Nora waited on the couch. She’d thought about calling her friend Lily to see if she was free, if she’d come over and knit with her. But she wouldn’t be able to explain why she was like this, why she was so desperately jangled, why she must seem like she was seconds from flying apart.
She’d given up pretending to read an hour ago. She’d picked up her notebook and pencil and had doodled under her list of things to do tomorrow (check drain, buy shampoo, recover completely). She found the doodle becoming words: sex, love, flirt, man, boy.
HOW TO FLIRT
People will tell you it’s about how you touch your lower lip, how you pull your hair forward or push it over your shoulder. Some say flirting is how you touch his arm, how you laugh at what he says, how you’re just a little standoffish until the moment you’re not. But flirting has very little to do with the body. It’s about your hearing, and your sight. It’s about watching his face as he talks, thinking about what he says, and asking him the one question he wanted someone—anyone—to ask. It’s not hard. It should never be difficult. If it is, you’re trying it with the wrong person. Find someone prettier, or uglier, or more interesting, or less so. Throw your best joke at them and see if they laugh. Picture them crying with laughter and then make it your goal to see it happen. Flirting is simple: it’s connecting with one other person directly, deliberately, as the rest of the world spins on, unnoticed.
She should have known about Dylan. Before. Nora stared into the fireplace. She didn’t know how long she’d been sitting there, and after a while, she didn’t care. Hours after the rains had begun in earnest, the storm blowing up the way she wanted it to, Nora finally heard Ellie’s key in the iron security door.
“It’s past midnight,” said Nora, proud of how even her voice remained. “It’s pouring out there.” When Mariana had confessed to telling Ellie the fact that something was wrong with Nora (and nothing else, she swore, nothing else), Nora had insisted Mariana leave, cross the bridge and go home. “I was wrong. This is something I have to do by myself.”
“But we were going to tell her together.” Mariana had looked desperately hurt. “You shouldn’t have to—not without me—”
Nora had been furious with her sister but had no solid ground on which to stand. That made it so much worse. She should have told Ellie a month ago. Two months ago. The minute the first diagnosis came in from Dr. Pretty Susie.
Now, looking at her daughter’s perfectly still face, the face she knew better than her own, better even than Mariana’s, Nora said, “Come sit with me?”
“Mmm.”
Was this what the rest of her daughter’s teen years would be like? Tissue paper–thin veiled hostility masked by icy politeness? A hotel concierge who hates you but has to wish you good evening in order to get a tip?
“Come here.” Nora pulled her feet up onto the couch. In the old days, Ellie would have laughed and hurled herself at the middle cushion.
“Tired.” Ellie put her hand on the banister.
“You’ve never broken curfew before.”
“Well.” Ellie kept her eyes straight ahead, focused on the stairs in front of her. “Not that you knew of, anyway.”
“Excuse me?”
“You heard me.”
“You’ve been sneaking out?” The idea of it ached—another nail in the signboard that advertised her subpar mothering ability.
“When I feel like it.”
She didn’t believe it. “Ellie, come on.” It wasn’t fair, this part. Nora should be telling her truthfully what the future would hold. Nora should be comforting her daughter. No one knew how to dry Ellie’s tears better. No one knew how to pet her until she fell into sleep, rubbing her shoulders in small round circles. It had worked from the first moment she’d laid baby Ellie in the hospital bed next to her, and it worked now. Even on really rough days—the ones when Nora couldn’t say one damn word right to Ellie, the days of slammed doors and exasperated eye rolls and sighs so heavy they required handcarts to remove—if she went into Ellie’s room after her light was out and rubbed her daughter’s shoulders in those small circles, she would hear Ellie slip into heavier breathing, unable to hold any grudge all night.
It was the best sound in the whole world.
Right now, though, Ellie felt so far away. Miles, not just fifteen paces. She was three steps up the staircase. Ten to go. Ellie stared straight ahead, her face paper blank. “Anything else?”
It was childish, and god knew Nora should be trying her hardest to be the parent here. But she couldn’t help asking, “You don’t want to know?”
Eyes still resolutely forward. “Know what?”
“Mariana told me she started—”
“No. I don’t want to know. Keep your private life private.”
And stay out of mine. Even unspoken, the words were loud and clear. “Honey, this can’t be private.”
“Just don’t have twins—can I at least ask you that much?”
Nora spluttered, “What?”
“I know you’re pregnant. Harrison’s baby. Or babies. Whatever.”
“Ellie!”
Her daughter still stared straight ahead. Nora could only see the side of her jaw.
“Harrison’s a good guy. If you want to get married, that’s fine by me. Don’t make me be a flower girl or anything, but . . .”
Nora could hear in her daughter’s tone, in the rigid set of her corded neck, that nothing was fine, nothing at all. But the truth was so much worse.
“I’m not pregnant. I’m sorry you thought I was. The truth is—”
“No!”
“We have to talk.”
“Whatever it is”—Ellie put one foot on the step ahead and dragged herself up, as if she’d gained a hundred pounds in the previous thirty seconds—“I don’t want to hear it. I don’t care.”
The blow was effective, cruel in its sharpness and thrust. “Stop.” It was her mom voice, the one she’d never had to use that often with Ellie. It was the “wait for the light, don’t run at the pool, watch out for that car” voice. Maybe in the future they were going to be that mother-daughter duo who couldn’t stand each other, the kind she and Ellie had always laughed about in Target, the ones who bickered viciously over what kind of dorm-room throw pillow to buy, as if tassels or cords made any kind of real difference at college.
Then the tips of Nora’s fingers ached as the realization surged through her blood again.
They weren’t going to be that duo.
They had, what, two or three more years of this teenage discomfort? She wouldn’t be around long enough to see it out, to see her daughter magically like her again, the way her friends told her she would, the friends who’d been through this teen-girl hell. Nora would be lucky if Ellie deigned to wheel her outdoors on a Sunday afternoon at whatever care home she landed in.
Anger ran her over then, like she’d once done to a possum on Highway 120. A solid thunk and the car rattled as if it would come apart. The thud was anger not just at the disease, not just at the fact that she had no idea what was going to happen to her, mentally or physically, but at the child in front of her who didn’t seem to give a crap about anything.
“I’m dying,” Nora said.
Ellie didn’t even blink. “I don’t want to talk about it.”
It was the last thing Nora had expected. A scream, a wail, maybe sobs—those she would have been able to handle. Collapsing to the staircase, falling down it, she could have understood that. “Well. We have to.”
Ellie shook her head. “I’m just super-tired.”
“Are you kidding me? I tell you I’m dying, and you need your beauty sleep?” The word “dying,” the one she thought would stop her heart the very second she said it out loud to her daughter, came easily. Gleefully. “Dying,” she said again.
“We can talk tomorrow.”
“You have school tomorrow.”
“That reminds me, I have a test in physics.” Ellie’s nose went higher, something she always did when she refused to listen.
Nora wanted to threaten her with something, anything. Turn out your light. It’s after midnight. No studying. You blew it, going out with that boy instead of coming home. You should have been home talking to me. You’re grounded for the rest of your life. No, for the rest of my life.
But there was nothing she could say. It was selfish, and truly, if she could have spared her daughter ever knowing, she would have. She’d fantasized about suicide, leaving Ellie behind without a conversation, a note on the counter the only clue. I love you. I’m sorry. Then she would die (pills? gun? where? how? what was the kindest, easiest method?) without ever having to talk to her daughter about it.
Nothing was right, nothing at all. The anger left her in a rush, leaving a burned-out husk seated on the couch she’d picked out by herself after Paul left. “Okay, sugar. Good night.”
Okay, sugar. Good night. How many nights had she said that? She could get out a calendar and add up the numbers, get an approximation of the total amount. What Nora couldn’t do was estimate the number of times she had left to say it to her daughter. After she was gone, who would wish her girl sweet dreams? Because Paul—it could never be Paul. Even if Paul wanted to take care of his daughter, he’d fail. The one summer Ellie had gone to stay with them—once—Ellie had been back inside a week. Paul had left her at home, twice, while the rest of the family went to dinner and a movie. He’d blamed his wife, that she felt threatened by Ellie. But Nora knew—and Paul knew—it was him. He’d never asked his daughter back, just saw her when he came through town on business, never more than an hour at a time. When he’d left his first family, he’d left them for good. Paul couldn’t have Ellie. He wouldn’t want her, and that was utterly heartbreaking in and of itself. It would have to be Mariana. Nora’s brain stalled, caught in the pain, still watching her daughter standing—seemingly stuck—halfway up, halfway down the stairs.
Wouldn’t it have to be Mariana?
Ellie didn’t look at Nora. Her chin just went higher in the air. “What is it, the thing you have?”
If Nora told her, Ellie would google it in her room. She would learn that EOAD ended badly. Worse than that, she’d learn that she herself had a fifty percent chance of having it. Nora couldn’t say the words, not with her daughter halfway up the steps.
But she couldn’t not answer. That would be the cruelest thing of all.
So she said it. “It’s called early-onset Alzheimer’s.”
Ellie gave a terse nod and then continued up the stairs, her spine ramrod straight.
Her strength was what terrified Nora the most.
She drank the glass of wine she hadn’t let herself have while she’d been waiting for Ellie to get home from god knew where. She sipped it slowly, the unshed tears a solid mass of pain behind her eyes.
A careful, deliberate fifteen minutes later, she went upstairs. She knocked on Ellie’s door once, gently, before opening it.
The light was off in her daughter’s room, a faint white glow coming from where the covers were bunched around Ellie’s face.
Ellie dropped the phone, and then Nora could see nothing but her daughter’s huge green eyes, as gorgeous as they’d been the day they’d handed her baby to her in the hospital.
“Mama,” she whispered.
Nora pulled back the covers and slid in. Then she held her baby as the storm passed overhead.