Chapter Forty-two
Packing for the Labor Day camping trip to Yosemite had been easier in years past. It had been simpler. Tent, sleeping bag, water bottles, some food in a brown paper bag, hibachi and long fork to hold first the hot dog, then the marshmallows. That was about it. Ellie always packed her own clothes and picked out the games. Mariana always brought nothing but a backpack for her clothes and usually a bottle of Scotch. Harrison had come on the trip for years, and he was good for bringing handy things Nora never thought of as essentials: Kosher salt and vermouth and toothpicks. This year, probably, Luke would come and with him bring his box of tools, which always came in handy. A heavy hammer could do a lot for a tent stake.
Nora used to enjoy packing for the trip. Now it felt epic, like her own personal video game. For every item she found and corralled into a box, she should get a ding or a tweet or a bong in reward. Remember the citronella candle? Ding-ding-ding! Pack the toasting fork, zipzipzipBAM. She had a camping packing list that was a full two pages, printed in ten-point type. There were categories and subcategories, moved and augmented as the years had passed and become more complicated. She had a kitchen box and a washing-up box. A bathroom box (tampons, wet wipes, toilet paper, shovel) and a sleeping box (eyeshades for the early sun, earplugs for the silly but now unshakable spider threat). Nora had a plastic storage bin full of quarter-sized spice jars. Every spice she had in her home kitchen was also available at her camp kitchen. Her propane stove had three—not two—burners. She could make the pancakes, heat the syrup, and boil the cowboy coffee at the same time.
Nora had not only a patch kit for the inflatable beds, but also an extra bed just in case one tore so badly a repair wouldn’t work. As she shoved the air pump into the bin she kept the tent supplies in, Nora remembered that the first night in the backyard in Tiburon, they hadn’t even put a tarp under the tent. They’d slept in their sleeping bags with only the thin ripstop fabric between them and the ground below.
Now they had beds in the wilderness, beds with their own fitted sheets. She had three down duvets—one for each of them, Mariana, Ellie, and her—that she used only for camping.
It was ridiculous, Nora knew. But she loved her list, as complex as it was (“double-check cumin level, don’t forget six extra quart-sized ziplock bags, enough ChapStick?”). She drew comfort from printing it out every year before their Labor Day trip. Crossing each item off it made the muscles in her neck release.
This year . . . Well, the list felt even better in her hand this year.
Efficient. That’s what she was. She had this down to a science.
Nora stared at the list, trying to figure out what she’d been planning on packing next.
“Mom?”
Nora whirled. She hadn’t heard Ellie getting up from her nap . . . She hadn’t even thought out her afternoon snack. Maybe peanut butter on an apple . . .
But Ellie was so tall, and she wasn’t dragging the Cal sweatshirt behind her—she was wearing it. No, no . . . Nora closed her eyes for a moment and thought. That wasn’t the same binky . . . It couldn’t be. No. This was the sweatshirt they’d bought together at the college bookstore last spring. They’d laughed about it being the same color as that long-ago disintegrated sweatshirt Ellie had loved.
“Mom,” Ellie said again, her voice quieter. “Are you okay?”
“Fine.” Nora brushed at the air in front of her face. “Just packing.”
“You’ve been staring at that piece of paper for, like, ten minutes.”
“No, I haven’t.”
“I was in the living room. Watching you. You didn’t move.” Ellie’s voice was tight.
“I was just thinking, honey.”
“You got stuck. Again.” Ellie’s voice was a mixture of concern and faint but undeniable disappointment. It embarrassed Nora as much as if she’d caught a whiff of her own body odor.
“Maybe,” said Nora. “Maybe I did just for a second.” It was a game of freeze-tag, only Nora was the only one tagged. In this round, anyway. She tried to make her eyes bright, tried smiling with a twinkle. “What’s up, chipmunk?” Ellie still wanted permission to get tested. They’d had the fight twice already. For their second round, Ellie hadn’t talked to her for two days. That was fine. That was easy. Denying her that permission with every fiber of her body, with every neuron of her still-functional mind, was as simple as breathing. Until she checked out completely, Nora would keep refusing it. She steeled herself to hear the question again.
“I’m going to sleep with Dylan.”
Nora felt her bare toes curl slightly into the cool tile and understood, for the first time, the phrase “caught flat-footed.” “Oh,” she managed. “When? On our camping trip?”
“Ew! Gross. No.”
Relief swamped her. There was no way in hell Nora would have been able to take listening to her daughter make sex sounds two thin pieces of tent material away from her. “He’s got his own tent.”
“Yeah. I told you that.”
“You’ll sleep in my tent, though?” Nora couldn’t help asking hopefully, even though Ellie’d had her own little two-man tent for years now.
“No.”
“What are you saying, then?”
Ellie yanked open the junk drawer and rummaged through it. Then she slammed it closed. “I don’t know.”
Did she want approval? Nora could try to understand it, but she couldn’t approbate. “What are you looking for from me?”
“Why? Would you even know where to find it?”
The stark, unclothed vitriol of Ellie’s words turned the hope stubbornly lodged in Nora’s heart into anger. Her blood felt heavy with it. She couldn’t contain her words, and she didn’t think she should. “Are you this mean to me because you’re scared? Or is it that you just don’t like me? Because what I’m getting from you is that you think I’m a fucking terrible person.” She leaned back against the counter and crossed her arms. She rarely swore, and the word felt heavy and appropriate. She didn’t want to take it back.
Ellie’s eyes widened.
Nora went on. “And honestly? I’m sick and tired of it. I’ve given you a pretty generous pass because I’m sick and I know the world is a terrifying place to consider without your mother. I’ve been there, believe it or not. But I’m here now. Packing this goddamn box for this goddamn camping trip that you’re not acting happy about going on at all, and I’d really like to get a signal from you as to how long I have to put up with your attitude.”
Ellie looked as shocked as the moment Nora had hit her. Her mouth opened, but no sound came out. Ellie’s face was exactly the same as it had been that moment—as pale as paper. Nora could almost see the pink stripes she’d left across her daughter’s face, as if she’d hit her a second time. Had she truly apologized? Had she? “Ellie. I’m so sorry I hit you that day. God, I’m so sorry, baby.”
“Mom.” It came out as a gasp.
“I’m so sorry.”
“You’ve said that.”
Nora pressed her hands to her cheeks. She didn’t remember. “I have?”
“When Aunt Mariana brought me home. And two weeks after that. Remember?” Ellie’s eyes looked desperate.
Nora couldn’t remember. It wasn’t there. Was there something even worse about the disease, something that hadn’t shown up in her research, something that said heightened emotion made you lose things faster? How could she have forgotten apologizing for physically attacking her daughter?
How could she trust herself?
And how the hell could she be trusted?
“Do you . . . ?” Ellie’s voice was soft now, all traces of anger gone. “Anyway. We’ve done that. I said it was fine. I meant it. I know you didn’t mean to. You told me. Let’s just talk about the other thing, okay?”
Sex. Of course. “Okay,” Nora said as lightly as she could. “So . . . sex. Yo
u’re not looking for my blessing, I take it.”
Ellie tucked in her lips and shook her head.
“No. You’re seventeen in two weeks?” At least she wasn’t lost on dates. Not yet. Today was Thursday. She glanced at the clock. In two hours they’d be on the road, and she still had so much to check off, to make sure got done. Then she looked at the list on the counter. Everything was checked off. Even the cumin.
She didn’t remember checking the spices. God.
“In eleven days.” Nora corrected herself quickly. “In eleven days, you’ll be seventeen. You don’t need my permission. Oh, I guess technically you do, don’t you? After all, he’s over eighteen and you’re not. Obviously, that’s statutory rape.”
“Mom—”
“If I chose to pursue that. Which I never would.”
Ellie’s slim shoulders dropped a good two inches.
Nora went on. “But why are you telling me, then? Why not just do it and tell me later? Or do it and never tell me? Isn’t that the way kids do it nowadays?” She was thinking out loud, something she caught herself doing more and more lately. “Sex is casual, no big deal.”
Ellie ducked her chin. “It’s a big deal to me, all right?”
“I’m sorry,” said Nora. “Talk to me.”
“No.”
Well, then, why had Ellie brought it up? She just wanted to present it as a fait accompli?
“Okay. You’re going to have sex with Dylan. Do you love him?” Lord Jesus, please, every deity that ever was, please don’t let Ellie have already told her, don’t let Nora have forgotten something that important—that would be unbearable, completely unthinkable.
But Ellie’s face softened. No, they hadn’t already had this talk, then. “Yeah.”
“And he loves you.”
Her daughter nodded.
“He told you?”
Ellie nodded again. “How old . . . ?”
Nora waited. She moved her toes again, touching the tile with first her big toe, then the little ones. She couldn’t get stuck if she could feel herself moving, if she kept track of herself.
“How old were you?”
“The first time? Eighteen.”
“Oh.” Ellie’s voice held disappointment. “How about Aunt Mariana?”
“She was earlier. Seventeen when she had her first real boyfriend.” Mariana had beat her in the race to devirginization. But she’d told her everything, every single detail, sparing nothing, so that Nora could picture the boy’s freckled thighs and the way his penis smelled of Drakkar Noir. They’d laughed for weeks over that, the way he’d put cologne on his balls.
“What was his name?”
Nora poked around in her mind, but it was gone. It was a fair thing to lose. He hadn’t been her boyfriend. “I have no idea. Nice. Very blond. Skateboarder, I think?”
“No, your first.”
“Oh. His name was Max. I actually considered marrying him.”
Ellie gave her a flabbergasted look, her hands open at her sides. “Why didn’t you ever tell me this? About him?”
“What, I should have told you I had a pregnancy scare right after graduating?”
“You did?”
“That’s all it was. A scare. But I was a week late, and I was terrified.” Funny, back then she’d thought nothing in life would ever be scarier than the thought of herself with a baby.
“I could have had an older brother or sister!”
“That’s what you get from this story? Nothing about safe sex? Contraceptives?” Nora bit her bottom lip and took a breath. “Do you want to go see Dr. Rimes?” She was the pediatrician Ellie had always gone to, and at seventeen, Ellie was about to age out of her practice. Dr. Rimes, though, adored Ellie and had said she could come to her as long as the insurance company didn’t throw a fit.
Ellie looked down at her fingers and picked green polish from a peeling nail. “I went to Planned Parenthood.”
It hit Nora then. “You’re on the Pill already.”
Ellie nodded.
“How long?”
“Two months,” muttered Ellie, scratching at her nail harder.
Nora covered her hand with her own. Ellie’s skin was cool. So familiar. “Nail polish remover.”
Her daughter jerked her hand back. “I like peeling it.”
Funny, just last night before she went to sleep, Nora had written in her journal; she could barely see the paper in the dark, but she didn’t need to see well. Her hand knew the letters, knew the space of the margins.
Sex is a big deal, it began. You have to . . .
No. The point in these notes to Ellie was to be honest. Totally. She scratched it out.
Sex is a big deal. You have to . . . Sex isn’t as big a deal as everyone makes it out to be. That might surprise you coming from me. I’ve always been the heavy when we have those talks that make you roll your eyes and pretend to gag. “Just wait,” I’ve said. “Save it for when you know it means something.” And I meant that, but what I didn’t say—what I didn’t know how to say—was that it doesn’t matter that much in the long run. The first guy you have sex with likely won’t be the one you end up marrying.
At eighteen, Nora had sex with Max, a nineteen-year-old classical pianist who had the most amazing hands. She’d chosen to lose her virginity to him because he was sweet and handsome, and she thought she would never see him again after that night. She’d failed, though, at being a one-night-stand kind of girl. She and Max had fallen in love and for a little while she’d thought they’d be together forever. It seemed silly now, but it had felt so real then.
Nora balanced the pen in her fingers in the dark. She’d forgotten to teach her own daughter the most important thing about sex—that it could be good. She’d kept their sex talk dry, sterile. This is a tampon. This is a condom. This is how herpes is transmitted. How the hell had that happened? Had she been PTA’d into it? Responsible, professional women didn’t teach their daughters how to have sex for fun. Only irresponsible hippie mothers with too much sexual confidence did that.
God, she’d failed in so many ways, she couldn’t count them anymore.
Ignore what I’ve told you in the past. Have fun. Be safe (I can’t not say that—there’s a strain of gonorrhea nowadays that can’t be killed by antibiotics. I know you know that) and know that it’s your choice. Whatever you decide to do is right. Enjoy yourself when you get to that point in your life.
Ellie was sixteen. She was going to be having sex with a boy. Naked. With a man. Nora’s immediate reaction to the thought was to feel a protective rage, an anger that started under her fingernails and raced through her blood to her heart. Impossible. Not her daughter, not her Ellie. She was too young, so young.
Then Nora took a breath and thought about what she wanted her daughter to know most of all. If she could tell her only one thing.
Slowly, she wrote the words, When you love, love. It’s all that matters.
Now, in the kitchen, Nora rummaged in the cabinet. Somewhere in here, next to the defunct phone book that she kept around just in case . . . “I have some nail polish remover right here. It’s bad for your cuticles to do that.”
“It’s fine, Mom.”
“Your nails will break.”
“Not the end of the world.”
They weren’t talking about the nail polish remover.
“I’m sorry,” said Nora. For everything.
Ellie said, “I know.” She accepted the nail polish remover Nora thrust at her.
Then, awkwardly, Nora held out the beach glass she’d put in her pocket that morning. It had been a simple Coke bottle at one time, probably, but now it was warm amber, clear on one side, occluded on the other. Ellie didn’t say anything, but she took it. Then, in a move that took Nora’s breath away, Ellie leaned forward and kissed Nora’s forehead.
; It was just the way Nora had always kissed Ellie.
Just exactly the way.
Chapter Forty-three
Luke was made for camping. Mariana watched him drive another tent stake into the ground with his boot—one solid backward heel thrust. He looked like the kind of man who could build a cabin from trees he knocked down himself with his two bare hands.
He looked up and grinned at her. “This a good place for it, baby?”
“Great.”
Meanwhile, Ellie and Dylan were arguing. It was kind of adorable, actually. Ellie didn’t know how to argue with a boy—a man—she liked yet. She’d learn. For now she was still stuck in the passive-aggressive mode of sweetly suggesting ideas. “Is that maybe a little too close to their tent?” What she meant was, If we go in your tent to fool around, I don’t want them hearing us.
“Nah, this is fine. It’s super-flat here,” Dylan said obliviously.
“Does the fly maybe go the other way? With the point to the back?”
Dylan kept doing it his way, ignoring Ellie.
Maybe he was good for her.
Mariana wondered if they’d already had sex. She would have asked Nora, but . . . And she would have asked Ellie, but every time she’d seen her in the last week or two, Dylan had been tagging along behind her like an eager groupie. Good. At least Ellie wasn’t the one tagging along behind a guitar player, the way Mariana had done so many times. That never went well.
She helped Luke unfold the third camping table. Nora was busy unpacking the kitchen supplies, and Harrison had taken one of the cars to go buy the specially treated firewood the campground required them to use.
“We shouldn’t have come.”
“It’ll be fine,” said Luke, but he wasn’t listening to her. She followed his gaze.
Nora stood still, looking down into the blue plastic bin that held the camp cutlery and plates, her body rigid, thrumming with contained energy, her face slack. Rigid tension and abject looseness held in one body, a space too small for both.
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