Two

Nora reclines on the couch, her hands crossed over her stomach. She tries not to think about how she must look with her head propped on the pillow. Hannah Portman was probably being arranged into a similar pose at that moment.

“I think it’s the wrong one who’s gone, if you want to know the truth.” Her voice sounds shaky. Starting is always the hardest part. But she is here to air her most toxic thoughts, to let them out. “If there were any justice in the world, it would have been him. Instead there he is, alive and kicking, never an illness of any kind. Though he likes to complain enough.”

Her heart is at a trot and she breathes to steady it. “My dad thinks they’re snooty. Leo’s parents, I mean. When he first heard about the annual party, he just about fell over laughing. But my mom—I think she understood. The thing about Michael and June is that they have these rules. And, yeah, June comes down hard on people who never got the manual. But no one in that house ever yells. There’s something to be said for that.

“I’m supposed to be doing more with my life. It’s what my dad says. ‘Got into Yale, and for what? All that debt, for what?’ But I’m the one with the student loans. It’s not like they’re his problem.

“I get it from other people, too, even if they don’t come out and say it. Like my program director.” Although, in a way, he’d said exactly that. “You were not born to be a teacher,” he told her crossly at graduation. “Why are you throwing your talent away?”

“Stephen, too. It’s obvious he hopes I’ll go back to opera. He’ll be embarrassed for me when I get introduced around today. Almost thirty, giving voice lessons. A lounge singer.

“Meanwhile, Stephen has this total attitude with teaching. He calls his students morons. He thinks his parents are pretentious, but who is he to call anyone a snob? Why begrudge people their hobbies?” She feels where her thoughts want to take her, the justifications and rationalizing. Pulling your hair out isn’t normal, she knows. It’s no hobby.

“With today . . . it annoys me, I guess, that I’m so aware of it. Everyone else at the service will be thinking about their own shit. How they need to go to the supermarket, the emails they need to write. And I envy them. They don’t get what a luxury that is, to be bored at a funeral.

“My mom’s funeral wasn’t exactly official. We had people over to the house, like a morose party.” Nora thinks back to that afternoon, neighbors milling about the living room. “We should’ve done something nicer. But my dad—” He told Nora about the arrangements before she could object. “Those funeral homes cost a fortune,” he grumbled, and she was too exhausted to fight him. “My dad had the last say. So there wasn’t even a eulogy.” There was only the cardboard box of ashes sitting unceremoniously on the coffee table. The box was long and rectangular, as if it might be holding a pair of boots.

Nora lifted the cover after everyone left. The ashes were coarser than she expected, gritty and uneven. The lack of uniformity alarmed her. She touched one of the shards through the clear, thick plastic and felt a strange urge to pocket it. She replaced the lid hurriedly, appalled by her own desire.

“So today, it’s not like it’s the same. I didn’t really know Leo and Stephen’s grandmother. I saw her at Delancey a couple of times. I swear the woman never said a word. She just sat there. I once told Stephen it was like she’d been taxidermied. He got so mad at me—maybe the maddest I’ve ever seen him.

“Anyway, it’s not like today dredges up all these memories. It’s not like I’m going to stand there and have it all come flooding back. Part of me is curious to see what a real funeral is like. I’m sure Michael and June shelled out for it. And I’ve never been to a synagogue before.” Nora frowns. Will there even be a burial? It’s what she has been picturing, a stately cemetery scene, but suddenly she isn’t sure. She should ask Leo, though he might not know. Only Stephen had converted.

“I couldn’t sleep last night, so it must be on my mind.” Couldn’t sleep and had pulled, but she doesn’t say it. “The thing I can’t figure out is if it really bothers me or if it’s just supposed to bother me. There are these times when her being gone comes up for real.” Like when Leo had proposed. Nora couldn’t call the one person she most wanted to tell; she didn’t want to call the one person she had left. “But there are other times where it comes up in a fake way. Like I’m supposed to be thinking about it. Like it’s my duty.

“It’s not that I imagine her doing all these mother/daughter things with me. I don’t know that she would’ve taken me wedding dress shopping, for example. That wasn’t like her.” Nora pictures her mom at the kitchen table with the bills and the mail, stapling things, highlighting things, an office manager to her core. She would tap the papers when she was finished, the corners perfectly aligned.

“Grandma Portman died suddenly. She was old, but it happened fast. And I wonder what that’s like.” Nora’s eyes roam the ceiling. There is a pattern, fifth tile up, second across: a woman in profile. If she stares at the tile long enough, her face comes into focus—the hook of her nose, the broad plane of her forehead.

“They used to call it a nadir,” she remembers. “After a course of chemo, the cell counts would dip. That was the medical term for it. I kept waiting for someone to be like, ‘I know, I know, poor choice of words.’ Like it isn’t bad enough you’re going through this awful period, but then they have to come out and call it that? It’s like if they were to call chemo ‘suffering.’ Or cancer ‘that sucky thing.’ ‘What does she have?’ ‘Oh, that sucky thing of the liver. But we’re treating it with suffering.’ And the worst part is, soon enough, you’re nodding along. Because you’ve forgotten that the word once meant anything else. You forget the nadir isn’t temporary. It’s now your whole life.

“I guess you can’t go through all of that without getting used to it. She had so many trips to the ER that we stopped freaking out. How awful is that? We should have freaked out every time. But that tenth emergency—it can’t feel like the first.

“Michael and June got the one phone call. They never had to go through what I did. My mom got diagnosed my sophomore year. That’s, what? Seven years of phone calls.”

Nora shakes her head. “I guess, at a certain point, my mom and I sort of drifted apart. Leo and I had that amazing summer together. It seems so ridiculous that I did that. She’d just been diagnosed. There I was, gallivanting around—” She stops. It’s what her dad would say. “There you go, gallivanting around! A selfish girl.” “The truth is that it was hard to be around her. She used to joke that cancer was like a mistress. I didn’t know what she meant, but maybe now I do. She couldn’t be with her kid with the mistress in town.

“I stopped knowing how to hang out with her. I didn’t know how to be. I tried to make myself useful. I took her to chemo a few times, but she didn’t like anyone else driving her car. ‘I have those mirrors set just right,’ she’d say. Then we’d get there and she’d sit in her chair with her magazines. She never wanted ice chips or a blanket—she got annoyed if you offered. So I just stood there, not knowing what to do, feeling like I was in the way.

“The stuff she complained about was minor. There was this nurse she thought was rude, this black woman with long fingernails. I hated it when she complained about her. I thought it was racist. ‘Those damn fingernails,’ she’d say. ‘It can’t be hygienic.’ ‘Cut it out, Mom,’ I’d tell her.

“Maybe I was preparing myself for it. I don’t know. Maybe I latched onto Leo and his family because I knew what was coming. Maybe that’s why no one talked to Grandma Portman. Maybe you disengage without realizing it because some part of you knows.”

Nora nods at the ceiling, sees the words before her, the truth of them. “Everyone thinks the past is the nightmare, that I just need to wake up from it. But the past isn’t the nightmare at all. It’s the present that threatens to consume you. Because at least in the past I had her.

“I don’t know what to do with myself. Every day, I have this feeling of not knowing what to do.” Nora stops, swallows. “It feels like I’m in a swimming pool filled with tar, with a three-hundred-pound backpack on. It takes everything I have just to stay afloat. And I don’t know if that’s okay. Do you fake it more? Fake it less? Does ‘fake it till you make it’ work?”

Her fingers find the couch beneath her and probe its surface.

“Then there’s the wedding. It’s always there. Even at the funeral today—a funeral, of all places. Everyone will look at the ring and ask if I have a dress.” Nora bites the hard ridge of her cuticle. She feels a sharp peal of pain as it separates that isn’t altogether unpleasant.

“I guess the whole time she was sick, I fooled myself. You tell yourself these things, like, ‘Oh, it’s not cancer cancer.’ What does that even mean? And you see her not looking great, but she looks that way for months. So you forget that she once looked any different.

“Meanwhile, there’s the hospital stuff around the house—the beige water pitcher, the pink kidney-bean thing. You hate that stuff, but it comes in handy. Maybe that’s a mistake. Maybe you should never let the kidney-bean thing into your home in the first place.

“I still try and fake myself out. Like I’ll put off paying my credit card bill—which used to drive her nuts—so that, for a second, I can hear her getting upset about it. ‘You paid your MasterCard bill yet? It’s the second already! You can’t leave it till the grace period, Nora.’ I do these things to bring her voice back for just a minute.

“Anyway. The time it hit me, I think for real, was when I went to call her. I want to say it was the night of her funeral, but I could be wrong. It might have been the next day. Those first few days were a blur. But here’s what’s funny: I picked up the phone because I wanted to tell her about how weird the funeral had been. That’s what was running through my head.

“I was in the middle of dialing when I stopped. It’s like that feeling people talk about with phantom limbs: that used to be there, but it’s not anymore. Like a tickle from what’s gone.

“And later, I think a few hours later, I dialed anyway. I guess I wanted to see what would happen. Like there was a chance I’d imagined it all. And before I could confirm it by looking around the room and seeing the flowers or my dress, I dialed.

“I heard it ringing on my end. Doesn’t that mean it has to be ringing somewhere else? I never found out what happened to her stuff—her cell phone, her purse. I imagined her phone lighting up. And it seemed, for just a minute, that someone would answer. That someone would have to.

“It rang and rang. I didn’t even get to hear her voice. She was one of those people who never recorded a message. Thought it was silly. So there was just that automated one. You know, where it goes, ‘Hello. Please leave a message after the tone.’ That was when I realized: from now on, I’d be talking into space.”