It wasn’t until she reached the corner of Grove Street, where the sidewalk buckled and the pre-dawn smells of yeast and fabric softener perfumed the air, that Nora remembered it was her thirty-second birthday. She stopped abruptly, as if someone had yanked a leash around her neck, and let the information settle along her shoulders. Thirty-two. The number rolled around in her head, and she waited for the onslaught of—what was it exactly: relief? dread?—that was supposed to arrive at reaching the end of another year, but it didn’t come. Instead, the first line from a book she had once read occurred to her: “Once upon a time, there was a woman who discovered she had turned into the wrong person.” Nora could not remember the title of the book or even the name of the author, but the words themselves, strung like so many lights in the distance, felt as distressing now as they had the day she had first come across them. Maybe even more so.
A band of sky behind the rooftops ahead was turning a soft purple. The moon, a lopsided waxing gibbous, was so translucent as to appear glass-like there in the heavens. It would be another forty minutes or so before the sun rose, erasing all traces of the moon for the day. Now, though, it was hers. The September air was sharply cold, the imminent warning of a quickly approaching fall, and the streets were littered with leaves browning around the edges. Alice Walker, her chocolate brown retriever, nuzzled the stiff grass for a few seconds and then turned around, staring up at Nora. She barked once, and then again. It was unusual for Nora to stop during their morning walks, a daily ritual that had become so ingrained in their lives by this point that it was hard to imagine anything preventing it. Even bad weather did little to deter her; Nora made the trek in rain and snow, and once even in a hailstorm, during which she’d had to stop and take refuge under an enormous red-and-green-striped awning until things settled down again. Walking cleared her head in a way few other things could, and she never turned around until she reached the little grove of birch trees by the railroad tracks, where she would sit for a moment and rest before starting back again.
Alice Walker barked again, loudly, the sound reverberating through the stillness, and then cocked her head. The birch trees, her eyes seemed to say. Let’s get to the birch trees. Nora looked away from the dog and stared down at her sneakers instead—pale blue Asics with orange strips on each side. She pressed two fingers beneath her breastbone and took a breath as if to steady herself. A heaviness that was not disappointment or regret or anything else she could identify yet filled her nonetheless. And for the first time in as long as she could remember, she did not want to keep walking toward the birch grove. She just wanted to go home.
“Come on, love,” she said, turning around, tugging at Alice Walker’s leash. “Let’s go.”
The dog barked a third time, obviously confused.
Nora’s feet moved with a mind of their own, leading her back to the apartment they shared on Winslop Avenue. “Yeah, well, I don’t know either,” she said. “Come on, now.”
She could hear the phone ringing in her bedroom as she unlocked her front door. Alice Walker bolted toward it, barking after each ring, as if the phone might respond. Nora hung back, struggling to get her key out of the lock, which still continued to stick, despite numerous complaints to the landlord. She tugged again. Nothing. Well, she’d have to let the machine get it. It was probably just Trudy or Marion from the library anyway, calling to ask her to pick up some more coffee beans on her way in. Between the three of them, the office coffeepot went through at least four refills a day.
“Hey, this is Nora.” The recorded sound of her voice echoed through the empty apartment. “I’m not here, but I will be eventually, so please leave a message.” Nora winced, listening. She’d gone through at least a dozen messages when she’d set up the machine, trying her voice out each time—a little happier here, more serious there—until she’d just said to hell with it and settled on this one.
There was a pause and then:
“Norster?”
Nora’s fingers froze around the rubber grip of the keys. No one had called her Norster since she was seventeen years old. And even then, there had been only one person who had ever used that name.
A throat cleared. Then: “Nora Walker? Is this you? God, I hope I have the right number. This is . . .” There was a muffled noise, as if the receiver had just been covered, and then the faint, nearly obscured sound of a reprimand. “I need a minute, Jack, okay? Mommy just needs one minute. Now, please.”
No. It couldn’t be. Nora gave the key a final furious tug and then let go of it altogether, racing toward her bedroom. It just couldn’t be.
“Sorry about that.” The voice was back, unmuffled now and slightly raised. “Um, this is Ozzie Randol. I’m just calling to—”
“Ozzie!” Nora snatched the phone up so quickly that she almost dropped it. “Ozzie, I’m here!”
“Nora! Oh my God!”
“Ozzie.” Nora said the name a third time, as if the word itself would settle her breathing somehow, stop her legs from trembling. Her windbreaker, unzipped and loose, hung open in front of her like a mouth agape. How long had she been waiting for this moment? She couldn’t remember anymore. “Oh, Ozzie. Oh my God. Is that really you?”
Ozzie laughed. “Of course it’s really me. You know any other girls out there named Ozzie?”
“No.” A giggle emanated from Nora’s mouth like a bubble. “No, I’ve never met another Ozzie.” She sat down carefully on the end of her bed, smoothing the edge of the white comforter with the palm of her hand. Ozzie had the same laugh, a bright burst of sound that came out of a mouth so wide and lips so full that Nora used to wonder how everything fit in there together—and still looked so pretty.
“Shit, Norster, I can’t believe I actually found you! Monica told me she thought you still lived in Willow Grove, but . . .”
“Monica?” Nora interrupted. “Our Monica?”
“Har-Monica!” Ozzie said, using the nickname they had given her back in high school after Monica had started whistling through her teeth. “Who is doing great, by the way. She has a place in Manhattan now—a penthouse, actually, which I’ve decided not to hold against her. Or the fact that she’s managed to snag herself a billionaire to live there. Can you believe it? Harmonica, living with some Bill Gates guy?” Ozzie laughed. “Anyway, she told me that she thought you still lived in Willow Grove and worked for the library, but she couldn’t be sure. When’s the last time you talked to her, anyway?”
Nora blinked against the sudden onslaught of information. “Who, Monica?”
“Yeah. You two talk at all?”
“No.” Nora paused. “Why, do you?”
“No.” Ozzie sounded disappointed. “And I haven’t seen her in forever, either. Not since . . . God, I guess not since we all left.” She paused. “What about Grace? You talk to Grace at all?”
“No. Not Grace either.”
But that had been the deal, hadn’t it? They were all going to go and live their own lives and forget everything that happened. Put it behind them. Leave it in the past, Ozzie had said, where it would get smaller and smaller until one day it would just disappear altogether. Except that it hadn’t. At least not for Nora. Twice, just this past summer, she had gotten up in the middle of the night and walked over to the old house with Alice Walker, just to stare at it, to try to remember—or maybe make sense of—all the things that had happened behind those walls. It was an abandoned building now, the yellow paint old and curling off the sides like an old skin, the front porch split in two. But it had once been Turning Winds, a group home for unwanted girls, the temporary residence for Ozzie and Grace and Monica and Nora throughout their last two years of high school, a place that, for a while at least, had afforded them the only sense of safety they had ever known.
After graduation, Nora had been the only one of them to stay in Willow Grove. She hadn’t wanted to leave, hadn’t felt the tug and pull of the outside world the way the others had. Some nights, though, she wished she had. Some nights she wondered if her life would be different if she’d cobbled together the courage to strike out in a similar way, to carve her own path through the vast unknown. What things would she have seen? What would she have done? Who would she have turned into, aside from the wrong person?
The last time she had gone down to the house and stood there looking at it, she’d had to cup her hands under the curve of her rib cage as her heart beat steadily beneath it. If she didn’t hold on to it, she thought, if she didn’t gather herself around it and keep it safe, it would split open completely.
“Jesus, time flies, doesn’t it?” Ozzie asked. “Can you believe we’re in our fucking thirties now?”
“Actually,” Nora said softly, “I’m thirty-two today.”
“What? Wait, what’s today?”
“September sixth.”
“Oh my God, I totally forgot it was your birthday!” Ozzie laughed again. “Holy shit, Nora! How weird is it that the day I call you—after all this time—it’s your fucking birthday? I mean, how crazy is that?”
Nora smiled. Along with her fondness for cursing, Ozzie had always believed in crazy, inexplicable things—things that had to do with fate and the meanings of names and the way the planets aligned with each other to keep the world spinning. The only facts that made any sense, she used to say, were the ones that we had no answers for. Back then Nora had thought she agreed with her. Now she wasn’t so sure.
“So how are you?” Ozzie’s voice was soft all of a sudden. “What’s your life like? Oh my God, do you still collect first lines?”
A flush of joy washed over Nora as Ozzie recalled her favorite thing to do in high school. Nora had still been in the throes of her silent stage when she first arrived at Turning Winds—a period of selective mutism that had begun when she was twelve years old and that, the doctors said, would end only when Nora decided it would end. It had ultimately taken a little over four years. But those silent years had not stifled her in any way. In fact, Nora thought they had actually saved her. She disappeared into books instead of talking, reading whatever she could get her hands on. Her fascination with first lines started almost immediately, after she came across Alice Walker’s novel The Color Purple and read the first eight words: “You better not never tell nobody but God.” They had made her suck in air, and she’d given in right then and there, sitting down on the library floor between the fiction stacks to read the whole book from cover to cover. She’d collected over two hundred first lines since then, each of them a small, quiet joy in its own right. There was something about the infinite promise that the first line of a book held, as if the weight of everything that came afterward rested upon it. First lines were one of the bravest things she knew. They toed the line, bent their knees, and jumped—right into the abyss, taking you with them. Good ones did, anyway. Nora had gotten into a bad habit of not bothering to read the rest of the book if the first line failed to measure up to her standards. Which, she understood, probably meant that she had missed out on a great number of wonderful books. But that was the way it was for her.
She still had the same blue and green notebook she’d started her collection with; in fact, she’d taken it out of her underwear drawer just the other day, jotting down a first line she’d found while shelving a copy of The Chronicles of Narnia at work: “There was a boy called Eustace Clarence Scrubbs, and he almost deserved it.” It had made her laugh out loud, and she’d taken the book home with her that night to read. Now, as she stared at the notebook on her bedside table, the whole thing felt stupid and childish. Another reminder of the person she still was.
“No,” she said. “I haven’t done any of that first-line stuff in a long time.”
“Ohhh.” Ozzie sounded crestfallen. “I used to love it when you would tell us first lines! God, I wish I remembered some of them.”
“Yeah. Well.” Nora heard her voice drift off. “What about you? Where do you live now?”
“Amherst. Up in Massachusetts. The winters’ll make your balls turn blue, but my house is the sweetest little thing in the world. We raise our own chickens and vegetables in the backyard. My kids love it.”
A string in Nora’s heart tugged. “You have kids?”
“Three of them. All under the age of six. Can you believe it?”
Nora stood up. She had not known she was holding her breath until she exhaled, a sudden, forcible movement. “Are you married, too?” she asked, steadying herself against the edge of her dresser.
“Yup.”
“No, you’re not!”
Ozzie was the only one out of all four of them who had insisted, had sworn, that she would never get married. Kids, maybe. But only after she’d gone and seen the world, driven some stake into the ground of a piece of uncharted territory and claimed it for her own. But marriage? Chaining one’s self to another human being until you died? Never. What happened? Nora wondered. How did something you had once been so sure of suddenly become negotiable?
“I am.” Ozzie’s voice got quiet. “Almost twelve years now. And you know what, Nora? I’m still not sure I did the right thing. I mean, I love him and everything, but, Jesus Christ . . . I really don’t fucking know sometimes.” She paused. “Do you know what I’m talking about? I mean, what about you? Are you married now? Kids?”
“No, not married.” Nora headed down the narrow hallway of the apartment. Her sneakers made a peeling sound against the hardwood floor as she walked over to the living room window; her fingers closed around the soft pouch of her earlobe as her heart beat a little faster. “But I’m dating a great guy. It’s been almost a year now.”
This was a lie. A few years earlier, she’d been in a relationship with an accountant named Tom Robertson who had asked her out after finishing her tax return and then went and ruined everything by picking his nose while sitting in her living room one night and, thinking she was still out of the room, wiping the offending extraction on the arm of her couch. In her twenties, she’d gone with a guy named Sinclair Westley, whom she had liked well enough. He was her car mechanic and liked to come over early on Saturday mornings with Boston cream doughnuts and coffee before heading into the shop. She couldn’t remember anymore why that one had fizzled out, but it didn’t matter. Now, though, there was nothing to tell. Nothing at all.
“Oh, that’s great!” Ozzie said. “What’s he like?”
“He’s . . . sweet. And funny. You would love him.”
“Do you love him?”
“Yes!” Nora said, too quickly. “Of course!”
“Good.” Ozzie said. “Good, I’m glad.”
Why was she doing this? What was she ashamed of, still being single after all this time? If anyone would understand the way things were, it was Ozzie Randol. Wasn’t it? Ozzie had always been one of those people who said things like it was better to be alone than with the wrong person, that there was no man in the world worth compromising one’s self for. In high school, she’d snubbed a senior boy named Linus Worthington, who, despite the fact that Ozzie was only a junior, had pursued her relentlessly, smitten with her brash personality and obvious confidence. She hadn’t cared a whit that he was older, or that he was so popular that to get an invitation to one of his legendary house parties was the equivalent of achieving a social status of ethereal proportions; she’d said he just didn’t do it for her, period. But had Ozzie ever gone twelve days without talking to anyone in the entire world? Did she know what it was like to hold an animal against her chest, just to feel the soft pulse of breath against her skin, the thrum of a beating heart from inside another living thing? Had she ever gone to bed directly after dinner and prayed for sleep, just so that she didn’t have to figure out how to fill one more empty hour by herself?
“Hey, is Turning Winds still around?” Ozzie asked, not seeming to notice Nora’s evasive answers. “They still running the place?”
“No.” Nora turned as Alice Walker barked from the kitchen, alerting her to her empty water bowl. “It’s just an old empty building now.”
“Wow,” Ozzie said. “I can hardly remember what it even looks like anymore. It’s been so long!”
“Fifteen years,” Nora said, holding Alice Walker’s red plastic bowl under the running faucet.
“Fifteen years,” Ozzie repeated. “That’s practically a lifetime.”
Two lifetimes, Nora thought.
“So I know it seems crazy that I’m just calling you out of the blue like this,” Ozzie said, “but I do have a reason.”
Nora froze. The water spilled over the top of the dog’s bowl and rushed down the sides.
“It’s about Grace,” Ozzie said. “I mean Petal. She goes by Petal now, you know.”
“Wait.” Nora shook her head, feeling as though something had drained from inside her chest. She turned off the faucet, set the water bowl down in front of Alice Walker. “Grace goes by Petal now? What are you talking about?”
“She changed her name. I don’t think she went and made it legal or anything, but her husband says she likes to be called Petal now.” Ozzie paused. “It could be worse. She could be calling herself Stem. Or Root.”
Nora didn’t laugh. “Why would she change her name?”
“Oh, I’m sure it’s part of that whole artist-persona thing she had going on. You remember.”
Nora did remember. The four of them had been as close as sisters in that house, but she had shared a bedroom with Grace for two years. Nora knew parts of Grace that Ozzie and Monica did not. Parts they might not ever know.
“Anyway,” Ozzie said. “Grace—I mean Petal—”
“Just call her Grace.” Nora felt impatient suddenly, and it startled her. She rarely got impatient. With anyone. “I mean, at least to me. Petal’s . . . I don’t know. It’s too weird.”
“Okay, so Grace’s husband called me last night, and we talked for a long time. Over an hour, I’d guess. They live right outside of Chicago now; I don’t remember where, exactly. Somewhere in the suburbs, I think. Anyway, the point is, she’s not doing so well.”
Nora held her breath, as if to block the pinprick of fear rising behind it. “Can you be more specific?”
“She’s . . . well, her husband—his name is Henry, by the way—said that she was in the hospital.”
“She’s sick?”
“Yeah, but not physically sick,” Ozzie said. “It was a mental hospital. She tried to kill herself, Nora. Just a few months ago.”
The pinprick exploded into a flash of heat that spread out across the front of Nora’s chest and down into her stomach.
“And it was no joke, either,” Ozzie continued. “You know how some people kind of do it half-assed because they don’t know how to ask for help and making a few scratches on their wrist is the only way they can get anyone to take them seriously? Well, Grace wasn’t asking for anyone’s help. Henry said he found her hanging in the closet. She was blue. Her eyes were bulging out of her sockets.”
Nora blocked a cry that was trying to escape from her mouth with the side of her fist. It just didn’t seem possible. Grace had always been horrified by death. Once, when the two of them had been walking back to Turning Winds from school, they had come across a dead bird lying on the sidewalk. It was a sparrow, small and brown, with tiny feet that curled up under it like fern fronds. There was no sign of violence, no mark that gave any indication as to how it had died, and for a moment, as Grace sank down next to it, Nora had been sure it would wake up and fly away. It hadn’t, of course, and when Grace turned to her, her wide face stricken, and said, “What do you think happened?” she hadn’t known how to answer.
“Why?” Nora asked now. Her voice was a whisper.
“Henry said they’ve been having a lot of problems,” Ozzie said. “I mean, obviously. But I think she’s been struggling with depression for a while. And then she just had a baby this past May. Henry thinks it was postpartum depression mixed in with everything else. I guess it made her suicidal.” She paused. “If he hadn’t come home when he did that day, we’d all be meeting up again at her funeral instead of talking like this.”
Just for a moment Nora wished Ozzie had learned not to speak so bluntly. And then, in the next breath, she was glad she hadn’t. Ozzie had always been the one who said the things that the rest of them could not.
“She has a baby then?” Nora pulled at the soft skin along her throat.
“Yeah. A little girl. Henry’s parents have been taking care of her until he can get things sorted out, I guess.”
“Is Grace back home? Or is she still in the hospital?”
“No, she’s been home for a while. Since the end of July, I think. Henry said she’s really been making progress. But he also said that he was worried she was starting to relapse again.”
“Relapse?”
“You know, reverting back to her old behaviors. Crying a lot, not sleeping. Especially in the last two weeks or so. I think he’s scared.”
“Well, he should bring her back to the hospital!” Nora stood up and raked her fingers through the top of her hair. “What’s he doing calling you?” She bit her lip, realizing how that sounded. “I mean . . . you’re not a doctor. He should be calling her doctor, right?”
“He’s done that.” Nora could hear a catch in Ozzie’s voice. “Her therapist, too. They upped her meds, and they’re monitoring her pretty closely. Henry says rough patches are normal; that they’ll come and go.”
“Okay,” Nora said uncertainly.
“Here’s the thing, though, Nora. Henry says that she just wants us. If he said it once last night, he said it ten times. Apparently Grace keeps telling him over and over again that all she wants is to see the three of us.”
“The three of us?” Nora repeated. “You mean you and me and Monica?”
“Uh-huh. That’s why he called.”
Nora let her hand fall from the back of her head. She had been carrying the hope of this—or something exactly like this—around like a stone in her pocket, a toothache that never stopped throbbing, a constant, steady pulse. The stone had gotten smaller, the toothache less painful, but the pulse was still there. It was always there.
And yet . . .
“Nora?”
“God, Ozzie. I don’t know.”
“You don’t know what?”
“Are you going to see her?”
“Well, of course I’m going to see her.”
“What about Monica?”
“Monica’s in,” Ozzie answered. “I called her just before I called you. She already booked her flight, and she’s meeting me at O’Hare tomorrow afternoon, which is what I was hoping you would do. Then we could all drive to Grace’s house. Together. Like she asked.”
“And . . .” Nora walked over to the window and pressed her palm flat against the cold glass. “And . . . do what?”
“What do you mean, ‘do what?’” Ozzie sounded indignant. “I don’t think Grace is looking for us to take her to the mall or anything here, Nora. She just wants us to be there. For . . . support.” A faint clicking sound came over the phone, and Nora realized that Ozzie was biting her nails. Ozzie had bitten her nails back in high school, so badly sometimes that she drew blood and had to wear Band-Aids over the raw skin. “Don’t you want to be there for her?” Ozzie’s question hung in the air.
“Well, yeah.” Nora’s voice wavered. “I mean, of course I do. But I don’t think you can blame me for being hesitant about seeing people I haven’t seen in almost fifteen years.”
“People?” Ozzie repeated. “I know it’s been a while, Nora, but we’re not just people. It’s us! We were the best friends of your life!”
“Were.” Nora repeated Ozzie’s word gently. “We were best friends, Ozzie. And then nothing. Not a card, a letter. Not even a phone call. For . . .” Her voice drifted off. It had been a long time, but she wanted to say forever. That was what it felt like. Forever and then some.
A small child’s voice wailed in the background. “Mommy! Olivia dumped the flour on the floor!”
Ozzie muted the mouthpiece again with her hand. “Two more minutes!” she bellowed. “Mommy’s busy right now!”
There was a short silence. And then, “I . . .” Ozzie’s voice was already heavy with apology. Quieter too, as if letting Nora in on a secret. “Shit, you know how we all left things, Nora. After that night. And I know I was probably the most vocal about just forgetting all of it and moving ahead. I know I was. I said those exact words, didn’t I? To all of us?”
Nora didn’t say anything, afraid that Ozzie would stop talking.
“I did,” Ozzie said, answering her own question. “And you know, back then, I really thought that was what we should do. I mean, we were seventeen years old! None of us knew what the hell to do after it was all over. At least I didn’t. Shit, the only thing going through my stupid head was how fast we were going to get the hell out of there, and what we’d need to do to forget it.”
Nora could hear herself breathing through the line, a desperate sound, muffled like a trapped animal. She wanted to scream, could feel it moving like a living thing from the depths of her belly. “And have you?” she asked instead. “Forgotten, I mean?’
“Mostly.” The word entered Nora’s ear like a bullet. “What about you? Do you ever think about it anymore?” Ozzie’s voice was hoarse, barely audible. “Or are you okay with things now?”
Nora removed her hand from the window glass. A large, damp stain remained, the outline of something that looked as though it might still be breathing. “I’m okay with things now.”
“All right.” Ozzie swallowed through the phone. “But you know, maybe Grace isn’t. I mean, she was a basket case afterward. You remember. Maybe she has some kind of posttraumatic stress thing going on. I don’t know. I’m not a shrink. All I know is that she needs us. She needs the three of us to help her get through this, whatever it is. I know we’re not teenagers anymore. I’m not asking you to come out to Chicago so we can stand around in Grace’s backyard and stare up at the moon. But I think she needs us to be around right now, you know? To just . . . be there for her. I need you to be there for her.”
“You?” Nora repeated. “Why do you need me to be there?”
“Because it won’t work without you. There’s no such thing as three of us. There never was. It’s the four of us or nothing.” She paused. “C’mon, Nora. Please say you’ll come.”
The pale purple had drained from the morning sky, leaving behind a slate of gray. The sky had been that kind of gray the morning Ozzie left, as solemn and still as Nora had felt. Nora had held her tightly at the bus station, knowing that she would not see her for a long, long time after everything that had happened. She might have held on longer if Ozzie had not pulled back, insisting, “Let go now, Nora. You have to let go.” She’d obeyed, unclenching her arms, watching as Ozzie ascended the narrow set of steps into the bus and disappeared into the belly of it.
Now her own belly churned like some kind of lopsided washing machine. Just the thought of reuniting with all of them again made the inside of her mouth taste sour. A rushing sounded in her head, and the tips of her fingers tingled. There was no way she had it in her to go through it again; she’d barely made it through the first time. And yet there was something about hearing her name again—Norster—combined with the nearly defunct feeling of being needed that almost made her knees buckle. Two parallel lines of pain began to work their way up the back of her throat. Beyond the red maple tree on the sidewalk, she could see the narrow steeple of Saint Augustine’s rising in the air like a pair of folded hands, a perpetual prayer. She’d stopped praying so long ago that she couldn’t even remember how to begin anymore. And yet right now, this instant, she knew that one of her prayers had just been answered.
“All right,” she heard herself whisper into the phone. “Okay, I’ll come.”