Splinters of Light (32 page)

She followed Ellie to the front of the restaurant. Her daughter was carrying Nora’s sweater for her.

Yep, it sure was something. It was a terrible, dark, awful, wonderful something—a cocoon breaking open, the wet chrysalis wriggling for the first time into its butterfly shape. It was so beautiful Nora wanted to put it in a shadow box it and hang it on her wall at home so she could look at it as long as possible. It was, of course, the only Halloween costume appropriate for her gorgeous daughter, and the best part (and the worst part, too) was that Nora had gotten to see her wearing it.

C
live Wearing, the man who forgot everything but his wife and his music and who could hold on to only a few seconds at a time, wrote all day long. He covered the pages of his notebook with tiny, cramped words, hundreds, thousands, millions of words, most of them stating a version of, “I awoke for the first time, despite my previous claims.” He would note the time and underline the statement, scoring it as the only truth he knew. Then he would read the earlier lines written in his own handwriting and scratch them out viciously—those times, the times he’d written that he was awake, those were untrue. Someone else must have written them, even though the words were in his handwriting. The only time he’d ever been awake was
now
, at this exact moment. Nora couldn’t stop wondering about semantic versus episodic memory: How did he write? How did he string words together, when he didn’t know who he was or how he’d gotten there? How did he think he knew the words to write? How did he remember what a pen was and how to pick it
up? How did he remember how to shape a jagged
A
or add the three cross bars to a capital
E
? Was it pleasurable to him? Could he feel happy when he was putting pen to paper? Was it a last grasp at something that he hoped would put everything together again? Or was it a leftover tic, the respiration of ink? One day, using semantic memory, her episodic memory gone, would she remember how to use the coffee maker but not be able to remember what color her own eyes were?

Clive Wearing remembered almost nothing. But he remembered his wife, Deborah, even as she aged. Clive had fallen sick with encephalitis shortly after he married her, and his memory of her was always passionate, his immediate feeling upon seeing her that of new love.

What a glorious, terrible weight for her to bear.

Mariana had come over unexpectedly the night before for dinner. She’d asked for spaghetti, so Nora—surprised—had gotten out a pot to boil water. “No,” her sister had said. “The twice-baked kind. Can’t we just eat the leftovers from last night?”

Nora couldn’t remember eating spaghetti within the last few months. But there in the refrigerator was the red casserole dish she always stored the leftover pasta in, ready to top with Parmesan and rebake until the cheese browned.

Nora hadn’t said anything. She’d simply pulled it out and turned on the oven. Mariana texted someone, her lips pulled in as she battered the phone with her thumbs.

“Is that Luke?”

Mariana nodded.

“What are you telling him?”
She’s losing it. Only a matter of time now.

But Mariana had smiled. “Nothing. I just told him when I’d be home.” She looked tired, Nora noticed. “I brought over your retirement package. I had my lawyer go over it, and—”

“You have a lawyer?” It had to be Luke’s lawyer, didn’t it?

“I hired one to set up the corporation and she’s come in
handy a few times. Anyway, the package looks good, all but the length of terms. We were talking, and—”

“How’s BreathingRoom?” Nora hadn’t asked in a while. Had she?

Mariana smiled. “We hit a million.”

A million what? Nora tried to think. Dollars? People? Pencils? Puppies?

Her sister clarified, “A million subscribers. For the free version, anyway. But the paid version is already at more than forty thousand. We’re making money.” A pause. “A lot of money.”

“Holy shit.” Swearing felt good. Why hadn’t Nora used to do it? She couldn’t remember.

Mariana’s smile turned into laughter. “Right? A million! A freaking million! I hired three more staffers and—get this—a full-time publicist. She got us onto NPR, and next week she’s pitching a package to United Airlines. They’re thinking about using the relaxation module for one of their channels for nervous fliers. Is that wild?”

Nora hugged Mariana so tightly it hurt. It was wild, yes. And wonderful and amazing. And it was unnerving. In the pit of Nora’s stomach, a tiny piece of jealously unspooled, cold and metallic. Her sister was turning into what she was supposed to be, who Nora had always believed Mariana could be. And Nora was flaking apart, iron left to rust in acid rain. “Well, goddamn,” Nora heard her inappropriate self say. “Let’s celebrate.”

After they’d opened a bottle of champagne (Ellie got half a glass), after they’d eaten spaghetti for what was apparently the second time that week (what else had she forgotten?), Nora said, “I want to show you something amazing.” She led Mariana and Ellie into her office to show them the YouTube video of Clive Wearing, who by now almost felt like an old friend.

“Look!” she said, turning and pointing at the point at which he greeted his wife with such joy. “Isn’t that something?”

Ellie, her eyes wide, her cheeks pale, said, “That’s
horrible
.”
She turned and ran down the stairs so fast Nora worried she might fall.

“No,” was all Mariana said.

“Wait—” Nora stretched out her fingers, but Mariana had already followed Ellie out of the tiny room.

“Wait,” she said to no one, alone again. It
was
something.

The week before (the month before? time was getting slipperier, as if it were wet and mossy), she’d gone to an EOAD support group, held in the basement of a church. Only four others had come. Marcia, a woman of about sixty who’d lost her husband at fifty-five to the disease, had been the facilitator. One woman had been driven by her daughter. She’d sat, slack-faced, not appearing to know where or who she was. A fifty-two-year-old man had chattered almost nonstop, as if trying to prove he could still converse. The other man, Dirk, had proclaimed it was his last meeting.

He’d thumped his hands onto his thighs. “You want to know why I’m not coming back? I can’t remember where I am half the day. I have to write down every single thing I need to do, and then I forget to look at my list and nothing gets done. My wife can’t look me in the eye, says I’m not the person she married. Of course I’m not. None of us are. We thought we were one person, and then it turns out we’re just idiots with no memory.” He stood. “I came to say I’m done. And thank you, Marcia. You’re a sweet woman, and I’m sorry for your loss, but coming to this group has been like being on deathwatch. One person is fine, then they get worse, and their skin sinks in, and their eyes go blank like Jennifer’s there”—Jennifer didn’t even look at him—“and they stop coming, and then they
die,
and then another person doesn’t remember that person at all, then we all go to the funeral and instead of thinking about that person getting slung down into a hole, we’re thinking about what they’ll sing at our service, what our friends will wear, how often they’ll think about us after we’re rotting in the dirt. I’m fucking
sick
of this group’s funerals.”

Nora couldn’t breathe. She dropped most of a needle’s worth of stitches and didn’t look down at them.

Marcia said, “Dirk, I’m—”

“No,” he said. “Let me go. At least I’m coherent enough to make an exit, and I’m not going to have a funeral, so this is the last time.” Dirk looked down at Nora, her hands still frozen in place. “Have they told you about the loss of impulse control yet?”

She’d read about it. Someday she’d lose her bladder while in the kitchen. She’d argue about nothing for no reason. Nora had spent her whole life reaching for control, loving the feel of clean, tidied surfaces under her fingertips, and to know she’d lose all that . . .

“What they don’t tell you is that now you have an excuse to do whatever the fuck you want.”

“What?”

Then the man named Dirk leaned over and kissed Nora on the mouth. His lips stayed still, not asking for anything, but they were strong. She smelled coffee, and—faintly—putty, as if he’d been working with wood before the meeting. The kiss was over as fast as it had begun. Nora touched her lower lip. Damn it, she shouldn’t be grinning. But she was.

“There,” he said. “That’s the perk. My gift to you—the knowledge that you have a get-out-of-jail-free card. Use it now before you forget you have it.” He tipped an imaginary hat to them and left, bumping open the door with his shoulder, his hands tucked into his sweatshirt pockets. They heard his whistle long after he was out of sight.

Now Nora came back to where she was: in her office, Clive Wearing talking in front of her.

That was the amazing thing. Clive Wearing’s brain, so damaged that it held almost
nothing
, still held this: love. Perfect love.

That was everything. It was the thing Nora clung to most of all. In the middle of the night, deep in the throes of the three a.m. terror that made her wonder if she was forgetting how to
breathe, that image of Clive Wearing was what got her through. She knew that no matter how the cells in her brain failed, no matter what dropped away from her, she wouldn’t forget the way it felt to look into her daughter’s eyes, which were the exact color of the piece of green beach glass she’d had in her pocket every day for weeks now. Nora needed to believe, even if she was nothing but a body in a bed, that if Mariana crawled in and wrapped her arms around her, she would know her sister. That she would feel love and warmth. That she would
know
, for that moment, peace.

It was impossible to continue otherwise, without that hope.

So Nora believed. She watched the clip of the video over and over, until she’d memorized every word. “Oh,
look
who’s come. Oh, darling.”

And again, seven seconds later. “Oh,
look
who’s come. Oh, darling.” Clive kissed his wife, musically and with great enjoyment. “Can we dance?”

“Oh,
look
who’s come. Darling. Can we dance?”

EXCERPT,
WHEN ELLIE WAS LITTLE:
OUR LIFE IN HOLIDAYS,
PUBLISHED 2011 BY NORA GLASS

Thanksgiving

When Ellie was little, we had pizza for Thanksgiving.

It was the first Thanksgiving for us to be on our own, and I wasn’t thankful for anything. Not one single thing. The Civic had died (again—that time it was a radiator so rusted it looked like a cheese grater). The washing machine had turned toes up, sending a biblical flood across the kitchen floor, and, because I was riding the bus at the time with Ellie, I didn’t get the water up in time, and it warped the kitchen linoleum. The clothes dryer was working, but it smoked a little even when it
was on low, and I was too scared to use it. That left me washing our clothes in the bathtub and line drying them, heavy from not being spun first. The clothesline itself kept breaking free of the tree I’d tied it to with what I thought was a square knot (but obviously wasn’t), so just when I thought I was done with laundry for the day, I’d go out and find our soggy clothing lying in mud puddles. Then all my hand washing in the tub created a clog that I couldn’t fix with the cheap plastic snake I’d bought at the hardware store, so when Ellie or I showered, we had to stand in calf-deep water. She didn’t like it. I told her to buck up, but she was four. Four-year-olds don’t buck up. They smile, they jump like baby goats, they sparkle and rumble and twirl and twinkle, but they do not understand bucking up or why it is sometimes necessary.

Then the stove died, refusing to heat to temperatures of more than two digits, and the toaster went up in a blackened bagel accident.

The refrigerator was the last straw. When I came home to find warm milk and all my carefully planned frozen meals defrosted and gray, I sat on the kitchen floor and sobbed. I had enough money in the bank to pay the mortgage and the utilities, and no more. Alimony and child support were late and often slimmer than they should have been. I couldn’t afford to replace a single broken thing.

Really, all I wanted to replace was myself, and I couldn’t afford that, either. I wanted the new, shiny version of Nora Glass. I was freelance copyediting as well as working at the paper, and I routinely stayed up past two in the morning to finish a job that would pay for Ellie’s day care. Then I got up at six to get us ready for the next round. The woman I saw in the mirror was too skinny, with dark shadows under her eyes. The humor that used to dance there was gone. Ellie had complained that she wanted to live with her aunt, “who always laughs like you used to and has cookies for me.”

To this I snapped, “Yeah? Well, those are store-bought.” It was my ultimate insult.

I wasn’t good at divorce. I wanted to figure out the method to it, the reason behind it. If I could figure out where I’d gone wrong, then I could fix whatever it was and start over. I didn’t want Paul back—once my heart started beating again about six months after he left, I was so angry with him I wouldn’t have taken him back if he’d showed up covered with hundred-dollar bills. I wanted
myself
back. I’d lost myself, somewhere, along the way. I’d left myself behind like an empty popcorn box, like a sweater forgotten on a train.

No, it was worse than leaving something behind.

I’d failed.

Divorce is, at its very core, the ultimate failure. You can blame many things on circumstances: you lost your condo because of the recession, you lost your job because of downsizing, your album failed because of distribution interruptions. But divorce? You just picked the wrong person. You were wrong, all the way around, about him and, worse, about yourself. You did it all wrong, and there’s no absolution. Even if you’re both better off being apart, when you say, “I’m divorced,” it means, “I failed.”

My bread always rose. I got out every stain. My curtains always hung straight. I hated failure more than anything.

One night as I was roughly drying Ellie with a towel I’d have to wash in the tub that took hours to drain, she said with four-year-old honesty, “You used to be fun, Mama. I liked you better then.” She wrapped her arms around my neck, smacked a kiss to my cheek, and raced away, bare bottomed and joyful.

The day after she told me I wasn’t fun was Thanksgiving. I would
be
fun, by god. I would find where my fun was hiding if it killed me. Hand in hand, we walked to the corner store and bought one turkey breast. I called my twin, even though I knew she had plans with her boyfriend, and left her a
message. On our walk home, I pushed Ellie in the swing at the playground until my arms were sore.

At home, I dug through the boxes in the garage until I found what I was looking for: a toaster oven Paul and I had received as a wedding gift and had never used. Ellie was enchanted by the two dials and the high-pitched pings it made. She loved its loud ticking. I cut two potatoes into small pieces and cooked them next to the breast. When they were done, I mashed them, adding salt and the cheap margarine I had started buying. I cut the turkey into two pieces.

The front door burst open. My twin sister, Mariana, tumbled in. She was bleeding from both elbows and both knees, but she was laughing. “I couldn’t get a ride from Robby’s house, but I borrowed a bike. I kept falling off. I don’t think I’ve ridden one since we were kids. But I’m here! I rode all the way here!”

I boggled at her. “Robby lives in Fremont.” A bike ride that length would take four hours, at least.

“Okay, I took BART. And then two buses. I couldn’t get the bus bike rack down, though, and two guys had to help me. Then I fell off again and a pizza delivery guy almost ran me over with his car, and he felt so bad about it that he gave me two pizzas because they were made wrong. One’s Hawaiian and the other is pepperoni and green onions, which is weird but we can handle that, right? They’re bungee-corded to the rack. Ellie-belly, wanna help me carry them in?” Ellie, who was already jumping up and down, squealed in delight.

Together at my big family table, we ate small bites of turkey and potatoes and enormous bites of pizza, using our hands for everything (even the mashed potato!) just because we could. We guzzled sodas I’d found in the garage when I’d been looking for the toaster oven. We let Ellie draw all over the driveway with all the chalk colors, and then we spent an hour playing hopscotch. We played jump rope. After she fell
asleep on the couch, my sister and I talked into the late hours over a bottle of cheap wine she’d miraculously managed not to break any of the times she’d fallen off the bike. All three of us slept in my bed that night, together.

And I was thankful again, for everything.