There were always tests. Always. Something more to come in for. There was always a doctor she hadn’t met with yet, someone else with an amazingly clickable pen who wanted to weigh in on her diagnosis. Someone else with a great idea. And Nora bought it every time, bought into the hope they folded into their charts and tucked into their computers while they pecked at keyboards and stared at computer screens, looking for answers. Sometimes she wondered if they were just googling, doing the same thing she did late at night. She wondered if they were looking for the same thing.
Hope.
Stubbornly, like daffodils planted on freeway medians, hope was what kept springing up over and over again. Hope that they were wrong, hope that something had changed. Sometimes Nora woke with the startling belief that a cure had been found. Somewhere—maybe Sweden, wasn’t that where they were always doing something amazing with medicine?—somewhere far away, overnight, a young medical professional had stumbled over it, the one thing that would selectively lower levels of amyloid-beta 42 and make all the difference. The one chemical with innumerable syllables that, mixed with the other seventy-two necessary substances, would fix Nora, would bring her back to where she was supposed to be.
Every day, as she jotted notes of things to remember, to do, to keep, one word kept coming up, doodled in the margins, drawn in bold at the bottoms of the pages of her journal: “Hope.”
It was a song. Hope, hope, hope.
She had it. It seemed more important than anything else she wrote down, more important than other worthwhile words like “fortitude” and “courage.” “Resilience” and “strength” were good, too, but none were as necessary as “hope.” She looped the H and drew out the last breath of the E, over and over.
One late spring morning, while she sat in the backyard watching the hummingbirds swarm the honeysuckle, Nora remembered with sudden clarity her very first diary. It had been small and pink, with a white and yellow spray of jonquils on the front. Her mother had bought it for her ninth birthday. Nora had been thrilled with everything about the locking journal, especially with the tiny brass key that fit so satisfyingly in the book’s strap, opening with an almost soundless click. She wanted to swallow the key to guarantee she wouldn’t lose it. She pictured the key deep inside her belly, safely stored away, safe from Mariana’s curious fingers and eyes.
Mariana, for that birthday, had gotten exactly what she’d asked for—a box of Fashion Plates with their gorgeous colored pencils and snapping plastic pieces that each depicted one-third of a perfect woman’s body. Talons of jealousy pierced Nora’s soul. No doubt Mariana would accidentally crumple the paper and carelessly break off the tips of the pencils. Their mother had warned Mariana when the paper had been stripped off the box, “Remember, if you break these, I can’t afford to get you another set. This is it.”
“I know,” said Mariana, her voice filled with flop-over-and-die joy. She’d clutched the white cardboard box to her chest. “I know, Mama.”
Nora felt the clawing pain of jealousy again. The only things she and Mariana were good at sharing were the bedcovers. At night after they crawled in together, Nora pulled the afghan close, and Mariana used her feet to wind the bottom sheet around them both. There was enough room for both of them. Their hair wound around each other’s and their fingers entwined. Sometimes they thought they had the same dreams. They shared the space, the very air.
Most other things they fought over.
That birthday, Ruthie sat back, looking pleased with how the gifts had been received. “Honey, I’m sorry your diary’s pink. I know you like green better. But you said you wanted it to lock and that’s all they had—I’m still not sure the lock is a good idea.”
“It’s perfect, Mama,” said Nora. “I love it.”
Her mother’s mouth twisted. “But . . . the lock, I’m just not sure . . .”
“You can use the key whenever you want to,” said Nora. She’d never lied harder in her life. The key was hers, no one else’s. She’d wear it on a piece of string around her neck until she died. She knew it was what her mother needed to hear, though. “You can even write in it, Mama.” She couldn’t; only Nora’s newly learned cursive letters would fill the book: all her dreams, her fears. All her hope.
“Oh, sugar,” said her mother happily. “I would never ask to do that, but it’s sweet of you to say.”
Mariana got the look she got when Nora got the bigger piece of cinnamon toast. “I can write in it, too, can’t I?”
“I’m sure your sister won’t mind,” said their mother, already moving toward her bedroom to change for the second half of her split shift. “Share, both of you. Happy birthday, girls.”
Nora slipped the diary under her shirt, the metal lock cold against her stomach.
“You have to share with me,” said Mariana, her voice chilly. “Mama said.”
“She did not.”
“She did. I have to share my Fashion Plates with you, and I don’t want to.”
Nora sensed a power play in the air, a way she could turn this to her advantage. “I really want to draw some dresses.” She did.
“I know you do,” said Mariana in satisfaction. “I’ll let you. If you do what I say.”
“But if you promise not to write in my diary, I won’t touch your Fashion Plates.”
Mariana glared suspiciously. “But you want to color.”
Nora made her eyes wide with need. “I do. But I won’t, if you leave my journal alone.”
“You’ll never use them once? You won’t sneak in and make a Fashion Plate while I’m in the bathroom or something?”
Nora gave up her thought of being sneaky and getting around the promise. There was nothing—usually—that she didn’t have to share with Mariana. From jeans to hair bands to the rare chocolate bar, everything got used up between them both. Nora was so tired of sharing. The journal—it could be filled with secrets. Secrets that Mariana wouldn’t even know, couldn’t even dream of. Secrets that were hers, Nora’s, alone.
“Deal,” said Nora. “I promise I’ll never use your Fashion Plates, ever.”
Still looking distrustful, Mariana stuck out her hand. “Deal.”
“And you won’t ever look in my diary.” She should stop talking. Nora knew she should. A better plan would have been to pretend she’d never use it, didn’t care about it, but she hadn’t thought of it in time.
“Okay.”
They shook hands, and it felt official. A business deal between the sisters.
It hadn’t worked, of course. Within a week, Ruthie had needed a piece of paper to make the weekly shopping list and had popped the lock in order to rip out a sheet. To Nora’s brokenhearted wail, she’d assured her, “I used a bobby pin to open it. It’ll still lock—don’t worry.”
The fact that the tiny cunning key still worked was beside the point. The safety was gone. Nora wrote in big block letters at the top of every page, STAY OUT, but then she found seven diary pages used for Fashion Plates stencils—women with blue eye shadow and incredibly short skirts—shoved under a couch cushion. In a fit of sheer rage, Nora found her mother’s thick black marker, the one that gave off fumes she knew she wasn’t supposed to breathe (thereby making inhalation terrifying and thrilling). She struck out every page in the journal.
If she couldn’t find privacy there, in the locked book, then no one would.
She was hit by remorse the very second she ruined the last page. She should never have done it—she’d ruined everything.
Again.
Nora wiped tears off her cheeks and looked up to find herself in her office.
In her home. She was in her Herman Miller chair, the one that had taken years of paid writing to justify to herself. She looked out the round window in front of the desk, down to the top of Harrison’s kitchen roof.
Hadn’t she just been in the garden? Watching the brilliance of the tiny green hummingbirds as they zoomed blurrily past? She’d been lost in the birthday memory for how long? When had she walked upstairs? Her phone said four o’clock, but she couldn’t remember what it had said the last time she looked.
Her own Moleskine journal was open on the desk in front of her. No lock. Nothing to keep anyone out.
The words were in her handwriting. She didn’t remember writing them. The page wasn’t dated. She’d left herself no clue.
In an online New Yorker article she’d found, Oliver Sacks had said, “Though one cannot have direct knowledge of one’s own amnesia, there may be ways to infer it: from the expressions on people’s faces when one has repeated something half a dozen times; when one looks down at one’s coffee cup and finds that it is empty; when one looks at one’s diary and sees entries in one’s own handwriting.”
Carefully, she wrote the date at the top of the next page. June 30. It felt good to write because it was true and verifiable by her online calendar and the fact that it matched the smudged date on her wrist, which rested above the word of the day, “obstreperous” (which had almost too many letters to fit on her skin—the smug O almost met the sinuous S). Every morning, first thing, she wrote the date along with the day of the week. Every day, she flipped open the pocket-sized Merriam-Webster she kept on her bedside table next to the bowl of beach glass and picked a word. She wrote it on her wrist under the date. She tried to pick a word she didn’t usually use in conversation so she wouldn’t accidentally run across it in daily use. She had to try to think of the day’s word: “cellulose,” “fulvous,” “prototype.”
Throughout the day, she said the word to herself. Today: obstreperous, obstreperous.
But Nora didn’t know what to write next in her journal, and she always knew what to write next. She couldn’t remember what she’d come up to her office to work on or if she’d even had a plan at all. She’d finished the column on the dementia village in San Luis Obispo. She’d turned it in to Benjamin. She knew that. But for the life of her, she couldn’t remember her next column idea. She popped open the lid of her computer and searched her calendar for Benjamin’s name.
Ah. The piece, due in a day and a half, on mothers who smoked through pregnancy.
That was all it took, really, Nora thought with satisfaction. A careful methodology. With the tools available nowadays, she could orchestrate a way to not forget things. An iPhone reminder app and her Google calendar plus lots of notifications—set minute by minute if that’s what it took—and she wouldn’t put anyone out. It would be fun, actually. It would be a really important game. And that, perhaps, was the best hiding place of all for hope. Hope lived tucked in the base of one question: If Nora played this vicious game against herself, even if she always lost, didn’t it mean (since she was both the player and her own opponent) that she also always won?