Splinters of Light

by Rachael Herron

  “No,” was all Mariana said.

  “Wait—” Nora stretched out her fingers, but Mariana had already followed Ellie out of the tiny room.

  “Wait,” she said to no one, alone again. It was something.

  The week before (the month before? time was getting slipperier, as if it were wet and mossy), she’d gone to an EOAD support group, held in the basement of a church. Only four others had come. Marcia, a woman of about sixty who’d lost her husband at fifty-five to the disease, had been the facilitator. One woman had been driven by her daughter. She’d sat, slack-faced, not appearing to know where or who she was. A fifty-two-year-old man had chattered almost nonstop, as if trying to prove he could still converse. The other man, Dirk, had proclaimed it was his last meeting.

  He’d thumped his hands onto his thighs. “You want to know why I’m not coming back? I can’t remember where I am half the day. I have to write down every single thing I need to do, and then I forget to look at my list and nothing gets done. My wife can’t look me in the eye, says I’m not the person she married. Of course I’m not. None of us are. We thought we were one person, and then it turns out we’re just idiots with no memory.” He stood. “I came to say I’m done. And thank you, Marcia. You’re a sweet woman, and I’m sorry for your loss, but coming to this group has been like being on deathwatch. One person is fine, then they get worse, and their skin sinks in, and their eyes go blank like Jennifer’s there”—Jennifer didn’t even look at him—“and they stop coming, and then they die, and then another person doesn’t remember that person at all, then we all go to the funeral and instead of thinking about that person getting slung down into a hole, we’re thinking about what they’ll sing at our service, what our friends will wear, how often they’ll think about us after we’re rotting in the dirt. I’m fucking sick of this group’s funerals.”

  Nora couldn’t breathe. She dropped most of a needle’s worth of stitches and didn’t look down at them.

  Marcia said, “Dirk, I’m—”

  “No,” he said. “Let me go. At least I’m coherent enough to make an exit, and I’m not going to have a funeral, so this is the last time.” Dirk looked down at Nora, her hands still frozen in place. “Have they told you about the loss of impulse control yet?”

  She’d read about it. Someday she’d lose her bladder while in the kitchen. She’d argue about nothing for no reason. Nora had spent her whole life reaching for control, loving the feel of clean, tidied surfaces under her fingertips, and to know she’d lose all that . . .

  “What they don’t tell you is that now you have an excuse to do whatever the fuck you want.”

  “What?”

  Then the man named Dirk leaned over and kissed Nora on the mouth. His lips stayed still, not asking for anything, but they were strong. She smelled coffee, and—faintly—putty, as if he’d been working with wood before the meeting. The kiss was over as fast as it had begun. Nora touched her lower lip. Damn it, she shouldn’t be grinning. But she was.

  “There,” he said. “That’s the perk. My gift to you—the knowledge that you have a get-out-of-jail-free card. Use it now before you forget you have it.” He tipped an imaginary hat to them and left, bumping open the door with his shoulder, his hands tucked into his sweatshirt pockets. They heard his whistle long after he was out of sight.

  Now Nora came back to where she was: in her office, Clive Wearing talking in front of her.

  That was the amazing thing. Clive Wearing’s brain, so damaged that it held almost nothing, still held this: love. Perfect love.

  That was everything. It was the thing Nora clung to most of all. In the middle of the night, deep in the throes of the three a.m. terror that made her wonder if she was forgetting how to breathe, that image of Clive Wearing was what got her through. She knew that no matter how the cells in her brain failed, no matter what dropped away from her, she wouldn’t forget the way it felt to look into her daughter’s eyes, which were the exact color of the piece of green beach glass she’d had in her pocket every day for weeks now. Nora needed to believe, even if she was nothing but a body in a bed, that if Mariana crawled in and wrapped her arms around her, she would know her sister. That she would feel love and warmth. That she would know, for that moment, peace.

  It was impossible to continue otherwise, without that hope.

  So Nora believed. She watched the clip of the video over and over, until she’d memorized every word. “Oh, look who’s come. Oh, darling.”

  And again, seven seconds later. “Oh, look who’s come. Oh, darling.” Clive kissed his wife, musically and with great enjoyment. “Can we dance?”

  “Oh, look who’s come. Darling. Can we dance?”

  Chapter Fifty-eight

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

  Thanksgiving

  When Ellie was little, we had pizza for Thanksgiving.

  It was the first Thanksgiving for us to be on our own, and I wasn’t thankful for anything. Not one single thing. The Civic had died (again—that time it was a radiator so rusted it looked like a cheese grater). The washing machine had turned toes up, sending a biblical flood across the kitchen floor, and, because I was riding the bus at the time with Ellie, I didn’t get the water up in time, and it warped the kitchen linoleum. The clothes dryer was working, but it smoked a little even when it was on low, and I was too scared to use it. That left me washing our clothes in the bathtub and line drying them, heavy from not being spun first. The clothesline itself kept breaking free of the tree I’d tied it to with what I thought was a square knot (but obviously wasn’t), so just when I thought I was done with laundry for the day, I’d go out and find our soggy clothing lying in mud puddles. Then all my hand washing in the tub created a clog that I couldn’t fix with the cheap plastic snake I’d bought at the hardware store, so when Ellie or I showered, we had to stand in calf-deep water. She didn’t like it. I told her to buck up, but she was four. Four-year-olds don’t buck up. They smile, they jump like baby goats, they sparkle and rumble and twirl and twinkle, but they do not understand bucking up or why it is sometimes necessary.

  Then the stove died, refusing to heat to temperatures of more than two digits, and the toaster went up in a blackened bagel accident.

  The refrigerator was the last straw. When I came home to find warm milk and all my carefully planned frozen meals defrosted and gray, I sat on the kitchen floor and sobbed. I had enough money in the bank to pay the mortgage and the utilities, and no more. Alimony and child support were late and often slimmer than they should have been. I couldn’t afford to replace a single broken thing.

  Really, all I wanted to replace was myself, and I couldn’t afford that, either. I wanted the new, shiny version of Nora Glass. I was freelance copyediting as well as working at the paper, and I routinely stayed up past two in the morning to finish a job that would pay for Ellie’s day care. Then I got up at six to get us ready for the next round. The woman I saw in the mirror was too skinny, with dark shadows under her eyes. The humor that used to dance there was gone. Ellie had complained that she wanted to live with her aunt, “who always laughs like you used to and has cookies for me.”

  To this I snapped, “Yeah? Well, those are store-bought.” It was my ultimate insult.

  I wasn’t good at divorce. I wanted to figure out the method to it, the reason behind it. If I could figure out where I’d gone wrong, then I could fix whatever it was and start over. I didn’t want Paul back—once my heart started beating again about six months after he left, I was so angry with him I wouldn’t have taken him back if he’d showed up covered with hundred-dollar bills. I wanted myself back. I’d lost myself, somewhere, along the way. I’d left myself behind like an empty popcorn box, like a sweater forgotten on a train.

  No, it was worse than leaving something behind.

  I’d failed.

  Divorce is, at its very
core, the ultimate failure. You can blame many things on circumstances: you lost your condo because of the recession, you lost your job because of downsizing, your album failed because of distribution interruptions. But divorce? You just picked the wrong person. You were wrong, all the way around, about him and, worse, about yourself. You did it all wrong, and there’s no absolution. Even if you’re both better off being apart, when you say, “I’m divorced,” it means, “I failed.”

  My bread always rose. I got out every stain. My curtains always hung straight. I hated failure more than anything.

  One night as I was roughly drying Ellie with a towel I’d have to wash in the tub that took hours to drain, she said with four-year-old honesty, “You used to be fun, Mama. I liked you better then.” She wrapped her arms around my neck, smacked a kiss to my cheek, and raced away, bare bottomed and joyful.

  The day after she told me I wasn’t fun was Thanksgiving. I would be fun, by god. I would find where my fun was hiding if it killed me. Hand in hand, we walked to the corner store and bought one turkey breast. I called my twin, even though I knew she had plans with her boyfriend, and left her a message. On our walk home, I pushed Ellie in the swing at the playground until my arms were sore.

  At home, I dug through the boxes in the garage until I found what I was looking for: a toaster oven Paul and I had received as a wedding gift and had never used. Ellie was enchanted by the two dials and the high-pitched pings it made. She loved its loud ticking. I cut two potatoes into small pieces and cooked them next to the breast. When they were done, I mashed them, adding salt and the cheap margarine I had started buying. I cut the turkey into two pieces.

  The front door burst open. My twin sister, Mariana, tumbled in. She was bleeding from both elbows and both knees, but she was laughing. “I couldn’t get a ride from Robby’s house, but I borrowed a bike. I kept falling off. I don’t think I’ve ridden one since we were kids. But I’m here! I rode all the way here!”

  I boggled at her. “Robby lives in Fremont.” A bike ride that length would take four hours, at least.

  “Okay, I took BART. And then two buses. I couldn’t get the bus bike rack down, though, and two guys had to help me. Then I fell off again and a pizza delivery guy almost ran me over with his car, and he felt so bad about it that he gave me two pizzas because they were made wrong. One’s Hawaiian and the other is pepperoni and green onions, which is weird but we can handle that, right? They’re bungee-corded to the rack. Ellie-belly, wanna help me carry them in?” Ellie, who was already jumping up and down, squealed in delight.

  Together at my big family table, we ate small bites of turkey and potatoes and enormous bites of pizza, using our hands for everything (even the mashed potato!) just because we could. We guzzled sodas I’d found in the garage when I’d been looking for the toaster oven. We let Ellie draw all over the driveway with all the chalk colors, and then we spent an hour playing hopscotch. We played jump rope. After she fell asleep on the couch, my sister and I talked into the late hours over a bottle of cheap wine she’d miraculously managed not to break any of the times she’d fallen off the bike. All three of us slept in my bed that night, together.

  And I was thankful again, for everything.

  Chapter Fifty-nine

  Dylan was being a gigantic asshat. Yeah, the Incursers were on the run and the Healers were suddenly on top of the social strata, but they’d talked about that potential universe switch a million times—the game turned on a dime, and by next week the Velocirats could be calling all the shots and they’d all be doomed, Incurser and Healer alike. It didn’t matter what plotline Ellie wrote, or how many people chose to play it, if the game’s creators hit the override button on the universe.

  Don’t pick that, Ellie typed as Dyl attempted to grab a flame from a low blue tree.

  He ignored her, lifting out the flame and then doing a pain dance as it blackened his arm to his elbow.

  I told you so. Only Healers could carry the flame. She had a ball of fire now under her cloak that she hadn’t even told him about yet.

  Let’s go skinny-dipping!

  Fine. It was silly, but he loved going there, so she would walk with him through the glade to get to the hot spring. If you walked right at it and at the last minute hit a jump sequence, then your character’s clothes would disappear as you cannonballed into the water. Not that you could see junk or anything—the game makers blurred out the genitalia—but it was still kind of funny.

  Four other “couples” were already in the springs. How many of them actually knew each other in real life? She wondered if any of them had actually met and actually liked each other. They couldn’t possibly be the only two players to ever get together in real life. The game was already huge—there’d been a con dedicated to it in Houston just the month before. There must be other couples in the world who owed their relationship to this purple and green world where Healers couldn’t swim but, given the right plants, could fly when necessary.

  Hey, what’s wrong?

  What? Ellie made Addi tuck a Lopi flower behind her ear.

  What’s up with you?

  Nothing.

  Seems like more than that. You want me to call?

  No, she didn’t.

  Ellie hadn’t seen Dylan for three weeks, not since she’d met him and his band at a recording studio in Emeryville. He’d been different. Yeah, they were recording a demo and she knew it was important—maybe it was even the equivalent of her applying to colleges—but she still wanted to be . . . looked at. To be seen. He’d practically acted like she wasn’t there, just kept fiddling with his guitar, even when they were on breaks. And afterward, when he’d driven her to BART (instead of across the bridge and home), he’d kissed her differently. Like she was . . . something he expected.

  They’d had sex three times now. Once at the hotel, which was the best time. Once in his car, which was uncomfortable but okay, and once in his bed while his roommates were chilling in the other room completely baked out of their minds.

  Had she done it wrong? Was she bad in bed? Did she not know how to do it right? How would she know if that was true? He was sweet, of course. Dylan was always sweet. And he’d seemed happy; it was pretty obvious he’d been satisfied. (Had she been? She wasn’t quite sure. Why was it so confusing? Wasn’t it supposed to be a big bang followed by giddiness? Instead, it was kind of awkward and then awesome and then awkward again. God, she really must not be doing it right.)

  Dylan had been supposed to come over tomorrow for Thanksgiving—they’d planned it weeks before—but he’d IM’d her that morning and said his brother was coming to town and was taking him out to dinner.

  Ellie hadn’t even known he had a brother. She knew about his sister, but not a brother.

  In the game, Dyl ran up the side of the riverbank (his clothes miraculously reattaching as he went) and kept going. Addi followed him. Dyl ran past the edge of town toward the Hinters. His avatar paused as he juggled two swords.

  What are we doing? she typed. Maybe they’d be the first to ever have a “talk” in Queendom.

  Running.

  No. I mean you and me.

  Nothing, Ellie. He rarely called her by her real name in the game. We just ARE. Dyl ran faster, Addi at his heels. Tell me a story about where we’re going now.

  She could do that. That was, maybe, the only thing she was good at. Once upon a time, she started as she hit the command to keep Addi running (she’d pass Dyl eventually; she was just a little bit faster than he was), at the end of the world, there were two runners on a mission to save the Dragon Queen. The sky went red over their racing avatars, getting more orange the closer they got to the edge of the game. Every night, as the sun fell, a great spell would fall on the land . . .

  Wanna go back to the springs?

  Hey. It’s my story.

  Yeah, well, Josh just texted me and he’s going to try to find the Queen’s eg
gs, too.

  No! The fewer people looking for the eggs the better. Did you tell him that’s what we were doing out here?

  Not really . . .

  The motion detector went on outside the living room window. Ellie jumped and leaned to look. Her mother wandered past, in the direction of Harrison’s house. Shit. She hadn’t even heard her leave the kitchen. Ellie didn’t type to tell Dylan where she was going—she just raced to the back door. The door was unlocked, the screen door standing open.

  Ellie watched while her mother walked across the grass under the moon. She opened her mouth to call her, to say something, but then she saw Harrison’s porch light go on. He stepped into its yellow pool and opened his arms.

  Her mother folded herself into them.

  Ellie’s shoulders dropped, and her stomach did, too. She was glad—truly—that her mother had Harrison.

  But her mom also had Mariana.

  And Mariana had Luke.

  Who did that leave her with?

  Inside, she typed, Hey, it’s late. I’m going to bed. She sat at the dining room table and crossed her fingers on both hands. Sometimes he liked to go to sleep at the same time she did. Dyl came into Addi’s hut and stood as near to her as his avatar could. Then, with the violins softly playing, they’d sleep as close to each other as two Queendom players could.

  K. Night.

  That was it. Not even an XO. Nothing else.

  Ellie’s back ached with something that felt dull and heavy. Her knees were stiff as she walked up the stairs. On the landing, she looked at the series of twin pictures hung on the wall. The simply framed pictures showed her mother and Aunt Mariana at various ages, draped over each other, laughing. Always laughing. Sometimes they wore matching clothes ironically, and sometimes they were just themselves. But they were together in every single photo, and they had a story for each one, too. That was the year we had chickenpox. Remember how itchy those sweaters were?