The Invisibles

by Cecilia Galante

  “I’d have to take tomorrow off,” she said. “I’m working Saturdays this month, remember?”

  “Oh, I think we’ll manage,” Trudy replied dryly.

  “Hot diggety!” Marion broke in. “Not much else can beat a last-minute plane trip!” She tilted her head, a sly look coming across her porcelain features. “Except maybe cake and ice cream for breakfast! You ready?”

  “You brought ice cream, too?” Nora sat forward, grateful that Marion had changed the subject. As bullish as Trudy was, Marion could be equally tactful.

  “Of course we brought ice cream!” Marion’s heels clicked against the linoleum as she started for the freezer. “Whoever heard of eating birthday cake without ice cream?” She grabbed a plastic sack off the top of the microwave on her way back. “And Swedish fish, too! To sprinkle on top!”

  Nora grinned. She knew that her addiction to Swedish fish was something that Marion, who rarely, if ever, ate sugar, considered both appalling and endearing.

  “And remember.” Marion began cutting the cake. “There is no such thing as calories on your birthday.” She plopped an enormous section of cake onto a plate and slid it over to Trudy for ice cream. “Of course, you don’t have to worry about things like calories for at least another ten years. Forty is when it really starts to go to hell. And then fifty, well, you may as well just go ahead and burn every girdle you’ve ever bought, since the only thing they manage to do is leave unsightly indentations around your middle.” She patted the front of her skirt gently, as if forgiving her body for such a thing anyway.

  “Speak for yourself.” Trudy slid her finger down the side of the cake and winked at Nora. “You got any plans for tonight?”

  Nora averted her eyes. “No, not really.”

  “Nothing at all?” Marion repeated kindly. She stuck a single gummy fish in the middle of Nora’s slice of cake, and then sprinkled a handful of them around the edges, as if they were swimming.

  Nora smiled, trying to hide her embarrassment. “You both know Alice Walker would be offended if I left her alone on my birthday. We’ll get some steaks and hang out.” She toed the leg of the table with her shoe, knowing how lame this sounded, but the truth was that an evening alone with her dog did not make her want to jump off a bridge anymore. There had been a time, maybe even as recently as a few years ago, when the idea of such a thing created such feelings of dread that she found herself staying late at the library to avoid going home, but not anymore. She’d gotten used to keeping herself company. And Alice Walker, who Nora could swear had been a therapist in a past life, always knew just when to climb up on the couch next to her and rest her head in her lap. No, buying a steak dinner and sharing it with her dog tonight would be just fine.

  Trudy, however, did not seem to agree. Nora pursed her lips as the older woman began shaking her head across the table.

  “Marion and I would be more than happy to take you to dinner tonight—just the three of us—but why don’t you come with us to our salsa class instead? There’s lots of young people there; you never know.”

  Trudy had a variation of invites that she peppered Nora with, but the silent, underlying purpose behind them was always the same: It’s not healthy for a young woman like you to spend so much time alone. You need girlfriends, Nora. Women your own age you can cook with and drink wine with and go to the movies with. Girls you can gossip about sex and love with and bare your darkest secrets to, and know that afterward, they will love you just as much, if not more.

  What Trudy didn’t know was that Nora had had all that. She’d had it in spades actually, friendships that had made her feel invincible, whole, complete in a way that defied completeness. And since it had disappeared, she had never had the heart to go out and look for it again. It had been too hard to lose the first time.

  She stood up. She wasn’t about to get into any of this now. “No, thanks. But listen, thank you for my—”

  “Oh, sit down.” Trudy put her fork down and, with a great display of irritation, reached under the table and withdrew a box wrapped in light blue tissue paper. “For you,” she said, sliding it in Nora’s direction. “Happy birthday, kid.”

  Nora sat back down, touching the side of the small box as Marion clapped her hands. “You didn’t have to get me anything,” she said. “Jeez, the cake was enough.” She pulled the tissue off and stared at the cube-shaped box. Randall’s Jewelry was etched across the top in gilded letters. She looked back up at the women, bewildered.

  “Just open the damn box,” Trudy said. “And before you get all weird about it, yes, it was expensive. But this is what we wanted to do. Besides, Marion and I like to spend our money, not hoard it like some people we know.” She raised a thatch of eyebrow. “Don’t we, Marion?”

  Marion reached out and patted Trudy’s hand. “Be kind, dear.”

  Nora opened the box—and then inhaled at the silver link bracelet nestled in a sea of dark velvet. In the middle of the links was a thick crescent moon, the edges tipped and shadowed in a dark gray. The word Nora had been inscribed along the outside curve, a tiny sapphire chip dotting the top of the capital N.

  “Do you like it?” Marion leaned forward, her forehead furrowed. “We weren’t really sure . . .”

  “It was her idea,” Trudy said, jerking her head toward Marion. A blue butterfly barrette quivered in her hair. “She thought it would be cute and all, ’cause you’re always talking about the moon. I have the receipt if you want to exchange it.”

  Nora shook her head, struggling to retrieve her voice. “I love it. It’s beautiful. Thank you.”

  “Really?” Marion asked. “You’re sure?”

  “I’m sure.” It was hard to get the words out around the mound in the back of her throat. They were so good to her, these women, and had been for so many years. So loving. So attentive. Even if they did feel sorry for her.

  She held out her wrist so that Marion could fasten the clasp, and then leaned back, stroking it with a fingertip. “I love it,” she said, looking back up at the women. “I really do. Thank you so much.”

  “You’re welcome.” Trudy stood up, brushing crumbs off the front of her zippered cardigan sweater. “And now that that’s over, it’s time to get to work.”

  Chapter 3

  Although she had never done it before, booking a plane ticket online was not nearly as difficult as Nora thought it might be. Nora had been on a plane exactly once in her life, when her mother had flown the two of them to Florida to attend her grandfather’s funeral. She had only been four years old at the time, and she did not remember much about the funeral or the plane ride. Trudy, however, found her a last-minute deal on some obscure travel website, which shaved fifty dollars off the final price, and had offered to take care of Alice Walker while Nora was gone so that she would not have to pay for a kennel.

  “You do want me to come back, don’t you?” Nora asked as they locked up the library later that evening.

  Trudy laughed. “Only if you promise to go again.”

  It was dusk when Nora started back home. The sky was awash in a sea of periwinkle, and the moon was brightly visible. She had been too preoccupied with things today to look for a new first line in any of the books she had to shelve, but one came to her now as she gazed up at the sky: “It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.” She remembered the chill that had descended over her the first time she read that line from George Orwell’s book and how a similar sensation—like small, frozen fingertips—tiptoed over the top of her head and down the back of her neck as she thought of the weekend ahead. Anything could happen, she thought. Anything at all.

  She still had to pack and get Alice Walker over to Trudy’s, and then call a taxi service to come pick her up in the morning so that she could get to the airport, but right now she needed to walk. She grabbed a handful of Swedish fish, clipped on Alice Walker’s leash, and headed toward the east part of town, over a mile away, until she got to Wisconsin Avenue. It was located on the
outskirts of one of the more ragged sections of Willow Grove, and the street stuck out from the highway like a dislocated arm. Her head started to pound as she made a left onto Magnolia and stood on the sidewalk opposite the old building, just like it did every time she came down here.

  Ozzie would never believe it if she saw what it looked like now, Nora thought; how Turning Winds had transformed over the years from a stately yellow Victorian house with a snake of red ivy crawling up one side into a pale, sagging structure. The wide wraparound porch they used to sit on, Ozzie’s legs dangling over the side, skimming the tops of the rhododendron bushes beneath, had almost rotted away to nothing. When Monica had gone through her “I’d rather die than be fat” stage, she used to hook her toes under the railings and do sit-ups until she couldn’t breathe. Now the porch floor had sunk to the ground and the railing spindles, formerly delicate white arms, had collapsed into jagged stumps. Behind the house, the grass was waist-high, but back then it had been a lawn, neatly trimmed around the edges and flanking the east side of the river. Nora walked around to one side of the house. She stared past the weeds, tall as grown men, until she could see Grace and herself that last week, before everything happened.

  They’d walked to one of their favorite spots, a place where the ground dipped down into a wide sort of basin and three birch trees, their trunks wide as flagpoles, draped the surrounding area in shade. It was a particular spot where Grace liked to sit and draw. A forgotten section of railroad tracks sat less than a stone’s throw away, obscured by tufts of weeds, and the bank itself, which sloped toward the water, was sprinkled with blue cornflowers. Nora thought there were more attractive places—just a hundred feet behind them was an entire field full of black-eyed Susans and Queen Anne’s lace—but Grace always insisted that the light in this particular spot was perfect. Whole, she called it. Untainted.

  The weather had been gauzy-warm, a breeze soft as cotton breathing over everything. Grace was looking at a book of photography, flipping the glossy pages slowly as she examined each face, every picture with a studied intensity. A large sketch pad, which she brought with her everywhere, lay next to her, along with a variety of charcoal pens. She had rolled up the sleeves of her T-shirt, exposing her bony arms, and a lone pencil stuck out from the bun in her hair.

  Nora lay next to her, one arm draped over her face to avoid the glare of the sun, the hand of the other arm dipping intermittently into a bag of sunflower seeds. She was reading Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston, hooked by the stunning first line: “Ships at a distance have every man’s wish on board.” It was already in her notebook.

  “Do you think people who die can still feel love?” Grace asked, turning from her book to look at Nora.

  Nora cracked a sunflower shell between her teeth. “Yeah, I guess.” She was at a good part in the book where the main character—a girl named Antoinette—was about to meet the man she was supposed to marry.

  “No, really.” Grace’s hair, which was the color of corn silk, curled in wisps around the side of her face, and there were dark circles under her eyes. Her bare legs, thin as pins, were crossed at the ankles. “You know, some people think that if we can’t get into heaven when we die, our spirits just sort of drift in and out of the universe. Do you think those spirits can feel things? Like love?”

  “Uh-huh.” Nora kept reading. Grace talked this way a lot—she loved ethereal things like heaven and hell and beauty and God, things, Nora assumed, that must have been passed down by her mother. She kept a picture of the Blessed Virgin Mary under her pillow, a glossy rectangular head shot of a lovely dark-skinned woman with a blue mantle over her head, downcast eyes, and lips the color of an overripe peach—something she had never explained to Nora, and about which Nora had never asked.

  “Are you even listening to me?” Grace poked Nora in the ribs.

  Nora put the book down and stared at the river. The water was a gunmetal gray for some reason, dark and foreboding despite the sunlight. In one more week, her best friends in the entire world were going to leave Willow Grove forever. Talking had become difficult again. Talking about the future—nearly impossible. “Say it one more time,” she said.

  Grace sat up and pulled a piece of grass out of the lawn. “Do you think spirits or souls—after we die—can feel things like love?”

  Nora thought about this for a moment, hoping it wasn’t a trick question. “Maybe,” she said.

  Grace tipped forward a little as Nora spoke, as if she had been waiting for the answer to tumble like a crumb from her lips. “Maybe?” she repeated.

  It was then that Nora understood that Grace was talking about the abortion. Nora didn’t know too many of the details other than the few Grace had given them a few days before: it would happen on Wednesday, which was three days from now, and it would be as uncomplicated as taking a vitamin. Grace’s boyfriend, Max, who was a sophomore at the university across town, had already obtained some kind of pill called Cytotec, which would make the uterus empty itself of what they had calculated to be a six-week pregnancy. Or at least that was how Grace had described it to them. Max, who was studying premed, said it was going to be a simple miscarriage of unwanted tissue, nothing more. He’d slashed open a medical textbook in his dorm room one night and directed them to look.

  “There,” he said, pointing to something that resembled a pink lima bean nestled inside a soft blob of tissue. “That’s all it is right now. It’s nothing. It’s not living, it’s not breathing; it’s not even human.” Nora, who was squeezed tightly between Grace and Monica, leaned in past them, peering closely at the image. She thought it looked more like a comma than a lima bean, but she didn’t say so. Her eyes drifted to the bedspread alongside the book instead, the dark blue, rumpled material under which Grace had been entwined with Max for months now. What was he like in bed? she wondered. Did the things he did to Grace make her moan? Cry? And what kind of thoughts, after all of them would leave his room again and head back to Turning Winds, did Max himself have about the abortion?

  “How long will it all take?” Grace asked.

  “An hour,” Max answered. “Two, tops. It’ll be like a really heavy period. And then it’ll be over.” Nora snuck a look in Grace’s direction. Her mouth was twisted into a painful scowl and she looked pale. Nora already knew that Grace’s strict Catholic upbringing made it impossible for her to believe that any of it was going to be as simple as Max was making it out to be. Grace was pretty sure the whole thing was going to be the equivalent of committing murder.

  Nora herself hadn’t given the abortion too much thought after the decision had been made, although every so often, after the sound of Grace’s faint snoring drifted through the bedroom at night, her mind would wander. There was no reason to doubt him, but she hoped Max knew what he was talking about. He was ranked third academically in his class, but he was still just a college sophomore. Medical school wasn’t even on the virtual horizon yet. What if there was something he missed? Something he didn’t—or couldn’t—know yet? It was frightening to think about.

  “Listen,” Nora said now, putting her hand on Grace’s arm. Fifty feet away, the river roared, the black water churning like a washing machine. “You’re starting to overthink things. Don’t go there, all right?”

  Grace’s face darkened. “Don’t go there?” she repeated. “Don’t go there? It’s too late, Nora. The pills are in my sock drawer. I’m already there, okay?”

  “I just . . .” Nora fumbled for the words she should have said earlier. “All I meant is that it’ll be okay. Max looked into everything, and it’ll all work out. Really. It’ll be fine.”

  Grace had looked away, staring off at some invisible point in the distance. Nora was sure she didn’t believe her, but that had been the end of their conversation.

  They had never—not once—spoken of it again.

  Now, as Nora stood there staring at the old house, she wished with all her heart that she could go back.

  “Yes,” she wo
uld have said this time, even if she still hadn’t believed it, even if she hadn’t really known the answer for sure, “yes, Grace, I think dead people can definitely feel love.”

  Chapter 4

  There was a litany of things for Nora to worry about as she sat on the plane the next morning: Alice Walker for one, who would probably never forgive her for leaving for two whole days, who would pretend not to know Nora upon her return, lifting her nose in that snooty-dog way she did sometimes when Nora accidentally ran out of her favorite food. Then there was the cost of the plane ticket, which Trudy had sworn was a steal, but because of hidden costs had actually ended up costing a small fortune. The last time Nora had spent a similar chunk of money was two years ago, when she had purchased a new sofa at Burlington Furniture. It had been a necessity—her old one had gotten so threadbare that Tom (who she had been dating at the time) had come over one evening for dinner and gotten stabbed by a small wire when he sat down—but she had tossed and turned over the purchase nevertheless. She didn’t like to spend money. Especially on herself. It made her anxious.

  Then there was the whole ordeal about what to wear, which had completely thrown her for a loop. She stood in front of her closet for a full twenty minutes after getting out of the shower, feeling slightly dumbfounded. Nora never fretted about her appearance. Ever. She dressed for work exactly the way she ate—grabbing whatever was closest. Trudy did not have any rules about what they wore to work, which meant that she could indulge in her usual assortment of jeans or khaki pants, a soft long-sleeved T-shirt, and sneakers. Nora had a collection of sneakers that rivaled that of any professional sports player. It was her only indulgence, born out of her necessity to walk, and she took great pleasure in adding to it. To date, she had eighteen pairs, each one labeled and stacked in its original box in her closet.