NORA
NORA GLANCED IN the rearview mirror and saw that the girl had buried herself in the dusty car blanket. It was wrapped completely around her, a plaid cocoon from which only the toe of one purple sneaker peeked out. She wasn’t even sitting up anymore. Instead, her seat belt was pulled taut over the soft mound of the blanket and her tightly curled body, the fabric twisted so that Nora wondered if the restraint was doing any good at all. Maybe this wasn’t safe. Maybe transporting a child required a special endorsement on her driver’s license. Nora remembered the complicated five-point harness of the little girl’s toddler days and wished she would have remembered to grab the booster seat.
The last few hours had been a fog. A grueling blur of tears and exhaustion. Of trying to comfort and failing miserably. Nora couldn’t help it—she was tense, scared, and the child had wilted beneath the strain of the stifling atmosphere in Nora’s apartment. She sat with her back tight in a corner and cried as though the world would end. Hot dogs didn’t help, though Nora drowned them in ketchup just the way the girl liked. Neither did cartoons, but the only kid-friendly TV shows were reruns of SpongeBob SquarePants. The child had seemed more afraid than entertained.
Nora had been there when the girl was born, a truly terrifying affair that disabused her of the notion of ever having children of her own. When it was all over and the doctor had cheerfully announced, “It’s a girl,” Nora had taken the nameless infant into her own arms. She felt all elbows and thumbs, awkward and angled, as she cradled the tiny bundle, a hesitant participant in what should have been a natural rite of new life. The baby wasn’t quite what she expected either. The skin on her newborn cheeks was white and peeling, her fingers so diminutive that Nora hardly dared to touch them for fear they would splinter. But the infant was wide-eyed and quiet, her lips parted as if she were about to say something.
“She’s amazing,” Nora said. And she was. But she was also strange and unnerving and miraculous. “What are you going to call her?”
“Her name is Everlee.”
“It’s pretty,” Nora forced herself to say. But she hated it. And in the years after, she used every excuse she could not to call the girl by her ill-chosen name. Sweetie or honey or bug. Anything but Everlee. She had a hard time even thinking the name.
“Honey?” Nora called, shifting her eyes to the rearview mirror again. The child was still balled up under the blanket. Maybe she was sleeping. She certainly needed it. “Sweetheart, can you hear me under there?”
No answer. But then, she wasn’t much for talking and never had been.
“We’re going to play a little game, okay? A pretend game.” Did this sound like fun? Nora hoped so. She wanted to make it as painless as possible. “It’ll be great. Like playing dress up, only we’re going to put on a different name. Just for a little while. You get to pick what you want to be called. Won’t that be fun?”
Silence. Nora could see the blanket shift a bit in the rearview mirror, but it seemed she was only pulling the swaddle tighter.
“What’s your favorite name? Should we call you Courtney? Or Piper? What about Olivia like in those books I bought you?”
Not even a flicker this time.
Nora sighed and adjusted her sunglasses as the sun dipped closer to the horizon. The sky was all vivid pastels, long sweeps of clouds like brushstrokes as she drove into the light. It was too cheery for her errand. So picture-perfect it was almost artificial. It reminded her of the place she was going, and not in a good way.
I have something for you, she wrote, and then couldn’t think of anything else to say.
What could she say? Get the guest room ready, I’m strapping you with a reticent six-year-old for I don’t know how long. Oh, and I don’t intend to tell you a thing about her.
Nora knew how that would go over.
Details. Quinn would want details and an annotated outline and the entire freaking story beginning with the very moment that the girl was conceived. And Nora couldn’t tell her anything.
Perfect little Quinn. Lovely, good, careful Quinn, who played the part of the wide-eyed baby sister so beautifully. Her degree was in secondary education, high school English to be exact, but Nora understood that she was better suited for preschool even if Quinn wouldn’t admit it herself. Quinn was an optimist, a happy girl who had once been both the head cheerleader for the Key Lake Titans and the vice president of the student body. She was supposed to marry the captain of the football team and have lots of adorable babies to populate Key Lake. But Quinn had uncharacteristically gone against everyone’s expectations and decided to do something different altogether.
Quinn was trying to be someone she was not. Marrying that unbearably sexy, but totally weird, artist. Moving to Los Angeles. Pretending she could handle a roomful of teenagers when Nora fundamentally understood that high school students would eat her sister alive.
The last time Nora saw Quinn, her hands and wrists were hennaed, elaborate flowers and intricate designs crisscrossing her fair skin like a map. Walker was experimenting with graffiti and tattoos, and his wife had become his favorite canvas. That had been almost two years ago, a rare family Christmas at the Sanfords’, and Nora had felt downright sorry for her sister. Quinn seemed bewildered by her own life. She stared at her husband with a naked longing, a look that made Nora feel as if she had witnessed something shamefully private. But then Quinn’s eyebrow would quirk and it was as if Walker was a complete stranger to her. Lips slightly parted and head tipped just off-center, she gazed at her own husband as if seeing him for the very first time. It was unsettling. The henna began to smudge partway through the day and Quinn drank just a bit too much champagne during the gift opening and began to seem blurry and indistinct herself. She was melting away, fading like the orange dye that stained her hands.
But Quinn was great with kids. At least, she had been. A dozen years ago.
“What about Annie?” Nora asked, directing the question to the back seat. “I love the name Annie. To match your hair.”
A shuffle. The slightest scuff of blanket on car upholstery.
Did she say something?
“What?” Nora tilted her head so that her ear was angled toward the back seat while her eyes remained on the road. The last thing she needed to do was end up in a ditch with a child bundled like a caterpillar in the back. The girl would look like the victim of a poorly planned abduction. “Did you say something, love?”
“I want to go home.”
“I want that, too,” Nora said, because she didn’t know how else to respond. And it was true. But it wasn’t possible. Not anymore. Not for either of them ever again.
Nora stifled a shiver and told herself that the goose bumps sprinkled across her arms were because the air-conditioning was on too high. She reached for the vent, angled it down and away, and then grabbed her phone from its resting place in her cup holder. The girl would probably be scarred for life, would grow up to text and drive and kill herself in a fiery crash, but Nora set a bad example anyway. One eye on the road and the other on her screen, she pecked another text to Quinn: I’m coming.