In the next days, she might as well have been invisible to him. Until Claire came home, he could sit silently through breakfast, take his second cup of coffee out to the clinic rather than drinking it with Nora. He could sit in his easy chair all evening, ignoring her. He could walk upstairs to Jo’s bedroom and go to sleep.
Nora could spend hours at the shop, talking to Diane. Or sit in the kitchen staring out the window and tell herself why she shouldn’t e-mail Tom – until she couldn’t stand it anymore and went up to Claire’s room and did it anyway. To have told him about what was happening with Charlie would have felt like too great a betrayal, so, instead, she wrote to him about what she remembered: small things, mostly, moments that floated up and pierced her heart.
Friday morning, she woke full of dread. When Charlie had gone to the clinic, she went into Claire’s room and e-mailed Tom.
FROM JBMI65@aol.com
SUBJECT No Subject
DATE SENT Friday, December 18 12:46 PM
Claire’s coming home today, and she’ll be using the computer so I have to delete this e-mail account while she’s here. I’m scared, Tom. I can’t imagine how to talk to her, how it can turn out right. But I have to try.
SUBJECT RE: No Subject
DATE SENT Friday, December 18 12:55 PM
I understand. Take care.
She deleted the account and felt for a moment neither Nora nor Jane – nobody at all. She’d stop this thing with Tom for good, she told herself. She had to. She wouldn’t e-mail him again – or she’d e-mail him one more time to tell him that she and Charlie had come to an understanding after all. Claire was what mattered, and they’d work together, find a way to be what she needed them to be.
She couldn’t help but brighten when Claire burst in that afternoon, so full of life. She talked all through supper – about her finals, which she thought she had done well on, and about Dylan, with whom she was clearly even more in love.
“It’s so good to be home,” she said, beaming at both of them. If she thought it odd that, moments later, Charlie got up and went out to the kennels, she didn’t mention it, but chattered on to Nora about a dozen different things.
Nor was she alarmed when Nora dissolved into tears opening the narcissus bulbs that Charlie gave her on Christmas morning. He got them every year for her; she’d set them on Petoskey stones piled in the bottom of glass vases, water them, and mid-January the whole house would be full of their scent.
“Mom,” Claire teased. “Get a grip!”
“They’re just always so beautiful,” Nora said, thinking, When they bloom, will I be here?
On New Year’s Eve – Claire at a party with some high school friends, Monique and Diane in Chicago with Carah – Nora lit a fire and sat down across from Charlie, determined to convince him this time that telling Claire the truth was the right thing to do.
“I want to have a real relationship with her,” she said. “And I can’t, if I don’t tell her the truth about my life. It’s her life, too. Charlie, even if things were perfectly normal, our relationship with Claire would be changing. It has to change. We can either keep pretending she’s just our little girl or start to try to develop an adult relationship with her.”
“She’s my child,” he said. “I don’t want an adult relationship with her. I want to take care of her and protect her, like my mom did for me. That’s what parents do – as long as they’re able.”
Nora started to argue that, if Jo could, she’d tell him that Nora was right, that they had to be honest with Claire – but, quite suddenly, she wasn’t at all sure what Jo would say. She’d cared for and fiercely protected Charlie, yes, but in so doing she’d allowed him to be emotionally dependent upon her. In truth, she’d allowed Nora to be dependent on her, too. Why wouldn’t she feel the same way about Claire? If Nora had been able to tell Jo the truth, would she have counseled her to keep it a secret from Charlie?
Her mind reeled, she felt half-sick at the rush of thoughts that followed. Jo loved Nora, but that love had been based on someone she was not. She could never know now if Jo could have forgiven her for the harm the lie at the center of her life had brought to Charlie. Could Jo have loved the mix of Jane and Nora she now knew she had to learn to become. Could anyone?
“Charlie,” she said. “I have to tell Claire. Help me. Please.”
“Help you what?” he said. “Break her heart? I really don’t see any good reason to do that, Nora. Unless you have some plan I don’t know about.”
“What plan?” Nora asked.
She knew from the way he looked at her and shrugged his shoulders that he meant Tom.
“It’s not about that,” she said. “I don’t have any plan. But, Charlie, Claire must know something’s wrong between us by now. She’s been home nearly two weeks and we haven’t said anything but the absolute bare minimum to each other. And you think she hasn’t noticed that you’re sleeping in Jo’s room, but –”
“She doesn’t know that,” he said. “I’m up and out of there way before she wakes up in the morning. I keep the door closed at night.”
“Maybe,” Nora said. “But if you intend to sleep in Jo’s room forever –”
“I’m not prepared to talk about my . . . sleeping arrangements.”
“Well, what are you prepared to talk about?” Nora asked. “We can’t keep on this way. I’ve said I’m sorry, Charlie. I am sorry – for the hurt I’ve caused you. But I can’t take back what you know; I’m not sure I’d take it back if I could. It was wrong trying to pretend what I did never happened. It was there all the time, anyway. I didn’t even realize what it was doing to me, to us until I –”
“Spare me the therapy, okay?”
“It’s not therapy,” she said. “It’s true. It’s also true that this is the way it is now, and we have to deal with it.”
“You deal with it,” he said. “Or talk it to death with Diane. Or –” He shrugged again. “Whatever his name is.”
“Tom. His name is Tom, but this has nothing to do with him. It’s about us – you and me and Claire.”
He picked up a magazine from the clutter of them on the coffee table and leafed through it. Claire’s Seventeen. It would have been funny, Nora thought, the sight of him reading a magazine with the photograph of a teenage fashionista on the front – except nothing was funny between them right now. She went and put a log on the fire, watched it flare up. By the time she returned to her chair, Charlie had put down the magazine and was on his way upstairs. She heard the door of Jo’s room close behind him.
She sat awhile by the fire, then put her jacket on and went outdoors, Astro yipping at her feet. He leapt through the knee-deep snow like a dolphin, circling around her as she walked toward the edge of the forest. She had tucked her jeans into her boots, but they were quickly soaked through. Her feet freezing.
It was so beautiful, though. The night was clear, moonlight illuminating the snow in the meadow so that it glittered like a field of stars fallen from the sky – and the old farmhouse, her home, in the center of it all. Though it could not feel like home again until she was right with her daughter in it.
It was just past nine o’clock, hours before Claire would return. Nora walked back to the house in her own tracks, showered to warm herself. She put on her nightgown and robe, made a pot of tea, and sat alone by the fire to wait for her. She felt calm for the first time in a long while, grounded in the moment. It was right, what she meant to do. Necessary. Regardless of what might come of it. It seemed strange to her to think that she’d ever considered any other option.
“Sit, Honey,” she said, when Claire came in. “There’s something I need to tell you.”
“What?” Claire said, alarmed. “Where’s Dad?”
“Sleeping,” Nora said. “It’s not that. He’s all right.”
“Then –”
“Honey, sit down. Please.”
Claire sat on the edge of Charlie’s chair. “You and dad aren’t –? I mean, you’ve been so weird since I’ve been home. Are you getting a divorce?”
She looked so fearful that, for a moment, Nora thought she couldn’t go on.
“Mom –” Claire said, urgently.
“No,” Nora said. “It’s something about myself I need to tell you. I’m not sick,” she added quickly. “I promise. It’s something about –
“Remember, I got so . . . upset about your wanting to go to IU?”
“Of course, I remember,” Clare said. “But what’s that got to do –”
“The thing is,” Nora said, “I went there myself. I never told anybody. Because –”
“You went there?” Claire asked, leaning forward. “Mom, what do you mean you went there?”
“To college,” Nora said. “When I was a girl, when I was your age. I know. You thought I didn’t go to college, but I did. There.”
“And you didn’t tell anybody?” Claire said. “But why? And why were you so, well, shitty about it when I decided it was where I wanted to go?”
Nora flinched at her words. “I –” She had not meant to cry, but suddenly tears were streaming down her cheeks. “Because I was afraid to go back there,” she said. “Because I knew if that’s where you decided to go, I’d have to go back.”
She paused, collected herself. Claire watched, a wariness in her expression that Nora had never seen.
“I was involved in the antiwar movement in the sixties,” she went on. “I got caught up in something that, well, it turned out very, very badly. And I ran away from it. From my life. I thought I could really do that.”
“Mom,” Claire said. “What are you talking about? What did you do?”
Nora told her, briefly, and Claire stood, lurching, as if she’d been hit.
“You’re not –” she began. “I mean, who are you if you’re not –”
Nora stood to go to her, but she stepped back. “Honey,” she said. “Claire.”
“No. Don’t talk to me. Don’t tell me anymore. I don’t want to hear!”
“Claire, please.”
But she turned and fled up the stairs to her bedroom.
“I’m going to Dylan’s,” she announced in the morning. Her voice was cold, firm. “I got my ticket online last night. I’ve got a ride to the airport in Traverse City. Right now, I just need to be with him.”
“Now see what you’ve done?” Charlie said, when she’d gone – and refused to say another word about it. Claire’s anger Nora could accept, and even the precipice of silence she slipped into once she’d gone to be with Dylan. But the quiet distance Charlie so determinedly continued to put between them, the sense that she had become invisible to him, she did not think she could bear.
A week passed. Though the final report of the weapons inspectors would not be in until the end of the month, there was news of troop deployments to Kuwait, aircraft carriers moving toward the Persian Gulf. Rumors of air squadrons departing for bases in Al Jaber, something else Charlie refused to acknowledge, along with the fact that Jo had grown weaker, more distant since her illness in December. She slept more and resisted getting out of bed when she woke, curling away from the nurse or from Nora herself, covering her face with her gnarled hands.
“Charlie, talk to me. Please,” she finally said.
But he stood and walked out to the clinic, his breakfast left half-eaten on the kitchen table. Watching through the window, Nora felt as she did in the relaxation part of her yoga tape, no more than the sound of her own breath, uncertain where the edges of her body met the air. But the sensation was not a happy one, as it had seemed when she was using the tape – a reason to do yoga. Instead, it frightened her.
She walked, thinking the feeling would dissolve. But it didn’t. She longed to talk to Diane, but didn’t want to call her in Chicago, where she’d gone to be with Carah in this last week before the baby’s birth.
By lunchtime, she felt a headache coming on and lay down on Claire’s bed. Snow had begun to fall and she was grateful for the way it dulled the daylight, darkening the room so that it seemed almost like evening. She slept awhile, dreamed herself, Jane, shouting at her own mother, “I can’t be here. I can’t listen to you anymore. Don’t you see that Bobby died for nothing? Nothing, Mom. Nothing at all.”
Jolting awake, she thought of Claire. She got up and went to the computer to see if she’d sent an e-mail. No. Nothing since the brief message she’d sent to say she’d arrived safely in Cincinnati. Had she talked to Charlie, Nora wondered – perhaps called him at the clinic during the time she knew her mother took her morning walk? Had Charlie called her? Nora had no idea what either of them might do. How they might be, who they might be without her. That was when she made a new e-mail account and wrote to Tom. Because he was real, because she knew he would answer her.
FROM MIJB65@aol.com
SUBJECT No Subject
DATE SENT Thursday, Jan 9, 2003 12:46 PM
I told both Charlie and Claire everything, and it was a terrible mistake. Claire left the next day and went to be with her boyfriend; Charlie won’t talk to me. I can’t think. I don’t know what to do, just what I can’t do, which is to keep on as if I’d never had a life before I came here.
SUBJECT RE: No Subject
DATE SENT Thursday, Jan 9, 2003 1:07 PM
Do you want me to come?
FROM MIJB65@aol.com
SUBJECT No Subject
DATE SENT Tuesday, Jan 9, 2003 1:10 PM
Yes.
SUBJECT RE: No Subject
DATE SENT Thursday, Jan 9, 2003 1:15 PM
Heading for Traverse City as soon as I wrap up a few things here. I’ll find a place to stay there. Let me know where/when to meet you tomorrow. You’ve got my cell number. Call if you need to talk before that.
FROM MIJB65@aol.com
SUBJECT RE: No Subject
DATE SENT Thursday, Jan 9, 1:25 PM
Drive to the public beach at Monarch. Walk south, and in about fifteen minutes you’ll see a downed tree near the water, and just after that, just before the lake curves, some weird little stone sculptures up on the sand. I always walk in the morning around eight. That’s where I’ll be.