Mariana felt fear knife its way through her guts.
“Shit,” Mariana said.
“How long does she do that for?” Luke’s knuckle was bleeding from putting up the tent fly. He sucked it absentmindedly. Mariana knew if she asked him how he’d hurt himself, not only would he have no idea, but he’d be surprised to see the blood.
“Ellie said it’s going for longer now.”
“Like an hour?”
“No! No.”
But truthfully, Mariana had no idea how long Nora would stay frozen in that glazed position.
Ellie rolled her eyes at something that Dylan had just said, something about how to properly light a fire. Mariana waited to hear Ellie’s smart-assed answer. She’d been the master of lighting their fires for years now. She had the touch. She’d even taken a weekend class last year on survival living and could start a fire with nothing more than two dryish sticks and a determined glare.
But instead, disappointingly, Ellie got her eye roll under control and nodded along as Dylan showed her how to find kindling, as he explained the concept of tinder.
Oh, girls. Mariana called, “Hey, Dylan, did you know that Ellie can start a fire with two sticks? She doesn’t even need a match.”
Ellie’s face fell. Mariana wanted to suck the words back in. Such a jerk move.
“Oh,” said Dylan, dropping the stick he held onto the pile of kindling. “Oh, never mind, then.”
“I was just—,” started Ellie. She glared at Mariana. “Everyone does it differently. I liked hearing your way.”
Dylan brightened with the soft eagerness of a nineteen-year-old boy. Mariana’s heart ached, and she glanced at Luke, now stringing up the hammock Nora always insisted on bringing, the one they never put up because they didn’t know the knots.
Luke knew the knots. All of them. She wondered, as she had many times before, what he had been like at eighteen. She could imagine him, just like this, but thinner, gawkier. Eager to please, and eager to laugh.
He was still like that.
Mariana went to him, threaded her arms as far as she could reach around his thick rib cage, and kissed him.
He pulled back and looked at her. “What was that for?” he asked. But then he kissed her again. “I’m not complaining, mind you.”
Mariana pressed her forehead into his neck.
He held her tighter. “What?” he whispered. “You all right?”
She nodded. “I’m good,” she said. “I’m just glad you’re here.”
Chapter Forty-four
It was a full-time job, having a boyfriend along for the camping trip. Ellie took a walk to the big bathroom near the lake just to get away from him for a minute. She only had to pee, but she made it last, sitting on the cold toilet seat until it warmed up. She dragged the toe of her sandal through the dirt on the concrete floor, making swirls and curlicues. She walked back through the campground the long way, waving at families who’d been camping here as long as they had. There were always strangers, of course, tourists who managed to grab a spot on Labor Day weekend, but most of the campers were familiar to her, as familiar as kids at school, the kids in other grades. She might not know their names, but she knew what they looked like as they laughed, how they fought with their brothers and sisters.
Each campsite had a theme, and she walked past Camp Pig Out, checking to see if they’d brought the full-screen TV back. They had—she could see it through their open RV door. What’s the point? her mother always said. Why bring the indoors with you? The point is to get away, not bring it with you. The next camp was Camp Rainbow Song. The group was big and loud and cheerful, always in the middle of something that looked like a fun project. Today it was tie dyeing. Three kids were dunking pieces of fabric bound with rubber bands into buckets of gray-blue water. Two shirtless guys who had matching scraggly beards strummed guitars, and a woman wearing red cowboy boots played a ukulele.
Back at camp, Dylan had crashed out in his tent. She peered in the open door flap to see him openmouthed on his sleeping bag, softly snoring. She could smell weed and hoped to hell her mother couldn’t smell it, too.
Boring. Sleeping was boring.
All of this was boring.
Her mother and aunt were sitting at the long picnic table, playing rummy, wineglasses at their elbows.
“Are you drinking?” Ellie hated the tone in her voice, but she’d just read that excessive drinking could accelerate the symptoms of Alzheimer’s. Then again, another article had suggested the opposite, so what was anyone supposed to believe? Better safe than sorry, though, right?
“Honey,” said her mother. “It’s just a glass of wine.”
“You shouldn’t be drinking. I thought we talked about that.”
Mariana laughed. Her mother’s eyes flashed to her sister’s, and then she looked back at Ellie.
Ellie felt herself flush. “What?”
“Oh, chipmunk, she’s not laughing at you.”
“Yes, I am!” Mariana said, still giggling. “You sound like you’re twenty years older than we are.”
Well, it wasn’t like she wanted to be the mother. She hated it. She just wanted to be a kid again. Simple. Uncomplicated. Really, was that too much to ask? She was seventeen—almost—and she was having to live her life like she was thirty or something. She was supposed to be figuring out how to take care of herself, wasn’t she? Vani’s mom was teaching her how to cook on nothing but a hot plate, so Vani would be able to feed herself healthy food while living in a dorm. Moms took care of their children until their children could take care of themselves. It wasn’t supposed to be this way. “You have no idea what it’s like. To have to watch her. All the time.”
The card her mother was laying down snapped to the table and then skittered sideways and off the table into the dirt. “What?”
Mariana sat up as if tugged by a wire. “What are you talking about?”
“Nothing,” said Ellie, fear moving through her like wind. “I didn’t mean anything.”
Her mother swung her legs sideways and stood. “Ellie.”
“No,” said Ellie, backing up, her hands palm out.
Her mother’s voice was small. “Is it worse than getting stuck?”
Ellie maintained silence.
“Is it bad?”
Mariana said, “Ellie.”
“No. Uh-uh.” She wasn’t going to tell anyone. It was going to stay locked inside her until she needed help, but she didn’t need help. Not yet. “I just play my game. As long as I can play my game . . .”
Mariana cast a wild glance at Ellie’s mother. “What is she talking about?”
Her mother stayed quiet now, fixing her with a look that made Ellie ache inside. “What is it, sugar? What’s going on?”
You go away and no matter what I do I can’t make you come back. I lose you. “I just meant I play my game around you now.”
“I don’t understand what you mean.”
I have to be near you. “You know how I told you I like to use my laptop downstairs better than in my room?”
“You said it helped you think. To be out of your room with all its distractions.”
Her mother had believed it, then. “Yeah . . .”
“What?”
Ellie couldn’t say it. To say it out loud would be a betrayal. To her, to her mother, to her aunt . . .
But her mother got it. She wasn’t stupid. “You have to watch me.”
“That’s not . . .” But she’d never been good at lying to her mother.
“You think you have to take care of me.”
She didn’t think so. She knew so.
“Oh, god.”
“Mom—”
“Have I done something? Something that scared you?”
“Not . . . You’re just different. You lose track of things now. And you n
ever used to.” Ellie was furious at the tears that threatened to rise in her eyes. “I just worry.”
Her mother reached for her arm, to touch her, but Ellie’s anger grew. “No! Don’t! You don’t get to soothe me now. You don’t get to tell me it’s going to be okay. It’s not.”
“Sweetie—”
Ellie had a visceral memory of what it felt like to lie on the ground and have a tantrum. The feel of the dirt on her arms, the way the ground thumped as she beat at it. She couldn’t remember what her last tantrum had been about, of course, and she was sure it had been something stupid. Probably about the last bite of cotton candy or whether she could have pizza for breakfast, a five-year-old’s problem, solved with empty calories or a hug.
She hadn’t known then that there would be such huge things to rail against. It wasn’t fair. To have a mom like this. To have this happen to her. To have this happen to Ellie. They were so sad, her mother and her aunt. They had given up, and that was fucking bullshit. As if they weren’t going to fight. As if they weren’t going to at least try to stop the disaster that was lurching toward them. She hated them for a dark moment, a feeling that was more familiar now. The sunlight draped through the pine canopy above them, dappling her mother’s face, making her look so goddamned normal.
“I just want to play my game.”
“Here?” Her mother looked confused again. Great. Just like always. “I think you could borrow electricity from the Pig Out camp, maybe. They have all the other electronic stuff going . . .”
“No. I just want that to be my biggest worry. Whether or not I’ll save Queen Ulra. Why is that so hard for you to understand?”
“I’m so sorry—”
Her mother’s hand went out again. Ellie dodged.
“Don’t touch me. I shouldn’t have come.” She looked toward Dylan’s tent. “We shouldn’t have come. We should have stayed at the house and”—she wanted to say fucked but she couldn’t get the word out—“had sex the whole time you were camping.”
“Ellie!”
She threw herself at the opening of Dylan’s tent. She scrabbled at the zipper until she remembered it wasn’t closed. She fell forward and landed on top of Dylan, who awoke as cheerfully as he’d fallen asleep. He didn’t ask questions. He just wrapped his arms around her and pulled the end of the sleeping bag around her lower legs. She could feel his erect penis against her stomach, and she pushed against him. A promise. Soon. Soon, when she needed to forget everything. Wasn’t that the way sex worked? In the movies, in books, people had sex to escape.
She felt him take a breath to speak and dreaded the words that he’d say. Are you okay? How’s your mom? You want to talk about it?
Instead, he said, “If the Queen leaves the castle, you know the Incursers will run her to ground. She’s not strong. Do you think we could change that? She trusts you. You think you could write that for the game?” His voice was sleepy. This was all he had to worry about.
Ellie clutched the fabric of his T-shirt and felt a low-grade happiness flow over her like music. It wasn’t trustworthy—when she woke up, it might not be there. But for now, it felt good to drift off, talking desultorily about the game while the top of the tent rocked slightly in the soft wind.
Chapter Forty-five
Ellie’s face, when she’d been talking about taking care of her—her face had made Nora want to kill something. Maybe herself.
Taking care of her. Watching her as if she were a child. As if Nora weren’t the parent.
How would she know when it was too bad to keep going?
Thank god Harrison was there. He made it all feel normal. Just a campout. He’d grilled the burgers and the hot dogs—so many more than they’d ever eat; there were only six of them, for Pete’s sake. He’d actually gone through a whole package of dogs and had made at least ten burgers. “We can share them with the guys next door,” he’d said when she protested. The site next to theirs was full of young guys who seemed to have brought only beer and tequila. So far it seemed to be doing them just fine.
At the picnic table, Mariana whispered to Luke. Was it about Nora? “What do you think they’re saying?”
“Chill,” said Harrison in her ear.
“I can’t.”
“You have to.”
She looked at him, meeting his eyes for the first time all day. Heat lit the inside of her body, and she was half pleased, half upset. Harrison was still a secret, mostly. Mariana knew, of course. And because she did, Luke did. And Ellie might suspect something was still going on and so her boyfriend Dylan probably . . . Okay, everyone knew.
God. Shouldn’t she be too upset to think about sex? She was practically past thinking, for god’s sake. That was the damn point. But she thought about his mouth on hers, the way his fingers—so surprisingly long—pushed inside her, the way he knew how to bring her to orgasm within seconds, literally. He knew exactly what she liked, the exact pressure, tempo, rhythm. As if instead of books and friends and politics, they’d been talking about sex over those years of glasses of porch wine.
Maybe, in the pauses between their sentences, they had been.
“How?”
He pushed a plate full of meat at her. “You need to eat something. Then another glass of wine.”
She took it, knowing she wouldn’t consume more than a bite or two. “No wine. It freaked Ellie out.”
“None of her business, is it?”
“You know that thing you told me I should think about doing?”
Harrison tilted his head, thinking. “I can think of ten things. Which one?”
“That thing.”
“Oh! The pot card? You got it?”
“Shhhh.” Nora looked over her shoulder at Dylan’s tent. Please, God, let them have all their clothes on in there. “I did.” She still couldn’t believe she’d been able to walk into the office, talk to a “doctor” on Skype for less than a minute, and get issued a medical marijuana card. It had been easier and faster than getting a library card.
Harrison gave her a silly double-fisted thumbs-up. “Let’s fire it up!”
“I’m nervous.” She hadn’t yet dared try what she’d bought at the dispensary. All she could remember about the one time she’d smoked marijuana (at twenty, and at Mariana’s insistence, of course) was that it had made her paranoid and dry mouthed. She’d gone to bed and pulled the covers over her head and prayed that the cops didn’t come to raid their apartment. Nora didn’t do drugs. She hated to take so much as an Advil. And even though she’d read the study Harrison had sent her—that cannabis combined with ibuprofen or another COX-2 inhibitor could actually delay the long-term memory effects of Alzheimer’s, actually improving neuron capacity—it was too counterintuitive to make sense. Potheads didn’t remember anything, right? Wasn’t that her whole problem?
“Nothing to be scared of. I’m here.”
He was. Thank god.
“What about . . . ?” She jerked her thumb toward Dylan’s tent.
“Grab your stuff, and we’ll take a hike.”
Nora was going to get high in the woods. Who was she?
Besides nervous and worried, she wasn’t sure anymore. Pot probably wouldn’t hurt. Not once, anyway. She’d try it.
At the lake, as she showed Harrison what she’d bought, she had a sudden memory of being right there with Ellie at the edge of the water, years before. Ellie loved to look for frogs in the shallow, plant-filled murk. Every year, as they’d “hunted” frogs (which meant grabbing them, holding them for a second to marvel at their shiny sliminess, and then releasing them), she’d smelled the teenagers’ weed drifting through the reeds. It was a good place to hide from the grown-ups.
And now she was here, about to toke up.
Harrison showed her how to put the concentrate on the vaporizer’s element. “Just a little bit.”
“I don’t get it. What�
��s the difference between this and one of those e-cigarettes?”
“No difference. Then you just push this button, here. When it’s blue, you inhale.”
“Hard?”
He laughed. “As hard as you want.”
“How do you know how to do this?”
Harrison’s left eyebrow rose. “I have a couple of secrets left.”
What if Ellie saw her doing this? What if she acted baked for the rest of the evening? Nora rested her forehead on her knees. “No, I can’t. I’m not going to get high in front of my kid.”
“She’s not here. And this is medicine.”
“Yeah, right.”
“Nora.”
“Fine.” She took the small metal tube, pushed the button, and inhaled.
Harrison did the same. Then he leaned back on his arms, watching the far dock, where at least twenty children jumped, splashing and screaming.
“How long does it take?”
“As long as it takes.” He threaded his fingers with hers, and Nora felt her heart lazily thump in awareness.
“Oh, no!”
“What?” He didn’t let go of her hand.
“I forgot to take the ibuprofen.”
“That’s fine. I thought about that.”
“I’m supposed to take it together. At the same time. To prevent it from impairing my memory and so I don’t feel stony. Oh, no.” Was it too late? Could she run back to camp and grab some? Would she forget what she was doing on the way?
“Just feel it, Nora.”
She could feel it then, a downiness in the front of her mind. A lightness, a lifting off of something she didn’t know she’d been holding.
“Oh.”
“Not bad, right?”
It wasn’t bad. It was nothing like it had been twenty years before. Maybe now the formulation was more precise. God knew the dispensary where she’d bought it had seemed to know exactly what she needed. “Indica, not sativa. You don’t want to get stoned,” the young man had said. “You want to feel better and not stress as much.”
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