Tom felt the same way. She kept the business card he’d given her tucked into the torn lining of her wallet, took it out countless times and looked at it – mostly in the middle of the night. Walking each morning, she carried on a conversation with him in her head – about how much she had loved him, about the mistakes she’d made, and how frightened she was at the way the world she’d made so carefully and lovingly no longer seemed enough. Then spent the whole way back home telling herself that to reconnect with him at this point in her life would be to invite disaster.
November came with its gunmetal skies – and Thanksgiving to look forward to, Nora thought – until Diane tentatively offered up the news that she and Monique had been invited to Carah and Seth’s for the holiday.
“Oh!” Nora said. “That’s wonderful. Of course you should go.”
Diane’s eyes teared up, and she engulfed her in a hug.
“Mo will be making Betty’s cranberry salad for us before you leave, though,” Nora said, still caught in the embrace. “And you’ll do the corn soufflé. Right?”
She meant it as a joke. But her voice cracked, and Diane stepped back to look at her.
“Nora,” she said. “Are you okay?”
Nora waved her hands, she hoped, reassuringly.
Diane looked at her a moment longer, and Nora saw her decide to believe her. In the past weeks, she’d been consumed by her renewed relationship with Carah; if she had noticed that Nora was not herself, she hadn’t mentioned it.
When Nora stopped in at the shop, Diane talked about how Carah was feeling and showed Nora some new photo Carah had sent on the internet – of Carah standing sideways to reveal the ever-increasing curve of her belly, or the progress of the nursery she and Seth were decorating together. When the four of them had dinner, Diane knitted afterwards – a beautiful blue bunting taking shape beneath her needles for the baby (a boy, the ultrasound had revealed) to wear home from the hospital – while Charlie and Monique talked about music or the clinic and Nora drifted quietly away from them all, thinking about Tom.
Time after time, she sat before the computer, staring at his e-mail address, which she had typed into the little box on the screen. She might actually have written to him, but she had no idea how to begin. She couldn’t even think what to put in the subject box. “In My Life?” “The Things We Said Today?”
Already, she’d been deceitful enough to create an alternate e-mail account. Then she deleted it, realizing that Claire was likely to use the computer when she was home for Thanksgiving break. She wouldn’t be able to open any e-mails that came to the address without knowing the password, but she’d notice the new screen name listed there.
Nora willed herself to stay in the present moment. She did not listen to NPR or read the newspaper; she set aside the Newsweek with “Top Gun” in a banner across the cover photo of President Bush dressed in ranch clothes, giving the thumbs-up, grinning. She redirected all thoughts of the past to the long list of things she must do to prepare for Claire’s arrival.
Focused this way, her irritation with Charlie dissolved. She thought of an article she read years ago in a women’s magazine: you know yours is a healthy marriage if, mid-argument, you start feeling sorrier for distressing the person you love than you are angry at him for whatever he’s done. Then, the writer said, it’s possible to talk about how to make things right between you. It had struck her as true at the time, and still did – though, limited in its usefulness in her relationship with Charlie because, of course, it did not accommodate the idea that one of the partners in the marriage might be keeping a secret that could never be told.
Until she saw Tom in October, she still believed she did not dare tell it to anyone. She was Charlie’s wife, Claire’s mother, but she was also a fugitive, complicit in crimes that had caused both death and destruction. For years, she had believed that, if caught, she’d be arrested and sent to prison. Now, Tom said, that wouldn’t happen. It never would have happened. The life she’d made with Charlie wasn’t even what she believed it had been.
There had been no need for the distance she’d cultivated between them. If she had told him her most painful truth right from the start, would he have told her his? He had been drafted when he graduated from veterinarian school, and his medical skills had qualified him to be a surgical assistant in a MASH unit; at least once, he’d stood outside a surgery tent, listening to intelligence officers torturing a Vietnamese kid who’d been thrown out of a helicopter. After nearly twenty-five years together, that’s all she knew – and that he remembered the boy every day of his life, heard him screaming.
It made her feel more sympathetic towards Charlie to wonder at which moments the memory came. When he stopped suddenly, gazing up into the November sky, was that what he saw? When the dogs whined in the kennels and he bent to feel their real, rough tongues on his hand, was it a way to efface the boy’s voice in his head? When Claire was a baby, sometimes Nora would wake and find him standing at the side of her crib. Now she wondered if he had dreamed the boy on those nights and, in watching Claire sleep, found some kind of proportion.
At the sight of her daughter emerging from the car, hefting the strap of her cello case over her shoulder, Nora felt their world come back into balance. Charlie opened the door and threw his arms around her, cello case, duffel, and all. Her ride, a girl from Traverse City, tooted the horn and backed down the driveway. She was theirs again, if only for a little while.
The next morning, Nora and Claire rolled out the crust for the pies: pumpkin, apple, pecan. Monique and Diane came by on their way to Chicago, bearing the cranberry salad and corn casseroles they contributed to the meal every year.
“I know you were kidding about these,” Diane said. “Mo and I wanted to bring them. That way you have to think about us tomorrow.”
“Like we wouldn’t,” Claire said. She was still in her robe and pajamas, her hair wild – and floury, where she’d kept pushing it back with her hands. “We’re making the doll pies, too. Look! Just like the ones Grandma and I used to make when I was little. Next year, you guys can take some to the baby. Or maybe he’ll come!”
“This summer, for sure,” Diane said. “Carah’s already promised to bring him. We can slather him up with sunscreen and do the short float, maybe. The beach, of course. He’ll be, what?” She counted on her fingers. “Six or seven months, just sitting up. Perfect for pouring sand.”
“Did you like Carah?” Claire asked Nora when they’d gone.
“I did,” Nora said. “She’s a lot like Diane – funny and smart. I liked her husband, too. They were sweet together, so excited about the baby coming – and both wanting Diane to be there when it happens. I was worried, you know. That it wouldn’t go well, and
Diane would end up feeling worse than she had before.”
Claire’s face hardened. “I never could understand why Carah and Rose were so mean to her. And Rose still is. I mean, how could anyone be mean to Diane?”
“She –” Nora began. “They were angry. They felt . . . abandoned by her.”
“Mom. They were my age. It’s not like they were little children.”
Nora looked at her, disquieted by such certainty. “It wasn’t only that she went away, Claire. Not everyone grew up like you did, believing it might be . . . acceptable – even natural – for two women to be together. That was hard for Rose and Carah, too.”
“I just don’t get that,” Claire said. “Whose business is it, really? Why do people care?”
“I don’t get that, either. Love – well, it’s not all that easy to find, and it’s always seemed a blessing to me, regardless of how it happens. But some people just can’t deal with the gay thing, even when it’s someone that really matters to them. Maybe especially then. Or it takes time – which seems to be what happened with Carah. Finally, whatever she feels – or felt – about Diane being with Mo became less important to her than wanting her mother back again. Probably because of the baby coming. Babies change things.”
“Yeah?” Claire asked. “Did I change you?”
“Oh, Honey –” Nora said. “Yes.”
“How?” Claire asked. “Before, you were – ? And – then?”
“Before –” Nora began. “You . . . grounded me. That’s all I know. Holding you, I knew I was in the absolute right place, right in the world – which was something I hadn’t felt in a long time. I loved your dad, of course. I loved –” Her voice cracked.
“Mom,” Claire said, alarmed. “God, I didn’t mean to upset you.”
Nora closed her eyes a moment, collected herself. “You didn’t,” she said. “Not really. It’s just – I’m so glad you’re home.”
“Me, too,” Claire said. “I love school. I love it. But I miss you guys. I miss this –” She flung out her arm to encompass the kitchen, the view out the window, sprinkling flour on Astro, who lay asleep at her feet. “You know, I kind of like it that it’s just us for Thanksgiving – you and me and Dad. Except I wish Grandma could come. Grandma the way she was.”
A light snow began to fall, dusting the meadow, and when the big pies were finished and set out on the counter to cool, Nora and Claire wrapped the little ones in foil to take to Jo. Snow swirled on the pavement, hit the windshield in icy whispers. Tomorrow, after dinner, they’d go cut a Christmas tree, as they did each year, and if the snow kept up they’d carry it back on Charlie’s old sled. Jo had been with them last Thanksgiving, still enough herself to remember Christmases long ago when she’d pulled Charlie into the pine forest on the sled, cut down the tree he chose, lashed it to the sled with clothesline rope, and then pulled it home, Charlie trudging along beside her. Now to bring her home at all would just frighten and disorient her.
She’d been sick with the flu in the past weeks, too, still weak with it, and Nora watched Claire closely as she entered Jo’s room and saw how frail and lost her grandmother had become.
“Oh!” she whispered, glancing back at Nora. But then went straight to Jo and knelt beside her recliner. “Grandma?” she said, taking Jo’s hand. “Grandma, I’m home.”
Jo turned her head slowly from the window, where she’d been watching a flurry of birds pecking at each other to get at the seed in the tray of the feeder, and gazed upon her with the frank curiosity of a child.
“It’s Claire,” Nora said. “All grown up. Remember?”
Jo smiled, a little anxiously. Perhaps, at least, she knew she should remember, Nora thought. Though, clearly, she did not. Intently, she watched Claire take the little pies from the basket, unwrap them one-by-one, and set them on the TV tray near her chair.
“I brought you these,” Claire said. “Remember? You used to make them for me? For my dolls. When I got big enough, we made them together.”
Jo raised her hand, as if to reach for one. Then gave Nora an inquiring look, as if asking for permission.
Nora nodded, offered a fork, which Jo took.
She beamed at her first taste. “Apple.”
“Yes, apple,” Nora said, through a scrim of tears.
In the morning, Nora stuffed the turkey, trussed it neatly and rubbed it with butter. Then went about preparing the rest of the meal. It seemed odd to be in the kitchen alone – and in charge – on Thanksgiving morning. All those years, she had been Jo’s willing assistant – she, Mo, and Diane. Normally, by now, all four of them would be tripping over each other, washing and peeling potatoes, assembling various casseroles, setting out ingredients for gravy, buttering the dinner roles.
“You girls!” Jo would say, finally. “Out!”
And the three of them would flee, giggling, to throw themselves onto couches and easy chairs in the family room to watch the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade on TV with Charlie and Claire.
It was so hard without her, Nora thought. When Jo was here, when she was herself, they were all like a big bunch of amenable children who just let her tell them what to do and how to think about whatever problems cropped up and caused them sorrow or confusion. Why wouldn’t they have? She was always right.
Still, half to her surprise, the meal was perfect, and it was nice – just the three of them. When they’d cleared the table and put all the dishes in the dishwasher, Charlie went out to get the sled from the barn.
“Pull me,” Claire said, plopping down on it, her red parka bright against the new snow.
She’d brought her camera and handed it to Nora so that she could take a picture of her on the sled to send to Dylan. Nora snapped one of her alone, then one with Charlie holding the rope of the sled, grinning. Together, they pulled her, laughing, toward the stand of pines at the edge of the meadow – Astro running in circles, barking, at their heels.
All along the highway, there were vast pine forests planted in long, perfectly straight rows by the WPA during the Depression; these pines were haphazard, though – volunteers grown from pinecones dropped and blown, every kind of size. The three of them spread out, tying bits of blue rag on the straightest, most shapely among them, then revisiting each to decide. They looked for the worst tree, too, a Charlie Brown tree to set in the sunroom and decorate with the fading paper chains and cotton-ball angels Claire had made all through grade school. It smelled wonderful in the midst of the pines: sharp and fresh.
It was near dusk when they returned with the trees and dragged them inside. Nora brought the ornaments down from the attic, while Charlie set the big tree in place. He laid out the long strings of bubble lights to test them, then wound each string round the tree, top to bottom – taking forever, as he always did.
When he was finally through, Claire put her own ornaments on the tree: one from every Christmas since she was a baby, each dated with a Sharpie on the bottom – a pink glass teddy bear with “Baby’s First Christmas” written in glitter on it, a Snoopy, a cello, a sled, a skier, a snowman. She clapped with delight when Nora produced this year’s: a Santa with “IU” on his hat. Nora and Charlie had found it, browsing in the bookstore on the Saturday morning of Parents Weekend, just before Nora had walked to People’s Park in search of Tom.
The sky had grown heavy again and, at six, Charlie turned on the television to get the weather forecast. There was the predictable tease: “The day after Thanksgiving is traditionally the year’s busiest shopping day, and this year’s early Christmas shopping may be white.”
Then the news. Film footage showed the first UN inspectors arriving in Iraq.
“It’s hopeful, don’t you think?” Charlie asked. “The inspectors going in?”
Nora looked at him, first dumbfounded, then furious that he would even mention it – especially at the end of the happiest day they’d had together in a long, long while. “No,” she said. “I don’t. I think Colin Powell convinced Bush we had to agree to it. To
look like we want to avoid a war if we possibly can. A few months, big deal. Then W can go in there and bomb the shit out of them, which, if you’d read anything at all about what’s going on, you’d know was what he made up his mind to do on about September 12th. So what, if there’s absolutely no connection.”
She felt her words take all the air out of the day. Claire looked as surprised by what she’d said as she herself, had been surprised by Charlie having mentioned Iraq at all – though whether Claire was surprised by what Nora had said or by the tone of voice in which she’d said it, Nora couldn’t tell. Maybe she was just surprised by the fact that it seemed to matter so much, Nora thought. She couldn’t bring herself to take the words back, in any case. Stung, Charlie picked up the box of tinsel and started laying it on the tree, strand-by-strand. It was the last touch on the tree every year, his job. He was the only one with the patience for it.
They ate turkey sandwiches and watched It’s a Wonderful Life, as they always did when the tree was done. But when the movie was over, Claire went up to her room. Finals were coming up in a few weeks, she said, and she had some reading to do if she didn’t want to fall behind. Watching her go, Nora remembered how desperately she used to miss Tom when she went home on breaks, how quickly her true home had become wherever he was. Probably Claire felt the same way. Would she call Dylan and tell him about her mother’s strange outburst, Nora wondered? Or would she just throw herself across the bed in her dark room, longing to be with him?
Nora went upstairs after she’d put away all the dishes from the Thanksgiving meal and set the kitchen right for morning. She drew a hot bath and lay back against the tub, calming herself with the Ujjayi breathing she’d learned on her yoga tape. Audible breath. She concentrated on moving it through her body. Pure energy. Her chest rose and fell; her hands floated in the water. Still, the thought came: I can’t.
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