The Invisibles

by Cecilia Galante

  She raised her eyes, but only to tie level, a rich cream silk with navy stripes. “How did Ozzie get your number?”

  “She said she looked it up in the phone book while you guys were in the ER.” He cleared his throat, a nervous sound. “I used to work in Jersey, but now I’m in private practice in Chelsea. I have an ad in the yellow pages.”

  She nodded slowly, absorbing the information a bit at a time. “Well, it was nice of you to help.” She flicked her eyes at him and turned around to focus on the street again. “It was good to see you, Theo.”

  “Nora.” He stepped off the curb and stood next to her. He smelled different, she realized. Older. Stranger. Richer. Which he was, of course, on all counts. How foolish she was to think he would smell the same, that the old Twizzler smell might still be there, lingering around his earlobes.

  “Do you have kids now?” It came out before she realized she had formed the thought and hung there in the air between them, a faint bubble.

  “No.” He squinted at something, toed a bare spot on the pavement. “My wife wanted them, but I . . .” He rolled his teeth over his bottom lip. “It’s why we split up.”

  A yellow cab peeked around the corner at the opposite end of the street. She moved toward it, blinking back tears.

  “Nora.”

  “I have to go. I really do.”

  “Ozzie told me what happened, Nora. That last week. At Turning Winds.”

  Her arm froze as she struggled to breathe. The oxygen in the air seemed to have been cut off, and for a moment, her mouth open and shut like a fish. And then as before, a sudden gasp of breath, a surfacing again. She whirled around.

  “You knew?” Her rage was at a peak now; a new blood coursed through her veins.

  “Not until after.” Theo swallowed, his Adam’s apple as big as a peach pit. “Ozzie wrote me a letter after she got to that ranch in Montana, and she told me. I saw her again totally by accident at a bar a few years back, and we talked about it again.” He took another step toward her. “Why didn’t you ever tell me?”

  The cabdriver had seen her and was moving the vehicle in their direction. “You knew?” she said again. “All this time? And you never called? You never—” She stopped as her voice broke, and she moved over as the cab slid in next to her.

  “I tried.” Theo took her hand, but she shook it off. “I wanted to come see you when I came home from school that Christmas on break. I drove to the house three different times, but I couldn’t do it. I don’t know why. I was terrified for some reason. I’m sorry, Nora. I was an idiot. I was dating another girl at school, and I . . .” He stopped, squeezing the space between his eyebrows with his thumb and middle finger. “God, I’m so sorry.”

  She got into the car, inhaling a strange, spicy scent. The driver was wearing a purple turban and had a black beard that came down into a point.

  He’d known?

  Theo lurched toward her. “Nora, will you just—”

  “Don’t.” She turned her head and looked straight at him. “You should have said something. Anything.” His face blanched as she closed her fingers around the door handle.

  He stepped back as the door shut in his face and then knocked rapidly against the window. “Nora, please. Just wait.”

  “Go,” she said to the taxi driver. “Please. Go now.”

  His tires squealed as he moved away from the curb and shot down the street. She was sitting close enough to the passenger window that she could see Theo in the sideview mirror running after them.

  She held on tight to the edge of the seat and forced herself not to look back.

  Chapter 30

  The taxi driver had dark brown skin and was wearing a turban, but Nora could not tell what his ethnicity was. The ID tag on the front dashboard spelled out the name—Aaquil Shezzbaharrat—but that was no help, although Nora guessed he might be Muslim or Tibetan. It was even more difficult when he began to talk; his words were so thick with a foreign accent that she had trouble making out even a few of them. Still, there was no mistaking the look on his face when she told him where she wanted to go.

  “Pennsylvania?” he repeated, although it came out as “Pennsyl-vay-neeya?” He shook his head. “That is too far. Too far. Way out of my your-isdiction.”

  She held up a wad of bills. “Name your price. I mean it. I’ll pay you whatever you want. I just have to get back home. Right now.”

  Aaquil’s dark eyes widened.

  She shook the bills under his nose. “I’m serious.”

  “Four hundred dollars,” he said quickly.

  “Done.” She handed him two one-hundred-dollar bills. “The other half later. When we get there.”

  Aaquil took the money and held it up to the light. Then he shrugged and turned around. “Crazy American women.”

  “You have no idea,” she muttered as the cab barreled down Interstate 80. “You have no fucking idea.”

  She was glad Aaquil didn’t talk; gladder still that she couldn’t understand him even if he had wanted to. She stared instead at the back of his turban, examined the soft folds of material wrapped tightly around his head. What secrets were under that purple slip of silk? How many things would the people in his life never know? And what would keeping those things secret do to them? To him? She’d been right to feel uneasy that first day when Ozzie called and begged her to come to Chicago. Her instinct not to go had been right on the money. None of them were equipped to deal with everything that would come out into the open again; not one of them over the years had developed the skills needed to do such a thing. Nora doubted if any of them even knew where to look for them. It was like putting a bunch of children in a room full of cobras and telling them to duck.

  And now Theo.

  My God, Theo. Coming out of nowhere, like the final blow.

  All these years he had known, like the rest of them, and hadn’t said a word. Hadn’t done a thing. What was wrong with him? What was wrong with them? Or maybe it was her. Maybe with all her quirks and oddities, she’d just been entirely unapproachable. Untouchable.

  What had made him blurt out such a thing on the sidewalk? To a stranger! Which, when all was said and done, was really what they were. Maybe it was all they’d ever been. Oh, he could pretend that they were more. That they’d had some kind of sordid emotional history together, instead of the pathetic fifteen or sixteen months they’d shared. She’d let him have that, if that’s what it took. She didn’t care.

  I tried, but I couldn’t do it! I’m sorry!

  She brushed the words away with a hand across her eyes and looked out the window. Ozzie had told him, had written a secret letter from out West, telling him everything. She’d broken a vow of confidence, of solidarity. But then they all had when it came to her, leaving her behind the way they had. She hated them all. She really did. She would never forgive them, even if they begged her for an entire lifetime to do it. It was time to leave them all behind. Time to cut the cord, to put on her big-girl panties, as Monica liked to say, and strike out finally on her own. She’d done it with Mama. She could do it with them.

  A first line came to her, as they usually did when things began to make sense again, realigning themselves like overturned chess pieces: “The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.” Good old L. P. Hartley, who’d written The Go-Between. He knew what he’d been talking about. And now she did too.

  The past was over.

  It was time to move on, to look toward the future now and create a new life.

  The cab pulled into Trudy’s driveway at three thirty, just as the light was beginning to change. The moon hung low in the sky, full as a womb. Nora gave Aaquil the other two hundred dollars and thanked him, not just for the ride, but for the silence. The stillness was something she had not realized she needed until it ended. It felt enormous now, like a gift he had bestowed upon her without request. He nodded, bringing his hands together against his lips, and bowed his head.

  She headed up the steps, her ins
ides quavering for some reason. Where was her previous resolve? Her new determination? The sound of Alice Walker barking as she rang the doorbell undid her, a ball of string loosening from the inside out, and she leaned against the door and wept at the sound of it. How strange that it would come down to this, that an animal should be the one, the only one, who would remain loyal to the end. But of course that was how it should be. It was something she had known from the very beginning. The dog barked once more and then again. She knew it was her. She knew Nora was back.

  “All right, all right.” Nora could hear the impatience in Trudy’s voice as she fiddled with the lock, and Nora grasped the doorknob, as if that might help things along, might get her inside faster. Another bark. “Calm down, Alice Walker!” Trudy snapped. “I’m going as fast as I can here.” The lock jiggled again, followed by a fifth bark. “Yeah, well, you get some arthritis in those paws of yours and then you can talk to me about getting a door open.”

  “Let me, dear.” Marion’s voice drifted through the door, and the lock gave way all at once, opening so fast that Nora nearly fell in. “Nora?” Marion stepped back in alarm as Nora stumbled and then caught herself. “Oh, darling, what happened? What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing’s wrong.” Nora sank to her feet, embracing Alice Walker as the dog jumped up to greet her. She buried her face in the thick brindle of fur along the back of her neck, closing her eyes and inhaling the warm, familiar scent of her. She was home. She was back. This was all she needed. She knew it now. She would never let herself get carried away by anything else again. She lifted her face, regarding her dog’s liquid brown eyes between her hands. “You want to go for a walk, baby?” Alice Walker barked, and then reached out and licked the tears from her face.

  “Nora?” Trudy was dressed in a blue velour sweatsuit and pink bedroom slippers. Her face was pale.

  Nora ignored her, wiping her eyes with the back of her wrist and rubbing the back of Alice Walker’s ears. “Let’s go,” she said to the dog. “Let’s go for our walk.”

  “All right, whoa!” Trudy had her hands out in front of her, palms out, as if Nora were holding a gun in her direction. “Just whoa, okay? Do you want to tell me what the hell is going on here?”

  “Trudy.” Marion sounded hopelessly reproachful.

  “Nothing’s going on.” Nora stood up, looking around the room for Alice Walker’s leash. “Can I have her leash?”

  “Her leash?” Marion glanced around the room. “Where’s her leash, Trudy? Did we leave it outside?”

  “Screw the leash.” Trudy’s eyes were fixed on Nora in the sort of way that made her want to run as fast as she could in the opposite direction. “You burst in here after being gone for three days; you’ve got no bags, and you’re crying your eyes out, and you tell me that nothing’s going on?’

  Nora shook her head. “I just mean it’s nothing I can’t handle. Listen, thank you so much for taking care of Alice Walker. I really appreciate it. Can I just have her leash?”

  Trudy didn’t move. Her eyes glowered and her mouth had reverted into the kind of scowl she sometimes adopted when the occasional rude or nasty person came into the library. It was her no-nonsense look, her “you screw with me and I’ll have your ass in a sling” stare. Nora knew it well. It made her nervous.

  And then Trudy blinked. Shrugged. “All right. You know what? Have it your way.” She whirled on a heel and strode into the kitchen, snatching Alice Walker’s leash off the table.

  “Thank you.” Nora took it from her, avoiding her eyes, and clipped it to Alice Walker’s collar. Her hands were shaking. “I really do appreciate—”

  “Save it, please.” Trudy ushered her toward the front door with the back of her hand. “Glad to help, though. You take care. And keep building those walls, Nora. Keep it up. And then come back and tell me one day how it all worked out for you. What the view behind them looked like.”

  Nora stood there on the front step for a moment as the door slammed behind her. She could hear Marion whispering and then the faint footsteps of Trudy walking away from her. Trudy had never crept around the edges when it came to saying something about Nora’s choice of an isolating lifestyle. But not once, in all the years she had known her, had she ever said something like that. Something with such finality. Such closure, as if the choice was out of her hands now. As if it was too late. Nora felt stunned.

  Alice Walker barked again, looking up at Nora with her usual quizzical expression. Nora blinked, jarred out of the feeling. It was fine. She’d already let go of the others. She didn’t need Trudy, either. She didn’t need any of them.

  “All right, baby,” she said, starting down the steps. “Come on. Let’s go for our walk.”

  The moon followed them as Nora and Alice Walker moved through the familiar streets of town, the white fullness like an oversize pearl inside a sea of periwinkle blue. Nora could not shake a peculiar feeling that rose inside her as they strode along; it was as if she were moving through some kind of invisible barrier, as if the pages of her life were turning one after the other, beside her. Soon, very soon, she felt, she was going to get to a page where she would be forced to stop and read the words . . . What would the words be? She couldn’t imagine.

  She picked up the pace, tugging impatiently when Alice Walker paused to sniff the base of a fire hydrant, and hurrying her along when the dog stopped again to stare at a squirrel. It seemed incredible to her that on a night when she had to get to the birch grove, when everything she knew, everything she had ever come to understand about her life rested on this moment, that it might take them twice as long.

  And then, all at once, like a small door opening, they were there. The three birch trees, their trunks as white as bleached bones, stood tall as sentinels. Fragments of shredded bark peeled back from the sides, and a few remaining leaves, which hung like small yellow coins from their branches, made a faint tinkling sound in the wind. Opposite the trees were the train tracks, rusted now and choked with weeds. The red crossing sign on the corner was chipped and faded, and farther down, a single blinking light clicked on and off like a blue heartbeat. The relief and dread that she always felt filled her now as she headed for the trees. She let go of Alice Walker’s leash and then, just as she had done every morning for the last fifteen years, she stretched herself out and lay down beneath them. After a few minutes, the dog came over and lay down beside her. The earth was cold and damp against her cheek, but Alice Walker’s body, pressed against her side, was warm.

  Nora closed her eyes and let it come.

  She had been much farther along in her pregnancy than Max or any of the rest of them had guessed, a gestational length that no oral medication, given by a doctor or otherwise, could fix without serious, potentially fatal risks. The Cytotec—four small white pills shaped like facet-cut diamonds—was meant to be used only in the earliest stages of pregnancy and as a result, took much longer to work. For two days and two nights, Nora bled like an open wound, getting weaker and sicker by the moment.

  She refused to be taken to the hospital, and since her cries were getting harder to quell, Ozzie and Monica carried her up to the widow’s peak on the roof and settled her inside a nest of blankets. It was the most practical place to go, since they were the only ones who knew about it, and it wasn’t going to take much longer for Elaine, who was on duty that night, to question their story about a painful period. It was late June; the dark summer night pulsed around them with a waning heat, and the moon rose like a silver disk in the sky. They tried to keep her as comfortable as possible, but it was difficult. The pain that coursed through Nora’s abdomen was like nothing she had ever imagined; finger-knives reaching into her uterus and then twisting, squeezing, burning. Worse, it would not let up, not even to let her take a deep breath, and so barely a moment elapsed without a whimper escaping her lips.

  Grace was not helping anything either; she paced around the tiny space, crying endlessly about going to hell. “I’m the most to blame,” she kept saying. “
I asked my boyfriend to do it. It wouldn’t have happened if I hadn’t asked him. He gave me the pills. It’s like giving someone the gun to go shoot someone. I’m as much to blame as anyone else. More, even.”

  No one refuted her words; even Ozzie, who sat next to Monica, her knees drawn up beneath her chin, stared at the ground, lifting her eyes every few moments to look over at Nora. Grace paused from her rants only when a strangled sob made its way out of the back of Nora’s throat. Then she would rush to her, lying down in the space alongside her belly, rubbing the contracting muscles along the flat expanse of her back, smoothing the damp hair away from her forehead. “Okay,” she said. “Okay, sweet girl. It’s going to be all right. I promise. It going to be all right.”

  Another hour went by—or was it a day, a month, a year?—before Ozzie finally stood up. “This is crazy,” she said. “You’re trying to end the life of one thing and killing yourself in the process. I’m calling an ambulance.”

  Something moved and twisted between her legs then and Nora let out a cry that was so animalistic, so pure with pain, that she felt the hairs on her scalp prickle. She arched her back and groaned again, more softly this time, but with just as much agony, and then sank back to the ground in a heap.

  “Oh my God,” Monica said. “It’s too late.”

  Even Ozzie, who was already two rungs down the ladder, stopped and rushed back over. “Nora,” she said, leaning over her limp form. “Nora!”

  Monica let out a screech and pointed to a rivulet of blood seeping out from beneath the blankets. “Oh God,” she whispered. “I think it’s the . . .”

  Ozzie threw back the covers. Nora’s legs began to shiver violently under the cool air, but she struggled to sit up, to see. There was so much blood that for a moment she was sure she was dead. But no. It was something different, an emptiness now, a deep and terrible void, as if she were inside some kind of wreckage at the bottom of the ocean. She searched Ozzie’s face desperately, watching the planes of her cheekbones tighten and then loosen again. “It’s out, I think,” Nora whispered. “Oh my God, I think it’s out.”