Splinters of Light (35 page)

M
ariana gripped the edge of a barstool at the kitchen island. She’d been listening to Nora’s rant long enough, the rant about how Mariana didn’t
know
enough to insert her opinion about Ellie. That Mariana had no
right
. “You’re seriously thinking that you should pull your daughter out of school less than a year before she goes to college.”

“What I’m saying,” Nora said, her lips white against her face, “is that you don’t have a say in it.”

Mariana nodded. “I hear you. I should just butt out.”

“Exactly.”

“Yeah, well. I can’t do that.” She straightened her spine, feeling every tiny bit of her half-centimeter height advantage.

Nora laughed, and the sound of it sliced the interior of Mariana’s heart. “You think
you
get to say what my daughter does or doesn’t do?”

Mariana pulled her lips in.

“Oh, my god,” Nora said. “You do think that.”

“Now’s not the time . . .”

“Now? Now is the only time I have!” Nora hit the top of the cutting board with the flat of her hand, a thump followed by a wooden clatter.

Mariana knew she wasn’t handling this right. “Okay, I hear you, we can just—”

“Don’t you dare patronize me.”

Her temper flared. “So you want me to help you with everything else, but not with Ellie.”

There was a long, taut pause. “Yes.”

“Why?”

Nora shook her head, refusing to answer.

Mariana heard what she didn’t say, though. She already knew the answer.
Not good enough. Fuckup. Never the right one.
“She’s my only niece. You’re my
sister
.” She bent at the waist, collapsed like a snapped clothesline, and then straightened as if she were being winched back into place.

“One thing.” Nora crossed her arms. “I need you to leave me this
one
thing.”

“One thing? Fuck, Nora, letting you take care of Ellie isn’t like you wanting to pick up the dry cleaning.”

“You couldn’t even remember the mashed potatoes. Good god, when have I
ever
been able to count on you? And you want to take my daughter away from me?”

“Of course not—”

There was a cough behind them, in the living room.

Ellie stood there, her thin arms long along her sides, her green eyes as wide as a startled cat’s. “Mom?”

This was terrible. Mariana didn’t know much, but she knew this: she couldn’t go back to the table with Nora and pretend everything was fine.

Nothing was fine.

Her sister was dying.

And she’d never be good enough, not even as a fill-in, second-string substitute.

So she said, “Ellie, darlin’, I have to leave. I forgot . . .” God, it was hot in here. She had to get out. Go home. Find Luke. Look down. Open her hands. Find her breath.

“She forgot what’s important,” said Nora. “That’s all.”

That was too much. “Holy shit.
Excuse me?
” The only important things in the whole world were Nora and Ellie. Mariana never forgot it, not even in her deepest sleep. Never.

Nora went on. “After all the ways I’ve taken care of you over the years, after all the things I fixed for you, you think you’re ready to take over? To just step into my shoes?”

Mariana swiped at her forehead, which was as wet as if she’d just come in from the rain. “The things
you
took care of.”

“Do I have to list them?”

“You have a
list
?”

Nora held up a hand. “Feeding you when Mom was too busy or too tired to. Making sure your homework was done while I did my own.” With every point, she raised a finger. “Moving out. Finding our apartment. Getting us financial aid, for whatever
that
was worth, since you didn’t even stay until graduation. When you came back from India the first time, I put you up again for three years.”

“Put me up? I thought we lived together. I didn’t know I was considered a charity case.”

“Stop it,” said Ellie.

“You barely remembered to put money toward rent every month.” Nora raised her other hand and with it, more fingers. “Eddie, the goldfish. Timothy, our cat. Antonia, your godchild. Every plant I ever gave you. You’re irresponsible. You have no follow-through. You can’t be trusted with emotions.” She glanced at Ellie, as if she was going to stop, but then she didn’t. “You can’t be trusted with
her
.”

It felt as though Nora had stabbed her in the gut. It was one thing to wonder. It was another thing altogether to know.

But Nora kept talking, her voice acid. “I don’t know why I thought you could take care of my daughter when I was gone. What the hell was I thinking?”

Did she want Mariana to crumble? To be washed away? To be forced into a free fall, through a space so cold she felt she’d never be warm again? “Nora, stop.” Mariana looked at Ellie, whose face was white as she held on to the doorframe, neither quite in nor quite out of the kitchen.

Nora said, her hand back on the cutting board as if she might smack it again, “You’ve never taken care of one thing except your business, and that’s brand-new. Congratulations on that, by the way. Good thing you have a million listeners who think you’re compassionate. That’ll keep you warm at night. Keep up the good work.”

Behind them, Ellie started crying.

And Mariana knew it was finally time to tell her sister the truth.

“Y
ou know nothing. You have no
clue
.”

Mariana’s face was terrible, and Nora knew her own probably matched. She felt like an inferno inside, a fire that had ice at its core, and Mariana looked the same—her cheeks and eyes red, her lips as white as paper.

Mariana went on. “I never took care of
anything
? You honestly think you’ve been taking care of
me
this whole time?”

Nora didn’t think it; she knew it. Nora had been the one to keep them together, since forever. Since the first moment they slept in the same crib. There was a picture of them somewhere, standing in the rain as toddlers. Nora held the umbrella high over both their heads.

“
Fuck
you.” Mariana’s voice was so low she was almost inaudible. “I’ve let you feel that way my whole life. Because that’s the one thing you needed.”

The taste of Nora’s laugh was vinegar in her mouth. “Right.”

“You remember that guy Bill? The one you thought got away from me, another one of my failures?”

Bill had been nice. The only truly nice guy her sister had ever dated until Luke.

“He tried to rape me.”

Nora gasped. “No. He didn’t.”

Mariana laughed, a brittle piece of chipped glass. “I couldn’t tell you. You would have fallen apart. That was during the time you thought you weren’t going to pass your econ class. Remember? You couldn’t think of anything else. It was all you thought about and every other night you were on the couch crying, thinking that if you didn’t pass, you’d be kicked out of college and you’d wind up living on the streets. You were so upset all the time, hyperventilating when you found mold on the yogurt in the fridge. You could never have handled knowing. You think you’re taking care of things, but you’ve only ever known how to deal with things on the surface. The easy things. If Windex can’t clean off the dirt, you’re not interested.”

“No—”

“I broke his thumb, you know that? Snapped it. You were out in the living room, flirting with some frat guy, and that’s all you talked about when we walked home that night. You didn’t ask me one thing, and I knew I couldn’t tell you.”

“His thumb?” Nora’s brain felt like sludge. Her sister’s words weren’t making sense. They were crawling back on themselves, like the words on the menu at the gluten-free restaurant had.

“The reason I came home from India? The reason I left Raúl? I needed an abortion.” Mariana spoke through gritted teeth. “The day I had it you got mad at me for not bringing home the half-and-half you wanted me to pick up. I’d taken a cab. I didn’t have money for an extra stop on the way home from the clinic.”

Nora remembered that day. Mariana had come home with no half-and-half, her face blank. Nora had accused her of being stoned, and her sister had slammed her bedroom door so hard the
mirror had fallen off their bathroom wall and shattered. Nora had been furious she’d been the one who had to clean it up. As usual.

The words Nora chose were so distant she almost didn’t know how to pronounce them. “No, you would have
told
me that.”

“You would have dissolved into nothing.”

Ellie was sobbing now, but Nora stayed frozen. Broken. “I would have—”

“If I’d told you, you would have done exactly what you did with everything else. You would tell me it was my fault and then clean it up so it looks tidy from the outside.”

It was the worst accusation of all. And the accusation didn’t matter, nothing mattered but the fact that Nora hadn’t comforted Mariana
then
, when she’d needed it most. Nora hadn’t been there for her. “You should have—”

“You think I’m the same person as you, just the weaker version. I’m not. I’m me. I’m only me. Fucked up and forgetful, but fucking real. I’m the Velveteen fucking rabbit, and you’re still wearing a goddamned price tag.”

“Mariana, no.”

Her sister dug her keys out of her purse on the countertop and kept talking while she shook them in front of her. “Let me tell you who I am. For once. Maybe you’ll hear it this time if I make it really, really clear to you.”

“Mama. Auntie,” said Ellie. “Please
stop
.” Her voice was a child’s. She should go to bed soon, thought Nora, and then realized she had no idea what time it was or how old Ellie was or who she herself was. She glanced at her hands. More lines, her mother’s nails . . .

“I’m someone who takes care of
you
, Nora Glass.”

“I—”

“Don’t interrupt me. You need to know this. When your life fell apart, I came running. I was here every weekend after Paul left. Every single one.”

Weakly, Nora managed, “I’m sorry we put you out like that—”

“Oh,
Jesus
,
shut up. This is where I wanted to be. I’ve been taking care of you since before that, though. You think you’re the tough one, not because you keep the memories, but because you rewrite them that way. By the time you put something in essay form, you’ve already changed it in your mind, made yourself into better-than and everyone else into less-than.”

The accusation cut like a whip. It was so patently
untrue
. Nothing made sense. Was this the disease? “I don’t even—”

“That was fine. I let you think that was okay. That’s on me. And it’s true, you were the one on track, to get your degree, to find your way in life. Not me. I’ve always been a fuckup, but that didn’t stop me from taking care of you.” Mariana’s lower lip trembled, and that—just that—was enough to make Nora want to fling herself off the cliff from which she was currently hanging.

And then Mariana delivered the killing blow, the one Nora never saw coming, the one she would never recover from.

Her keys still jingling, Mariana said, “You think you can’t die because it would destroy me, but what’s actually true is that it destroys you to think about doing this alone. You’ve never had to struggle through
anything
by yourself. I have. Back then? Starting with Bill trapping me in that room at the party? That’s when I knew the truth—that I would have to take care of myself. I knew I could. I’m strong. But you’ve never seen that. You’ve been seeing me as a disaster area for so long that you forgot to look at
me
.
And it’s just going to get worse. I’ll be with you when
you
die, taking care of you, but I’ll be alone again afterward. As usual. And someday I’ll do what you won’t have to: die alone.” A crystal-shattering pause. “I have to admit, it might be nice not to be judged all the time.”

Then her sister was gone.

Her sister was
all
the fucking way gone, leaving nothing behind in the foyer but two Glass women both shaking like they were taking their last breaths, the very last breaths left in the whole world.

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

Christmas

When Ellie was little, she loved for me to tell her stories. Her favorites, of course, were about her or a little girl very much like her, a girl who was brave and fought great battles on horseback or found hidden castles. Her next favorite were stories about me and her father. She liked to think about what Paul was like before she came along. Before he left. She loved our getting-lost-in-the-desert story, and the one about how we once mistook a baby skunk for a kitten in the dark. But the story she asked for most was the one about how we met.

The story always changed. I never told her the real story, which was too prosaic and boring. It was no good for a little girl’s bedtime, a little girl who wanted something exciting. So I would make up a story, always changing the elements.

“We met when I was a pirate.”

“He was a pirate?”

“No,” I would growl, covering my eye with my hand and stomping in a peg-legged circle. “
I
was a pirate. My ship was the
Sea Siren
, and I plundered the oceans, filling the hold with jewels I took from around queens’ necks.”

She would giggle and fall backward on her bed. “Did you have both your hands?”

I pulled my arm up in my shirt. “Of course not! This was just a hook back then.”

“How did they fix it?”

“I was rich. You can buy new arms that work if you’re rich.”

“Where was Papa?”

“On a kayak.”

Ellie gasped. “In the middle of the ocean?”

“Do you think that’s very safe? For a tiny kayak to be all the way out there in the big waves?”

Solemnly, she shook her head.

“Me, neither. So I pulled my sailing ship alongside. ‘Prepare to be boarded,’ I yelled down at him. He looked up, surprised. He’d been napping, you see.”

“You woke him up?”

“I did. He was very grumpy about it. Your dad never liked to be woken from a sound sleep.”

“Like me!”

“Like you, chipmunk. So he said, ‘Don’t even think about it!’ That made me, as a pirate, very upset. You can imagine.”

She nodded solemnly.

“I reached over with my very long arms and put the point of my hook right behind his collar. I hauled him on board and turned him upside down, shaking him to see if any doubloons fell out of his pockets.”

“Did some?” Ellie scrambled excitedly to sitting.

I pushed her gently back into her pillows. Story time was about going to sleep, after all. “No money. But lots of jewels.”

“What kind?”

“Diameralds. And rupizluli. Do you know what colors those are?”

Her green eyes wide, she shook her head.

“Diameralds are rainbow colored and they come out of rain clouds, and rupizlulis look like sequins but they’re actually tiny crystals that fairies dig out of riverbanks after lightning storms.”

“Oh . . . ,” she breathed.

“So I collected all of them, because they were rolling around the deck of my ship, and you know how I hate dirty floors. And usually, when I turn prisoners upside down and shake them, they start crying. It’s to be expected. It’s not a very pleasant feeling, as you can imagine. But your dad, he was different.”

“How? He didn’t cry?”

“Just the opposite. He yelled at me.”

“He
did
?”

I nodded. “Well, I deserved it. I was a thief, after all. He said I’d better give him back all his jewels. I said, ‘Or what?’ And then he said, ‘Or I’ll sic my pet alligator on you.’”

“Pet alligator?”

“Sure enough, I looked back down in the water, and there was an alligator thrashing his tail so hard he sent water up into the sky for a mile. Maybe a mile and a half.”

“What was his name?”

“Alastair.”

“That’s a funny name for a crocodile.”

“It’s a funny name for a crocodile, yes. But this was an alligator, and it’s a pretty common name among that species.”

“Then what?”

“I gave up, obviously. I didn’t want to get bitten by Alastair, because he looked like he hadn’t brushed his teeth in twenty years.”

Ellie touched her freshly clean top teeth. “
Then
what?”

“Then he said he loved me and that he wanted to marry me.”

“Alastair did?”

“Your dad did.”

“That’s silly. Why would a pirate marry a man in a kayak with an alligator?”

Because of his eyes, your eyes
. “Because he made me laugh.”

“I make you laugh, too.”

“All the time.” I kissed her and told her to sleep. The next night, the story would be different. I tried to never tell the same one twice.

The actual story was dull. I was twenty-three years old, just a baby. I’d landed my dream job at the
Sentinel
, and I wasn’t fully aware yet that really what I’d landed was a glorified gofer position. It was Christmas Day, and there were only ten people in the whole office, all of us rookies. The only place open for lunch was Pho King, but that was okay. I ordered my pho with extra jalapeños and green onions, light on the chicken. The man behind me in line laughed. “I’ve never heard anyone order it exactly the way I do.”

I said without looking around, “Well. We should probably get married.”

He laughed again, and I liked the sound of it, round and sweet. “I’m in. How do you feel about roofing materials?”

“Nothing better,” I said. Then my eyes met his. I had a
piece of beach glass in my pocket at that very moment that exact shade of green.

We fell in love. He gave me my heart, my Ellie. For that—divorce and failure and alimony and resentment and anger and regret aside—for that, he will always be the best Christmas present I ever got. He gave me my strong, clear Glass girl with his own beautiful matching eyes and my long nose and, of course, a strength that is all her own.