The Invisibles (9 page)

She stood facing him. Her eyes locked against his Adam's apple,
a miraculous thing, she thought, a small and perfectly astonishing thing. She wanted to press her lips against it, to hold the whole of it inside her mouth.

“Maybe we can go see another one sometime.”

“What?”

“I mean, if you want to.” He laughed, a nervous sound. “Do you?”

She stepped into him instead of answering, pressing her forehead lightly against the cotton material of his T-shirt so that he wouldn't see her cheeks flushing hot, the violent quivering of her lower lip. It was too much, her wanting him. Him wanting her. Making friends at Turning Winds had been more than she'd ever imagined, but this was more than she'd ever hoped.

He laughed again, the nervous edge gone now. “Is that a yes?” He rested his hand against her hair, sliding it down along the back of her head.

She nodded, hoping he couldn't see the splotches that were invariably rising along her neck, and took a slow, deep breath. She wouldn't let him see her cry, no matter what.

“Nora?” He stepped back, tilting his head down so that he could see under her lashes. “You okay?”

She nodded, swallowing the knot, large as an acorn now, in the back of her throat. “I'm fine,” she said. “And yeah, I'd like to go. To the movies or something. Again. With you.”

“Great.” He grinned and shoved his hands in his pockets. “Me too.”

Ten seconds later the bus pulled up. She waved from the window, and then, as the bus pulled out of sight, she turned around in her seat, leaned over her knees, and wept. She wept and wept
until she could not cry any longer. And when the bus dropped her off in front of Turning Winds twenty minutes later, she knew that she had just traveled a distance no vehicle could ever take her.

She was on her way to being loved.

Which, after a lifetime of not being loved, felt like the first day of the rest of her life.

D
o you know anything about postpartum depression?” Nora asked as Ozzie sailed past another tractor-trailer. “You said that Grace's husband told you it might've been connected to everything.”

“I don't know a whole lot.” Ozzie scratched her cheek. Her fingernails were torn and ripped, the edges raw. “I didn't go through it with any of my kids, thank God. But I know it's no joke. Your hormones just go completely off the reservation, apparently. I mean, some women can become homicidal.”

“Homicidal?” Monica snapped back to attention. “As in . . .”

“Yeah.” Ozzie's jaw set. “You ever hear of Andrea Yates?”

Nora bit her lip so hard that she tasted blood.

“You don't think Grace ever wanted to hurt . . .” Monica started.

“I don't know.” Ozzie's voice was edged with a sudden harshness that made Nora's arms prickle. “I would think anything's possible when you're in that state of mind. And Henry said the
baby's staying with the grandparents, right? That can't be accidental.” She sped up, bypassing a blue Toyota in front of her and then settled back into the passing lane.

“Do you have to keep swerving?” Nora asked.

“I'm sorry.” Ozzie looked in the rearview mirror. “There's some asshole in a silver Buick back there who has been driving on my tail for the last ten minutes. I'm just trying to lose him.”

“Well, let him pass you.” Nora closed her eyes, trying to fight off the rising nausea. “I'm serious, Ozzie. You have to stop flinging the car all over the road.”

“Okay.” Ozzie rubbed the side of Nora's arm. “I'm sorry.”

“Maybe the baby's with the grandparents just to give Grace and her husband a break,” Monica suggested. “I can't imagine trying to deal with a suicide attempt and trying to take care of a newborn at the same time.”

“Could be,” Ozzie said, glancing in the rear view mirror again. “God
damn
it.” She swerved across the lane, just missing a white Volkswagen bug. The woman in the driver's seat slammed on her brakes and then gave Ozzie the finger.

“Yeah, yeah,” Ozzie muttered under her breath. “Back atcha.”

Nora bit down hard on her tongue as the familiar, sour taste of bile pooled in the back of her mouth. “Ozzie,” she said, “I'm gonna . . .” She clapped her hands over her mouth, her eyes wide and pleading.

“Pull over!” Monica shouted. “Ozzie, pull over on the shoulder! She's going to get sick!”

Ozzie veered to the right amid a flurry of angry honks and screeches. Nora grabbed the door handle as the popping sound
of gravel crunched beneath the tires, and then flung herself out as the car skidded to a stop. She made it just in time, stumbling into the weeds and then falling on one knee as she began to retch. Her whole body seemed to empty itself from the inside out, tears pooling in the creases of her eyes as it shook. A door slammed behind her, and then another, followed by the sounds of gasps and running. She could feel Monica's cool hands as they reached down and pulled her hair away from her face. Ozzie grabbed her around the shoulders as Nora heaved again, steadying her so that she did not fall, and then it was over.

“Okay?” Monica's voice, just a few inches from Nora's face, was a whisper. Nora raised her head. She tried to focus on the tangle of bushes that lined the overhead ridge, but everything looked blurred, as if the Earth were swaying in front of her. A smudged white line, like chalk, split the blue sky in two, and she searched for the plane in front of it. There was nothing.

“Nora?” Monica's mascara was smeared a little around the edges. “Honey? Are you all right?”

For a split second, Nora wondered if either of them remembered the last time she had done this exact thing. They had been driving back from Max's place after he had given them the Cytotec for the abortion. Grace had been in the back with Nora, holding her hand, her eyes closed inside her stricken face. Ozzie was up front, biting her nails and driving too fast. Monica was next to her, twisting the orange braid around her fingers. It was the smell, Nora thought later, that sterile, antiseptic smell from the rubbing alcohol Max had in the room, combined with the warm, salty scent emanating from a half-eaten bag of Doritos on the floor of the car that had
turned her stomach. She'd called out, feeling the sourness pooling along the inside of her cheeks, and Ozzie had screeched to a halt.

“Yeah,” she gasped now, still struggling to keep herself upright. “Yeah, I'm all right.”

“Okay then.” Monica helped her back to her feet. “Come on. Let's get you fixed up.”

They put their arms around her—Ozzie and Monica both—and like a bridge carried her through the weeds back into the car.

N
ora listened to the dull roaring sound of the wheels as she lay in the backseat for the next forty-five minutes. They sounded like thunder in the distance, and sometimes, if she turned her ear just so, like something she'd heard once at the bottom of a body of water.

It was near the end of February in their senior year when Theo asked her to meet him at his house one Saturday. Despite the fact that they had been dating for almost nine months, Nora always insisted that they meet at his house or somewhere downtown. Even though she had finally told him the bare minimum about Turning Winds, the place itself was off-limits when it came to anything social. Having a boy over to a group home was just weird. And if she was being perfectly honest, she didn't want to share him—or their time together—with anyone else, even The Invisibles.

It was an unusually mild day for February, the third one in less than a week. Single-digit temperatures had climbed up well into the thirties, and while there was no chance the balminess would last, the respite had raised everyone's spirits. Nora had
unzipped her winter coat on the walk over and shoved her hat deep into her front pocket. She would take her sweater off too once she got inside Theo's house, but she was a little worried about the dampness under her arms. Had she used deodorant this morning? She couldn't remember. Maybe it wouldn't matter. Maybe they'd just go down in the basement again and play air hockey with Theo's little brothers, who without fail jumped all over her when she walked into the house, eager to start a game.

Theo, though, met her at the door, his winter coat already zipped, dark brown gloves on his hands. “Hey.” His whole face seemed to brighten when she came into his presence, something Nora never failed to notice, and something of which she would never tire. “You up for a walk to the pond today? I really want to show you something.”

“Sure.”

He slid his hand in hers, by now a natural, unconscious gesture, and led her down the front steps. He lived in a well-developed wooded area just outside of Willow Grove. A long dirt path wound its way through the development and into a section of woods, ending at a small pond bordered with cattails and scrub pine. Today the path was wet and muddy, the weeks of snow long melted. Dirty slush edged the sides, and tire tracks were filled with icy water. They hopped and dodged their way through it as best they could, laughing as they emerged at the end, breathless and mud-spattered.

It wasn't her first trip to the pond; Theo had taken her two weeks after their initial date to the movies, and almost every weekend during that summer. They would sit on a large, flat
stone beneath one of the pine trees and kiss until their lips were numb. More and more frequently, she would let his hands wander beneath her shirt, and once or twice, she had allowed her own fingers to drift along the inside of his waistband and then a little farther down until Theo's breath caught in his throat, and he clenched handfuls of her shirt along her back. Pictures of Daddy Ray sometimes filled her head during these moments, and she would have to squeeze her eyes shut and force herself to breathe, but there was no denying the immediate pulse of physical pleasure in her own body that always accompanied the ugly pictures, and along with the obvious sensations in Theo's, she had tentatively decided she wanted more. She wondered if he had something like that in mind today. She hoped he did.

Today, though, Theo tiptoed to the edge of the pond where the ice was already beginning to crack. Alarm shot through Nora just as a first line came to her:
“Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.”
The line was from Gabriel García Márquez's
One Hundred Years of Solitude;
she had read the book just last year, during a long, rainy week. Despite the beauty of the first line, the book's strange, ambiguous ending had left her brooding for weeks afterward.

“Don't go any farther,” she warned as Theo began to tap the ice with the toe of his shoe. “It's dangerous.”

“It's all right.” He pressed down again. “I was just here yesterday. Some parts are thin, but it's okay around here.”

“You're not really thinking of walking on that, are you?” She shoved her hands inside her pocket. Overhead, a crow floated against the white sky, the only blemish in a sea of pearl.

“Well, maybe not right there, exactly.” He drew his foot back as a section of ice splintered beneath it. “Or there.”

“Theo!”

But he had already hopped over to another section of the bank and was testing the ice again with his shoe. “It's much thicker in this spot.” He beckoned to her with a wave of his hand. “Come on, Nora. Please. It'll just take a second.”

“What'll just take a second?” She moved toward him slowly, her heart thumping in her ears. “For us to fall through the ice and drown?” She thought about something Grace had said once, during an Invisibles meeting, when the topic of how they'd want to die if they could choose such a thing came up. Monica and Ozzie had both opted for a gunshot to the head, while she herself had decided that an overdose of sleeping pills would probably be the most painless way to go. Grace, though, had said she'd prefer drowning, optimally beneath a sheet of ice, so that her body could move seamlessly from a state of frozen inertia to one of burning joy.

“Burning joy?” Ozzie had echoed. “What the hell are you talking about? When does anything like that come in?”

“When you get to
heaven
,” Grace answered impatiently. “Obviously.”

Nora didn't know if she believed in heaven, but she remembered thinking that the idea of moving between two worlds in such a way sounded lovely. Like being asleep one moment and waking up, singing, the next.

Theo cocked his head, hand still outstretched. “Do you really think I'd let something like that happen?”

She didn't answer. The obvious response was no, of course he
would never let something like that happen. Still, things happened anyway, whether you wanted them to or not. Didn't he know that yet?

“You don't even have to step on the ice,” he said, pulling her in next to him. “Just come here. Just listen. You won't believe it.”

She followed his lead, getting down on her knees on the edge of the bank, and leaning the side of her face as close to the ice as she dared. He was stretched out several feet ahead of her, his palms pressed against the glassy surface and his right ear an inch or so above it. His eyes were closed and the edges of his nose had begun to turn pink. “Just wait,” he whispered. “Hold on.”

She scooched up a little more until he was just in her line of vision, and then she waited, studying the dark curve of his eyelashes and the faint shadows they made against his cheekbone. Up close, his eyebrows were wild and ragged looking in a sexy sort of way, and the slope of his nose, which had a tiny bump at the top of it, was narrow and pronounced.

The sound came all at once beneath them, a long, drawn-out whooshing noise punctuated by splitting pops and gasps, like some sort of broken pinball machine. Nora's eyes went wide and she jerked back, startled, but Theo's hand shot out and rested on her shoulder.

“It's just the ice,” he whispered. “It's cracking way, way down below. It's okay. Close your eyes and listen.”

The strange sounds that followed were like nothing Nora had ever heard before. She closed her eyes as a screen door screeched, a bullwhip hissed, and plastic bubble wrap snapped and popped with abandon. Some sounds she could not place at all; they were otherworldly, as if aliens had settled beneath the surface and were
playing a strange, cavernous symphony on bizarre instruments. And yet they were sounds she recognized, too; she could feel their odd familiarity in a desolate part of herself she had not known existed until this very moment.

She opened her eyes as the faint shrieks faded into the distance, only to find Theo gazing at her. His eyes were so green against the paleness of his skin that she blinked, as if the color hurt her eyes.

“What do you think?” he asked.

Below them, the silence thundered. An unbearable loneliness engulfed her like a wave, followed by the sudden understanding that nothing in this world, not even Theo, who loved her in a way that she had never thought possible, would ever be able to assuage it. The moment hung above her, hollow and hopeless, and then left again. She leaned in and pressed her lips against his. They were cold, almost rubbery. He brought his hand around the back of her head and kissed her back, opening his mouth so that he could move his tongue around hers. She hated being kissed like that, had always considered his insistence of it an intrusion of sorts, but she'd never said anything. Now she pulled away. Beneath them, the ice shuddered and wailed again, a splitting noise reverberating from the depths of what seemed an endless chasm. As if in response, Nora cried out, a single, desperate sound that burst out from her chest, and then clapped her hand over her mouth.

“What's wrong?” Theo looked alarmed.

“I want to go.” She was already scrambling back tentatively over the thick, opaque surface. “This is crazy. I just want to go.”