It was ten a.m. by the time everyone got into the car. Nora pretended not to watch as Henry and Grace said their goodbyes in front of the house, but it was hard to look away. Despite his anxiety, there was an ease to the way he touched her, smoothing the palm of his hand over her forehead and then letting it slide down the small of her back until hooking it along a belt loop on the outside of her jeans. Even the way he kissed her seemed easy; full on the mouth, with no hesitation at all. You are mine, his movements seemed to say. And I am yours.
Theo had never kissed her in front of anyone; they had never gotten comfortable enough for that. In private, though, he had kissed her with such confidence and sometimes with such urgency that she felt as if he were sucking the breath out of her body. It was an alarming feeling at first, but it morphed quickly into a deep pleasure, one she would return to again and again as she lay in bed at night and thought of him. Now, watching Henry with Grace, she felt that same kind of longing pulse through her and then settle like a stone in the pit of her stomach. She needed to get hold of herself, bring herself back to reality. She wasn’t really shocked to hear that Theo had gotten married; it would have been odd if he hadn’t. He probably had children now too, maybe a boy that looked like a miniature version of him, or a girl that had the same eyelashes as his wife. It was a good thing, him being married, moving on, creating a life. It was what people did, how life worked.
Grace had offered to drive the first leg since she knew the surrounding area best, and Monica, whose mascara had started to run despite washing her face and applying new makeup, got in the front with her. Monica had been sitting on the edge of her bed when they came up to tell her about their decision, her fingertips pressed lightly on either side to keep herself upright. Her back was to them, and Nora had marveled at the length of her neck, the narrow, rectangular shape of her shoulders, how beautiful she was even from behind. Monica didn’t say anything right away when Ozzie blurted it out—“Well, we’re going”—and at first Nora wasn’t sure if she had even heard her. Then she exhaled, a low, hoarse sound, and Nora realized that Monica had been holding her breath since she’d first heard them ascending the steps behind her.
Ozzie, who had been surprisingly quiet since they all emerged from the house, was in the back with Nora. She reached over the front seat as soon as she got in and placed a steady hand on Monica’s shoulder. Nora couldn’t help but think how different this trip was going to be from the one they had taken in from the airport; how much more was riding on all of their shoulders this time around. There was no telling what might happen, no way of knowing what would come next. Especially when they got to Manhattan. She’d never been inside a police station before, let alone one in New York City.
“So I was thinking we would take I-90 to 80 East and just go straight through,” Grace said. “It’s the fastest route.”
“Sounds good.” Ozzie let go of Monica’s shoulder. “What’s the time frame?”
“About twelve, thirteen hours with stops,” said Grace. “Give or take.”
“I’ll get us a hotel room,” Monica said, turning around weakly in her seat. “For tonight. I’d have you all at my place, but I don’t . . .”
“Want Liam to know,” Ozzie finished. “We know.”
Monica blushed and turned back around as Grace started the car.
Henry stood in the middle of their front yard, his left arm raised as Grace pulled out of the driveway. Nora watched as he got smaller and smaller under the eave of the small porch roof, his lined face a mixture of fear and hope and something else she could not place.
She wondered if she’d ever see him again.
No one spoke until Grace aligned the Escalade into a stream of traffic along Interstate 90. Nora had already taken two Dramamine; now she prayed silently that it would not have some kind of adverse effect on her system since she was sure, when she woke up this morning, that she was still vaguely high. Remnants of the night floated around like torn pieces of lace in her head: the dinner at Tru, the joints, Monica’s palm reading, the baby crying.
The baby crying. Just the memory of the noise hurt, like pieces of glass moving around inside her chest, cutting the softest parts of it into jagged shards. She’d been sure she could handle it; there was no telling what the women thought of her now that she hadn’t. She pressed her forehead against the cool sheet of window glass and closed her eyes. At least something else had taken center stage; now the attention would be off her.
“All right,” Grace said after a while. “We’re pretty much out of the city. We have to take 90 straight for about five hours and then switch over to 80 East. That’ll take us right into Manhattan.”
Monica, whose silent, intermittent weeping had ceased for the moment, took out her cell phone for what must have been the tenth time and dialed. “Nothing,” she said after a moment, flinging the phone onto the seat. Her voice was desperate. “I don’t know where he could be.”
“Who?” Ozzie said.
“My attorney.” She raised an eyebrow. “I’ve left him at least three messages since I talked to the detective.”
“It’s Sunday,” Ozzie reminded her. “Maybe he’s doing something with his family and turned his phone off. He’ll probably check tonight and then call you back. All you need is him there with you tomorrow, right? To take you through the precinct? Get you to the next step?”
“Yes,” Monica said absently.
Nora watched her from the backseat. For the first time since she’d laid eyes on her, Monica’s beautiful veneer seemed fragile. Tiny lines perched like quotation marks along the corners of her eyes, and her mouth was pinched together. The gorgeous plume of blond hair was in a state of wild disarray, as if she’d clutched at it numerous times, and pieces stuck out in back like misplaced fingers.
Ozzie glanced over at Nora, who gave her a look. No one had said anything more about the theft since Monica’s admission at the breakfast table, but Nora could tell by the way Ozzie sat forward a little on the seat and gathered a piece of Monica’s hair in her fingers, that she wanted to. “Do you want to talk a little bit more about it?” she asked. “It might help.”
Monica’s shoulders tensed as she looked out the window. “Not right now.” Her voice was faint.
“Okay.” Ozzie didn’t move. “Whenever you’re ready.”
Nora watched Ozzie’s fingers trail through Monica’s hair, remembering how Ozzie had used to do the very same thing at Turning Winds as Monica sat pressed up against the side of her bed. Monica had even fallen asleep once, and Grace, who had been talking, hushed her voice and pointed. “She’s asleep,” she whispered, obviously impressed. Ozzie, who continued to run her fingers through Monica’s hair, just grinned. “Magic fingers,” she said, raising one eyebrow. Now though, Monica reached back with one hand, and pushed Ozzie’s fingers away. Ozzie sat back, stung, and looked out the window.
Grace, who had noticed the gesture too, sat up a little straighter in her seat. “I’m confused about something,” she said, looking at Monica. “All weekend you’ve been telling us how amazing Liam is. He arranged for you to use this car, and then he treated us to that beautiful dinner. I don’t know what the rest of you think, but he seems to me like a really great guy.”
“He is a really great guy,” Monica said dully. “The best.”
“So why don’t you want him to know about this?” Grace pressed. “I mean, if he really loves you, he’ll understand. He’ll—”
“Oh, he loves me,” Monica said. “But he won’t understand. He’ll never understand.” Nora could hear the despair in her voice.
“You sure you’re giving him enough credit?” Ozzie asked.
“We’ve been together a long time,” Monica said. “Almost four years. Liam’s the one who took me in when I was a nobody. A bike messenger!” She spit the word out. “He’s the only one who’s ever really believed in me, the only person in my entire life who made me feel like someone. If I—”
“Hey!” Ozzie’s voice was tight. “We believed in you first.”
“And then you left!” Monica turned around in her seat, her eyes filling. “You built me up, all of you, and then you left! No one ever called to see how I was doing or where I ended up, or what was happening to me! Not one of you! Ever!” She was looking at all of them, her head moving from side to side, her mangled hair whipping around her face.
Nora felt her breath catch in the back of her throat.
These were her words.
Her cry through the years.
It had never occurred to her that any of them might feel the same way.
Not once.
“That was the deal!” Ozzie planted a hand on Monica’s shoulder again. “That’s what we said we would do!”
“No!” Monica pushed Ozzie’s hand off her shoulder, glaring at her in the harsh light from the window. “That’s what YOU said, Ozzie! That’s what you said we would do!”
Ozzie opened her mouth and then shut it again. She let her hand drop against the backseat. It lay next to her like a stone. She slumped back against the upholstery and stared out the window.
“I can’t go through that again.” Monica’s voice quavered. “He loves me. I can’t lose that.”
For what seemed like an eternity, they sped on in silence. The air inside the car was so thick with emotion that Nora could feel it along the tops of her arms, a light, prickling sensation shot through with electricity. She pressed the back of her hand against her mouth so that she would not cry and stared out at the flying scenery. Ozzie had sagged to the other side of the car, slung into submission, while Monica cried silently up front and dabbed at her eyes. Only Grace was still upright behind the wheel, her shoulders squared, chin set like a brick. Every few seconds, she would glance over at Monica, peek at Ozzie, and then position her eyes back on the road.
“All right,” she said suddenly. “I have something to say.” No one moved. “Monica’s not the only one who came here this weekend with secrets. I have one, too.”
Ozzie’s eyes fluttered open. A whimper froze halfway out of Monica’s mouth. Nora could feel the hairs prickling on the back of her neck as she lifted her head away from the window.
“I’m sick.” Grace laughed once, bitterly. “Like for real. I’m a total nut job, just like my mother. After all those years of waiting for her to come back, she finally did, in the form of a mental illness. I’m just like her.” She bit her bottom lip.
For a moment, no one said anything. There were no words. And then Monica said, “So you’re . . . ?”
“Bipolar II.” Grace recited the term deliberately, as if she’d been forced to memorize it. “A spectrum disorder characterized by at least one episode of hypomania and at least one episode of major depression.” The corner of her lips twitched, as if the words had scratched something soft inside her mouth. “It’s what she had, too, although we didn’t know it back then. Basically it just means that my brain is completely screwed up. I used to think that staying up for four days so that I could paint was something everyone did.” She winced. “It was the crash-and-burn part of things I didn’t do so well with, although thank God I didn’t have two kids to deal with at the same time, the way my mother did. No wonder she went off the deep end.”
“Did you have to go to the hospital, too?” Ozzie asked.
“Twice. Right before graduation from art school I checked myself in at a place in Atlanta for about twelve days. It wasn’t much help; as soon as I got stable, I stopped taking my medication and was off and running again. After the second episode, though, they put me in a long-term psych unit.” The lines in Grace’s face softened. “That one was longer. Almost three months.”
“What do you mean by an episode?” Monica echoed.
“Oh, there’s high ones and low ones.” Grace rubbed her forehead impatiently. “Being in the middle of a high one felt like I’d just chugged fourteen Red Bulls and then snorted a line of cocaine. I’d act like a crazy person, bouncing off the walls, talking gibberish, running all over the place. Sleeping was impossible because my feet twitched all the time and my head raced, so sometimes I’d go out and walk around town until the sun came up. Or lock myself in my room and paint.” She shook her head disgustedly. “The really ironic part about a manic episode is how much painting I could get done. Good stuff, too.” She squinted, as if trying to bring a thought into focus. “Things I couldn’t summon up now if I tried. My brain was working on a completely different level when I was manic, even creatively. Especially creatively.”
Nora thought back to the paintings in Grace’s house, the titles she had given each one. Staid. Mania. Spiral. Melancholy. Void. Blackness. Each of them a window into her beautiful, defective brain. Each of them a step on the ladder of her mental illness. She was starting to understand.
“So those paintings you have in your house . . . ?” Ozzie started.
“Yeah.” Grace’s jaw tightened. “Henry hung those. He says they’re art, but I think he likes to keep them up so that I don’t forget.”
“Forget what?”
“The episodes, I guess. What it feels like to be inside them. He told me once that seeing where I used to be helps me stay focused on where I am now.”
“Do you like having them up?”
“Not really.” Grace gnawed the inside of her cheek.
“Is that a yes?” Ozzie pressed. “Or a no?”
Grace glared at Ozzie in the rearview mirror. “It’s a ‘not really.’ Sometimes I look at them and they don’t bother me. They’re just paint on a canvas. Other times, though, they bring back the memories of those places in my head, and I just want to go hide in the basement. Or rip them off the walls and bash them over Henry’s head.”
“Well, I don’t blame you for feeling confused about it,” Ozzie said finally. “Art should be a celebration of something, not a reminder of your illness.”
“Have you ever told him how you feel?” asked Monica.
“Oh, yeah,” Grace sighed heavily. “He means well. I know he does. It’s not some dark, heavy, in-your-face kind of thing. If I told him to take them down, he would.” She tucked a strand of hair behind her ear. “You know, if Henry hadn’t been willing to stick around all these years, I doubt I’d still be here. He’s the one who finally convinced me to stay on my medication so that I could have a normal life. And after another year of complete mayhem, I did.” She paused, staring out at something in the horizon. “It changed everything. For the first time in my life, I felt as though I was living inside a relatively quiet mind.”
Monica’s hand moved up and down the length of Grace’s arm. “And then what?” she asked. “What happened last summer?”
“I got pregnant is what happened.” Grace spit the word out. “It wasn’t supposed to happen. After I got diagnosed, I decided I was never going to have a child. I was on the pill! But there it was. Life, pushing through, despite all the odds.” She bit her lip, her eyes swelling with tears. “Henry and I talked about it. You know, all the options. But I couldn’t get rid of it. I just couldn’t. Not after . . .” Grace wiped at her eyes with the back of her hand. “But every day that baby grew inside me, the more I realized that it was only thing I had ever really wanted in the entire world. The only thing maybe I’d ever wanted. And when she was born, and I looked at her for the first time, I also realized that it was also the single most selfish decision I had ever made in my life.”
“Selfish?” Monica whispered.
“I’ve given her the worst gift any person could ever give to another human being.” Grace was speaking through gritted teeth, her words chopped and precise. Nora had the feeling that she had said these words before—to Henry maybe, or just to herself—a hundred times. “I’ve passed on my own defective genes, just like my mother did to me. It won’t take long for Georgia to realize that her mind doesn’t work the way other people’s do. And when she’s in high school or college or maybe later when she finds someone and settles down, and she’s so exhausted from trying to balance herself between two worlds, she’ll try to eliminate herself. Just like I did.” Grace was choking now over her words, her fingers so tight around the top of the steering wheel that the knuckles protruded sharply beneath the skin. “I did that to her. I gave her that.”
“But, Grace!” Ozzie sat all the way forward in her seat. “You can’t—”
“PETAL!” Grace screamed. “My name is Petal!”
“No, it’s not!” Ozzie barked back. “Your goddamned name is Grace! What, was Petal something that you grabbed on to during one of your manic phases? Something you thought sounded cute or even made sense back then?”
Grace’s eyes narrowed.
“Was it?” Ozzie demanded.
“So what if it was?” Grace shot back. “Why does it bother you so much that I went and changed my stupid name?”
“Because it’s not you,” Ozzie said. “Don’t you see, Grace? It’s a symptom of your illness. And for some reason, it’s one you’re hanging on to.”
“Why would I want to hang on to my illness?”
“Maybe you don’t really want to get better.” Ozzie shrugged. “Maybe you don’t think you deserve to, or that you’re holding some torch for your mother, who never got a chance to get well. I don’t know. But this is your life. You have other options. And if you want to keep dancing the crazy dance, you’re gonna have to do it by yourself. Because I’m not gonna play along anymore.”
By the time Ozzie had finished talking, Grace’s face was another shade of pink. Her lower lip was trembling and her nostrils flared. “You’ve always thought you were the one with all the answers, haven’t you?” Her eyes strayed dangerously from the road, locking on Ozzie’s in the backseat. “Well, you know what?”
“Let’s pull over,” Monica said, tapping Grace on the shoulder. “Pull over, honey. Someone else can drive now. Please. You’re so upset. Please just pull over.”
To Nora’s relief, Grace slowed, easing the car along the side of the road and then bringing it to a stop. The silence crackled, charged like an electric cord. Grace raised her fingertips and pressed them along the edge of her forehead.
“I’m sorry,” Ozzie said, although the tone of her voice said otherwise. “I don’t think I have all the answers. And I really don’t want to make things any worse than—” She stopped as Grace raised her hand.
“Please,” Grace whispered. “Please just stop talking.”
The car fell silent, the engine humming beneath them. For a moment Nora wondered if it too was running on nervous energy.
“Monica, you stay put,” Ozzie said, yanking at the handle of her door. “I’ll drive.”
Grace lowered her hands and whipped around in her seat. “Who the hell ever died in your life and made you the boss of everyone else’s?”
Ozzie froze.
“I just took a huge risk telling you that I’m sick.” Grace’s eyes swept the inside of the car. “Telling all of you. I’m ashamed that I’m this way, okay? I don’t want anyone to know that I’m fucked up, or that I have the crazy kinds of thoughts that I do. But I told you because it’s us, and because . . . because you used to be people I could tell anything to.” She glanced at Ozzie before lowering her eyes again. “Don’t make me regret that. Please. After everything else, I don’t think that’s something I could bear right now.”