“You’re the busiest person I know,” her mother went on cheerfully. “That’s what I’m always telling my bird-watching friends.” Her mother had, to Nora’s knowledge, never watched a single bird until she became a widow. Now she watched them constantly.
“What about Marianne? She defends murderers! She works all the time. Nights, weekends.”
“Accused murderers,” said Aileen. “Innocent until, you know.”
“I know,” said Nora.
“But you’re busier,” persisted her mother. “It’s different when you have children, and when they demand so much of you. Now, honey, I have to go—I’m meeting a friend for a morning walk.”
“Which friend?”
“Stella. You don’t know her. New friend. The leaves are turning. It’s gorgeous today.”
Childishly, Nora felt pushed aside, and homesick for a New England fall.
“I’ll call you soon,” promised Aileen. “I want to hear what my beautiful granddaughters are up to. How’s Maya’s reading coming along?”
“Slowly,” said Nora. “She can sound out some words, but…well, it’s much slower than it should be. I’m trying to get in with this tutor everybody raves about but he’s got no openings forever. I’m worried Maya will be in tenth grade before this guy has a free slot.”
“No big rush,” said Aileen. “All in good time, you know. Just because Angela was so early with everything doesn’t mean they all will be. You weren’t toilet-trained until you were almost four!”
“Mom.”
“And Marianne was, what? Two? She practically trained herself, I just pointed her toward the bathroom and off she went.”
“Mom. Is this supposed to be helping?”
“I’m just reminding you that everyone develops at her own particular pace. And Nora?”
“What?”
“Take a minute. Take a few minutes. Deep breath. Enjoy every moment. They’re young only once, you know.”
“I know,” said Nora. To herself, after the call had disconnected, she said, “Thank goodness.”
By eleven ten, Nora had unloaded the dishwasher, showered, run the dwarf flax problem through her mind for the four hundredth time that week, made her face up minimally, and was on her way over to Suzanne Ramsey’s for the meeting.
She let herself in and seven voices said, “Nora!” in unison; the greeting made her feel like Norm from Cheers. Suzanne was balancing her youngest, a gorgeous eight-month-old boy with heart-stopping eyelashes, on her lap and trying to eat a croissant without letting the baby grab it out of her hands.
Suzanne nodded toward a plate on the coffee table. “Have one, Nora,” she said. “They’re gluten free.”
“Oh, no!” said Liza Massey. “Who has an allergy?”
“Nobody, yet,” said Suzanne. “But they think Lucas might have a sensitivity.”
Lucas said, “Baaaaah!”
Nora bit into a croissant—funny, you didn’t think much about gluten until it was gone, and then you realized what an important job it did—and tried to focus on the meeting. She gave a not-very-informative report on the booths, about which she hadn’t done much of anything yet (“We’ve got a long time still,” said Suzanne soothingly) and half listened while the head of the entertainment subcommittee and the head of the food and drink subcommittee offered their updates.
Then she allowed her mind to wander. She was thinking about Gabe. She had heard a report on the radio that said that people underwent significant changes in their early twenties—that was why marriages between younger people were more likely to break up than they were if people got married older. That part wasn’t really news to her. When she was in her early twenties she’d been a certifiable disaster, living in Rhode Island, dating a man named Brandon who was so unkind to her that he’d once told her she was so pale he felt like he could see right through her. Then one day she’d packed up her rust-colored Corolla and announced to her mother, to Marianne, to all of her childhood friends, that she was moving clear across the country. And she’d done it! Talk about impulsive.
“Another one?” someone said to Nora. Melanie Morris.
“No thanks.” She waved a hand. “I’m stuffed.”
“No, another baby,” said Melanie. “You look like you’re going to eat Lucas.”
“Oh, you’ve got to be kidding me,” Nora said. “I am forty-four years old. Can you imagine?” Her hand went involuntarily to her abdomen as if checking for signs of life, a heartbeat, a kick. God help us all. The baby’s eyes were following hers. She smiled at him and he considered her really quite seriously before breaking into a mammoth grin.
“Oooooh, Nora,” said Suzanne. “He likes you. He doesn’t smile that way at everyone.”
“Of course he does,” said Nora, feeling, despite herself, a little rush of pride. “Babies do.”
“No, really, he doesn’t. He’s very strict.”
“Oh, Nora,” said Lori Schneider. “Did you get in with that reading tutor for Maya?”
“Bob Huffman?” asked Nora.
“That’s the one—he did Craig a world of good. He really turned him around. He is just flying through Harry Potter now. I can’t keep enough books in the house!”
“No.” Nora sighed and looked into her coffee cup and thought about reaching out with one hand to pinch Lori Schneider.
“He’s really amazing, is what I heard,” said Melanie. “He’s the one you want.”
“I did not get in with Bob Huffman,” said Nora. She tried for a casual, devil-may-care laugh. “Because Bob Huffman is booked until the end of time. And beyond.”
“Oh,” said Lori. “That’s too bad.”
“Well,” said Melanie, “no surprise, I guess. He’s supposed to be almost magical.”
A respectful silence fell over the gathering, until Suzanne deemed that it was time to get back to business.
The more interesting part about the news report on the radio was that apparently a similar change came in the midforties; that accounted for the divorces in that age group. Look at the Kelleys from Maya’s class; look at George and Rebecca Nguyen, from Cecily’s Irish dance studio. All those brains and personalities, morphing into something their partners never expected them to be. Was something like that going on with Gabe lately? Because he’d been distracted and edgy. Going for more runs, working longer. Was he going to come home one day and put down his work satchel and announce that it was all over, that they’d been growing apart for a while now and it was time someone called a spade a spade?
They’d have such a complicated arrangement to work out with the three girls; the thought of it made her feel absolutely exhausted. And who would move out?
Not Nora. She didn’t want this divorce—she wasn’t moving an inch. Plus she had just organized her closet the way she wanted it.
“Someone’s phone is blowing up,” said Robin Fox, coming in from the kitchen.
Or probably it was just the Harvard application. Really, it was so (weirdly) important to Gabe that Angela get in. Gabe, who didn’t, truth be told, talk all that much about college, who didn’t keep in close touch with any of his college friends, who never even went to a reunion, was one hundred percent fixated on Angela’s application.
That must be what had him on edge. In fact Nora had heard him grilling Angela quite uncharacteristically harshly about her schoolwork and her application the other day: Was this thing done? Was that part in? What about the AP exams, when were they? Her alumnus interview, was it scheduled?
Nora had to say, “Whoa, easy, cowboy,” to get him to stop.
“Blue Coach bag? Nora?”
There were three missed calls from Lawrence. Oh boy. Easy enough to slip out. Everybody was caught up in an animated discussion about the band they were going to hire—last year’s had been dismal—and nobody really noticed her. Only the baby, Lucas, watched her, following her with his gigantic eyes that reminded her of Angela’s. Moon eyes.
CHAPTER 22
CECILY
“This is ca
lled the power selector ring,” said Cecily’s father. “And this is the eyepiece lock ring. And this”—he fiddled with something that Cecily couldn’t really see—“is the eyepiece lens. I can’t believe I remember all this. It’s all coming back to me, it’s like riding a bike.”
Actually, Cecily couldn’t see very much at all of the parts of the telescope. There was only a quarter moon. They were on the roof of their house. “The beauty of a one-story,” her father had said.
Cecily’s father had held the ladder steady for her to climb up and then he had followed her while Cecily’s mother held the ladder for him and said things like Take it easy, Gabe! and Do not let her hurt herself, she has to compete soon and Are you sure this is a good idea?
Cecily hadn’t even known that her father owned a telescope; it was tucked inside the closet in the office in a special case with purple velvet lining, like something a wizard would bring along to work. But at dinner, when her mother asked her about how her moon chart was coming along, her father, who hadn’t appeared to be listening to the conversation at all, said, “You want to see the moon? I’ll show you the moon.”
“I used to use this all the time on the ranch,” he said now. “I guess I was a stargazer.” He looked at her expectantly, and obligingly Cecily smiled, although she wasn’t sure if this was a joke or not, and if it was she didn’t get it.
Sometimes her father looked in the mirror and scrubbed his fingers through his hair and said, Look what an old man I’m turning into. He didn’t look so old to her—Pinkie’s father was bald and he looked older than Cecily’s dad—but sometimes when she paused in front of the wedding picture of her parents that sat on one of the built-ins in the living room and saw what he’d looked like then, she could see what he was talking about. There was also a picture of him holding each of the girls when they were infants, his big strong hand palming their little baby heads. She loved those pictures. Now he was wearing a headlamp, which made him look like the pictures of underground gold miners in South Africa that Mrs. Whitney had shown them. Her father definitely had a dorky side.
“Okay, then,” he said suddenly. “I think I’ve got it adjusted. It’s not the Hubble,” he said now. “But it’s better than nothing.”
Cecily didn’t know what the Hubble was but didn’t especially feel like getting into it.
Are you guys okay up there? Cecily?
“Fine, Mom,” she called out, though in fact she was terrified of heights and even this distance up made her feel queasy and uncertain. She tried not to look down but instead looked across, over the roof of the Fletchers’ house and to the yard beyond.
“Now,” said her father. “First rule of looking through a telescope. Before you do it, you look at the object with your naked eye and you observe everything you can. What do you see?”
Cecily trained her eyes on the moon. “A waxing crescent,” she reported. They’d learned that at school. “Twenty-nine percent.” She’d looked that up online. She closed one eye, then opened it and closed the other eye. “I see the sliver that’s lit but I also see the outline of the rest of it. A very light outline. The part that’s lit is reflecting the light of the sun, and the part facing away from the sun is in darkness. It takes the moon 29.53 days to move around the earth.”
“Very good,” said her father approvingly. He cleared his throat in a way that let her know more and better information was coming. “Technically,” he said, “it’s more like twenty-seven days, but because the earth is continuing to move around the sun during each lunar phase, we observe it as twenty-nine days. If you were a star, for example, observing the phases of the moon, you would see a twenty-seven-day cycle. Okay?”
“Okay,” said Cecily. How did parents know so much about so many different things? Her father was looking up at the sky, his hands folded behind him. He sighed deeply and happily and put his hand on top of Cecily’s hair and messed it up a little. She didn’t mind. Angela really minded when her hair got messed up; she spent a long time on it each morning. “Okay,” she said in her mother’s voice. “Whatever you say, boss.”
Her father shook his head at this. “How can you do that, sound exactly like her?”
Cecily shrugged modestly. “I’ve been practicing with Pinkie. You should hear her do her mom.”
“You could take that act on the road,” her father said. “Now, when you’re ready, put your eye to the telescope. And tell me what you see. I have it set at the right angle, so kneel or bend down or whatever works best for you, but don’t touch anything.”
The night air was cool and dry. Cecily shivered; she was wearing a thin fleece but had turned down the jacket her mother had offered.
She was prepared to overdo it for her father’s benefit. (Be extra nice, her mother had whispered when her father was setting everything up. I think he had a long day.) Every day seemed like a long day for her father. She was ready to be the cheerful, appreciative kid her father was expecting. She was ready to pretend to be wowed.
She bent until her eye was level with the eyepiece and looked.
She didn’t have to pretend at all. She was wowed for real. Up close, the moon was gray and looked like a giant rock. It was covered with pits that looked like you could put your finger right into them. In fact she found she was, embarrassingly, holding out one hand as though she could actually touch the pits. When she realized she was doing that she put her hand down.
She said, “Wow,” but that word didn’t seem like enough to convey the unnamed emotion she was feeling. It was astonishing, that something that looked so bright and simple from far away, something that sat in the sky night after night after night, looked like this up close. That they could just point a telescope (a telescope her father had owned since before she was born and had never mentioned) and see it, just like that, no big deal.
“With the Hubble they can see individual craters. They have specific names, you know. I think the largest is called Bailly.”
There was that Hubble again.
“See you on the dark side of the moon. That’s a line from an old Pink Floyd song. I used to listen to a lot of Pink Floyd.”
Cecily sort of wished her father would stop talking, though she would never hurt his feelings by saying that. She wanted to be alone with the moon.
“Makes you feel sort of insignificant, doesn’t it?” he said.
“Yeah,” she said. But in fact the opposite was true for Cecily. It made her feel huge and mighty. It made her feel like she wanted something big to happen. More than that: like she wanted to make something happen. Like she had a power in her she hadn’t known she had. That wasn’t it, exactly. But it was hard to explain. Maybe not a power, maybe more like a responsibility. It made her feel like she was the beating heart of the family, or maybe even the heart of something bigger.
Her father let her look for a while and then he cleared his throat again and said, “Had about enough? Your mother’s going to send a search party up here.”
Reluctantly she moved away from the telescope and allowed her father to use his headlamp to repack it in its velvet-lined case. Every part had its own spot in the case; even the tripod folded up small enough to fit in. It was very satisfying, watching it get packed up like that.
When he’d closed the case Cecily said, “Thanks, Daddy. That was—” she paused, then, for lack of anything better, said, “That was awesome.”
“Thank you, Cecily. We should do this more often. I can’t tell you how—”
His voice splintered off and he lifted his eyes to the sky and Cecily felt slightly embarrassed, the way she did when her aunt Marianne, talking once about one of her cases to Cecily’s mother, had started crying. Still talking, but with tears slipping down her face and her makeup all smudged beneath her eyes. (Cecily hadn’t known where to look.)
She shifted her gaze down to the ground and this time her stomach didn’t drop. Wait until she told Pinkie about this, about looking at the moon through the telescope but also about the way she felt now. She fe
lt like she could fly over the rooftop of the Fletchers’ house, and maybe all the way up to the great gray rock itself. She wasn’t afraid of heights after all.
She wasn’t afraid of anything.
CHAPTER 23
NORA
Nora and Maya sat with a book: Biscuit Visits the Big City. Biscuit, the intrepid puppy, was attempting to navigate the streets of Manhattan. Woof, Biscuit. Maya’s nose was running slightly and her bangs were in her eyes. Nora smoothed them from her forehead. In twenty minutes, she had to start dinner. She glanced at her watch. Fifteen minutes would be better. Better still would be if she’d already started it.
“Try, sweetie,” said Nora. “I just don’t feel like you’re trying.”
She felt an off note in her voice. She tried to tamp it down—Angela could read the Biscuit books when she was three but you were not supposed to compare your children, every parent knew that. Too late: Maya heard it too and looked at Nora from underneath the hair with a look that said: betrayal.
“I am trying,” said Maya. “I just can’t do it.”
Maternal betrayal, the worst kind. It wasn’t Maya’s fault she couldn’t read. It was Nora’s fault.
Maybe it would have been easier if they were elephants. Angela had once told Nora that in the elephant world, after a mother gives birth, a bunch of the other female elephants chip in on the work so the actual mother can focus on eating enough to nurse the baby. They were called allmothers. What a lovely concept.
“I just—honey, I just don’t understand why you can’t do it. You know your letters, and you know the sounds the letters make. We’ve been over the flash cards so many times, sweetie. I know you can do it.”
But elephants were also pregnant for nearly two years. So no thank you to that. Nora adored infants but she loathed being pregnant. In fact she was suspicious of any pregnant woman who claimed to love it, because in Nora’s mind it simply wasn’t possible. She thought of what Maya had looked like as a baby, her face scrunched up like an elderly man’s, her delicious legs kicking, and her heart softened. Imagine if someone had told her that one day she’d feel impatient if that little creature was a late reader. She would have said to that someone, “Don’t be ridiculous. I am not going to be that kind of a mother.”
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