Splinters of Light (12 page)

I
n her column a few years before, Nora had described what
didn’t
go in her ideal picnic basket. Tiny cream cheese and cucumber sandwiches of the type made for high tea, wrapped in wax paper, none of that. A flask of strong, hot coffee and real porcelain mugs—why bother? Petit fours with fondant butterflies, bought fresh from the closest local bakery—cute, but too fussy. Seasonal fruit from the farmer’s market—too much work to clean and cut; save that for home.
The point of a picnic isn’t to spend hours preparing for a moment that will pass too quickly. Save that time for getting to your ideal location. Laugh in the sunshine with your family and friends.

No, the ideal picnic basket was fast.
No lavish action here, please. If you have fancy embroidered napkins, this isn’t the time to fold them carefully so that they nestle beneath your picnic silver. Paper works just fine. Peanut butter and jelly sandwiches smooshed into a ziplock will do. No fancy desserts—Hostess cupcakes will be appreciated by everyone. You don’t even need a fancy picnic basket or wine bottle backpack, though
those are fun, of course. A Trader Joe’s paper bag will do. Don’t worry about a pretty tablecloth to lay on the grass. An oversized beach towel that you grab from the laundry room on your way out will be perfect, and less stress to clean when it gets stained by new grass and grape jelly. The point is that you’re together. Eating outside increases food enjoyment exponentially. It’s practically scientific and has probably been studied by people in labs, but I’m telling you this: you should study it with your favorite people, and if you bring a Quiddler deck and play while boats chug past on your favorite body of water, it’ll probably be the best picnic that ever happened in the history of the world.

Big words. They were harder to live up to. In the car, on the way to Shoreline Park, Nora racked her brain. She’d forgotten something, she knew she had. She just didn’t know what it was, and the feeling, instead of being irritating, was electrically terrifying.

“You should let me drive,” said Ellie. “It’s Mother’s Day.”

“That’s
why
I’m driving,” said Nora. “Because I get to do whatever I want today.”

Ellie scooted sideways in her seat and put on a beatific smile. She folded her hands beneath her chin. “Mom. Dearest, beautiful Mom of mine. Don’t you know I just want to chauffeur you around? You work so hard. Let me take care of you.”

Nora lost her breath in a surprised laugh. “You
really
want to drive.”

The act fell away as Ellie thumped back. “Come
on
. I’m good. Mrs. Lytton let me drive her minivan and she said I was a natural.”

Nora made a mental note to discuss with Cindy Lytton what was and wasn’t appropriate when she was on pickup duty. “I’m fine. It’s my picnic, anyway. Oh,
crap
.”

Ellie said long-sufferingly, “What?”

“I forgot to tell Mariana to bring plates and cups and cutlery. That was going to be her job.”

Ellie didn’t drop her feet off the dashboard even though
Nora had already told her to. “We can eat with our fingers. We’ll drink out of the Martinelli’s bottle! Like wine!”

But Mariana never brought anything—she never remembered to do so when asked and never thought to do so when she wasn’t. How could Nora even begin to consider . . . Her stomach dipped as if they’d hit a pothole, but the road was smooth.

“It’s just sandwiches, anyway.”

“It’s the point. I forgot to ask, and she won’t bring them.”

Ellie stared at her phone. “I don’t get what the big deal is.”

The big deal? Nora had forgotten to ask. She’d forgotten
another
thing. Another important thing. Another pinprick in the balloon that was supposed to be keeping her in the air.

The third and fourth opinions, the ones Nora had paid for out of pocket, had come back with the same result. Mariana was still unwilling to talk about anything except a cure, and Nora would lay money her sister hadn’t yet accepted that all cases of EOAD—
all
of them—ended in death.

Well, hell. Life ended in death, didn’t it? Nora was no different. She wasn’t special. Spine stiffened with the spray starch she loved so much, Nora could do this. She would do this. She would tell Ellie the truth. The diagnosis. She’d finally tell her today, with Mariana at her side.
Mother’s Day.
What a horrible day to do it, but she’d been waiting, hoping for a way out.

It turned out there was no good day to destroy your child’s life.

If indeed that’s what she did. Lately it seemed that Ellie only tolerated her at best. Like now. If it wasn’t Mother’s Day, Ellie would have rolled her eyes twenty times already. As it was, Nora could tell her daughter was working incredibly hard to stay polite.

It used to be easy to be together. It used to be joyful.

Mariana had to get tested, too.

Ellie . . .

God, please, not Ellie. No test for Ellie. Nora wouldn’t—couldn’t—chance her receiving a death sentence. It was bad
enough for Nora as it was, at forty-four. To hear your fate at sixteen? Never.

Nora maneuvered around an old green Mercedes that had broken down in the right lane. Then she slammed on the brakes as a light turned red—had it even gone yellow first? “
Dang
it.” Her throat felt tight; her eyes were hot like she had a fever. Her hands felt as if they were shaking as hard as her heart was hammering, but when she looked at them on the wheel, she could barely see the tremor. Thank god Harrison insisted on inspecting her car every month or two—her brakes were good, her tire pressure full. Her short stopping distance made up for the fact that she’d almost just run the light.

“Mom, what’s going on?”

“Nothing,” said Nora.

Ellie kept her face forward, her feet stubbornly on the dashboard. “Then why are we just sitting here?”

“What?”

“The light,” Ellie said as behind them cars honked. “It’s green.”

“It just turned.”

“It’s been green for a while.”

Time. How many seconds had she lost? “No, it hasn’t.” Was it possible her daughter was just messing with her?

Her eyes felt too dry. Symptoms of early-onset Alzheimer’s disease include paranoia and suspicion.

No, Ellie didn’t even know yet. And besides, she wouldn’t do that.

To their right was an antique store that sold old marina collectibles, and across the street was a chocolate shop that specialized in fair-trade cocoa. Nora could almost taste her favorite treat there—they called it maple bourbon but she could never taste the alcohol. It was just rich and sweet. Jenny, the dark-haired woman who owned the shop, rode a purple penny-farthing that she locked to a chalkboard
Open
sign during store
hours. It always looked as if she was on the verge of falling off while she rode it, but somehow the crazy bicycle, with its one huge (penny) wheel and its tiny trailing (farthing) one, stayed up. Maybe it was how Jenny moved her body, balancing . . .

A horn blared. Nora drove past the chocolate shop, then let an older woman with a walker cross in front of her, waving cheerily back at her.

She carefully braked for the next stop sign.

Her hands on the wheel went cold and slick with perspiration.

She had no idea where she was.

The SUV behind her blared, an impatient foghorn.

The terror was visceral, an animal in her chest, its talons hooked in the lining of her lungs as they wheezed. A headache blazed suddenly, insistent and sharp behind her eyes.

“Mom?”

Where was the ocean? Where were the hills? The damn buildings, as short and twee as they were in the little tourist town, were still too tall for her to see over them. If she could just see the foothills of Mount Tamalpais, she’d know which direction home was, but Jesus, where were they headed? Was it the grocery store? Which store? Had they already been? She glanced behind her but the unlabeled brown grocery bag told her nothing. She clutched the steering wheel tighter, unable in her panic to remember anything about the morning that had passed. She couldn’t even remember waking up—she was able to recall only the middle of the night, when she’d woken from a dream about Harrison . . . or was that a memory of him? He’d been so tall in it, taller than she remembered him being . . .

“Mom!” Ellie’s voice was sharp with fear. “What’s going on?” Her feet thumped off the dashboard and down into the footwell.

“Nothing!” said Nora brightly. “I was just making a decision.”

“Mom—”

“Just a second.” Nora pulled to the side of the road and parked next to a fire hydrant.

“I don’t think you’re supposed to—”

“You’re
right
. You should never, ever park in front of a fire hydrant. Consider that your first lesson today.” She unbuckled her seat belt and opened her car door.

“Mom!”

Nora walked around and opened her daughter’s door. “Yep.”

Ellie’s eyes lost their terrified look. “You’re going to let me . . . but you’ve never let me drive on a real road before.”

“You have to practice sometime, right? In a place that isn’t a big, empty parking lot.”

Ellie didn’t even get out of the car; she just scrambled over the hand brake into the driver’s seat.

Nora carefully breathed around the blade of dual-edged terror in her chest. “Now. Tell me what things you’ll do before you merge into traffic.”

Ellie’s grin was even wider than her left turn onto Tiburon Boulevard.

“I
would have picked up the utensils and shit if you’d texted me.” Mariana shoved her cell back in her pocket, ignoring the text from Luke. It wasn’t right that Nora never let her bring anything. “I would have liked to feel useful.”

Nora said lightly, “It was my fault for forgetting. I swear, I’m turning into you!”

Forgetting. Nora was going to tease Mariana about
that
? Mariana felt small and mean for even having the thought and said, “I know. But I do try, believe it or not. I even have a lot of stuff left over from the BreathingRoom party I could have brought. We broke ten thousand subscribers. Did I tell you that?”

This appeared to jolt Nora. “You’re kidding.”

Mariana grinned and bounced on her toes. “Nope. Isn’t that
wild
? We’re just about to hit the break-even point. Maybe it’ll actually
work
.” If they did that, if she could actually pay Luke back and stand on her own two feet—well, it would be a long
cry from bouncing so many checks she went into collection from the bank fees alone.

Either that or it would fail. Well, she was used to
that
, right?

Lightly, Nora said, “Good.”

Mariana felt a jab of disappointment. Ten thousand subscribers were probably nothing to Nora, who must have, like, ten
million
readers. She watched as her sister pulled out a tall stack of sandwiches, carefully wrapped in wax paper. Was Nora planning on feeding the family twenty feet away on the grass as well as Tiburon’s two homeless guys, who panhandled every day in front of the café? Was she going to hand a sandwich to every one of the joggers who bolted past as if being chased by zombies?

Then came the industrial-sized container of wet wipes. Nora handed her five, as if she thought Mariana had been picking up dog poop barehanded. “Am I supposed to take a bath with these?”

Gratifyingly, Ellie snorted.

“Germs are good for you, you know,” added Mariana, but scrubbed her hands anyway. She and Nora would never see eye to eye on it. Cleaning, for Nora, was like some kind of religion, bringing her absolution nothing else could. Nora believed that cleanliness was right. Cluttered was wrong. Elbow grease expunged everything. It was as easy as that. It had been annoying when they lived with their mother, but when they’d roomed together in college, that conflict had often been the catalyst for nuclear explosions of anger on both their parts. Mariana’s papers and books and half-empty coffee mugs filled with creamy curdled dregs would drift into Nora’s neat half of the apartment, and Nora, instead of just pushing them back toward her, would “tidy” whatever it was. Half the time Mariana hadn’t been able to find essentials: her calendar, her wallet, any bra at all. While Mariana ran around the apartment frantically, ripping into drawers and diving under furniture, Nora would say absentmindedly, “Oh, I put your debit card into the junk drawer.”

“Why?”

“It was in the kitchen next to the cutting board. It didn’t belong there.”

“So it belonged in the junk drawer?” What made sense to Nora didn’t make sense to Mariana. Her face would go purple with the effort not to yell, but Nora wouldn’t even lift her eyes from whatever she was writing at the time, saying, “Just pick up after yourself. If you do it, then I don’t have to.”

“That’s just it. You
don’t
have to,” Mariana would fume in the front hallway of that tiny apartment, the one that no matter what they’d done to try to mask the scent—candles, flowers, incense—had always smelled faintly of mold. Mariana had loved that place. She’d loved her mess, her sloppily made bed with its covers just right for smooshing all around her sleepy body, the tiny desk she’d picked up on the street on Big Trash Day. (The pulls were missing, that was all. She’d meant to buy or make new ones but never got around to it before selling it for ten dollars, years later at a garage sale, still pull-less.) Her mess held the contents of her mind; it was the real-life display of her thoughts, desires, and actions.

It was still that way. Mariana’s home office was a small room in the attic of Luke’s house with a slanted ceiling and one small triangular window that would be impossible to replace with thicker glass. It was hot in summer and cold in winter, but she loved it. She’d been going into the brand-new BreathingRoom office most days (it had its own office now! three employees and a water cooler and everything!), but every once in a while, Mariana worked from the attic, falling onto the small green couch under the window for a nap, knocking last week’s paperwork to the floor. When the room held seven or eight water glasses, she’d take them down the stairs in a wicker basket her sister had given her. “I use my basket to tidy,” Nora had said. “I just walk around the house and pick up what needs to go in another room and walk around till everything’s redistributed back to its proper place.”

Mariana had said, “I can’t believe you’re still trying to tell me how to clean,” but surprisingly, she’d left the basket at the foot of the attic steps. It did come in handy, going up and down, carrying the piles she’d made.

Now Nora just shook her head in the sunlight and passed a plastic container of green olives to Ellie. “Germs are the work of the devil. Someday,” she said, “I’ll have a housekeeper.”

“And you’ll ride her ass into the ground,” said Mariana cheerfully, not letting herself think that maybe Nora would need a housekeeper, and more. A tender. A minder. Someone to wash her, to dress her . . .

Ellie took the olives with one hand, dropping the container to the grass, never glancing up from her phone.

Will you be there? When I tell her?
Nora had looked so panicked when she’d asked.

Of course
. Of course.

Do I really have to tell her?

Yes.
It had been the only thing Mariana knew for sure.

You have to get tested, then.

I will. What about Ellie?

Never Ellie.

Mariana tried to catch Nora’s eye, but unpacking the food was taking all her sister’s concentration.

Ellie’s phone tapping slowed, and she looked up blankly, as if trying to remember where she was. “I have to . . .” She looked toward the public restroom. “I’ll be right back.”

“Really?” Nora asked. “You hate using that bathroom.”

A flasher had exposed himself to them there, years before. He’d startled Mariana so badly she’d screamed, and he’d yelled back at them before cramming his dick back in his pants and hurtling out past them. Nora had predictably handled it well—she’d gotten his license plate number and had the man cited for indecent exposure.

“God, Mom. I’m fine.”

“Let me go with you,” said Mariana. “In case . . .” How did Nora manage it? The whole motherhood thing? How did you continue to breathe when the person you loved the most could be in imminent danger at any moment? She wanted to drape bubble wrap around Ellie’s shoulders, a ridiculous plastic shawl.

Ellie rolled her eyes and clomped off in her Dr. Martens without even bothering to answer.

“Are those your old Docs?”

Nora looked rueful. “She took them off my feet. Literally. I was going to wear them to the office, and she asked me for them.”

“And you can’t say no to her.”

“Please. I say no to her all the time. It’s all I do.”

Mariana moved closer to her sister on the picnic blanket as Ellie stomped farther away. “She’s prickly today.”

Nora said, “Like a porcupine. Every day.”

Mariana fingered the woolen fringe of the picnic blanket. “You talk a big game, Glass, like you’re the anti-Martha, but where did you get this blanket? This is no cheap beach towel.”

“Oh, you know.” A smile tugged the corner of Nora’s mouth.

“I do know. I bet you got it from the back of your Prius from a matching plaid box where it lives when you’re not sitting on it in bliss.”

Laughing, Nora said, “Everyone has a car blanket. My friend Lily has a blue one.”

It felt so good to see her sister smile. Mariana touched the fiber more carefully and kept teasing her. “Not everyone has a pure Scottish merino wool blanket in the car, one without a stain on it. You get it dry-cleaned between picnics, right? No stickleburrs on this guy.”

Nora fell backward onto the blanket in question. “I know. I can’t help it. It just happens.”

“What’s to be sorry for? I love merino. I only know that’s
what it is because Luke is crazy about these plaid ones. He has five of them in a cedar chest in the hallway. We never get them out. I asked him recently what he was saving them for, and he said he didn’t know. He just likes the idea of having wool blankets in case we’re stuck in a blizzard. You know, one of those good old San Francisco snowstorms.”

“How is Luke?” Nora took out her knitting, the perennial sock in progress.

Mariana twisted a piece of blanket fringe between her fingers. “Fine. Business is good. Everyone wants a Harley right now, and he got some great Yelp reviews, so his phone is ringing off the hook. I think he’s going to have to hire another guy.” They joked, at home, about the day when she had more employees than he did. In the middle of the night, Mariana sometimes couldn’t believe where she was. She still didn’t feel like a grown-up, but she had a payroll clerk at BreathingRoom. She had a publicist.

Her sister’s smile was gone, and in its place was Nora’s listening face. Earnest. Interested. “And how are you two?”

Mariana sighed. “Fine. The marriage thing is off the table. I think.”

“If he’d asked you in private, you would have reacted more positively?”

Mariana stayed quiet.

Nora tucked a long piece of hair behind her ear and then reached forward, doing the same to a strand of Mariana’s. “Why not?”

I can’t fail at something I don’t do.
She shouldn’t have to verbalize this to her sister. Nora should just understand. Even if Mariana herself didn’t, quite. She tried to change the subject. “What’s up with Harrison?”

Nora’s eyes widened. Mariana wondered if her own face, so like Nora’s, was as transparent as her sister’s. Somehow, Mariana doubted it. She’d always been a better dissembler. “What?” she
said. “Did you sleep with him again? There’s something you’re not telling me.”

“No.”

Her sister was lying. But that was okay. Mariana didn’t want to talk about her boyfriend, either. They were
supposed
to be telling Ellie her mother might be sick. Might be, because no doctor was infallible. Sure, four had independently corroborated the diagnosis, but all it took was one creative, open-minded doctor to turn it all around. Mariana would be sure to emphasize that for Ellie since Nora sure as hell wouldn’t. The resigned, pulled look around Nora’s eyes did nothing but tick Mariana off. Resignation was the same as acceptance. And while Mariana’s app was based on helping people understand what to let go of (everything), she didn’t want Nora to let go of a single thing. Not a memory, not a skill, nothing. She would collect them for her, if she had to, holding them in her cupped fingers until everything fell away but the two of them and her full and steady hands.

“Mom?” Ellie had come up behind them. “Aunt Mariana?”

She was holding hands with a boy.