The Invisibles

by Cecilia Galante

  “We left him in the lobby of a Days Inn,” Monica said. “You know, the one behind the high school? He wanted to come, but we told him we needed some time with you first.”

  Nora nodded numbly, trying to visualize him in his beautiful shoes. He was probably sitting in one of those shitty chairs by the window, fiddling with his iPhone. Maybe he’d unloosened his tie, run a hand through his hair. He might be staring out at the window next to the vending machine in the front lobby, wondering if they’d all come back in time. If they’d come back at all.

  Trudy and Marion had left, taking Alice Walker with them, and the rest of them were seated around the faintly ridged hill of dirt. Above them, the birch trees swayed and bowed in the cool wind; higher still, the full moon waned.

  “We should finish our Invisibles meeting before we go,” Ozzie said, staring up into the sky. “We can pick up where we left off the other night. I mean, it’s the real thing now, with that goddess staring down at us the way she used to.”

  “I don’t even remember where we left off,” Nora said, settling herself down in a circle with the rest of them. “Monica’s wine bottle blow job, maybe?”

  They laughed a little, and the sound traveled up around them like tiny pieces of light before dispersing again.

  “You were just about to share a first line,” Ozzie said, holding Nora’s hand. “You said it was from some book called The End of the Affair. Do you still remember it?”

  Nora bit the inside of her cheek. “I do,” she said.

  “Okay, then.” Ozzie squeezed her hand tighter. “Go for it.”

  Nora took a deep breath. “My first line tonight is from the novelist Graham Greene, who wrote The End of the Affair. And it goes like this: ‘A story has no beginning or end: arbitrarily, one chooses that moment of experience from which to look back or from which to look ahead.’”

  It had meant something the night she chose it, but now the meaning had deepened to a level she had hardly known existed. She made a mental note to add it alongside her other favorite first line in her notebook, one an artifact from her past, the other a light for the future.

  “I’m confused,” Grace said. “What’s it mean?” She burst out laughing.

  They laughed with her, all of them, knowing that somehow tonight they had crossed the deepest of chasms and emerged intact. Somehow, despite their own personal hells, each of them was still holding on to the best part of themselves. And it would be with these selves that each of them would look bravely ahead, into the future.

  Stick wishes were next, the final leg of the ritual, thrown out to the full moon in all her glory. Ozzie went first, tracing the air with a small twig she had found, writing her hopes there in desperate, frantic air letters. She turned, finishing, and Nora thought she might sit down the way she always did and concede to the next one in line. Except that she didn’t do that.

  “I want to say mine out loud this time,” Ozzie said, tossing her stick to one side. “Back at Turning Winds, I think I was too afraid to say what I really wanted. Maybe I thought you’d judge me. Or think I was weak, which would mean that one of you might stop loving me. But I’m a woman now. I need to tell each of you my hopes and dreams. Out loud. Because when I tell someone the truth, and she decides to keep on loving me anyway, that’s when I know I’ve found family. That’s when I know I’m really home.”

  The women watched as Ozzie turned around again and faced the moon. She raised her hands the way she had always done, until the milky, orbital belly was centered directly between them and threw her head back. “I want a life of my own,” she said loudly. “I want to forgive my mother for the things she did to me and to stop the fucking cycle she dragged me into. I want to reach down inside myself and find the strength I know is in me to leave the man who treats me so badly, to create a life for myself and my children of stillness and love.” She lowered her arms slowly, as if the words themselves had gotten too heavy.

  Nora stood up and put her arm around her. She pressed her mouth close to Ozzie’s ear. “You will,” she whispered fiercely. “You will, and we’ll help you. Every step of the way.”

  Ozzie nodded and kissed her hard on the cheek. “I’ll need it. After this trip, I know I can do anything. But not without all of you.”

  Monica was next. She stood up, making a great display of throwing her stick to one side, and shook her hair out. The women laughed encouragingly. It was not easy, saying such truths out loud. There had been a reason for stick wishes, for emitting their deepest hopes in silence.

  “I want to own up to the things I’ve done.” Monica’s voice was tremulous. “Whether or not that means I have to go to jail. And I want to meet my father, to get to know him, find the good in him, if there is any.” She glanced over at Nora. “I’ve already talked to Liam. I told him what I did. I don’t know what’s going to happen to us, but he’s going to help me set up a meeting between me and my father when I get back.” She shrugged, and even there in the dark, Nora could see her lips trembling. “It’s a start,” she said. “You know? And I’ve got to start somewhere.”

  Grace was next. She didn’t even bother with a stick, but she turned, facing the moon head-on. She paused for a full minute, as if gathering herself, and something in Nora lurched, waiting for her to object again to the pagan-ness of the situation, to the part that didn’t have anything to do with Jesus or Mary.

  “I want to accept myself,” Grace said softly. “I want to embrace every part of myself, the sick parts and the well parts. I want to open myself to my child, however imperfect I might be, and love her the only way I know how, with my whole, fractured heart.” She sat back down again, breathing hard, and Nora flung her arms around her.

  “She needs you, Grace,” Nora whispered into Grace’s shoulder.

  “I know,” Grace nodded. “And she’ll get me.”

  “Your turn, Norster,” Ozzie said.

  Nora lifted her face from Grace’s shoulder and rubbed her eyes. She had the sensation then of having traveled down a long road, a path blocked with thorns and boulders and somehow, in some way, reaching the end of it. She felt different, if not older somehow, then new again on the inside. She stood up on quavering legs and looked up at the moon, still high in the sky, the edges pulsing faintly with some miraculous light.

  “I want to talk,” she heard herself say. “I want to talk and talk and talk until everything inside of me comes out and there is nothing else left to say. I don’t want to not tell nobody but God anymore. I want to tell you. I want to cradle the past in my arms and feel it there, in all its terrible rawness, and then I want to say goodbye. I want to close the door on that part of my life and move forward under the moon, with all of you. Again.”

  The women rose as one and surrounded her, their arms like a brick fortress around her trembling shoulders, and she knew it to be true.

  She knew it to be the truest, purest thing she had ever known.

  They went to the car afterward and Nora slid into the backseat. There was not much room, since a large metal cage placed on the floor took up most of the space, and Nora frowned, angling her legs around it.

  “Don’t you recognize him?” Grace was looking at her from the other side of the car, her mouth split open into a grin. Nora glanced at Ozzie and Monica, who were watching her from the front seat.

  “Who?” she asked.

  Grace pointed at the cage, and it was only then that Nora saw Elmer, quivering silently in the corner, nibbling on a bit of hay.

  “You got Elmer?” She stared at the women, aghast. “How? When?”

  “We stopped in Hopatcong on our way here.” Ozzie shrugged. “We thought he’d do better with me on the farm than with those weirdos back at Hopatcong Honey’s. The place was a crack den, I think.”

  Nora hovered over the cage, her fingers sliding through the slots, as if she could reach him from there. The tiny animal shivered and huddled further into the corner at the movement.

  “His name means ‘noble,’” Ozzi
e said proudly.

  Grace laughed. “I thought you named him after Elmer Fudd.”

  “That’s just what I told you,” Ozzie said. “I was trying to keep things light. The cards were pretty much stacked against me at that point, if you remember. I didn’t want to get any of you more riled up than you were.”

  “It fits him,” Nora said softly as Ozzie started the car. “I love it.”

  Her heart was beating like a jackhammer as they drove into the Days Inn parking lot. Even the steady warmth of Elmer, who she had been holding in her hands, did not ease the building anxiousness inside. Horrible orange curtains flanked the wide front windows, blocking anything on the inside from sight, but Nora knew he was in there. She could feel it.

  “You want to go in?” Ozzie had parked the car and shut off the engine. She was turned around in her seat, looking at Nora. “Just you?”

  Nora paused for a moment and then put Elmer back inside his cage. He scurried toward the far corner again and rubbed his paws against his tiny eyes. And then, as she watched, he looked up at her with a steady, knowing gaze.

  “Yes,” she said, opening the car door. “I do.”

  He was standing at the far window all the way across the lobby, his back to her as she made her way inside, but he turned immediately, as if he had sensed her presence. Even from fifty feet away, she could see how tired he was, how the circles under his eyes stood out like small half-moons, how the front of his shirt puckered and bagged in the front. He was holding his suit jacket over one shoulder, the collar of it snug inside the crook of his index finger, but his shoulders sagged, and Nora wondered if he might drop it any moment. A receptionist with pink streaks in her brown hair looked up as Nora walked past the front desk. “Hello there, ma’am! May I . . .” Her voice drifted off as Nora kept going. Theo had not moved, but she did. She moved on steady legs toward him, stopping only when she was a few feet away. Even then, she did not drop her eyes, did not bring a finger up to pull on her earlobe.

  “Hi.” She was not sure what else to say just yet.

  “Hi.” His voice was soft as a breath, and his nostrils flared white around the edges. He lowered the jacket from his shoulder and dropped it along the back of a yellow-and-brown-striped couch.

  Was there any reason to bring it all up again? Nora wondered. Or had they already said what they’d needed to say? If she turned around and walked away right now, would she be all right? Or would she replay this scene a thousand times in the future, each one with a different verbal combination, each one creating a different portal through which they would—forever after—continue to view each other?

  “I’m glad to see you made it home,” he said, shifting his feet. “New York taxis aren’t always that reliable.”

  “It was fine. I paid him well.”

  Theo nodded.

  “Are you going back tonight?” she asked.

  He glanced at his watch, a heavy silver thing with a dark blue face. “Pretty soon. I haven’t slept much, and Monica and I have a lot to do before the arraignment on Wednesday.”

  “Thanks for bringing her. It meant a lot to me to have her here tonight.”

  “You’re welcome. It was the least I could do.”

  She could see something dim behind his eyes, and she stepped forward, taking his hand. “Theo.” He closed his fingers around hers, pressing just the tips of them against the back of her hand. “I should have been the one to tell you about the pregnancy all those years ago. I’m sorry I didn’t. I just didn’t know how. I was so ashamed of myself, so embarrassed.” She could feel the pressure behind his fingers, the steady pull of them against her own as he drew her closer.

  “Why?” he whispered.

  “Because I was such a mess to begin with. Every time we tried to be intimate, I’d have flashbacks of things done to me as a kid, or things would start resurfacing and . . .” Her tears rose in her throat. “And then you broke up with me, which I don’t blame you for, but it just confirmed everything about myself that I thought was broken and unfixable . . .”

  “Oh, Nora.” He stroked her knuckles with the edge of his thumb. “I thought I was doing the right thing when I broke up with you. Really I did. There’d be times when I’d touch your face or kiss you and you’d seem to go somewhere inside your head. Like something had grabbed you underwater and was holding you there. And then we started sleeping together and things just . . .” He closed his eyes, remembering. “That look in your eyes, your face . . . God, I thought I was killing you somehow. I didn’t know what to do.”

  “It wasn’t your fault.” Nora’s cheeks burned. “You couldn’t have known.”

  “When Ozzie wrote me that letter and told me about the pregnancy and then everything after that, I almost had a heart attack,” Theo went on. “I just couldn’t believe it. Something like that had never even occurred to me.”

  Nora nodded, pressing her lips together.

  “I would’ve supported you,” Theo whispered. “Whatever you wanted to do. I would’ve helped you through it.”

  “I know that now.” Nora pressed her forehead against his shirt. “I’m sorry I didn’t give you that chance back then.”

  They stood there for a moment, lost in thought, each of them unraveling the threads that had led them inside an old movie theater, atop a thick sheet of ice, beneath a set of striped sheets, and back around again. It was baffling how life worked, Nora thought, how the holes found their way inside everyone. Some were larger than others, some deeper, more treacherously sloped. But no one got off without them. No one, at the end of their story, emerged intact.

  And maybe that was the beauty of it after all. Maybe it wasn’t about how few holes we ended up with, but how we taught ourselves to see through them, how we learned to look at our lives from another angle, maybe discovering a light that had not been there before.

  “We were so young,” Nora whispered. “Weren’t we? So young and so hopeful.”

  “Yes.” He nodded, pulling her all the way into him, and wrapped his arms around her. “Nora,” he said, his voice breaking. “Oh, Nora, Nora.”

  Ozzie had told her once that her name meant “light.”

  And it was true she thought now, as the words coming out of his mouth drifted above them like tiny stars.

  It was true.

  Chapter 32

  That Friday, she took Alice Walker with her to see the razed building at the corner of Magnolia Avenue. It was dusk, and the air, purple and fragile, hung around them like iris petals. She stood across the street for a long time, gazing at the space where Turning Winds had once been. Except for a few small piles of rubble off to one side, the lot was empty. A small white board hammered into the dirt read WIDEMAN’S CONSTRUCTION, indicating the only past sign of life. There was nothing of them anymore. Nothing at all. She waited for the sadness, or maybe even anger, to surge up within her, but neither one came. She thought back instead to the past week, a series of days strung along one of the most miraculous fragments of her life, and how it had all begun on her thirty-second birthday, when the quote by Anne Rice had popped into her head: “Once upon a time, there was a woman who discovered she had turned into the wrong person.”

  But not me, she thought now. Not me.

  The truth was she could hardly believe how much her life had changed. It felt limitless in some strange way now, as if she had discovered herself on the first blank page of the rest of her life. She felt a thrill, thinking of it.

  And what of a first line? What would her own first line be? Maybe it wasn’t something she needed to know just yet; maybe she would surprise herself one day as a string of words came to her when she least expected it. That was how they worked after all, wasn’t it? Sitting there neatly in the middle of a page that one just happened to turn to? Taking your breath away? And then toeing the line, and jumping straight into the abyss, taking you with them?

  That was how Nora felt now: as though she had jumped, not into the abyss but over it. It would take time to secure h
er footing, maybe even a while to focus her gaze, but there was nothing as green as the horizon ahead, no light above so luminous as the moon’s.

  Acknowledgments

  First thanks goes to my extraordinary agent, Stacey Glick, who believed in this book from the very beginning and remained devoted to seeing it through to the end. Words fail me, friend. You are the real deal.

  Every writer on the planet should be given at least one opportunity to work with the brilliant Emily Krump, who not only created a path for me to walk down while editing this book, but remained steadfast company throughout the entire journey.

  Thank you to the art department at William Morrow for creating such a beautiful cover, and for everyone at HarperCollins for contributing their talents toward this book. I am forever grateful.

  I wrote this book because when I was a little girl, I belonged to a tribe of children who knew and loved me before anyone else did, much like The Invisibles. It is difficult to recall a time since when I have felt as authentic as I did then; being seen by this band of souls was, and remains to this day, one of my life’s most precious treasures. My endless gratitude goes to Amy, Maria, Ruthie, Ani, Josie, Michael, Joey, Lucy, Catherine, and Mark.

  It was because of you that I continued on.

  It is because of you that I still do.

  P.S. Insights, Interviews & More . . . *

  About the author

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  Meet Cecilia Galante

  About the book

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  The Story Behind The Invisibles

  Questions for Discussion

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  On Books and Reading

  About the author

  Meet Cecilia Galante

  CECILIA GALANTE is the author of three young adult novels, three middle-grade books, and a children’s chapter-book series. She is the recipient of many awards, including a NAIBA Book of the Year and an Oprah’s Teen Read Selection for her first novel, The Patron Saint of Butterflies. Her books have been translated into Japanese, Turkish, and Polish.