Splinters of Light Read online

  Not here. Not in front of God and everyone. Not where she couldn’t . . .

  “Mariana Glass, I love you. Will you marry me?” His voice was choked, thickened. The diners around them, as if alerted by some subsonic engagement bell, dropped their voices to silence. Even the noise of the attached bar quieted.

  Mariana’s fingers clenched around her napkin. She heard a woman sigh. Then another. But she couldn’t fix her face, couldn’t get the right words lined up, couldn’t, couldn’t . . . She was going to, she would fuck it up, there was no way she could explain, she didn’t even know—

  “Mariana?” He was white around the eyes. “Don’t leave me hangin’ here, babe.”

  She felt the word “yes” in her mouth, tasted it. Then Mariana said, “No.”

  The worst part was her volume. As if an almost-silent whisper of the same word wouldn’t have had the same devastating effect on him. But she practically yelled it, the terrible word hanging above them. Luke pulled his head back as if she’d hit him with pepper spray. He retreated a million miles just by blinking.

  Confident, strong Luke. Never, in the two years she’d known him, had she seen him in retreat. Not once. He’d been so sure she’d say yes.

  She’d thought she would, too. Up until thirty seconds ago.

  Then she was on the floor with him, and her arms were around his neck. Her lips against his cheek, she murmured, “I’m so sorry. So sorry.”

  Luke stayed completely still, as if the “no” had turned him to stone.

  The few gasps she’d heard when she’d answered changed into a swell of approval. She could almost hear them changing their minds. Perhaps they’d misconstrued her answer. “Yes,” that must be what she’d said. Perhaps her “no” actually meant “yes,” maybe that’s the way they worked as a couple.

  “So sweet,” she heard a woman say.

  A man offered a hearty “Congratulations!”

  Mariana kept her face against Luke’s neck. How could she stand up? How were they possibly going to be able to walk out of the restaurant and back to the car where they’d left it on Polk Street? When they got home, how would she brush her teeth next to him before getting into bed with him? Her fingers were pressed so tightly against his shoulders that she knew she would leave ten tiny bruises there against his skin, markers of the time he got it so wrong, so very wrong.

  Luke didn’t speak.

  He still hadn’t moved, still stuck in a kneel that now looked more like a crouch. No tears. Too hurt for tears.

  “I’m so sorry. I can’t. No, Luke.”

  Finally, he spoke. “I heard you the first time.”

  Slowly, so slowly, Luke stood, extending to his full enormous height. He carefully placed his credit card on the table, along with the car keys. The jacket he’d hung on the hook at the end of their booth creaked over his shoulders. “I need to walk.”

  “Wait . . .”

  He left.

  When Mariana presented the flustered waitress with her card—not his—the woman looked as if she were about to cry. Mariana didn’t answer when the hostess automatically asked if everything was okay with the meal as she pushed her way out the heavy old door.

  Fucked it up. She’d fucked it up. Again. She fucked everything up.

  It wasn’t until she got home—dark, no lights, he wasn’t there—that she remembered the ring that they’d both left sitting in the candy bowl. He’d told her about it once, late at night, right at the beginning of their relationship. I have my grandmother’s ring. I’ll only give it to the right woman, and I’ll only give it away once.

  She’d dreamed of the moment Luke would ask her to marry him. Stashed somewhere in the house she had an earmarked Brides magazine, the product of an afternoon spent in Barnes and Noble waiting for a phone call that never came from a blogger with connections to the Shambhala Sun.

  But she couldn’t.

  She wasn’t . . .

  God, the whole point was that Mariana wasn’t enough for herself yet. How could she be enough for anyone else? She broke things. She was a fuckup, practically a professional one. It was a miracle the app was still running, that it hadn’t put viruses on the phones of everyone who’d downloaded it. A marriage should be . . . something strong. If Nora hadn’t been able to keep hers together—well, Mariana would probably blow up a marriage before the end of the honeymoon.

  And she knew it was true: Luke loved her. She loved him back.

  It wasn’t enough, though.

  If she could reach her purse to get her phone, she could call Nora, but her purse was in the kitchen, and she was stuck on the edge of the bed, frozen in fear she didn’t recognize. Nora would know what to do—she’d know why Mariana had said what she’d said, and she’d know how to fix it, how to change it, how to turn back time so she could answer differently—but, god, Mariana wouldn’t answer differently. That was the point.

  Or if Mariana could reach her phone, she could open the app and hear her own voice telling her how to find calm, her sense of space. It was strange, yes, but she’d listened and relistened to the MP3s so many times in production that now the voice coming out of her phone actually sounded more like Nora’s to her, and Mariana could just absorb the words. Find the motion of your breath, and rest in that place.

  Mariana gripped the bedpost so tightly she could feel her fingernails denting the wood. Her eyes rested on the word tattooed on her inner forearm: Now. Normally a comfort, a reminder that the only moment to be sure of was this one. She took a deep breath, smelling the comforts of home, leftover coffee scent and the dryer sheets that Luke liked. Luke . . .

  Now. Now was all she had.

  Mariana held on tighter. Hopeful, despite herself.

  Chapter Ten

  Nora touched the Valentine’s Day card she’d bought for Harrison. Three months since they slept together.

  Three months since they were close, in any way at all.

  The card was blue, anomalous for the holiday, with an ice floe on the front. Inside it read, You melt me. She wouldn’t give it to him, even though he always gave her a card. He might not this year, as awkward as it had been between them.

  Twelve weeks ago. Before she was diagnosed, before the earth had rotated on more than just its axis. Midfall. The leaves on the sycamore in front of her house had just begun releasing their tight grip on the branches, fluttering down in twos and threes. She and Harrison had been drinking wine, like they’d done approximately a hundred billion times before. They never drank too much, just a glass or two at the end of an evening. Friendly. She and Ellie used to both walk next door when the sun started dropping. Harrison always had Ellie’s favorite brand of potato chips, Kettle Salsa. Ellie would take her book and her bowl of chips and read on the porch hammock while Nora and Harrison drank their glasses of wine, and then Nora and Ellie would walk across Harrison’s lawn, jump over the low line of dahlias back into their own yard in the dark.

  For the last year, though, Nora had gone alone more often than not. Ellie cited homework, but walking back home across the conjoined lawns, looking up at her daughter’s window, Nora could make out the wide-screen on her desk. She could tell by the colors displayed that she was usually playing a video game. Fine. She figured it was better than a lot of other things her daughter could have been getting into.

  That night, last fall, Ellie had been out of the house staying the night at Samantha’s house. Nora had waved at Harrison over their parked cars and raised her voice to be heard over the kids riding their whining motorized scooters that zipped up and down the street. “Come to my house tonight, okay?”

  She’d wanted to show him an article she’d written before she turned it in. It felt more like her earlier work, honest and raw. It had felt good to write, and she hadn’t felt that in a while. She hadn’t doubted her motivation in asking him over. Sleeping with him, she would have sworn, hadn’t ev
en crossed her mind. Harrison was just Harrison, well-worn and frayed like the right cuff of the brown sweater he wore from October to March every year. Harrison, for all his admirable qualities (which were many), tended to go for women who were quantifiably less intelligent than he was. They never stuck, and after the first three or four, Nora had given up on trying to be friends with the women who shot daggerlike looks at her when she let herself into Harrison’s kitchen to drop off his favorite oatmeal–peanut butter cookies.

  That night, his third glass of wine in his hand, Harrison had looked up from her pages, his dark eyes taking a moment to refocus on her. “Do you really feel like this?”

  Nora had laughed lightly. “Sometimes. Do you think it’s too much?”

  “No.”

  “Do you think my readers will hate me? They think of me as light and funny. I talk about bathroom tiles and the way light falls on candles from the dollar store. I don’t talk about . . .” Sex. Longing.

  Harrison twisted sideways on the iron porch chair so he could drop the pages onto the small table that sat between them. Then he faced his own house, his dark hair longer over his ears than he usually kept it. Silver showed at his temples, and Nora was startled by how much she wanted to touch it. The planes of his head and jaw were dear and familiar—she’d known him how many years now? They’d moved into the house when Ellie was one. Fifteen years now.

  “It’s a good piece,” he said. “I can’t believe you thought about a Craigslist hookup, though.”

  It felt as if he’d knocked the wind out of her. “And that’s what everyone’s going to say. Damn it. I knew I couldn’t send it in.”

  “No one else will say it,” he said in a low voice.

  “I can write something else, quickly. I can send it in the morning. Benjamin won’t care if it’s a few hours late . . .” She shuffled the pages, squaring the edges.

  Harrison turned suddenly. His fingers laced around her wrist, and instead of light friendliness, the kind that was always between them when they were together, she felt an electric tension. “You placed a casual encounters ad.”

  “Well, it’s not like it was a newspaper . . .” Nora wanted to pull her arm back and she wanted him to touch her wrist just like that, forever. She wanted to shut her eyes, but she couldn’t look away from his.

  “When . . .” He trailed off, a muscle jumping in his jaw in what looked like frustration.

  “When what?”

  He jerked his chin at his house. “When I was right there.”

  There was a thick silence, one Nora knew she couldn’t fill with a laugh or a joke. She could only stare at him. “You don’t . . .”

  Harrison said, “I do.”

  “You don’t like smart women.”

  He shook his head. “Not true. Sherry was a paleontologist.”

  “That’s right.” She’d forgotten about Sherry with the voice that sounded like a hive of bees, a glum buzz, Sherry who’d understood evolution and dinosaurs but who’d entrusted her every decision to the stars. “She was an astrologist, too, right? Why did you like her?”

  “I liked her—” Harrison’s voice was abrupt and low. “I liked them because you always said you were too busy.”

  For what? For him? She had been too busy to date, mostly. Besides, she’d always had Harrison, a glass of wine, and that incredible, wide grin waiting for her at the end of most of her days. Nora felt heat at the base of her spine. She spoke her next words slowly. “Would it be just this once?”

  He didn’t answer her. “Is that what you want?”

  She didn’t know. Maybe. No. “Yes.”

  “Then, yeah.”

  They were upstairs in her bedroom before she could even take another full breath. Then she was naked and so was he, and he was perfect, in every way, and then he was inside her, and the best part was that he’d stayed the night. No, the worst part was that he’d stayed the night. That he’d slept next to her, his head on the pillow next to the bowl of beach glass she kept on her nightstand, glass she and Ellie had picked up over the years. There was nothing finer than beach glass—function gone, only form left—everything worn away except opaque, occluded beauty. Nora’s favorite place was Glass Beach, up the coast a couple of hours, a shore littered with sanded, colored glass. She usually tried to carry a piece of it in her pocket—to rub, to remember how strong glass was, how strong Glass was. Plastic bags biodegraded in twenty years, plastic bottles in 450. But glass took a million years to biodegrade, to return to sand. The shards of beach glass she collected had almost nothing left of their former selves but had so much beauty and comfort left to give. And strength.

  Harrison had run his fingers through the glass in the bowl just the way Nora did before she went to sleep, each cool stone clicking against the others satisfyingly. Of course he got it. Nora had wanted to take the glass away from him as much as she’d wanted to give him every piece.

  She should never, ever have let him stay, even though the coast had been clear with Ellie out of the house for a night. How did you go from sleeping alone for thirteen years to warmth, twined arms and legs, to commingled morning breath? In the years since Paul left, she’d slept with exactly three men, and only a few careful times each. (The planning that went into sex as a single mother. It was an article she knew she should write someday. Forget hotels with their suspect comforters. Minivans are your friend. Tinted glass helps. If you park at the mall, choose a parking spot as far as you can get from the elevators to minimize foot traffic near where your groove-on is being got.)

  Harrison knew exactly how many men she’d slept with since the divorce. Two of them he’d met and approved of. That’s what friends did. Friends didn’t stay the night, naked, with each other. They didn’t cuddle. God, how Nora had missed that part—the skin against skin, the simple equation of body heat plus covers equaling a sweaty animallike warmth that was both erotic and slightly embarrassing in the morning.

  Now, three months and a whole new (non–sexually transmittable) disease later, she propped the Valentine’s Day card for Harrison on the windowsill in front of the kitchen sink. She had to decide what to do with it before Ellie got home, that was all she knew. It would be fine to tear it up and put it in the recycling. She should do that.

  But she didn’t.

  Nora scrubbed the sink drains with a paste of baking soda, water, and Dr. Bronner’s mint soap. Nothing got the steel brighter, and very little usually filled her with more satisfaction. But something didn’t feel right. She’d forgotten something.

  How many damn times in her life had she made this scrubbing paste? A thousand? More? There was an ingredient, a small one. A few drops of . . . The frustration bit at her, nipping at the back of her brain. Something small . . .

  The knock on the back kitchen door made her jump though it shouldn’t have. She’d been expecting it, but her stomach still clenched.

  “It’s open,” she called. Of course it was. She moved the stack of campus catalogs over so Harrison could take his normal seat at the kitchen island.

  “Happy Valentine’s Day,” he said.

  “You, too,” she said, too flustered to look in his eyes. Her fingertips were smooth and slick from the baking soda.

  “I moved your trash cans in.”

  He always did. “Thank you.”

  “I got you a card.” He held out a dark red envelope. “I just wanted to drop it off and then I’ll go.”

  A funny friend card, that’s what he always got her. Something that said that year’s equivalent of As long as we’re both single, let’s eat lots of chocolate in honor of those too busy having sex.

  “Don’t be silly—stay. Wine?” She put the envelope facedown on the counter.

  Harrison swung the barstool so that he straddled it backward. “Sure.”

  Nora felt goose bumps rise on her arms, as if it had just gotten colder. As if he’d t
ouched her.

  “Where’s Ellie?”

  “Volleyball.” Suzanne Carpenter had volunteered to drive the girls. Harrison knew as well as Nora did that Ellie wouldn’t be home for another two hours.

  But he just sat on the barstool, watching her with those dark eyes of his, taking the glass of wine from her as if they’d never been naked together, as if they’d never tasted the inside of each other’s mouths.

  “Whatcha doing?” he asked, pointing. “I mean, besides cleaning.”

  “Oh.” Nora sat next to him and restacked the brochures, closing her notebook on what she’d been jotting down for Ellie. “Colleges. I ordered a bunch of their catalogs.”

  He pulled the stack toward him. “Berkeley.”

  Paul’s alma mater. “Yep.”

  “Has he called her recently?”

  It was kind of Harrison to ask, but of course Paul hadn’t. “No.”

  Another catalog. “U of Mississippi?”

  “Random. She heard something about it. I can’t remember what.”

  “Huh,” said Harrison. “UCLA. Portland. Dallas?”

  “Another random one. Smith College is still her first choice. I don’t know what she’s thinking with the others.”

  “You always know what she’s thinking.”

  If Harrison were Ellie’s father, he would have a say in the college decision. He’d have an opinion and a right to share it. Nora knew he had an opinion, and like always, he’d keep it to himself until he was asked. “I don’t,” she said. “Not anymore. Not for a while now.”

  “Why are you doing this for her? She can’t order these for herself?”

  “She’s overwhelmed, I can tell.” Nora took the Cal booklet out of his hands. “I want to do this. I’m helping.”

  Harrison nodded.

  “I am,” she said again.

  In a normal voice, as if he were answering a question she’d asked, Harrison said, “I can’t stop thinking about kissing you.”

  The muscles in her thighs, the ones that would have to hold her if she stood now, warmed and weakened. “Tea tree oil,” she said.