“Well –?” Charlie said now.
Nora took a deep breath. “I – lived with someone in Bloomington,” she began. “We were together a long time. And I had a friend – we, all three of us, were involved in the antiwar movement. My . . . boyfriend, he was in law school. He did draft counseling. This was after my brother died, and then a good friend of ours went over and –” She paused to collect herself. “I don’t know what to say, Charlie. How to explain. You know what it was like then. How –”
She told him about Bridget, her deepening, radical involvement in the movement and how worried she’d been when Bridget left with Cam.
“She was gone a long time,” Nora said. “More than a year. And she came back that Christmas when Nixon bombed Hanoi. Remember that? 1972?”
Charlie just looked at her.
“See –” she went on. “And I know I’ve said this before, but part of why I’ve been so upset about Iraq is, it seems like it’s happening all over. I mean, look! Here it is almost Christmas again and, Charlie, they’re moving troops over there. If you go on the internet, there are all these sites. Photographs. Real information about what’s happening, and it’s nothing like what’s on the news. They’re lying about everything. Sometimes I feel like I’m living in two times at once. I think about what it was like then and –”
“Nora.” He leaned toward her, jaw clenched. “How many times do I have to tell you, I don’t care what’s happening in Iraq? It doesn’t have a goddamn thing to do with us.”
“But it does,” Nora said. “It has to do with me. How I feel. How I can’t –” A bolt of anger shot through her. “Okay. Fine. Then. My friend – Bridget – put a bomb in the ROTC building. I was with her. It went off too soon. She died. And I –” Now her hands were clenched in fists. “I left –”
“With . . . this guy.” Charlie said.
“No.” Nora shook her head. “Not with him. It was –”
“He’s still there, isn’t he? In Bloomington. You saw him when we went in October. That’s why you gave away the football ticket. That’s where you went instead.”
“I saw him,” Nora said. “I hadn’t made plans to see him. But I did. Oh, God. This never would have happened, none of it would’ve happened, if I’d told you all this as soon as Claire started thinking about going there. I should have told you in the very beginning, or at least when we decided to get married. But I didn’t know how – and after all that time went by, where would I start? Plus, come on, Charlie. Would you really have wanted me to tell you?”
“I didn’t want you to tell me now, Nora.” He shrugged. “But you did. So what am I supposed to do about it? What does it change?”
Nora looked at him, his face pinched and old. “Charlie,” she said. “Can’t you see? Everything’s changed already. Claire and Jo are gone. It’s just the two of us, day-to-day, from here on in, and we need to figure out what the rest of our lives together will be. We’d have needed to do that anyway, even if –”
“What? Our whole life together hadn’t been a lie?”
“It’s not a lie,” Nora said. “Not what we felt, what we’ve had. God, Claire’s not a lie! Charlie, I love you. I cherish the life we’ve had together. I don’t want –”
She leaned toward him, reached across the table for his hand. But he pulled it away.
“Who loves me?” he said. “Isn’t that the real problem? I don’t even know who you are.”
Outside, the snow was coming down harder. The café felt like a cave of light, its blue neon coffee cup glowing in the big front window. Except for the absence of Jo, the Hummingbird hadn’t changed since the day Nora wandered in and sat down, wondering how in the world she would manage to pay for the repairs her car needed and get to Saginaw.
If she could go back to that day, what would she do? Any option other than taking the job Jo offered would have played out in a life without Claire in it, which was something she simply could not imagine. She did not want to imagine it. Nor did she want to imagine telling Claire what she’d just told Charlie. But she knew she must.
When Nora walked the next morning, she did not turn back at her usual place but continued along the shoreline until she came to the public beach. It was deserted, gulls flapping and shrieking. Heavy clouds hung low over the lake, promising more snow. The sand in the volleyball pit was frozen in little peaks, edged in ice, and passing it on her way to town she thought of sitting on Mo and Diane’s porch, listening to the laughter of Claire and her friends drift up the beach into their hearing. They had come to the edge of an argument about Iraq that summer night, but Monique had veered them all away from it, protecting Charlie from any distress.
He would need Mo now, Nora knew. But he wouldn’t ask for help. Last night, when she suggested it, he said had no intention of telling Mo what had happened between them.
“What could she do about it?” he said. “It’s just information. She can’t change it.”
He wouldn’t want her to tell Diane, either; nonetheless, Nora turned on to Main Street and walked toward the shop, where Diane would be getting organized for the day. It was that or yield to the impulse to go back to bed and just lie there, paralyzed with grief.
She was freezing when she arrived, her feet soaking wet from sloshing through the wet snow. “Take your shoes off,” Diane said, pulling her in. “I’ll go make you a cup of tea. And would you look?” Laughing, she gestured toward the computer, where Nora saw a screen-size photo of Carah, standing sideways, dressed only in her underwear to display her pregnant belly.
“She’s gargantuan,” Diane called, from the back room. “That baby can’t possibly be six weeks away, do you think?”
When Nora didn’t answer, she stepped back into the shop, teakettle in hand, and actually looked at her for the first time. “Nora,” she said. “What’s wrong? It’s not Claire, is it? Has something happened to Claire?”
“No,” Nora said. “It’s not that.”
“What, then?” Diane asked. She kept two comfortable, chintz-covered easy chairs in the cluttered backroom, and the two of them had spent countless hours there, talking. She gestured Nora into one of them now and sank into the other herself.
“Talk,” she said.
And Nora told her everything.
She listened. The time for opening the shop came and went.
“You almost told me all this the day we floated, didn’t you?” she said when Nora was through. “When I was a wreck because I’d just found out Carah was pregnant.”
“I might have told you. I don’t know. But it was before I saw Tom – and I thought then I could work through it in my mind, just get over it. So maybe I’d have chickened out. I probably would have.”
“Still,” Diane said. “These past months – since that day, really, when Carah’s letter came – I’ve been so –”
“Happy?” Nora smiled.
“Stupidly,” Diane said. “Selfishly. Nora, I’m sorry. I’ve been so wrapped up in Carah and the baby coming that I didn’t even see. I mean, obviously, I saw there was tension between you and Charlie. Mo and I both saw that. But we figured it was all about adjusting to Claire being gone, that you’d work it out. You know Mo. She’d never ask. I should have, though –”
She shook her head. “Well, there’s no point wallowing around in guilt – either one of us. I’ll stop beating myself up over not paying attention if you’ll stop beating yourself up about telling Charlie. He’s your husband, for God’s sake. What else could you have done but tell him? The real question is, what are we going to do now? What about Claire? When does she get home?”
“Friday,” Nora said. “And Charlie says I shouldn’t tell her. Ever. Those were his last words to me before he went to sleep in Jo’s bedroom last night.”
“Shit,” Diane said. “And you think –”
“I think I can’t not tell her.”
“I think you’re right,” Diane said. “You have to tell her, and soon. She’s a smart girl. She probably knows some
thing’s wrong and, believe me, the longer you wait to tell her what it is, the worse it’s going to be. God. Where do we get this idiotic idea that being the perfect parent, protecting them from everything is even possible? I mean, you have a kid; you have no idea what you’re supposed to do. You don’t even know who the kid is – and it’s not till way later that you realize that’s even a factor. I had identical twins, and it’s taken me thirty-four years to figure out that they’re absolutely nothing alike – inside! Not to mention that all the time I was raising them I was trying to grow up myself.
“It’s interesting, you know? Since Carah and I have begun to talk again, really talk, I see how much of the damage that was done between us – and between me and Rose – was done less because I turned out to be a lesbian than because I didn’t tell them I was a lesbian once I knew that’s what I was. I didn’t even admit it to myself – which is how I got so whacked out that it would make any kind of sense to me to just leave with Audrey. I hadn’t been honest with myself for so long I didn’t even know what it would look like.
“The thing is, Nora. I know this sounds harsh, and I didn’t use to think this at all, but the world isn’t easy, and the sooner kids figure it out, the better. Jesus, the other day I was listening to some guy on a talk show – a counselor – who said it wasn’t necessarily a bad idea to lie to your teenage kids if you’d used drugs when you were younger. Can you believe that? Like, number one, they’d even believe it. Not to mention that it doesn’t help them figure out what to do when all their friends are getting high and it looks like a whole lot of fun. Shit! It is fun. Lying about that is about as stupid as Nancy Reagan and her ‘Just Say No.’ Easy when you’re eight and you have no idea what you’re saying ‘no’ to. Plus, where does that kind of lying stop?
“Sure, you could just not tell Claire – pretend you’ve never done anything wrong. Pretend you have a perfect marriage. Maybe she’ll buy into it. But eventually, when she finds out how hard it is just to live day-to-day, all the negotiation and compromise it takes to stay in a relationship – let alone keep loving the person you’re in it with – she’ll either be pissed off because you didn’t prepare her for it or feel like a failure because she can’t be perfect like you are. Or, worst of all, indulge you – which is what most kids do with their parents, after all. They never let them into their real lives.”
Diane was quiet a moment; she looked chagrined. “You know, Nora,” she said, “you’ve got to really fuck up big time to get as smart as I am now. So I hope you’re listening. Or you could just tell me to just shut up.”
“I knew what you’d tell me,” Nora said. “It’s why I came.”
NPR was on the radio in Charlie’s office later that day, when she knocked lightly and entered, as she had always done. Could the timing have been worse, she wondered afterwards?
“– looking drawn, years older than she had on the day of her arrest . . .” a reporter was saying. Laura Ann Pearson’s appeal had been denied, and she was escorted from the courtroom – glancing back just once at her husband and daughters, left heartbroken in her wake.
Charlie reached over, turned it off, and bent to the stack of papers on his desk, without acknowledging Nora’s presence.
“It won’t be like that for us,” she said.
He didn’t look at her.
“Tom –” She paused, jarred by the sound of her voice speaking his name “The . . . person I told you about. In Bloomington. He told me the case had been dropped years ago, so I didn’t need to be afraid –”
“Of being hauled off to prison?” Charlie asked, bitterly. “He told you this when? In October? So if that’s the case, why tell me anything at all?”
“I had to tell you. I couldn’t go on not telling you.”
“Which was really all about you,” he said. “What you needed. But, for God’s sake, why would you want to tell Claire? You said yourself there’s no danger of your being arrested –”
“That doesn’t mean it couldn’t still come out some way.”
“How?” he asked. “Come on, Nora. You know as well as I do that the only way Claire’s going to find out about all this is if you tell her.”
She looked at him, this man she had been married to for more than twenty years, and he looked completely unfamiliar to her. “Charlie,” she said. “Please. I’m her mother. I have to tell her the truth about who I am.”
“No, Nora. You don’t.” He stood, put on his lab coat, and brushed past her on his way to the kennels, where the animals awaited him, simple in their needs.
24
“Bridge over Troubled Water”
In the next days, she might as well have been invisible to him. Until Claire came home, he could sit silently through breakfast, take his second cup of coffee out to the clinic rather than drinking it with Nora. He could sit in his easy chair all evening, ignoring her. He could walk upstairs to Jo’s bedroom and go to sleep.
Nora could spend hours at the shop, talking to Diane. Or sit in the kitchen staring out the window and tell herself why she shouldn’t e-mail Tom – until she couldn’t stand it anymore and went up to Claire’s room and did it anyway. To have told him about what was happening with Charlie would have felt like too great a betrayal, so, instead, she wrote to him about what she remembered: small things, mostly, moments that floated up and pierced her heart.
Friday morning, she woke full of dread. When Charlie had gone to the clinic, she went into Claire’s room and e-mailed Tom.
FROM [email protected]
TO [email protected]
SUBJECT No Subject
DATE SENT Friday, December 18 12:46 PM
Claire’s coming home today, and she’ll be using the computer so I have to delete this e-mail account while she’s here. I’m scared, Tom. I can’t imagine how to talk to her, how it can turn out right. But I have to try.
FROM [email protected]
TO [email protected]
SUBJECT RE: No Subject
DATE SENT Friday, December 18 12:55 PM
I understand. Take care.
She deleted the account and felt for a moment neither Nora nor Jane – nobody at all. She’d stop this thing with Tom for good, she told herself. She had to. She wouldn’t e-mail him again – or she’d e-mail him one more time to tell him that she and Charlie had come to an understanding after all. Claire was what mattered, and they’d work together, find a way to be what she needed them to be.
She couldn’t help but brighten when Claire burst in that afternoon, so full of life. She talked all through supper – about her finals, which she thought she had done well on, and about Dylan, with whom she was clearly even more in love.
“It’s so good to be home,” she said, beaming at both of them. If she thought it odd that, moments later, Charlie got up and went out to the kennels, she didn’t mention it, but chattered on to Nora about a dozen different things.
Nor was she alarmed when Nora dissolved into tears opening the narcissus bulbs that Charlie gave her on Christmas morning. He got them every year for her; she’d set them on Petoskey stones piled in the bottom of glass vases, water them, and mid-January the whole house would be full of their scent.
“Mom,” Claire teased. “Get a grip!”
“They’re just always so beautiful,” Nora said, thinking, When they bloom, will I be here?
On New Year’s Eve – Claire at a party with some high school friends, Monique and Diane in Chicago with Carah – Nora lit a fire and sat down across from Charlie, determined to convince him this time that telling Claire the truth was the right thing to do.
“I want to have a real relationship with her,” she said. “And I can’t, if I don’t tell her the truth about my life. It’s her life, too. Charlie, even if things were perfectly normal, our relationship with Claire would be changing. It has to change. We can either keep pretending she’s just our little girl or start to try to develop an adult relationship with her.”
“She’s my child,” he said. “I
don’t want an adult relationship with her. I want to take care of her and protect her, like my mom did for me. That’s what parents do – as long as they’re able.”
Nora started to argue that, if Jo could, she’d tell him that Nora was right, that they had to be honest with Claire – but, quite suddenly, she wasn’t at all sure what Jo would say. She’d cared for and fiercely protected Charlie, yes, but in so doing she’d allowed him to be emotionally dependent upon her. In truth, she’d allowed Nora to be dependent on her, too. Why wouldn’t she feel the same way about Claire? If Nora had been able to tell Jo the truth, would she have counseled her to keep it a secret from Charlie?
Her mind reeled, she felt half-sick at the rush of thoughts that followed. Jo loved Nora, but that love had been based on someone she was not. She could never know now if Jo could have forgiven her for the harm the lie at the center of her life had brought to Charlie. Could Jo have loved the mix of Jane and Nora she now knew she had to learn to become. Could anyone?
“Charlie,” she said. “I have to tell Claire. Help me. Please.”
“Help you what?” he said. “Break her heart? I really don’t see any good reason to do that, Nora. Unless you have some plan I don’t know about.”
“What plan?” Nora asked.
She knew from the way he looked at her and shrugged his shoulders that he meant Tom.
“It’s not about that,” she said. “I don’t have any plan. But, Charlie, Claire must know something’s wrong between us by now. She’s been home nearly two weeks and we haven’t said anything but the absolute bare minimum to each other. And you think she hasn’t noticed that you’re sleeping in Jo’s room, but –”
“She doesn’t know that,” he said. “I’m up and out of there way before she wakes up in the morning. I keep the door closed at night.”
“Maybe,” Nora said. “But if you intend to sleep in Jo’s room forever –”
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