Chapter 9
Chapter Nine
It was a little more than an hour later that Nora found herself on Hilary’s veranda, eating a plate of fish, asparagus, and fresh bread prepared by Hilary’s husband. White wine glinted in their glasses, and the last of the day’s light spread like a glowing blanket across the sand.
Their conversation since their return from the bookstore had focused on Max: on how charming he was, on how well-spoken, on how well he’d read his book aloud.
But Nora knew that the Salt Sisters were biding their time, eager to ask her what was going on with Max.
She knew that they’d all seen him write his phone number in her copy of his book.
Immediately afterward, Nora had tried and failed to get out of the dinner they’d planned on all day.
She hadn’t wanted to return home alone, where she knew her thoughts would keep her captive.
But she wasn’t sure how to answer their questions, either.
Finally, Tina, the most impatient of the crew, let her fork clatter to her plate. “Are you ever going to tell us?” she asked, her eyes on Nora. “I feel like it’s all I can think about?”
Tension was released, and the other Salt Sisters cackled.
“The way he was looking at you!” Stella said, shaking her head. “I mean, you’re the only single one of us, so it’s fair. But I have to admit. I was aching with jealousy.”
“Me too,” Rose said with a sigh. “He looked at you like you were the most beautiful ghost.”
“I don’t want to be a ghost,” Nora said in a small voice.
All their smiles melted away. They understood the heaviness of this meeting; they understood that Nora was standing on a goldmine of secrets and backstories.
“I never would have come with you if I’d known it was him,” Nora said suddenly, surprising herself. She set down her fork. “I mean, I don’t think I would have.”
Hilary’s face was pinched with worry. “Nora, are you all right? You’ve hardly said anything since we got back.”
“It must have really shaken you up,” Stella offered.
Hilary raised her glass of wine. “Did he break your heart?”
Nora closed her eyes. She felt as though she were in a wind tunnel and unable to hear herself think.
Abruptly, she got to her feet, drawing her final bits of strength to smile at the Salt Sisters, who were truly kind and truly good and truly out of their depths, in terms of knowing Nora and knowing how to handle her wounds.
How could she trust them with everything that had happened?
“I knew him back in the eighties,” Nora said finally. “It was a thousand years ago. We’re old people, now. I can’t believe he even recognized me.”
A traitorous tear went down her cheek. Nora brushed it away and backed away from the table. She couldn’t eat anything else. “I’m sorry to do this,” she said, her voice breaking, “but I have to head home. It was an amazing day. Thank you.” She turned on her heel and fled for her bag and her jacket.
Hilary followed after her, quiet but purposeful.
When Nora reached the front door, Hilary was there to hold it open for her.
“Honey, I’m sorry,” Hilary said. “We should have known that that was a hugely emotional event for you. We should have handled it delicately. I’m sorry.
We’re usually a little more empathetic than that. I want to eat my words.”
Nora stalled at the top step. Max’s book was heavy in her linen bag. She didn’t know what to say.
Hilary stepped outside after her. “I know you don’t think you can trust anyone,” Hilary said finally.
“I know that, because I felt the same after my divorce, and after my mother’s death, and after so many other things happened in my life, things that I sometimes don’t know how to carry, emotionally.
But you can trust us, Nora. Despite how jealous we acted just now.
We want to build friendships with you. We want to know you, if you’re willing to let us. ”
Nora forced herself to raise her chin. She considered the truth of her life: that she’d been an orphan for decades, that her son didn’t talk to her, that it was too painful to talk to her ex-husband.
A gust of wind smashed into her from the ocean.
She didn’t know how anyone could ever really understand.
“I really appreciate that, Hilary,” she said. “I’ll call you tomorrow, okay?”
“You'd better.” Hilary offered a soft smile.
Nora struggled to feel her kindness. She struggled to feel anything but shock and fear.
Back at home, Nora realized she was starving. She should have had the foresight to eat the rest of her dinner before storming out. Rather than cook, she popped a bag of popcorn and sat on the porch overlooking the ocean, sipping red wine and nibbling and thinking.
Before long, her thoughts returned to Paul—Paul, who’d blocked her. Paul, her only son.
For the first time in a while, Nora called her son. Just as before, it didn’t ring in the slightest. She felt slammed against a brick wall. Angry, she threw her phone from the porch, so that it landed and bounced in the sand.
Why did Max Spader have to be on Nantucket Island? And why did he have to give her his phone number? It meant that the ball was entirely in her court. And that wasn’t a comfortable feeling.
Nora had never been the sort of person to chase someone. But was calling an old friend’s phone number really “chasing” someone?
Letting her head roll down the back of the chair, she thought back to her early days with Isaac. They’d met when they were both twenty-two years old, seniors at Brown University, both with dreams and visions for futures that felt just beyond their reach.
They’d originally met in the library. Nora had been rereading Sylvia Plath for a research paper about women literary figures.
Isaac had been studying for the LSAT. Drinking coffee after coffee and reading deep into the night, Nora had realized that she and Isaac were the only two students in that section of the library.
She caught him looking over at her a few times, but she didn’t think anything of it until, around midnight or one, he came over and asked her if she planned to do an all-nighter.
“I like all-nighters,” she’d told him, arrogant about her ability to read for hours at a time without growing tired. “They make me feel more alive.”
Isaac laughed. The sound was strange in the library, where they weren’t supposed to talk. But who were they going to annoy?
“Do you want something from the vending machine?” he asked her.
Nora followed him to the machine in the hallway, where she bought herself a Snickers and watched as he deliberated, then went for a pack of crackers with fake cheese between them.
“There are more nutrients in these, maybe?” he said, wrinkling his nose.
“Keep telling yourself that,” Nora said, taking a decadent bite of her candy bar.
They laughed at one another, the sound filling the hallway and echoing out the windows.
Eventually, at around two or three that morning, Isaac and Nora left the library.
They walked through campus, their backpacks heavy on their shoulders, no longer anywhere close to tired and no longer worried about their papers and tests.
After a full hour of walking and talking, they made their way to the all-night diner located a few streets away from campus.
The only person eating in there was a police officer without any hair.
Nora and Isaac sat across from each other and ordered: a burger, grilled cheese, french fries, onion rings, and two milkshakes.
Nora went for a strawberry, and Isaac said he was a chocolate guy, which Nora found childish and endearing.
She wondered if this was what it was like to fall for someone in the “normal way.”
The following morning, when her fatigue finally caught up with her and she was yawning through class, she told her friend Jenny about Isaac and their all-nighter. Jenny said it was the most romantic thing she’d ever heard in her life. She said, “I think you’re going to marry that guy.”
Two years later, when Isaac and Nora tied the knot in a Manhattan ceremony, Jenny gave a speech, explaining that she’d called this.
“I knew from the minute Nora mentioned Isaac’s name that she was going to marry him,” she said.
“These are two brilliant people who found each other in this crazy world. They know to hold on to each other, no matter what.”
They’d moved to Manhattan for Isaac’s law school.
But once there, Nora quickly carved out a career in magazines during a time when magazines were at their height, when people were well-read and eager for information.
She was a writer, then an editor, planning out how the pages would look and who they would feature.
She was the harbinger of numerous fashion trends.
She understood people and what made them tick.
People looked up to her. Women interviewed her to ask her how she made her career work.
When she got pregnant with Paul, many men said that that would be the end of Nora’s run.
But she knew better. In fact, she and Isaac planned to have numerous babies after Paul.
She imagined them moving to a bigger house in New Jersey, maybe, where they’d have a nanny help them raise five or six kids.
She’d pay the nanny handsomely, she told herself, because she knew what it was like to be unpaid and giving your life to child-rearing.
She remembered her days with Henry, Sarah, Felix, and Mona.
But she wanted a big family, if only because she’d been so lonely after her parents died.
If she and Isaac passed, she wanted Paul to have someone around.
But when she went into labor with Paul, something went wrong.
The baby wasn’t getting enough oxygen. It was the most terrifying time of her life.
When she finally held her baby in her arms, she sobbed with a mix of relief and dread.
She sensed that she would never have a baby again, that her body couldn’t undergo such a traumatic event.
Very soon, the doctor confirmed this, telling her that she needed to have a hysterectomy due to scarring that had happened during the dramatic labor—scarring that had occurred to help get Paul out in time.
These were dark days in Nora’s life. The brightest lights were her husband and her infant baby, a baby who seemed never to cry, who was healthy and thrilled to be alive.
Nora tried to get her magazine at the time to highlight more women’s struggles.
She tried to illustrate what many young mothers go through and how difficult it is.
But most of the magazines—even the ones geared toward women—were hesitant to talk about such major women’s health issues.
This enraged Nora. She sobbed to Isaac, telling him that this was part of the reason her health problems had destroyed her mentally and emotionally.
She hadn’t been prepared. She hadn’t known any of this was possible.
Slowly but surely, Nora, Isaac, and Paul fell into an easy rhythm of life and love.
They redesigned their apartment in the Upper East Side and dug their heels into city living.
Nora often spoke about how she “couldn’t imagine” ever moving to the suburbs.
She and Isaac had a wonderful, complicated, difficult, and beautiful marriage.
Everything about their relationship was filled with nuance, just as everyone’s was.
Now, Nora saw herself alone on the porch in Nantucket, her heart in her throat. It was hard to believe that so many things had happened in her life. It was hard to believe that Paul—a stranger to her, now—had been that baby in her arms all those years ago.
“What now?” she whispered to the moon, hanging over the ocean, illuminating the sand.