The Invisibles

by Cecilia Galante

  “I try hard,” Ozzie said. “God, I try so hard to give my kids everything that monster didn’t give me.” She clenched her teeth. “But I still fuck up. The thank-you notes are just one example. I still forget so many things. Like just the other day, Gary had to remind me to turn the lights on when the kids were doing their homework.” She shook her head. “It’s ridiculous, you know? You’d think that getting used to working in the dark because my mother was spending her money on drugs instead of the electric bill would have worn off by now! But I still do it! After all this time!”

  Monica reached over and touched Ozzie’s cheek. “It’s okay, sweetie. It’s just the way it is.”

  A muscle pulsed along Ozzie’s tight jaw. “No, that’s the way it was. That’s the way it was, Monica. It’s not the way it is. And I don’t want the way it was to keep being an excuse for the way it is.” She grabbed her whiskey glass, took a slug, and grimaced as it went down. Next to them, a woman with a beehive hairdo and frosted pink lips looked over as Ozzie plunked her glass back down. Nora stared across the table until the woman looked away again. She watched as the woman said something to the man across from her and then patted her lips with a cloth napkin.

  If she were braver, she would stand up now, right at this moment, and walk over to the other table. She would tap the woman’s thin shoulder, watch as the beehive turned, the painted eyebrows arched skyward. Can’t you see that my friend is peeling back her skin and laying herself on the table for all of us to see? Turn around. Cover your eyes. Show some respect, she would say.

  But Nora did not say anything.

  She put her head back down and took another sip of her wine instead.

  The meal lasted a good three hours. They shared multiple hors d’oeuvres, tiny plates of bizarrely shaped creatures—snails, mussels, chunks of squid—all drizzled with squirts of neon green liquid, and small dishes of white sherbet served in crystal wineglasses, something the waiter called palate cleansers. Nora spooned it carefully into her mouth, letting the bitter, sour taste melt along her tongue, and then asked for another one. The main courses came next. They had each taken a long time to decide on what to order and shared bites of their selections. Nora settled on what she thought would be a relatively benign piece of fish, only to sit back, shocked, as the waiter placed a gold-rimmed plate in front of her, heaped with a tangle of translucent noodles. The pile was drizzled with brilliant squiggles of green and a bright red poppy, complete with a stem, tucked in along one side.

  “Oh, I just ordered fish,” she said. “I don’t know if this . . .” She paused, embarrassed, as the waiter nodded.

  “The fish is under the noodles,” he said, smiling. “You can eat all of it. Even the flower!”

  Even Ozzie seemed a bit flummoxed. “Well, shit,” she said, surveying her dish. It was some kind of venison braised in wine, bedecked with an enormous variety of green leaves and purple and yellow pansies. “Should I eat this or frame it?”

  Nora poked at her pile of noodles with her fork, but they didn’t budge. They had a shellacked appearance to them, smooth and glossy, as if they had been sprayed with Aqua Net. She stuck her fork into the middle of it, cracked off a section, and put it inside her mouth. To her amazement, the noodles turned soft and salty against her tongue, the crispy veneer a thing of the past.

  “What do you think?” Monica was simultaneously watching her and texting on her phone.

  “It’s good,” Nora said happily. “Really good.”

  “Mine too!” Ozzie’s mouth was full, but she grinned, talking anyway. “Really fucking good!”

  “Ozzie.” Monica’s voice was low as she put her phone back. “You gotta keep the vocab in check here. Please.”

  “Oh God, I know.” Ozzie was still chewing. “Sorry.”

  Grace ordered some kind of chicken that had been freeze-dried and then flash-fried. It was settled atop a glistening puddle of cherry compote. Small green gooseberries dotted the sides, and an enormous pink orchid filled the other half of her plate.

  “You gonna eat your orchid?” Ozzie asked, still grinning. “I dare you.”

  Grace took a small, careful bite of one of the petals and chewed. “It doesn’t taste like much of anything,” she said. “It’s kind of bland.”

  Ozzie shivered. “They really shouldn’t serve flowers to people. It goes against every rule of nature I’ve ever learned.”

  “What’s a rule of nature?” Grace asked.

  Ozzie shrugged. Her plate was almost empty. “Flowers are to be admired, not eaten.”

  “Point made.” Grace nodded. “What else?”

  Ozzie stopped chewing then and put her fork down. She looked at all of them around the table and then lifted her napkin and wiped her mouth. “The moon is the strongest force in the universe,” she said slowly. “The moon is our rightful mother, the one we should have had from the very beginning.” Monica looked over at Nora. “Children are to be loved and cherished,” Ozzie went on. “We are to be loved and cherished.”

  A silence descended over the table. No one moved.

  It was, Nora thought later, one of Ozzie’s finest moments.

  Then, and now.

  Chapter 15

  It was unusual for Nora to have a second glass of wine, but she did, urged on by Ozzie, who was on her third Jack Daniel’s, and Monica too, who said that the sky—and the bill, apparently—was the limit. By the time they left the restaurant, Nora had to steady herself against the edge of more than one chair, and the periphery of the room seemed to swell and then close in on itself. She didn’t like the feeling; it made her uneasy, as if the tight edges she was trying to keep aligned were loosening.

  “It’s a beautiful night,” Ozzie said as Grace turned the car turned into the driveway. “What do you say we sit out on the back porch for a little while? Have a nightcap before we turn in?”

  Nora waited. The mood on the drive home had been unusually somber; Monica had yammered on and on about some trip she and Liam had taken to Greece last year, but no one had commented on any of it. It wasn’t that any of them were uninterested, just that their individual thoughts were elsewhere. She herself, for instance, was still thinking about the conversation at dinner, about the thank-you notes and the dentist. Were they still chained to the events that had shaped them throughout childhood, or had any of them—any single one of them—broken through and crossed over to the other side? She couldn’t be sure about the rest of them, but as for herself, she knew the answer.

  “Oh, that’s a great idea.” Monica’s eyes swept the group eagerly. “I’m in.” Her pupils looked too bright, as if they had been dilated. She’d had three glasses of wine at dinner, maybe more. Nora had stopped counting after the fourth course was served.

  “Sure, that’s fine.” Grace sounded resigned, as if the choice had been taken out of her hands. “Henry always keeps a few bottles of wine in the fridge. Help yourself. I’ll join you, but I’m going to run and get a sweat shirt. I always get cold at night.”

  Ozzie headed for the refrigerator as Monica and Nora went out to the back deck. They sat down at the wicker table, the same one Henry had served lunch on, and settled in. It looked strangely bare now without all the requisite china and dishes on the table; a wide green candle in the middle was its only adornment, centered atop a fresh white tablecloth. Crickets thrummed in the dark outside, and the faint smell of woodsmoke hovered in the air.

  “You know, I think this has been good after all.” Ozzie reappeared, an uncorked bottle of wine in one hand and three glasses in the other. “I don’t know what I was hoping for exactly, but I think it’s okay. At the very least we’ve gotten together and really talked, you know?”

  “I agree.” Monica traced an invisible line along the edge of the tablecloth. “I just hope we’ve talked about the things that need to be talked about.”

  “Like what?” Ozzie began filling the goblets with the amber-colored liquid.

  “Well, like the real stuff,” Monica said quiet
ly.

  “Like what real stuff?” Ozzie pressed, setting the bottle back down on the table. “You don’t think the conversation we had at dinner was real?”

  “No, of course it was.” Monica reached out and slid her fingers around the belly of her wineglass. “It just wasn’t everything.”

  “Well, we have all night.” Ozzie pushed the cork back inside the bottle. “So shoot.”

  Monica took a careful sip of her wine. Nora watched the muscles move up and down along her throat as she swallowed, like the sides of an accordion. “It’s not always that easy.”

  “What’s not always that easy?” Ozzie squared her shoulders. “God, Monica, you don’t always have to talk in code. It’s us, okay? Just fucking say it.”

  “You don’t always have to be such a bitch, you know that?”

  The skin on Nora’s neck prickled as Monica’s words slashed through the air. For a moment, the only sound she could hear was the rush of something inside her ears and then the steady chirp of crickets again outside the screen door.

  “A bitch?” Ozzie’s fingers froze around the stem of her glass. “I’m not—”

  “Yeah, you are, Ozzie.” Nora wondered if it was the wine that was giving Monica her nerve. Or maybe this was just a part of her that had blossomed, something that had finally emerged after years and years of being so subservient to everyone around her. “You don’t always have to say everything so rudely. Or like you’re the boss of everyone. Those days are over, in case you hadn’t noticed.”

  For a split second, Ozzie’s face blanched. And then the second passed. She set her mouth. “What are you talking about? All I’m saying is that I thought we were talking about real stuff. If I said it too strenuously, then I apologize.”

  Monica exhaled loudly. She was on the verge of responding when Grace appeared. A small army-green satchel was in one of her hands, and she had donned a gray hoodie with the words WEST POINT on the front. A quirky look decorated her pretty face as if she had tasted something strange. “You guys okay?” she asked.

  “Oh yeah.” Monica waved the question away with her hand. She sounded weary. “We’re fine. Little on edge is all. Long night, I think.”

  “Long day,” Ozzie muttered. She lifted her glass and downed half of it.

  Grace sat down, watching Ozzie carefully. “You found the wine.”

  Ozzie nodded and gestured with her chin. “What’s in the bag?”

  Grace didn’t answer right away, taking her time instead to place the bag on the tabletop before her and run a hand lightly over the top of it. “Well, I can’t drink, as all of you know. But I do have other ways to relax.”

  Monica, who had raised her own glass to her lips, froze. Her eyes moved from Grace to the satchel on the table and then back to Grace again.

  Nora felt something flip-flop in her stomach.

  Ozzie set her glass down on the table, surveyed the satchel for a moment, and then burst out laughing. “Can we join you?” she asked.

  “Of course you can.” Grace’s eyes flitted about the table without making eye contact with any of them. “Why do you think I brought it down?”

  It only took three inhales on the joint, the last one of which Grace coaxed Nora to hold and hold and hold until she thought her lungs might burst, before she realized she was high. It was a different sensation than the wine had produced, a deeper, thicker feeling that seemed to embody her cells and make time slow down to just the faint, steady ticking of something that might have been a clock or even just a watch. She was lucid in a way that she had not known she could be, a state of being in which everything was altered and then heightened. The crickets especially, with their incessant chirping, held a particular fascination; she found herself wondering whether, if she went outside and cupped one in her hand and then held it to her ear, the sounds it made would in fact manifest themselves into a kind of singing word. Maybe even a message.

  She was brought back suddenly by the sound of her name.

  “You don’t ever hear anything from that Theo guy anymore, do you, Nora?”

  She thought it was Ozzie at first, but she was mistaken. She stared at Grace again and then said, “What?”

  “Theo,” Grace repeated. “Theo Gallagher? I was just wondering if you ever saw or heard from him again. After we all left, I mean.” The tightness around her mouth was gone; her lips were slack as rubber bands.

  “No.” Nora stared at the tablecloth, wondering how a thing could get so white. “He left too, you know. The same time you did.”

  “Yeah. I figured. I guess I just hoped . . .” Grace stopped, biting her bottom lip.

  “What?”

  Grace shook her head. “Oh, I guess I wish someone had stayed. For you, I mean. Especially after everything . . .” She let the words trail off, where, Nora imagined, they were encapsulated by a bubble, drifting somewhere in the night air. Maybe it would be there in the morning, and she could put it in her bag, tucked in among her sneakers and clothes, and take it home with her.

  “What made you think of him?” Nora asked.

  “I don’t know,” Grace said, trailing her fingers through her hair. “I guess just thinking about things in general.” She let her head fall back and then rolled it up to attention again. “Didn’t you tell us once that he wanted to be a lawyer?”

  “Yes,” Nora said. “In L.A. or some other big city. Definitely a city.” She could feel her thoughts unfocus again, strands unraveling.

  “I wonder if he ever made it,” Grace said. “As an attorney, I mean. You don’t know?”

  “Me?” Nora touched her chest. “How would I know?”

  “Oh, I forgot.” Grace’s eyes were at half-mast. “You said you didn’t stay in touch with him. Still. It’d be fun to find out. You should Google him. Or Facebook him! See what you could find!”

  “You couldn’t pay me to be on Facebook,” Nora said, and then, as Grace opened her mouth to object, “because it’s annoying! Why people feel the need to document every breathing moment of their lives is beyond me. If someone has really significant news, tell them to pick up the phone the way it’s always been done.”

  “You don’t need to do anything like Facebook anyway,” Ozzie said. “I can tell you about Theo myself. He did make it. As an attorney, I mean.”

  Nora felt something firing inside her brain, like a distant firecracker. She sat up, eyes wide as quarters, and stared at Ozzie.

  “I actually ran into him a while back,” Ozzie said. “God, it must be eight or nine years by now, way before I had the kids. Actually, I can’t even remember if Gary and I were married yet. No, we must have been married. I remember Theo saying something about my wedding ring.”

  Nora struggled to sit up straighter. “Where’d you see him?”

  “Somewhere in Hoboken. You know, in New Jersey. Gary and I drove down for the weekend to visit some of his friends, and we went to this little dive bar after dinner and goddamn if Theo Fucking Gallagher wasn’t sitting on a bar stool right there, in the middle of the place, drinking a pint of Guinness.”

  “All by himself?” Monica’s eyes were wide.

  “No, he was with some girl. His fiancée, I think. If I remember right. Maybe they were already married. I don’t know. It was a while ago.”

  Nora felt a question rise inside her chest and then float off again. “And then what happened?” she asked instead. “Did he recognize you?”

  “Well, yeah, he recognized me.” Ozzie sounded insulted. “Geez, Norster, it’s not like I went and shriveled up into some prune.” She ran a hand lightly over the front of her face, as if to reassure herself. “Anyway, we had a blast catching up. I kind of felt bad for the wife, or fiancée, or whoever she was, if you want to know the truth. I mean, the two of us must’ve talked for an hour straight. I don’t remember her saying a single word. He told me he’d passed the bar a little while back, and that he was working for some guy in Jersey. He hated it, though. He said he was biding his time until he could strike out on his
own, maybe open his own practice.” Ozzie looked at Nora. “He asked about you, of course.”

  “He did?” Nora could feel her breath coming in shallow spurts.

  “Of course. He wanted to know how you were, all that. I told him I hadn’t heard much . . .” Ozzie’s voice drifted off. “You know, that we had sorta lost touch.”

  “Yeah, well.” If she had some kind of device that enabled her to look inside her chest at that moment, Nora was sure she would have seen her heart deflating. Or maybe it was already flat.

  “He really was such a nice guy,” Monica said. “And so cute!” Her eyes had a dreamy quality to them too, half lidded and drowsy. “I remember he was in my senior English class. He had a sweet smile even with those little crooked teeth in front. Great hair, too.”

  Nora wasn’t surprised that the girls remembered Theo. He had been her boyfriend, after all. But calling out details such as his crooked teeth caught her off guard, since for a long time, it had felt as if they were the only two people in the world. She had shared little things here and there with them, of course, such as the movies they went to see, the gold hoop earrings he’d bought her for Christmas, and the cake he’d made himself for her seventeenth birthday, but she’d kept most of it to herself. None of them knew, for example, about the first line she’d written down for him—“Whether or not I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station shall be held by anyone else, these pages must show,” from Charles Dickens’s David Copperfield—or that he tucked it inside his shoe on race day because he said it brought him luck. Nor had she shared the little wooden box he’d given her on Christmas, the edges etched with clouds and stars, a picture of Peter Pan carved on top, in memory of their first date. She’d never breathed a word about telling him that she loved him, and she had never even considered saying anything about the disastrous sexual part of their relationship.

  Still, how could she have forgotten the number of times Ozzie and Monica had crept into her room after one of her date nights so she could giggle about it with them? Monica liked to hear the details about the movies they’d seen, or who they’d run into at the theater, and Nora could still remember the look on Ozzie’s face when she told them about the extraordinary sounds they’d heard beneath the ice. They’d given her space too, after the romance ended, letting her mourn alone for a while, and then sitting with her when the solitude felt too large to hold by herself.