By four o’clock, when Nora heard Mariana enter, Ellie was on the couch again, playing her game. But that was okay. Ellie had cleaned up the whole turkey mess while Nora had been taking deep breaths in her bedroom, trying to remember—trying so hard to figure out what had happened to the turkey. Ellie had cleaned up the stuffing and washed the spoon that Nora had used on it. A smell of bleach hung in the air with a toxic tang, almost canceling out the scent of freshly baked bread (Nora had gotten up at dawn to set it to rise) and pumpkin spice (ice cream cake, since no one in the family liked pie).
The smell of death was gone.
Mariana swung into the kitchen with a green shopping bag under her arm. “I got three bottles of Martinelli’s, two of wine, and one good Scotch, which Harrison and I will enjoy even if you don’t.”
Nora reached for the list she’d made of things for Mariana to pick up. “Where’s Luke?”
Mariana didn’t meet her eyes. “Where’s Harrison?”
Nora changed the game. “Where are the mashed potatoes?”
Mariana stared. “I don’t know. Where are they?”
“No, no, no. We have no turkey, we have to have mashed potatoes.”
“Okay.” Mariana’s voice was cautious. “I can make some for you. That’s not a problem.”
“I don’t have any. That’s the problem. You were supposed to bring them.”
“No, honey.” Her sister pushed her fingers through her perfectly cut layers. “You asked me to bring drinks.”
Nora looked down at the list. “And the potatoes. You make the best ones. Of course I asked you.”
Mariana shook her head, as if she were giving up.
That head shake. That was the shake Nora was seeing more and more often, from Ellie, from her sister, from the new doctor at Stanford. As if whatever they were talking about wasn’t worth arguing about anymore, as if it were better to give in to her ridiculous beliefs, as if arguing with her would break her.
Potatoes weren’t on the list she’d given to Mariana.
Mariana said, “I’ll just run to the store.”
Nora shook her head. “They’ll be out.”
“They’ll have a potato or two left.”
“They’ll be closed.”
“Safeway’s open till five.”
“We don’t have time . . .” Nora’s throat closed over the words, sealing shut so that she couldn’t say the next ones.
“Nora . . .”
Out. She had to get out. She couldn’t be here—she felt like she was dying. Right there. In the kitchen she loved so much, in the jail it had become.
She was already out the door, racing across her yard, before she even knew she was moving. She pounded on Harrison’s back door and then, too impatient to wait for him, barreled through it.
He was in the upper bedroom. From the chair he sat in, he’d have been able to see everything: her throwing away the turkey, her pell-mell dash across the lawn.
He kept his eyes on the window. He didn’t turn around.
“Why are you here?” she demanded.
“I live here.” He sounded tired, as if he hadn’t slept.
“Why aren’t you at my house?”
“I could ask you the same thing.”
No, that wasn’t fair. Just because she wouldn’t let him move in didn’t give him the right . . . “It’s Thanksgiving. We always do Thanksgiving together. You bring someone who can’t do long division. We make fun of her behind her back. It’s tradition.” She heard the joke fall flat. This year the only person he was dating was her, and pretty soon, she wouldn’t remember how to do any kind of math at all.
Harrison didn’t laugh. “Tradition,” he echoed. He finally turned, and she could see that he’d been crying. There were no tears on his face, his eyes weren’t swollen—it was just there, in the set of his lips. She could tell. No one else in the world would probably be able to.
“I can’t do this without you.”
“What?” He gripped the arm of the chair. “What can’t you do without me?”
Nora’s mouth dried.
“Host a turkey dinner?”
She tried to smile. “About that turkey—”
“Or live? You can’t live without me?”
The words were stuck behind her gullet, words in eggs that would smash all over the grate of Harrison’s truck.
He went on. “What, you can’t die without me?”
Fear, frantically electric, zipped through her, leaving a white-hot burn. “Just come over—”
“And then be shuffled away? Across the lawn? Maybe you’ll come get a quickie after dinner, after Ellie’s in bed playing her game? You think that’s good enough for me?”
“No . . . I know it’s—”
“You don’t seem to know anything. I thought you’d be better at this.”
The words were huge and completely, unutterably unfair. “At dying?”
“Fuck, Nora. I thought you’d be better at living. You’ve always been the best one at it. Better than anyone else. You’re good at everything, you make everything look easy, but you refuse to look this in the face—”
Bullshit. What did he think she did at four in the morning? When she couldn’t sleep, when her eyes fell on the digital clock and wondered how many seconds closer she’d be to death when (if) she finally fell asleep again—did he think she was just lying there thinking about how to perfect an apple pie crust? “I look at it every day. I face it. Not you. You have no idea what I’m going through.”
“I know that!” Harrison stood and coughed. He looked older, suddenly, every year of his fifty-one. When had he become so gaunt? “And whose fault is that? It’s not mine, Nora. You shut me out, and that’s fine. I can wait for you to let me in, and I can’t imagine how hard it is for you. But for you to hide me, to hide what we have together . . .” He held up a hand, his palm creased and so well-known to Nora she could trace the lines on it with her eyes closed. “Ellie knows we’re still trying to stay hidden.”
Of course Ellie knew. “It’s just important that she doesn’t feel . . . that I’m not . . .”
“Do you want to go through this with me or without me?”
“With you.” The words were reflexive and true.
“Then let me stay with you. Or stay here. I can’t be—” Harrison put one hand backward to lean on the chair. “I can’t be in this halfway, when it’s convenient, when you feel strong enough to be with me.”
That was irony for you. When Nora was with Harrison, naked under his sheets, his skin warm against hers, that was the only time she felt free to be weak. Did he really not know that? “I don’t want to talk about this on Thanksgiving. My day’s been shitty enough.”
“That’s your decision to make.” Harrison sat back down in his chair, his gaze out the window.
“Don’t be like this,” she said. “Don’t do this today.”
He didn’t turn his head to watch her leave the room.
When she was on the lawn, when she glanced up at the window, he was gone.