Splinters of Light

by Rachael Herron

  She hadn’t thought, then, that it would actually help.

  But it did.

  After a few long, stretched-out moments during which she felt her hands—always restless—lie still in her lap, Nora said, “I love you.” She was surprised. She never said it first—he always did.

  “I’m glad,” he said simply.

  “Why didn’t we do this a long time ago?” she asked.

  “Weed?”

  “No.” She moved her hands slowly between them. “This. Us.”

  “You said you wouldn’t.”

  “I did?” she said in startled surprise. “When?”

  “When you said you wouldn’t date a man who had never been married. Or a man without kids. When you said you didn’t like tall guys, and when you said you were never dating again because you didn’t trust men anymore.”

  “You listened to me.”

  He inclined his head, a silent yes.

  Nora felt her heart get wider, more broad. “I didn’t mean any of it.”

  “How would I have known that?”

  She leaned against him. It was easy. That’s what it was. Nora’s tongue didn’t get tied. She didn’t feel as if she were losing track of time. She reached in her pocket for her beach glass, the one she’d planned on keeping there all weekend. Instead, though, she skipped her green piece of glass across the still water. It had come from salt water, and she sent it whirling into fresh just because it felt right. When the sun was almost all the way set, she suggested going back to camp to see if everyone had eaten.

  Walking back, it just didn’t hurt as much. The knowledge of everything, the weight of it all, was easier to carry. Walking single file when the trail narrowed, she could hear Harrison behind her. Maybe he always had been.

  Chapter Forty-six

  Nora wondered if she should keep hold of Harrison’s hand as they came into sight of the campsite, but he dropped her hand first, reaching to pick up a couple of good pieces of kindling.

  “There you are,” said Ellie. She and Dylan both held long metal forks over the fire, roasting marshmallows. “Want a s’more?”

  Did she? “Hell yes.” They laughed at her eagerness. It sounded like the best idea in the world. That part of smoking weed hadn’t changed, apparently.

  When Ellie handed her a roasting stick, Nora put her marshmallow as close as she could to the wood without putting it directly in the coals. When it caught on fire, she let it burn a second before blowing it out.

  “Tiki torch!” cried Ellie. There was approval in her daughter’s voice. Ellie had always preferred her marshmallows blackened before she pulled the hardened crust off with her fingers. Then she’d complain mildly as the melted sugar burned her. Then she’d stick it back in the fire and do it all over again.

  Luke, who’d been leaning back in his camp chair so the front legs were raised from the dirt, shoved his marshmallow farther into the flames. “That’s the right way.” His lit, too, and he held it up in the air, smiling at it.

  He looked . . . Luke looked a little high, now that Nora noticed it. A little soft around the edges.

  So did Dylan. He was reclined in another chair in much the same way, Ellie curled on his lap like a kitten.

  Jesus, even Mariana had that soft, inward look.

  Nora tried to work on her knitting, but even just the simple knit stitch seemed fuzzy in her brain. She held the sock loosely in her lap. “Is everyone here as stoned as I am?”

  Ellie fell off Dylan’s lap to the dirt with a thump. “Holy shit.”

  Luke started laughing.

  Mariana goggled at her. “Nora?”

  It was ridiculous, but her heart tickled, as if she wanted to laugh. So she did. She felt the ghost of shame—a recognition of something she should feel but didn’t. “Sorry. I shouldn’t have said that, maybe.”

  Ellie, her face still shocked, her eyes wide, said, “Mom?”

  “Yes, chipmunk?” Even that was funny, and she giggled harder.

  “Harrison!” Ellie leaped to standing. “You got her stoned?”

  “No,” said Harrison slowly, the grin on his face brighter than the fire that lit his face. “She got me stoned.”

  “Mother?”

  Nora should feel terrible. She should be horrified that her daughter knew. Instead, all she felt was expansive. “Do you want some, honey?”

  Ellie’s mouth fell open and stayed that way.

  “It’s not normal pot. It’s concentrate. Kush. For sick people.” Nora touched her own nose. “Like me. I’m sick, so they gave it to me. And you shouldn’t do drugs. But if you wanted to try some, then at least you’d be with me when you tried it . . . And everyone else here is high . . . so we could . . .” Somehow, it seemed like a good idea, a sweet one, to share this feeling with Ellie.

  “Nora!” said Mariana, her voice tight and thin. “We’re not high.”

  Oh, no. If Mariana was shocked, then it was really shocking. Sudden despair twisted like a serpent in Nora’s chest, roiling and thrashing in her blood.

  “I’m just kidding,” Nora hurried to say. “She’s only sixteen. I’m not going to give drugs to my daughter. God.” But for a second, she’d forgotten it was wrong. And that second was the worst second of all, and all the stoned expansiveness in the world couldn’t change that. She’d gotten it so wrong. So wrong.

  But then Ellie barked a laugh. “Is this seriously my life? This is fucking nuts.”

  Nora didn’t know what to say. There wasn’t an “I’m sorry” big enough to cover it, no groveling that would be low enough. To have offered weed to her daughter in front of everyone who was important, everyone who mattered . . .

  Then her daughter passed another blackened marshmallow to her, and Ellie’s eyes were soft. The marshmallow was sweetness, turned inside out, and it tasted like impossible forgiveness. It was as easy as that.

  Luke leaned far back, way behind him, and pulled out a guitar, all without getting out of his camp chair. He started strumming softly, as if he could change the subject with the instrument. After a moment, it seemed that was exactly what he was doing.

  Dylan was busy saying something in a low voice to Ellie, and Ellie was saying something back. Then she sat on his lap again, wrapping her arms around his neck.

  Soon her daughter would have sex with that boy, if she hadn’t already. Soon, even though Ellie wasn’t high now, she’d try marijuana. She might try other things, too. Mushrooms, coke, ecstasy. Worse. Things like bath salts and whippers and things Nora hadn’t even yet read about online.

  And Nora wouldn’t be there. “I wouldn’t be able to help anyway,” she said.

  She caught the look that flew between Ellie and Mariana.

  “What could I do? Encourage you? Discourage you? How is a mother supposed to know what to do?” She wasn’t supposed to ask it out loud, she knew that, but the rules felt skewed. Inside was out. Black was red. Her daughter was her mother and her sister was her, had always been her . . .

  “Mom, it’s okay.”

  Nora nodded. She couldn’t remember what she was agreeing to, but it felt right. She poked the fire with the metal stick, the marshmallow having already burned and dropped off in a plasticky black bump of molten sugar. Her knitting fell to the dirt, and she didn’t care.

  Mariana, who had been hovering next to Luke, watching his fingers on the fretboard, came to Nora. She sat down next to her on the ground.

  “Our pants will be dirty,” said Nora. It seemed important to say.

  “It’s okay,” said Mariana. “We’re camping. We’re supposed to get a little dirty. That’s what we do.”

  “Will you sleep in my tent?” asked Nora.

  “But . . .” Mariana looked at Luke, who answered with a slow dip of a nod.

  “Please? Ellie, you, too.”

  “Mom, I brought my own t
ent—”

  “Please. What if this is . . .”

  A pause. Nora didn’t want to play the sick card. Even lightly stoned and not tracking well, she knew she didn’t want to lay it on the table.

  So she didn’t. But they heard it. She knew they did.

  “Okay, Mom.”

  “Okay,” said Mariana, bumping a shoulder against hers.

  In the tent that night, her high worn off to a paler shade of shame, Nora listened intently to the sounds of the forest around them. The night wind had picked up, soughing in the pines overhead. Teenagers cawed outside, running in groups, probably toward the lake. In years past, Ellie would have been with them, running from the younger kids, emulating the older ones.

  But tonight, Ellie wasn’t with them. Neither was she in her boyfriend’s tent.

  She was here, her body pressed firmly against Nora’s back. She sighed in her sleep, sounding like a smaller, rounder version of the wind.

  Mariana lay with her back against Nora’s chest. They were a set of three spoons, with Nora in the middle. It was so warm they’d kicked off the top sleeping bag without discussing it.

  Their breathing moved together, as if their lungs weren’t only related by blood but by a set of bellows that inflated and deflated them mechanically. Three breaths in, three breaths out, a sighing in time.

  Tomorrow, they would spend the day fishing in a rented boat on the lake. Nora would hopefully finish the sock that was almost done and immediately cast on for the next one. She’d brought a drop spindle and some fiber to play with, though she wasn’t good at spinning yet. For the first time she wondered if she’d have enough time to learn to do it well.

  Tomorrow night, they’d cook whatever they caught or they’d cook more burgers if they came up empty-handed. The next day, they’d repack all the supplies they’d carried up the mountain, dump their trash and recycling in the cans at the entrance of the campground, and drive home.

  All this work. All this effort to pitch a tent and sleep with stuffy, recirculated air in a tent whose interior walls would be damp with breath by morning.

  But all the work was worth it, for this moment of warmth, for this moment of being so close to her girls, both of them. Given a choice between this moment in a national forest and an all-expenses-paid trip to a tropical resort, she would choose this. She would choose the dirt tracked into the tent, the possibility of scorpions in their shoes in the morning (she would remember to tell them to shake their shoes). She would choose burned marshmallows over any chef’s crème brûlée. Any day.

  Three breaths in, three breaths out. In tandem. Together.

  Then.

  Someday . . .

  Nora held her breath.

  Two breaths in, two breaths out.

  Just two.

  In her sleep, Ellie kicked the back of Nora’s leg and then tightened the arm that was draped around Nora’s waist. At the same time, Mariana pushed harder backward and tangled her foot with Nora’s. Breathe, they said in their sleep. Breathe, they encouraged her.

  Nora breathed with the two she loved most of all.

  Chapter Forty-seven

  EXCERPT, WHEN ELLIE WAS LITTLE: OUR LIFE IN HOLIDAYS, PUBLISHED 2011 BY NORA GLASS

  Ellie’s Birthday

  When Ellie was little—no, when she was still in utero—I wanted her to have her own day. She was due to be born on my birthday, but since I’d had to share mine my whole life, I didn’t want her to have to share it, too. She deserved her own.

  I’d been in labor for two days by the time I was finally fully dilated. Two full days of exertion, two full days of off-again-on-again pain that made me feel like I was going to split into violent atoms, two full days of the strong conviction that I would have her before our birthday, September seventh.

  Mariana, of course, didn’t see it that way. From India, after her missed flight, she’d sent more and more frantic texts from a borrowed cell phone. Wait. Hold on a little longer. If you just wait three more hours, we’ll all have the same birthday forever.

  Like I could possibly slow down. I pushed harder, even though the doctor said I wasn’t supposed to. It increased stress on the baby, she said. Birth, I figured, was a big enough stress, and my pushing couldn’t possibly hurt that much. Besides, how were they going to stop me? By saying “No”? Good luck to them.

  Paul said, “I’m here.”

  I looked deeply into his eyes and pretended I cared.

  I’m here, texted Mariana, even though she wasn’t.

  The truth was, I didn’t care. It was the first and only moment in my life I didn’t need her. I didn’t need my husband. I could only hear what was inside me, the roaring ocean kicked into tsunami mode by the tiny person earthquaking inside me.

  She would have her own day, I swore.

  Her own day.

  At eight p.m., the midwife thought she was finally coming. I agreed—I knew she was. I was wheeled into the delivery room. At nine p.m., I pushed more. I gave every ounce my body had to give, and as a mother giving birth, that was a lot. Two hours later, the epidural had worn off, and they couldn’t give me another one. They put a heating pad on my belly and I couldn’t find the words to scream that it was hurting me until I had second-degree burns. That pain didn’t matter, compared to what was happening inside me. At a quarter till midnight, the doctor talked in low tones to the nurse, and then the midwife told me that my baby was in distress.

  The guilt that landed on top of me with that accusation was like nothing I’d ever felt before. My first failure as a mother, and my daughter wasn’t even breathing air outside my body yet. I didn’t want to fail her again, so quickly, by taking away the chance for her to have her very own birthday.

  I grabbed the midwife’s hand—it was hard and calloused, as if in her off time she gardened without gloves. “Do it now.” I looked at the clock on the wall. Twelve more minutes. “Pull her out now. Use those forceps things.”

  “We tried that, Nora.”

  “If it’s surgery, can it wait? Till the day after?”

  She thought I was joking, so she laughed.

  Thirteen minutes later, as they prepped me for a cesarean, Ellie speeded up her entrance. Given the very last-chance go-ahead from the midwife, I pushed with my brain and heart and liver. I pushed with the strength I wouldn’t find for years, borrowing from it like it was a bank. There was nothing, no one in the whole world but me and my little girl. Mariana on my phone, Paul on my left—they both disappeared into a red twilight of background pain and noise, leaving me with no one but my Ellie, who was born one minute before midnight on September sixth, securing her very own day, all to herself.

  As they caught her, suctioned her nose, made sure she had all her parts, I panted like a racehorse pushed past its limit. I wanted to say Happy birthday to my new little girl, but just like that, sixty seconds later, my daughter’s birthday was over and it was ours, mine and Mariana’s.

  Paul couldn’t say anything. Not one word. He just squeezed my hand and his tears rained onto my forearm. He went up on his toes, bobbing up and down, looking for a glimpse of our daughter, who was already unhappy about her ordeal, screaming like an injured kitten.

  There would be time to examine her, to check every little part, to kiss every toe, to count every whisper of birth-black hair. I wasn’t worried anymore.

  “Ellie,” I said. We hadn’t decided on a name, hadn’t been able to narrow our list down. We’d hoped that when we met her, we would know. I hadn’t even properly held her yet, but I’d known her name while giving my final roar. Ellie. Strong, intelligent, willful. It hadn’t even been on our short list. I don’t think we’d ever spoken the name aloud before to each other.

  “Ellie,” said Mariana, her hiccups clear even from India. “It’s perfect.”

  “Ellie,” said Paul.

  Then the nurse handed her to me and
I was finally who I was supposed to be.

  Chapter Forty-eight

  For her birthday dinner, Ellie always got to choose where they ate. It was part of the fun of it. This year she’d chosen Forbes Island. She’d rattled off her reasons to Nora as if ticking off a list. “Some rich old geezer built it a long time ago and it floats, and it’s an island with a lighthouse, and he lived on it in the San Francisco Bay for years and years, and he had huge parties on it, and now it’s anchored and turned into a restaurant facing Alcatraz, and I really want to go.”

  Nora was surprised. She’d heard of it, of course—they’d seen it when they’d gone to see the sea lions at Pier 39. It looked like a standard tourist trap, like a five-and-dime version of Hearst Castle—glitz with all the glitter rubbed off. “Are you sure?”

  “Yes. And I want Dylan to come.”

  “Anything you want. It’s your party.” Easy to say. Harder to believe. Nora still fluctuated between hating Dylan for what he represented—an attack on her child’s very innocence—and what he was—a nice, sweet boy, a bit too old for Ellie but not by much, honestly. “Who else do you want?”

  “It’s your birthdays the next day, too. Invite whoever you want.” Ellie had stuck her earbuds back in and gone on killing dragons or whatever she did in Queendom. Then she pulled one out. “Harrison. Is he coming?”

  Nora’s brain cycled slowly once. “Yes. Is that okay?”

  Ellie rolled her eyes. “God. It’s Harrison.”

  Nora said, “What does that mean?”

  Her daughter only said, “Sheesh,” and went to her room.

  Nora had no idea how to interpret that word. Was it good, a “sheesh” of acceptance? Or was it a “sheesh” of irritation? Shouldn’t she be able to tell the difference between the two? Harrison and Ellie had been fine on the camping trip, fishing and laughing together like the old days, but since school had started again (her senior year! how could that be possible?), Ellie had been spending all her time either studying with Vani and Samantha or playing her game with Dylan. She’d refused to continue with water polo (she’d made varsity the year before), but to pad her application she’d been volunteering with a food bank on the weekends. She hadn’t allowed Nora to volunteer with her, pitching an honest-to-god fit when she’d suggested it. And whenever Nora and Harrison asked if she wanted to have dinner with them on Harrison’s porch, she did that “sheesh” noise that was a cross between a word and a curse. Nora had been choosing to ignore it, but she needed to figure it out sooner rather than later, especially since the week before, Harrison had said, “I want to move in.”