When Nora planned the Easter Alcatraz jaunt, she hadn’t planned on the rain. Riding the ferry to the defunct jail was usually a pleasant crossing of famous waters. When they’d gone in the past, they’d always remained on the top deck of the ferry, no matter how strong the wind or thick the fog. But with the miserable damp that ranged from drizzle to downpour, they had to stay in the main cabin, packed inside, competing for room with tourists who jousted with elbows like padded swords as they attempted to get lousy photos of the city through breath-misted glass. The smell of sodden wool and wet dog wrestled with a cloud of cologne and fading excitement. “I thought no one would be here,” Nora said in astonishment as they’d looked at the line of people trying to buy coffee at the inside counter. “It’s a holiday. No one’s supposed to be here.”
At least Nora, Mariana, and Ellie had managed to score three seats together. All Nora had seen when they’d boarded was a mass of people circling like chum. Her boarding stub pressed against her palm like a tiny knife. Mariana said, “We’ll never get to sit together.”
“Yes, we will.” Nora wasn’t at all sure of this.
“Whatever.” Mariana had that giving-up sound in her voice, the tone Nora hated the most. Ellie was the sixteen-year-old, not Mariana.
So Nora, who’d always been the one good at scoping out the overview of a situation and summing up what needed to be done, led them confidently to a section where two seats were available. A small child played on the edge of the third, hopping between it and his mother’s lap. As gracefully as she could, Nora slid her purse onto the seat of the chair while the child scrabbled on his mother’s shoulders between leaps. “You don’t mind, do you? This is my sister and my daughter. Oh, isn’t your son a cutie? You see, Mariana?” she said triumphantly. “Plenty of room.”
“Sit by me, sit by me,” said Ellie to Mariana, the same way she had as a child. Ellie had always loved her aunt, from the very first moment.
Well, not the first moment.
Mariana hadn’t been there for that. She’d been in India for the second time (this time she’d communicated by e-mail at least), studying yoga and her third eye. She hadn’t made the flight back home, the one Nora had booked and paid for, the one that would bring her twin back to her for the most important moment of her life, the moment Ellie entered the world.
A taxi problem, Mariana had said later. “Lost one tire, then another. I rode to town on the back of a motorcycle to grab another cab, but it was a tiny town, and the other cabdriver had died the week before. We had to wait for the guy’s uncle to come back. It was kind of a big deal.”
Nora had been in the middle of a much bigger deal, she’d been pretty damn sure. Ellie had gotten stuck and she’d almost needed a cesarean. She could hear her sister’s voice when Paul held the phone up, but Mariana wasn’t there. It didn’t count. When Ellie was finally bundled and passed into her arms, it had hurt to hold the baby without being able to show her to her sister. Ellie looked exactly like they had as a child: bright slapped red with a shock of black silky hair that stuck straight up. Sending the first video via e-mail to her sister wasn’t the same. Nora found she couldn’t even push the send button. She made Paul do it.
When Mariana had finally come to meet her niece, a whole three days late, Ellie’s birth-pale eyes had already darkened. Angrily, Nora hadn’t wanted to hand her sister the baby, who’d been crying most of the day. Most of her life, it seemed. Mariana didn’t deserve to hold this bundle, this part of herself.
Finally, Mariana snapped, “I’m sorry I missed her birth. All right? I’ll keep saying it if it makes you happy. Is that what you want? You know I would have done anything I could to be with you, and I couldn’t and it wasn’t my fault.”
“You’re just . . .” It was never Mariana’s fault. Nora looked at Ellie’s face, covered in angry tiny bumps. Her mouth was wide, busy with furious hiccups. Her hands were clenched in fists. “Sometimes . . . you’re careless.”
“Careless?”
“Not sometimes. You’re always careless.”
“You’re worried I’ll break your baby?”
Mariana broke lots of things. It was something to worry about.
But finally Nora said, “Here.” She thrust Ellie at her twin. “Knock yourself out.” Ellie would scream—she always did when taken from her mother’s arms, not that she didn’t do it in her arms, too.
Mariana’s face had shifted, softening. Ellie immediately quieted and stared upward, as if trying to figure out the differences between this new woman and the woman who normally held her. “Oh,” said Mariana. “Hello, my wee chipmunk.”
Mariana’s whole body held Ellie, not just her arms. A sudden earthquake could have tossed them all to the ground, and Mariana would have held up an unscathed Ellie seconds later, Nora knew, taking the entire hit herself. Ellie was as safe in Mariana’s arms as she was in Nora’s. Safer, perhaps, without the mother’s baggage, which came complete with a roll-aboard of concern and a carry-on of guilt.
Ellie calmed.
Cooed.
Her face smoothed, the red turned to pink, and her little fists relaxed into starfishes.
It would have been unbearable if it hadn’t been Mariana.
Instead, it was gorgeous.
It was still like that, even now, on the ferry. Ellie leaned comfortably against Mariana’s arm as they both looked down at something on Ellie’s cell phone. Her daughter never did that casual lean anymore with Nora. They used to cuddle on the couch at night with their feet tucked under each other’s. Now any physical contact was rare. Ellie ducked Nora’s hands, which moved to smooth her hair, scooting out of hugs too quickly. Nora wanted to clutch but knew she couldn’t; it would only make it worse. She remembered the feeling of ducking their own mother, of desperately wanting the hug offered and at the same time feeling like she might stop breathing if she had to take it.
Knitting might help. She took out the green sock she’d been working on for months. What she lacked in skill, she made up for in enthusiasm. Or at least she hoped her enjoyment of knitting would help hide the two holes she’d already left behind, one in the toe, the other at the heel. She was knitting them toe up and would stop eventually, when they were long enough. Her friend Lily had said they were ugly. “Puke green, that’s what that is. That yarn should be illegal.”
Lily. She’d almost told her. Almost spilled the diagnosis a few weeks before when they’d met at a coffee shop to knit together. “I know you’re hiding something,” Lily had said. Her nimble fingers made the lacework she was doing look easy.
Nora had held her sock in progress crumpled in her fist. She’d gotten as far as, “I . . . ,” before her voice stopped as if she’d swallowed a cork.
She and Lily had met two years before, when Nora had shown up at a stitch-n-bitch. Nora herself knitted a little bit, just like she quilted and crocheted and scrapbooked. She knew how. These women were different—knitting was their language, how they moved through the world. They recorded what they believed by the yarn they held. Nora’s recorder on the couch next to her, her notebook on her lap, she’d attempted to divine from the knitters what it meant to them—this yarn-as-life movement. Is it a reclamation of the domesticity of the hearth? she’d asked. Does it bring you back to your roots? Were your grandmothers shepherdesses? Do you feel wisdom in the fiber? Lily had pushed down her oversized black glasses and said, “Cut the shit. We just like to drink wine together. This is more fun than a damn book club. Put your recorder away, huh? Just knit with us.” They’d been close friends since that moment.
But that morning, a few weeks ago, Nora hadn’t been able to tell her. Lily had known something was wrong, but she’d just waved her ice blue yarn in her direction. “Just knit, darlin’. Tell me if you want to. I’m here. Till then I’m going to tell you how I found not one, not two, but three vaporizers in my son’s room. I would think if you had one, you wouldn’t need another one, right? How much weed can one eighteen-year-old smoke? Or vape, or whatever it is they’re doing these days.” She threw her yarn over the needle with a sigh. “Be glad you have a girl. Boys are the worst.”
Nora had gone home, the destructive secret still caught inside her. She couldn’t believe she’d even considered telling Lily before Mariana. Before Ellie. If she said it out loud, it might make it true, it might make her believe it, and while she was almost there, it still wasn’t real. Not quite yet. When she told Mariana, it would be true. When she told Ellie, she might stop breathing forever.
The Alcatraz boat rolled with a wake and Nora felt her stomach answer. Ellie giggled and pointed happily to something on her screen. Mariana nodded and said something Nora couldn’t catch.
Suddenly Nora couldn’t remember the last time she and Ellie had slept in the same bed. Ellie always used to want her to climb in bed with her. God, could it have been two years? Was she fourteen the last time they fell asleep listening to each other’s breathing? Or thirteen? Was this the disease? Or just a misplaced memory that anyone could have lost?
Nora missed Ellie desperately, and she was only a chair away on the other side of her twin. How much worse would it get? The balls of Nora’s feet ached with longing. If only she could just reach around Mariana and wrap a tendril of Ellie’s hair around her finger. For that matter, she wanted to grab the edge of Mariana’s wool coat and dig her fingers in and hold on, long after the ferry docked and the tourists departed. They’d be the last three on the boat. Nora would be wrapped in and around Mariana and Ellie, her feet hooked around their ankles, her hands clutching whatever part of their clothing she could grab. The people who worked on the boat would come to move them along, kick them out to join the tour, and Nora would put her head back and scream and not let them rip her from the two people she needed most.
Mariana noticed, of course. “Is something wrong?”
“Nah,” said Nora. She flapped the end of the sock.
“You’re never going to finish knitting that thing.” Mariana drew back as a child raced past. “And I don’t believe you.”
Nora smiled at her sister. “It’s nothing. Nothing much. Tell you later.”