Chapter 4
THIS IS THE LAST time I’m doing this, I swear to God,” Emily announced, as the three of them tumbled out of the taxi on Ocean Boulevard.
None of them were in the best mood after a long flight delay out of O’Hare and having not eaten most of the day.
But Emily, as always, was taking it to the next level.
“I mean, I just don’t have the time to fly out this same week, every year. We’re too old. I’m over it.”
Nora closed her eyes for a moment, inhaled the familiar cool, salty air. “I’ll never be too old to come here,” she insisted. “And besides, we promised Grandma Vera when we were little that we’d always come back here to her. All three of us.”
“That’s easy for you to say, because you’re still in high school.” Emily frowned. “I had to beg my internship to let me start a week late because of this.”
Julia nodded. She would be starting law school in the fall and Nora knew she was moving from her apartment in New Haven to DC the day she got back, where she had secured a summer job working for a congresswoman.
“Come on, you two old ladies,” Nora joked, hoping her humor covered how much she still hated being the youngest. She always felt out of sync, left behind in every possible way.
Starting the moment she was born, in the first and most awful way of all: Emily and Julia both had memories of their mother, while Nora had none.
“What a terrible life you lead, forced to spend one week on the most beautiful island in the world with our awesome grandma,” Nora continued.
“That’s not what I meant,” Emily said. “I just don’t know that anyone should really expect us to come the same exact week in May, all together, every year now that we’re all starting to have lives and stuff.”
“No offense, Nora,” Julia said.
Nora rolled her eyes, pulled her pink duffel bag from the trunk of the yellow cab, and walked up the front walk to Grandma Vera’s porch.
The screen door suddenly swung open and Grandma Vera stepped out, her arms already outstretched for hugs.
“It’s my favorite day of the year,” she called out. “May day!”
Nora chuckled. Emily and Julia might have thought they’d grown up, but Grandma Vera never changed. She announced this upon their arrival, every single year. The May sisters, arriving to visit her in May. May day!
Nora jumped into her arms, inhaling the comforting rose petal scent of her grandmother’s familiar perfume. “May day is the best day,” she said, happy at least Grandma Vera agreed with her on this.
“The very best,” Grandma Vera agreed as she took a step back, squeezed Nora’s forearms gently, and took a good look at her. “Even more beautiful than last year,” she proclaimed. Then released her to run down the steps and offer a one-armed hug each to Emily and Julia.
“Okay, girls,” she announced. “I got lobster tails for dinner, and s’mores out back for dessert. Go put your bags upstairs, and then we’ll dig in.”
After s’mores, Julia and Emily turned down Grandma Vera’s invitation to watch Some Like It Hot. Julia said she had work to do to prepare for her summer job and went up to her room, and Emily said she had a college friend also in San Diego for the week who was going to meet her at Clayton’s for pie.
“Suit yourselves.” Grandma Vera waved them away with a flick of her wrist. Then she turned to Nora: “I can always count on you to watch with me, can’t I, honey?”
Nora settled in on the old sagging couch under a blanket, while Grandma Vera popped the tape into the VCR. Then they watched the familiar movie curled up under the blanket together, the same way they had every May for as long as Nora remembered.
And as the ending credits rolled, Grandma Vera was already humming “I Wanna Be Loved by You” as she stood to eject the tape.
“The older I get, the sadder this movie makes me,” Nora said.
“Marilyn’s life was utterly tragic. She struggled so much.
She rose so high and then she fell so far.
Do you think that’s the price of fame, Gram?
” Nora had been thinking about this kind of thing a lot lately, as she was about to apply to college in the fall.
Her dad had talked her into pursuing a practical degree, maybe in science, something she could get a job in.
You can always act, he told her. You don’t need a degree in that.
Grandma Vera shook her head. “I think Marilyn had her own demons that probably would’ve gotten her, famous or not.”
Nora told Grandma Vera what she and Dad had been discussing for college and then Vera frowned. “So Bobby doesn’t think you should follow your dreams?”
Maybe she shouldn’t have said anything. Her dad and Grandma Vera had a weird relationship.
The older she got, the more Nora could sense a strange sort of tension that existed between them.
Dad never once came with them out to Coronado, and Grandma Vera hadn’t come out to visit them in Chicago in at least ten years.
They occasionally spoke on the phone, but when Nora caught pieces of the conversation from one end or the other, it always sounded strained.
But maybe that kind of thing was normal, considering Vera was Dad’s dead wife’s mother.
Nora knew she couldn’t possibly understand their relationship, given that it had mostly existed before she was born.
“That’s not exactly what he said,” Nora backtracked.
“He just wants me to get a degree in something more practical. Then maybe try acting later. After college.”
“Hmmph.” She put the tape into its case and then back in its place on the shelf. “Well, far be it from me to go against Bobby’s advice, but sweetheart, you have to do what’s going to make you happy. The heart wants what the heart wants.”
“I am happy,” she said quickly. She was happy right this very moment, in her favorite place in the world, with her favorite person in the world. But she knew that wasn’t exactly what Grandma Vera meant.
“Your mother…” Grandma Vera began, but then her voice trailed off. Hardly anyone ever talked about her mother, and certainly not in a way that Nora could understand, never having actually met her.
“What about my mother?” Nora asked softly.
“Your mother always loved acting. Did I ever show you the picture of her when she was in Guys and Dolls in high school? She was your age then, and you look so much like her now.”
Nora nodded. She had seen the picture. Or a picture of her mother as Sarah Brown, up onstage.
Their mother’s high school yearbook still sat on a bookcase in the den at home in Chicago, and Nora had taken it out and looked at it probably a thousand times.
“Mom didn’t become an actress though,” Nora said pointedly.
“She went to college as a biology major, then married Dad and had us.”
Grandma Vera sighed. “Sometimes I wonder how things might’ve turned out if I’d encouraged her to follow her dreams when she was your age, and then—”
“And then she wouldn’t have had me, and I couldn’t have killed her,” Nora burst out, tears welling up in her eyes, the way they always did when she thought about this particular truth.
The first thing that she had ever done coming into this world was take their mother’s life, just by the very act of being born.
“Oh, honey.” Grandma Vera sighed and walked to the couch to give Nora a hug. “Is that really what you think?”
Nora nodded.
She kissed Nora’s forehead. “That’s simply not true. Nothing that happened is your fault, Nora. You have to understand that, right?”
“I don’t know,” Nora said. “Aren’t you ever angry that the universe said me or her, and it took her away from you and gave you me instead?
” Sure, Nora hadn’t chosen to be conceived, or born, and hadn’t actively had any control over the eclampsia that quickly and silently ravaged her mother’s body.
But, what if her mother had decided to stop at two kids?
Julia and Emily would still have their mother.
Grandma Vera would still have her daughter.
“No, no, my tiny songbird,” Grandma Vera said emphatically. “I have never once been angry about that. I’m so grateful to have you. You know how much I love you.” Vera gave her a tight squeeze and kissed the top of her head.
Nora nodded. She did know that much.
Grandma Vera rocked her in a hug for a moment and then she started singing softly in her best Marilyn voice, “I wanna be loved by you…”
She pulled Nora up off the couch, ran and grabbed a spatula from the kitchen, and then handed it over, encouraging Nora to sing with her in harmony, the way they always did.
After they finished the song with a flourish of Nora going up an octave, Grandma Vera smiled and gave her another squeeze. “Okay, sweetheart, I’m going up to bed. But go take a peek at that picture before you go up. Top-left drawer of the dining room armoire.”
Nora sat back down on the couch for a minute after Grandma Vera went upstairs and felt a wave of sadness wash over her.
She stood and was walking toward the dining room armoire when suddenly she heard a noise from outside that made her stop.
A guy’s voice yelling in the distance. Nate? And he was calling, for her?
She forgot all about the armoire, the picture of Mom, and walked outside to the front porch instead.
There was Nate, standing out on the beach side of the sidewalk, right across from the house, waving his arms in the air. “Nora!” he called her name again when he saw her on the porch.