Nora stood upright, backed away a step. You’d like to think she was appalled by his words, the horrible things he was saying, or maybe appalled by the state he must have been in to utter them. And maybe she was. But mostly I think she was stumbling under the dawning realization of what he was going to say next. “Why are you here, Russell?”
“To tell you it’s over.” He did not specify what it was that was over. Everything, maybe.
But it wasn’t that simple.
For one thing, no one understood as well as Nora what Russell was going through. He felt at first that he could hardly stand under the weight of loving his newborn son but that his heart was also broken because no one else ever would. What we know now—that Sarah had shock and postpartum depression, not lack of love, that Matthew’s teachers and neighbors and doorman and the guy who runs the bodega downstairs and the two women who own their favorite coffee shop and all the kids at the Ninety-First Street playground would adore everything about him, especially his smile, wide as the arc of the swings—Russell could not see at the time. But I could. And Nora could. She was so thoroughly, entirely, in-all-the-world the right person to talk him off this particular ledge it seemed like a miracle to Russell that he’d ever met her. But, of course, that was why he’d left the hospital and driven through the night to show up at our door. That was the one thing, the main thing.
But the other was this: Letting go of Russell was heartbreaking and devastating and left a hole like a canyon, but it was possible. Letting go of the case against Belsum was not.
Actually, that’s not quite true. It was possible for Russell, who let it go like a weight sinking to the bottom of the ocean with him holding on. He released it and then floated right to the top where air and light and hope are. He watched it spiral down below, doomed, but doomed without him, his sadness eclipsed utterly by his relief. Or maybe it was just that he didn’t have enough hands anymore.
But Nora hung on like life while the case sank toward death, down down under the waters. She fought the waves and swells by herself, though she lacked expertise and experience in law; she lacked her partner in commitment and enthusiasm; she lacked someone with whom to share the highs of discovery and the lows of what she knew goddamn well but could never prove. But that didn’t mean she stopped. She never stopped.
There was no money for a new lawyer, one who hadn’t sought them out, wouldn’t work on contingency, would have to start from scratch. So Russell still helps. Still takes her calls. Files necessary paperwork. Keeps her apprised of developments. Does the minimum to keep the suit pending. But it’s on the back burner. Of the neighbor’s stove. Nora does the bulk of the work now—researches, reads, compiles notes, remains vigilant. She cheerleads too—stokes her neighbors’ anger, encourages when they despair, reminds when they forget. She’s kept the lawsuit alive, kept up with everyone signed on to it, kept after the elusive proof that will finally be enough. She has done it all. And she has done it mostly alone.
In the end, this is another of the many things my mother and I share, not just unrequited but unrequitable love, stories we know from the start will not—cannot—have happy endings. An unusual thing to turn out to be hereditary. Happy is not an option for us. Nora understands this. But she imagines fair is still on the table.
One
Fall comes for real. The world gets a little chillier, dark a little earlier, a funny, buzzy feeling.
“Mercurial,” Petra calls it.
“Serotinal,” I offer.
“Just barely.” We actually needed sweaters this morning. “Isochronous.”
“Seasonal?” I check.
“Or occurring at the same time. Either might show up.”
“Variegated,” I reply.
She high-fives me. “Good one.”
Even though it’s an easy word unlikely to show up on the SATs, what fall in Bourne usually is is anticlimactic. The color of the leaves changes but nothing else does.
Except this year. River’s face is healing. You can see it changing slowly like the seasons from bruised to mended, from broken open to whole. Other things are changing too—maybe also breaking open, maybe not—but they are harder to see.
He sidles up after English one afternoon. “Wanna go somewhere?”
“For what?”
He peers all around—I don’t know if he’s nervous or just pretending to be nervous—and drops his voice. “I might have found something.”
“Tell me!” My first instinct is to hug him.