Splinters of Light Read online

  Harrison nodded. “Whatever you say. Open your card.”

  “That’s what I forgot. In the cleaning paste.” Her voice shook. As well as having to tell Mariana and Ellie, she would have to tell him. If the second opinion came in with the same diagnosis—the wrong one—she’d have to tell him. She could imagine his face when she did. That was the problem.

  “As much as I adore you, I sure as hell don’t care what you forgot in the cleaning paste. Open the card, would you?”

  She carefully slit the envelope with the paper scissors as he sighed in impatience. The outside of the card was a large, red-foiled broken heart, jagged and torn. Inside, the heart was in one piece, sewn together with actual red thread. You mend me. So close, almost word for word, to the card she got him.

  Harrison had seen it, of course, and he stood, reaching behind her to take it off the windowsill. He was so close to her she could feel his shirt brush her upper arm. One rip and the envelope was open. You melt me.

  He didn’t move his feet, just ducked his head so that he could kiss her, hard. He tasted like popcorn and cinnamon. Stubble scraped Nora’s chin, and she wanted him to kiss her harder.

  But she pulled her head back. She didn’t remember reaching forward, but her fingers were clutching the front of his shirt. “I . . . What about Penny?” Harrison’s latest was an ex–Hare Krishna who drove a red convertible Mustang.

  “Over.”

  “Oh.” He hadn’t told her that.

  “What’s wrong?” he asked.

  She didn’t let go of his shirt. “This—we don’t do this.” When he’d asked her in the past why she didn’t date more, she’d told him she was too busy, her life too full to give her heart to anyone but her daughter. She’d thought it was the truth, but now . . . faced with the fear that ripped through her at the feel of his shirt. Maybe she’d just been a coward. Harrison would nod and say that’s why it was easy to date women who didn’t know Antarctica was a continent—he never had to get his heart involved at all. She’d thought he’d meant it. She’d thought he was just careless and sweet and really liked being the smart one in his relationships. This whole time . . . had he been . . . ? God, what else had she missed along the way?

  Harrison said, “I mean, what’s wrong with you?”

  Nora’s heart juddered. “Nothing.”

  “Something is. You’ve been acting strange for a week.”

  A week? She’d been acting funny for three months, since their night together—she knew that. “What do you mean?”

  “It’s like . . .” He tilted his head. He looked. Nora realized suddenly she wasn’t wearing a bra. She wasn’t even wearing ChapStick. She felt naked.

  He went on. “You’re quiet. You stopped chattering to me. You’ve always chattered.”

  Nora couldn’t tell him first. She had to tell her daughter, her sister, she had to explain what she had, what she was carrying, but she had no idea how. She couldn’t tell him, so she’d stopped her mouth in case she slipped. She hadn’t thought he would notice.

  “I think something’s wrong and you don’t want to tell me,” said Harrison. He placed his thumb against the corner of her mouth. “I can tell by the way you’re in some other place even when you’re five inches away from me. I don’t know if it’s menopause or cancer or something else.”

  Something else. She couldn’t make herself form the words.

  “But I’m not going anywhere. Well, yeah, I’ll go back to my house, but not until I kiss you a while longer.”

  “Oh.”

  “That okay with you?”

  “Yeah,” she said. “Yeah.”

  Chapter Eleven

  The music swelled through her headphones, and as Ellie raced her Healer back to the hut, she suddenly felt like crying with happiness. They were winning. The sick, dying Dragon Queen Ulra would be saved—healed—thanks to her and Dyl if they could just get this part right.

  Everything should have a sound track. It would be amazing to take a test at school with violins and cellos upping the danger level. Or doing water polo practice with drums and cymbals encouraging speed. The best thing about learning how to drive was that you got to pick a sound track. Or, at least, she would when her mother finally let her drive with music. Right now she was still insisting—wrongly—that it would distract her. Her mother didn’t seem to understand that it would actually make things easier. If she had a symphony, complete with organ and choral voices like in Queendom, Ellie knew driving would go smoother. The quietness punctuated only by the graunching of gears and her mother’s audible terrified gasps made Ellie forget to check both her inside and outside mirrors. The last time they’d gone out to practice, it had been at night—like, pitch dark—and her mother had made her practice three-point turns using the white lines in the mostly empty Whole Foods parking lot. Two of the streetlights in the lot had been burned out and her mother somehow thought she should be able to use her headlights to figure out how to stay in the lines. Right. That hadn’t gone well. Both of them had cried, although only Ellie’d had a reason to. She’d been frustrated. Her mother had just been a passenger. And why Ellie had to learn on Harrison’s old Jeep was beyond her. She should have been able to at least learn on her mother’s automatic Prius. Something about if you can drive this, you can drive anything, but since she didn’t plan on driving a stick shift ever, it didn’t make sense. What was the point?

  Ellie directed her Healer up the grassy knoll and then over the covered fire pit. She entered the code to open her hut’s door.

  Inside was Dyl the Incurser.

  Holy crap.

  Hey, she typed inanely. She’d given him the code, like, five days ago, and he’d never stopped by, not while her Healer was there, and it had kind of hurt—hella other guys were trying to get in her hut, claiming all sorts of wounds and life-drains, but not Dyl. On the battlefield, Dyl was professional. Above the fray.

  She’d looked him up in real life, of course. It wasn’t like Queendom was Ellie’s first MMORPG—she’d played a little World of Warcraft and had been into the new Star Wars game the year before. But Queendom was the first one she really loved at first roll, and Dyl was her favorite player. His real name was Dylan Hacker, which was possibly the best last name of all time. She’d found an article on his dad’s flower business, so she knew he hadn’t made it up.

  And he was local.

  Dylan Hacker lived in Oakland. He was nineteen, older than any other player she’d ever had a crush on except ChrisNINja, who’d said he was seventeen and in San Francisco but when she’d traced his IP, she’d found a married thirty-five-year-old man who actually lived in Mississippi. That had freaked her shit out.

  Dylan, though. He was as hot IRL as he was online in his Incurser’s body. He had light brown hair, high cheekbones, and sexy brown eyes with blue-gray smudges underneath them, as if he stayed up too late, or maybe as if he had allergies, though that was kind of less hot. He looked the tiniest bit like Ryan Gosling. Samantha didn’t think so. His Facebook pictures were clean enough to show a mother, lots of shots of him standing in front of school-looking buildings with other guys. There was one where he had his arms slung around two girls, both of them pretty and happy looking, neither of them pressed very close against him. His Instagram pics were more relaxed—there were shots of him holding a red plastic cup, obviously drunk. He was even cute like that, rumpled and sleepy looking. Looking at what must be his tiny bedroom in the shared house, she wanted to be there. She wanted to be the one he was looking at.

  Hey, he typed back.

  You’re in my hut, Ellie managed to respond. I’m kind of surprised. Ellie realized that Dyl was in Addi’s hut on Valentine’s Day evening. He wasn’t out with a girl. He was, kinda, out with her.

  Why? You invited me. I’m sorry I didn’t come earlier.

  Ellie felt something sharp and delicious shoot down her fingertips, d
ancing over every keystroke. You are?

  You did well on the battlefield, Addi.

  It was a ridiculous thing to say to someone, archaic and old-fashioned. It made him sound like a knight. And it made her feel like a warrior. Ellie loved it. Thank you.

  Really. How long have you been playing again?

  Ellie moved her Healer to the rocking chair near the fire. Dyl’s Incurser stayed in place, near the bed. My mom gave it to me for Christmas. She felt immediately juvenile and wished she hadn’t said it. So maybe three weeks. I’ve only done, like, five Sorties.

  And you have all that Growing already? And the StarFlight?

  I guess. Yeah. I like that part of it, finding the stuff.

  When you got in and healed that kid who had lost his mom? While the battle went on all around you? I thought the Dragon Queen was going to kill you for sure, but she just ignored you.

  When we heal them, they protect us. That was the story Ellie had made up in her last Rendering—the part of the game players themselves got to write—and it was good. She knew it. Other players were telling her story now—she’d seen it in the forums. For the first time she kind of got what her mom did, maybe. It was intoxicating, the knowledge that you wrote something that made people want to act, to do. Because of your words that before you wrote them didn’t exist. The Queen is sick anyway. She’s just trying to hide her eggs.

  I’ve heard that. So it’s true.

  Yep. It was her story. Her rules. Making up the game as she went was the biggest reason Ellie loved Queendom.

  You’d make a hell of an Incurser.

  Her back against the headboard, she felt as pleased as if he’d said she was hot. Thanks.

  You live in Marin, right?

  Had she mentioned that? Ellie didn’t type for a moment.

  You said in the game that glass was your secret weapon. I could see your real login name was Ellie, not Addi . . . I guessed Ellie Glass, and your mom came up.

  Ellie pushed the laptop to the bedspread and took a moment to writhe silently, flailing with her hands and legs. When Ellie Was Little. Shit. Sure, she’d looked him up online and had scanned his photos, trying to read the titles on the bookshelf behind him, taking long moments to figure out if she thought the skateboard propped against the desk was his or a roommate’s, but if he went back into her mother’s archives—or, god forbid, bought the book—he would know that when she was little, she refused to poop anywhere but at home, scared of what could be lurking in a stranger’s toilet bowl. Poop stories! There were stories about her taking a shit on the Internet. Every year or two, one of Ellie’s friends would trot out an oldie but goodie (the plastic-wrapped tampon as fishing lure, the time she thought their bunny rabbit was possessed by Satan), reading the chapter in question aloud at a sleepover. Ellie learned early on that the more she asked them to stop, the more interesting her mother’s stories about her became, so she’d gotten good at laughing along with them until they lost interest.

  But this was a boy.

  A man, actually. Not some kid in high school who relied on his parents for movie money. At least, she hoped he didn’t.

  Yeah. I live in Marin. Tiburon.

  Cool. Are you near the water?

  Pride she knew was misplaced but enjoyed anyway filled her. I can see it from our back door.

  That’s amazing. I might want to be a sailor someday.

  Why aren’t you one now? You’re in Oakland, right?

  Lol. You looked me up, too.

  You used your last name, which I didn’t believe at first, by the way, in the Guarding forum.

  Smart girl.

  Ellie grinned and pulled the laptop closer to her, shimmying it across her knees. Samantha was always telling her that no one asked Ellie out because she didn’t know how to flirt. In real life, she knew it was true. As soon as a boy talked to Ellie, her tongue went gummy and her brain went to mush. She hated it.

  But she was good at gaming. I totally stalked you.

  I’m glad. The stalking—the friendly kind, of course—is mutual.

  Ellie took a deep breath. Okay, I’m trying so hard not to overreact to that but can you not read my mom’s book, please?

  Okay.

  Okay?

  I only read half an essay before I felt weird about it.

  Weird how?

  Like I was reading your diary, only it was stranger because it wasn’t even yours. It was just about you. I felt like a creepster.

  Thanks. For that.

  No problem. Are you as pretty as you are on Instagram?

  She hadn’t friended him because she hadn’t wanted him to know she had searched him out. No. That’s just some girl I hired to play me online.

  Wouldn’t that be weird, if we did that? If we were our real selves in the game but fake everywhere else?

  She responded, Isn’t that what we do?

  Yeah. I’m more me here than anywhere else.

  Me, too.

  Ellie’s fingers went motionless on the keyboard. Did he hear the music at the same time she did? That soft, trilling flute part of the score, was that playing for him, too?

  The music is pretty in here, he typed.

  Is it different from other Healer huts?

  I don’t know. I’ve never been in any hut but mine.

  The admission made Ellie grin. What does it sound like in yours?

  Like guy music.

  What’s that mean?

  You know in science fiction movies, when the world is about to blow up and the people on the spaceship have to fix everything in the next seventy seconds?

  Yeah.

  It sounds like that.

  Doesn’t sound very restful for your Incurser.

  Dyl’s got to sleep there, not me.

  Ellie didn’t admit that since she’d started playing the game, she’d been falling asleep with her laptop open on the desk next to her, the music playing softly over her bed. She’d disabled the screensaver, knowing it would burn in the screen but not caring that much. The hut was just so beautiful, with its bottles of herbs and tinctures lined up on the wooden shelves and the crystal sun catcher in the window. At night, the Fernal moons rose and set on the other side of the glass, sending rainbow colors skittering around the room. Sometimes when she rolled over in the night, she’d catch the glow of the small green lamp next to Addi the Healer’s bed, and she’d stare at it, wishing she were really the lump under the red velvety-looking bedspread, instead of just her, just Ellie in the bed her mother had bought her at the Sealy store on a rainy Sunday when she was ten.

  Anyway, Dylan typed.

  Anyway, she agreed.

  Her mother knocked softly and pushed open her door. “Can I come in?”

  Ellie made sure her laptop was facing her stomach completely. Not that she was doing anything wrong.

  Her mother guessed, though. “Are you playing that Queendom game again?”

  She made it sound like checkers or something. “Yeah. I guess.”

  “You like it.” Her mother was so pleased with herself for buying it. It was beyond annoying.

  “It’s all right.”

  “So you don’t like it?”

  “Does this have a point?” She typed, Stand by. Intruder.

  The response came instantly: Let me know if you need the assistance of my knife.

  “I just wanted to say good night.”

  Ellie frowned. Usually her mother just stuck her head in and blew a kiss. Nora wasn’t big on chatting at night, preferring usually to work on whatever she was writing until one or two in the morning. They were both night owls, and when she was younger, Ellie would lie on the little sofa in her mother’s office reading until they both grew tired. Ellie would wake up being carried into her room. She used to love the feeling of her mom’s hands tucking the cool sheets around her, and on the best nights, s
he’d grip Nora’s hand until she gave in, crawling in next to her. Ellie had never been big on sneaking into her mother’s bed, but she’d loved it when Nora had slept in hers. She used to like pulling her knees against her chest and pressing her shins into her mother’s back.

  Her mom hadn’t slept in her bed with her for years, though.

  “You’re going to bed this early?” Ellie asked.

  “I’m tired.” She took one step into the room, tentatively. “How are you?”

  Ellie frowned. “What’s up?”

  “Why does something have to be up?”

  “You’re acting funny.”

  “Can I see what you’re doing online?”

  No. She could not. But if Ellie said that, then for sure she’d look. “Yeah. But are you sure there’s nothing wrong with you? Are you feeling sick? Getting a migraine?”

  Her mother’s fingers fluttered up to the small silver hoops in her ears and then back down again. “No. Of course not. I’m fine.” She smiled. “Absolutely nothing wrong with me except that I haven’t spent enough time with you lately. You don’t need to show me your computer. I trust you.” She narrowed her eyes, and for just a second, Ellie could see why people said Aunt Mariana and her mother looked like identical twins, not fraternal. “Unless you’re hiding something.”

  “Mom.” Ellie made herself laugh. “I’m not. I’m just talking to Samantha.”

  “About boys?”

  Ellie nodded. “Of course. How we’re planning to seduce them all and get pregnant just for fun. We get bonus points for STDs.”

  Her mother smiled. “Awesome. Best of luck in that.” A pause, and the joke got serious, as it always did with her mother. “You’ll ask me for condoms if you need them?”

  Ellie groaned. “Do you really need to say that?”

  “I just enjoy talking about condoms with my sixteen-year-old. What mom doesn’t?”

  “God.”

  “Happy Valentine’s Day. I love you.”

  It was like her mother always wanted to make her say it back. “You, too.”