The Nest Part 11

"I don't believe you."

"Why? I mean, if I were a boy would you have to 'come out' about it? Would you go home and say, 'Mom, there's something you need to know. I kissed a boy and I liked it.'"

"It's not the same thing. Or maybe my parents are just nothing like yours."

Simone shrugged. "I'd say that's a safe bet." She reb.u.t.toned her lime-green cardigan and stood up. "My parents are cool. My mom's brother is gay and it wasn't easy for him. My grandparents were super religious and, well, they were really hard on him. Always. But my mom and him-he's Simon, I'm named after him-they're really close. We're his family now."

"My mother has a gay brother, too." Nora was still sitting, looking up at Simone.

"Really?" Simone said. "Does she not approve?"

"No, no," Nora said, trying to think of an easy way to explain the Plumb family and their various alliances and grievances. "They're not close, but it's complicated. They're all kind of weird."

"Everybody's kind of weird." Simone put her hand out for Nora, helping her to her feet. "Your problem is you're worried about being everyone's mirror and that's not your job."

Nora braced herself; she could tell Simone was gearing up for one of her frequent-and sometimes baffling-extemporaneous lectures. Nora knew now just to listen and nod and say, Wow, I never thought of it that way, and then Simone would say, I live to elucidate, and then they could talk about something else. "Mirror?" Nora said, because Simone seemed to be waiting.

"Everyone's always on the hunt for a mirror. It's basic psychology. You want to see yourself reflected in others. Others-your sister, your parents-they want to look at you and see themselves. They want you to be a flattering reflection of them-and vice-versa. It's normal. I suppose it's really normal if you're a twin. But being somebody else's mirror? That is not your job."

Nora slumped against the wall a little. What Simone said made sense, a lot of sense, but so did wanting to see yourself in the people you love. So did wanting to reflect the people you love. "How do you know all this stuff?" she asked Simone.

"Some people have to learn this stuff sooner than others."

Nora didn't have to ask what Simone meant. The previous week they'd been in the museum gift shop looking for candy when a couple had walked up to Simone and asked whether she knew where they could find a rock tumbling kit.

"No, I don't," she'd said, concentrating on the shelf of candy in front of her.

They'd persisted. "Well, can you find someone who will help us?"

Simone had turned to face them then and crossed her arms. "No, I can't," she'd said. "Because I am not employed here. Like you, I am a customer." Even by Simone standards, her tone was blistering.

The couple, fl.u.s.tered, apologized. "We were just confused because you weren't wearing an overcoat," the woman said.

"Oh, I know exactly why you were confused," Simone had said.

"h.e.l.lo?" Simone tapped the top of Nora's shoe with hers, reclaiming her attention. "Do you understand what I'm saying? Being somebody's looking gla.s.s is not your job."

"I understand. I get it. But it's not just everyone else; it's me, too. I like definitions. I like to be sure of what's happening."

Simone put a consoling arm around Nora. "You can be sure about me."

Nora wished they were alone. She wished they could go somewhere and just be alone. If she told Louisa what was going on, maybe they could. Maybe they could stop these stupid afternoons at the museum, stop sneaking around.

"If somebody insists on a definition," Simone said, "tell them you're bicurious. That will shut them up, trust me."

Nora was imagining telling her parents that she was bicurious. G.o.d. She knew exactly what Melody would say and she said it to Simone: "That doesn't even sound like a real word."

"Maybe. But how does it feel?" Simone asked, pressing Nora against the darkened back wall in a remote corner of the Hall of Biodiversity. "How does it feel?"

NORA AND LOUISA TALKED ABOUT BOYS all the time and it had never occurred to Louisa that Nora might actually want to be talking about girls. There were plenty of lesbians at their school, but they all seemed so dramatically lesbian with their short haircuts and black boots and tattoos and multiple piercings; they were so in-your-face lesbian, holding hands and making out in cars in the parking lot. Or there were the girls who playacted at being lesbian, usually to flirt with boys, touching each other's hair and tentatively kissing on the lips, sometimes with tongues and then laughing and pulling away, wiping their mouths with the back of their hands. But Louisa knew that what she'd seen between Nora and Simone wasn't either of those things; it wasn't statement and it wasn't fas.h.i.+on. What she saw in the darkness of the museum was something else. It was l.u.s.t.

If Nora was gay and they were twins, was she gay, too? She liked boys, but she had to admit that when she'd seen Simone kiss Nora, watched the rise and fall of Nora's chest and Simone's hand move over Nora, her entire consciousness had reduced to one lasting image: Simone's thumb stroking Nora's nipple. But what did she want? To be touched by another person? A boy? A girl? Either? Both? She'd always imagined herself with a boy, but seeing Nora with a girl had upended something, introduced a new possibility that was rooted in their twinness. This was the thing about having a twin, the enveloping, comforting, disconcerting thing: They were equal parts and seeing the other doing something was almost like doing it yourself.

You are each other's pulse, Melody would tell them all the time, and Louisa believed it; she didn't always like it, but she believed it. When their father had taught them how to ride a two-wheeler, Louisa was terrified. Every time he let go of her bike, she felt the loosening at the back wheel and stopped pedaling in sheer terror and her bike would slow and wobble and tip and she'd have to jump off and free herself from the spinning spokes and whirring pedals.

"Let's let Nora have a go," Walt finally said.

Then it was Nora's turn, Nora who was always more fearless, more agile, and when Louisa watched her father run with Nora's bike and then release the back tire and saw Nora lean into the pedals, pump her legs faster, give the bike the speed and ballast it needed to stay upright, it was almost as if she'd done it herself. She could feel it exactly. Watching Nora's body do something gave her the concurrent muscle memory.

The next time Louisa tried the bike and her father let go, she flew.

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE.

Woman. Runner. Literary agent. Single. Stephanie looked over her list, the four words she'd hastily written to describe herself to a room mostly full of strangers.

"Don't think too hard," Cheryl, the cheerful woman running the team-building session, had said. "Jot down the first four words that pop into your head. No editing your first impulse and no job t.i.tles."

Stephanie crossed out literary agent and in its place wrote reader, which was more accurate anyway, describing what she was supposed to be doing all day but never actually had time to do until the evenings or weekends. She was a little stung that she'd written single, was surprised to see it emerge from the spongy ooze of her uncaffeinated subconscious. It had been four days since she surrept.i.tiously switched the coffee beans to decaf (Leo hadn't even noticed), and she still felt groggy, as if her brain stayed at half-mast for most of the morning. But single was not how she ever thought of herself. She considered her list again, thought about erasing single and replacing it with something else (New Yorker? Foodie? Gardener?), but that would be cheating and everyone else at the table seemed to be finished.

Stephanie very much wanted this day to end, the first of three infuriating, obligatory days of employee orientation. The corporation she'd sold her agency to, a behemoth of entertainment representation-film, television, music-headquartered in Los Angeles and wanting a literary presence for their New York office, insisted on the training. She knew this was just the first of many irritations she would have to endure after running her own office with the beloved, if quirky, group of employees she'd worked with for so long. She was trying to be patient, but this was bulls.h.i.+t-days of icebreakers, group dynamics, and s.e.xual hara.s.sment seminars. What did any of this have to do with her or her employees? They already knew how to work together, and they worked together well because each and every one had been handpicked by Stephanie for their specific intellectual gifts, for their discerning taste and, most important, for their ability to work with her.

Cheryl (who'd introduced herself as a human capital consultant, getting the first snicker of the morning from Stephanie and her longtime a.s.sistant, Pilar) was leading them through the second icebreaker of the morning. The first had not gone well. It was the old cla.s.sic, Two Truths and a Lie. Stephanie'd endured it on several previous occasions, conferences and meetings, when everyone had to stand in front of the room and read three statements about themselves: two that were true, one a lie, and the rest of the group had to guess which was which. Stephanie always used the same three.

I was in an Academy Awardwinning movie. (True. When she was seventeen, she'd worked for a caterer in Queens that provided craft services for the cast and crew of Goodfellas. She noticed Scorsese staring at her from beneath his Panama hat one day as she dumped an enormous bag of lettuce onto a white plastic platter. She smiled at him. He walked over, grabbed four oatmeal cookies from the table, and said, "Wanna be in a movie?" He sent her off to hair and makeup and used her as an extra for the Copacabana scene. Eight takes, all in one day. She stood for hours, tottering on high heels and wearing a tight gold lame dress and black mink stole, her hair teased into a mile-high twist. It was her red hair that Scorsese liked; he put her front and center in the shot where Ray Liotta guides Lorraine Bracco down the stairs to their table.) I can butcher a pig. (True. She spent one summer in high school at her uncle's farm in Vermont. She'd had a summer fling with the son of a local butcher and had spent her afternoons sitting on a metal stool watching his shoulder blades glide beneath his white coat, transfixed by how he could deftly break down a glistening side of beef or pork. He showed her how to slice along the fat line, spatchc.o.c.k a chicken, separate a pork shoulder into b.u.t.t and shank. They'd drive around town at night in his truck and drink Wild Turkey from tiny flowered Dixie cups, park near the pond, and touch each other until they were dizzy. She'd bring his substantial hands to her face and inhale, smells she still a.s.sociated with heady New England nights: Castile soap and pennies, the coppery scent of animal blood.) I was born in Dublin, Ireland. (Lie. She was born in Bayside, Queens, but between her hair and brownish-greenish eyes she looked like she could have been.) n.o.body ever guessed Ireland was the lie; they always went for the pig.

The first partic.i.p.ant that morning to stand in front of the room and read his truths and lie was a new hire from the Interactive Group. A gaunt twentysomething, wearing a vintage-looking cardigan and Clark Kent eyegla.s.ses that magnified his smudged eyeliner. He had a tattoo of a squid down his left forearm. He stood, stoop shouldered, and introduced himself.

"Hey. I'm Gideon and okay, well, here goes." He shoved his hands in his pockets and read from the paper on the table in front of him in a quick, even monotone.

"I nearly died from overdosing on pills. I nearly died from bleeding out. I nearly died from autoerotic asphyxiation."

"Whoa, whoa, whoa." Cheryl jumped up, waving both hands before anyone had a chance to respond. "Thank you, Gideon, for your candor." She paused for a beat. "But I guess I should have spelled out the guidelines a little more clearly. We want you to reveal something interesting about yourself, but nothing quite that personal in nature and, please, everybody, nothing s.e.xual. Think professional."

"Sorry," Gideon had said, shrugging idly. "Clinical depression and suicidal ideation are more common than most people realize, and they're both a really important part of who I am."

"I understand." Cheryl kept a smile affixed to the lower half of her face. "We're just going for something a little lighter here."

"The lie was autoerotic asphyxiation," he'd added. "FYI."

STEPHANIE OPENED HER MOLESKINE and tried to tune out the rest of the room as Cheryl asked for someone to read their four words. She started making a list of things she needed for dinner.

"You said not to self-edit," an amiable guy spoke from the other end of the table, "so this is what I've got: Fat. Happy. Golfer. Husband."

Her cell phone, sitting on the table in front of her, started to vibrate. Without even looking at the number, she waved at Cheryl. I have to take this, she mouthed and left the room as quietly as she could. Relief.

She looked down at the incoming ID: Beatrice Plumb.

Standing in the hallway outside the meeting room, Stephanie was surprised to find how happy she was to hear Bea's voice. She'd begged off the phone quickly, telling Bea she wanted to talk but was in a meeting (true) and couldn't stay on the phone (true) and that, yes, Leo had mentioned something about new work but they'd both been incredibly busy and maybe they'd talk about it tonight (lie).

Bea sounded so anxious that Stephanie found herself feeling protective, maternal almost. She didn't know if Leo had read Bea's stuff; she doubted it, but she could ask. She briefly wondered why Bea had handed the pages to Leo and not her, but then again-they probably weren't new pages, they were probably old pages that she was pa.s.sing off as new and Leo wouldn't know the difference. Stephanie would remind Leo to read them, and she would help him come up with something to say to Bea, something nice and noncommittal. She'd put it on her list.

Back in the conference room Gideon was up again, this time reading his four words (musician, pessimist, wizard, Democrat). A slight wave of nausea roiled her stomach; she sipped the lemon water she'd brought into the meeting. She was going to have to eat something soon.

She slid her phone out of her jacket pocket to check the time. Once it was in her hand, she couldn't resist opening the app she'd downloaded that tracked the development of the baby based on due date. This week your baby is the size of an apple seed! This week your baby is as big as an almond. This week an olive! She hit the b.u.t.ton and watched the photo appear of what her embryo looked like at nine weeks-like a tiny bay shrimp, a curled crustacean with an immense head and sci-fi budding arms. As she did almost every time she looked at the eerie images, she felt herself blush. It was unseemly, really, how addled she found herself to be forty-one and single and accidentally pregnant by Leo Plumb, beyond a shadow of a doubt the most irresponsible and least paternal of all the men she'd ever loved in her entire life.

She knew it was crazy, told herself a million times a day that it was crazy, but she found she couldn't completely suppress a few fleeting moments of optimism-about the baby for sure, about Leo, maybe. She was surprised by how responsible he'd been lately, how present. He helped around the house. He seemed to be working every day and was enthused about meeting with Nathan. He read all the time. Nothing in his behavior made her believe he was anything other than completely clean and sober. She couldn't help but wonder if everything in her life had been pitched toward this moment-agency sold, money in the bank, some time on her hands, a seemingly renewed Leo in her bed, trying to make some kind of amends to someone or something. That she was on the receiving end of this newly burnished Leo, the very thing she'd desired and abandoned as so much wasted effort all those years ago-Leo in the living room scribbling on a legal pad, Leo in her bed in the morning running a finger down her back, Leo in her kitchen every night, closing a book and pulling her onto his lap-well, she'd decided not to question it. She'd decided to selfishly, greedily, take it. All of it. Maybe even this new wrinkle, the unexpected residue of the power outage.

Over the years, she'd considered having a baby with any number of people. Marriage was not part of her plan; she wasn't against it, she just wasn't for it. She treated her occasional yearning for a baby the same way she treated her occasional yearning for a dog. Let it linger and wait to see if it pa.s.sed, which it always did, which she took as a good sign. Because other things she desired (her house, a particular author signed, a midcentury table in good condition) didn't flit through, they planted themselves until she turned desire into owners.h.i.+p. That her fleeting thoughts of motherhood never truly haunted her the way, say, her quest for the magenta peony bushes in her yard did was comforting as she imagined her ovaries surrendering the final vestiges of fertile eggs into the hinterlands of her reproductive system.

THEN THE STORM. The expected-unexpected arrival of Leo. The power outage. Leo. A little too much wine (hers), the familiar mouth (his). Leo had seemed the tiniest bit broken. She made him laugh. They talked. He took her wrists and circled them with his thumb and forefinger, pulling her to him (the way he had that first night their friends.h.i.+p became something else, the night he turned to her in a hidden booth at a small burger joint and said, "I've been wondering what you keep beneath your blouse") and then he'd two-stepped her across her kitchen, in the dark, under the moonlight, and kissed her with such acquisitive purpose, she thought she might combust. Leo. What else was there to do when the lights were out-wind howling, branches splitting and falling-but fuel the fire, let him lift the sweater over her head, unzip her pants, and f.u.c.k her silly under the unblinking, marbled gaze of Lillian.

She looked back down at the list she'd written. Her four words. She was going to have to talk to Leo very soon. Whatever he said, whatever his reaction, the decision was hers. This belonged to her. She took the cap off her pen and crossed out single, wrote mother.

It didn't look terrible.

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO.

When Matilda was recovering in the hospital and found out how much money she was getting from the Plumb family, she'd had all kinds of fantasies about what to do with it. (Shamefully, she remembered that her first involuntary thought was a pair of suede boots she'd coveted, the ones that went over the knee and stopped midthigh; then she remembered.) She thought about trips and clothes and cars and flat-screen televisions. She thought about buying her sister her own beauty salon, which she'd always wanted. She thought about buying her mother a divorce.

The staff at the rehabilitation hospital tried to prepare her for all her future expenses, not just her prosthetic foot (which would need to be replaced every few years) and its various related medical issues and costs, but the accommodations she'd have to make to her home. "It sounds like your living situation is not ideal," one of the social workers said to her. "You might need to rea.s.sess." Matilda took the financial worksheets and nodded her head, but she didn't really listen. Everything seemed so much sunnier at the rehab hospital where she was a little bit of a star, so young and determined and doggedly cheerful. She learned each skill quickly and was able to go home sooner than most patients. When she returned to her parents' cramped apartment in the Bronx, Matilda started to understand what she was up against.

The problems began at the building's front door, which opened to three flights of stained, uneven, peeling linoleum stairs that were discouraging in the best of circ.u.mstances but were horrific with crutches and wouldn't be much better once her prosthetic foot was ready. Inside the apartment to the left of the front door was a corridor, too narrow for a wheelchair (which she sometimes needed, especially at night), leading to the apartment's one bathroom and galley kitchen. Straight ahead, four small steps down, was the sunken living area that thirteen-year-old two-footed Matilda believed was the height of design sophistication and now made amputee Matilda want to weep in frustration.

And there was her mother's decor, what she and her sister used to call South of the Border kitsch-mismatched throw rugs from Mexico, colorful baskets full of fabric, tiny rickety tables holding religious statuary-all of it now seemed like a concerted effort to kill her. Small things she'd never noticed about the apartment loomed large: The toilet was very low, the shower required stepping over the side of a challengingly deep bathtub, there were no railings-not even a towel bar-for her to grab onto.

Beyond the physical discomfort with the apartment and the utter lack of privacy, which was psychologically draining, there was the emotional stress of being around her two parents. Even though they'd been unusually kind to each other in the wake of the accident, uniting in their worry and grief for the first time in years, they never left her alone. They watched her move around the rooms guardedly, her mother clutching a rosary, her father trying to avert his gaze.

She had to get out of there.

Matilda didn't believe in G.o.d as much as she believed in signs. (She knew she'd gotten a sign the night of the accident in the front seat of Leo Plumb's Porsche, the setting sun glinting off his wedding ring, and she'd ignored it and now look at her. G.o.d had taken her right foot.) She said a rosary every morning when she woke, praying to know what to do, where to live. So when she saw the billboard in front of a brand-new condominium complex on her favorite street, the one lined with cherry trees that bloomed exuberantly in the spring, she knew: The sign was her sign.

PRICES SLASHED it said. And in tiny print on the bottom: ACCESSIBLE UNITS AVAILABLE.

She bought two apartments. One on an upper floor for her sister who had three kids and a deadbeat husband, and a smaller one on the ground floor for herself. She paid cash, only asking her sister to cover her own maintenance costs. The leftover money had still seemed monumental. A lawyer-friend of Fernando's helped her open a money market account attached to her checking. She was being as frugal as she could, but it went so fast! And someone in her family was always asking her for a loan: a down payment for a car, plane tickets to visit family back in Mexico, a new dress for a daughter's prom. It never ended and how could she say no? She couldn't. Because when she thought about why she had the money, she was ashamed.

And now she was scared, because she had to find a way to be more mobile. She had to get a job. Once the morphine from the night of the accident wore off, she admitted what she'd always known: She'd never be a singer. "You're smart, Matilda," one of the nurses in rehab said to her. "What kind of career are you thinking about?" n.o.body had ever used that word with her before: career. She liked the sound of it. She liked imagining herself going to an office every day. After high school, she'd wanted to go to college but there was no money, and the day she'd come home, excited after her allotted fifteen minutes with one of the school's overworked counselors, with community college applications and student loan forms her parents had been so negative, so discouraging. She knew they were afraid of their undoc.u.mented status, of being found out and losing their jobs. She heard them later that night arguing over whether to let her apply, her father becoming increasingly angry and volatile. The next day she'd asked Fernando about catering work.

Now she had some money; she could take cla.s.ses if she wanted, but not if she was on crutches-or in constant pain.

Vinnie wasn't the first person during her stay at the rehabilitation hospital to mention elective amputation to Matilda, not the first person to gently suggest (or in Vinnie's case, aggressively suggest) that as far as amputations went, hers was a particularly s.h.i.+tty one and she should consider another operation to amputate below the knee, which would open up a world of better prosthetics. Matilda didn't understand because at first everyone had seemed excited by how much of her leg had been saved. She didn't remember much from the recovery room, but she did remember the surgeon triumphantly telling her that he'd taken "as little bone as possible." When she repeated his boast to her physical therapist, who was examining her stump and frowning, the woman said: "Sometimes more bone is a good thing and sometimes it's not."

She was right. Matilda's prosthetic foot hurt almost all the time. No matter how she paced herself or rested or how hard she worked to strengthen her body's other muscles, no matter how many (or few) barrier socks she wore or how much therapeutic ma.s.sage she had, after only an hour or two with the foot, her stump would start to throb, the pain gradually working its way up her calf and then past her knee until there was a concentrated knot of tension and an almost unbearable ache at the top of her hamstring where it joined her lower gluteal muscles. (How blissfully ignorant she'd been of the infrastructure of upper thigh to a.s.s before the accident! Only wondering if there was a cure for the tiny cellulite b.u.mps that peeked out from her very short shorts.) Most days the pain would creep into her hip; many days her neck would start to ache by late afternoon and she'd end up in bed before dinner.

Her doorbell rang, loud and insistent, angry. Vinnie. Matilda opened the door to find him standing there with a pizza box balanced on his left arm and a full-length mirror tucked under his bionic arm. She eyed the long mirror warily when he came through the door.

"I don't want that thing in here," she said.

"Maybe you don't want it, but you need it. Your foot is bad, right?" He could tell just by looking at her how much pain she was in. She would still laugh and smile, but her eyes would be unfocused. He understood.

"It's not too bad," Matilda lied. On good days, Matilda's nonexistent foot would tingle or just feel like it was there, its ghostly presence driving her crazy. But on bad days it hurt to distraction. Today, it felt like needles were piercing her nonexistent foot. For weeks, she'd had a persistent itch on one of her missing toes. She found herself in the ludicrous position of fantasizing about amputating a foot that didn't exist.

"Sit down," Vinnie said, placing the pizza on her kitchen table. "Take a slice while it's hot. You can eat while we do this."

She reluctantly sat on one of her kitchen chairs. Took a slice and blew a little before she bit into it. "How did you manage to get it here while it's still hot?" she asked him.

"Trade secret," he said.

"What's in the sauce that makes this so good anyway?"

"Nice try. We can talk my miracle sauce later. Let's do some work."

Vinnie had been talking about mirror therapy for weeks, and Matilda thought it sounded ridiculous, like voodoo. Still, he was in front of her and he'd carted a mirror all the way to her house, so she reluctantly did what he said. She straightened her knees and let Vinnie position the mirror between them so that when she looked down, she saw her intact foot on one side and its mirrored image on the other. "Oh," she said.

"Move your left foot," Vinnie said. She did and the optical illusion was of two perfect feet, moving in concert. "Scratch your toe," he said, "the one that's been itching."

"How?"

He pointed. "Scratch the itchy spot on your left foot, but keep looking in the mirror."

She leaned over and gently scratched. "Oh my G.o.d," she said. "It helps." She scratched harder. "I can't believe it helps. I don't understand."

"n.o.body understands, really. The simple way to think about it is that you're helping rewire the old signals in your brain. You're teaching your brain a new story."

She moved her foot to the left and to the right, flexed and pointed and flexed again. She wiggled her toes. She rotated her ankle and the foot in the mirror, her missing foot, seemed like it was back and was working. She scratched again, it helped again. "It already feels better," she said. "Not great but different."

"Good. Four or five times a week for fifteen minutes. And use the mirror whenever the foot hurts or itches. Got it?"

Matilda nodded and smiled. "It sounded so stupid," she said. "I didn't want to go buy a mirror just to do something that sounded so dumb. Thank you, Papi," she said. She spoke softly and put a light hand on his shoulder. "Thank you for bringing the mirror."

"It's temporary," Vinnie said, standing abruptly. The charge that shot through his arm, his chest, and other places he didn't want to dwell on when Matilda touched him was dismaying.

"I'll buy my own. You can have this back-"