The Invisibles

For Maria

Then, now, and always

I
t wasn't until she reached the corner of Grove Street, where the sidewalk buckled and the pre-dawn smells of yeast and fabric softener perfumed the air, that Nora remembered it was her thirty-second birthday. She stopped abruptly, as if someone had yanked a leash around her neck, and let the information settle along her shoulders. Thirty-two. The number rolled around in her head, and she waited for the onslaught of—what was it exactly: relief? dread?—that was supposed to arrive at reaching the end of another year, but it didn't come. Instead, the first line from a book she had once read occurred to her:
“Once upon a time, there was a woman who discovered she had turned into the wrong person.”
Nora could not remember the title of the book or even the name of the author, but the words themselves, strung like so many lights in the distance, felt as distressing now as they had the day she had first come across them. Maybe even more so.

A band of sky behind the rooftops ahead was turning a soft purple. The moon, a lopsided waxing gibbous, was so translucent as to appear glass-like there in the heavens. It would be another forty minutes or so before the sun rose, erasing all traces of the moon for the day. Now, though, it was hers. The September air was sharply cold, the imminent warning of a quickly approaching fall, and the streets were littered with leaves browning around the edges. Alice Walker, her chocolate brown retriever, nuzzled the stiff grass for a few seconds and then turned around, staring up at Nora. She barked once, and then again. It was unusual for Nora to stop during their morning walks, a daily ritual that had become so ingrained in their lives by this point that it was hard to imagine anything preventing it. Even bad weather did little to deter her; Nora made the trek in rain and snow, and once even in a hailstorm, during which she'd had to stop and take refuge under an enormous red-and-green-striped awning until things settled down again. Walking cleared her head in a way few other things could, and she never turned around until she reached the little grove of birch trees by the railroad tracks, where she would sit for a moment and rest before starting back again.

Alice Walker barked again, loudly, the sound reverberating through the stillness, and then cocked her head.
The birch trees,
her eyes seemed to say.
Let's get to the birch trees
. Nora looked away from the dog and stared down at her sneakers instead—pale blue Asics with orange strips on each side. She pressed two fingers beneath her breastbone and took a breath as if to steady herself. A heaviness that was not disappointment or regret or anything else she could identify yet filled her nonetheless. And for the first time in as long as she could remember, she did not
want to keep walking toward the birch grove. She just wanted to go home.

“Come on, love,” she said, turning around, tugging at Alice Walker's leash. “Let's go.”

The dog barked a third time, obviously confused.

Nora's feet moved with a mind of their own, leading her back to the apartment they shared on Winslop Avenue. “Yeah, well, I don't know either,” she said. “Come on, now.”

S
he could hear the phone ringing in her bedroom as she unlocked her front door. Alice Walker bolted toward it, barking after each ring, as if the phone might respond. Nora hung back, struggling to get her key out of the lock, which still continued to stick, despite numerous complaints to the landlord. She tugged again. Nothing. Well, she'd have to let the machine get it. It was probably just Trudy or Marion from the library anyway, calling to ask her to pick up some more coffee beans on her way in. Between the three of them, the office coffeepot went through at least four refills a day.

“Hey, this is Nora.” The recorded sound of her voice echoed through the empty apartment. “I'm not here, but I will be eventually, so please leave a message.” Nora winced, listening. She'd gone through at least a dozen messages when she'd set up the machine, trying her voice out each time—a little happier here, more serious there—until she'd just said to hell with it and settled on this one.

There was a pause and then:

“Norster?”

Nora's fingers froze around the rubber grip of the keys. No
one had called her Norster since she was seventeen years old. And even then, there had been only one person who had ever used that name.

A throat cleared. Then: “Nora Walker? Is this you? God, I hope I have the right number. This is . . .” There was a muffled noise, as if the receiver had just been covered, and then the faint, nearly obscured sound of a reprimand. “I need a minute, Jack, okay? Mommy just needs one minute. Now,
please
.”

No. It couldn't be. Nora gave the key a final furious tug and then let go of it altogether, racing toward her bedroom. It just couldn't be.

“Sorry about that.” The voice was back, unmuffled now and slightly raised. “Um, this is Ozzie Randol. I'm just calling to—”

“Ozzie!” Nora snatched the phone up so quickly that she almost dropped it. “Ozzie, I'm here!”

“Nora! Oh my God!”

“Ozzie.” Nora said the name a third time, as if the word itself would settle her breathing somehow, stop her legs from trembling. Her windbreaker, unzipped and loose, hung open in front of her like a mouth agape. How long had she been waiting for this moment? She couldn't remember anymore. “Oh, Ozzie. Oh my God. Is that really you?”

Ozzie laughed. “Of course it's really me. You know any other girls out there named Ozzie?”

“No.” A giggle emanated from Nora's mouth like a bubble. “No, I've never met another Ozzie.” She sat down carefully on the end of her bed, smoothing the edge of the white comforter with the palm of her hand. Ozzie had the same laugh, a bright burst of sound that came out of a mouth so wide and lips so full that
Nora used to wonder how everything fit in there together—and still looked so pretty.

“Shit, Norster, I can't believe I actually found you! Monica told me she thought you still lived in Willow Grove, but . . .”

“Monica?” Nora interrupted. “Our Monica?”

“
Har-Monica!
” Ozzie said, using the nickname they had given her back in high school after Monica had started whistling through her teeth. “Who is doing
great,
by the way. She has a place in Manhattan now—a penthouse, actually, which I've decided not to hold against her. Or the fact that she's managed to snag herself a
bill
ionaire to live there. Can you believe it? Harmonica, living with some Bill Gates guy?” Ozzie laughed. “Anyway, she told me that she thought you still lived in Willow Grove and worked for the library, but she couldn't be sure. When's the last time you talked to her, anyway?”

Nora blinked against the sudden onslaught of information. “Who, Monica?”

“Yeah. You two talk at all?”

“No.” Nora paused. “Why, do you?”

“No.” Ozzie sounded disappointed. “And I haven't seen her in forever, either. Not since . . . God, I guess not since we all left.” She paused. “What about Grace? You talk to Grace at all?”

“No. Not Grace either.”

But that had been the deal, hadn't it? They were all going to go and live their own lives and forget everything that happened. Put it behind them.
Leave it in the past,
Ozzie had said,
where it would get smaller and smaller until one day it would just disappear altogether
. Except that it hadn't. At least not for Nora. Twice, just this past summer, she had gotten up in the middle of the night and
walked over to the old house with Alice Walker, just to stare at it, to try to remember—or maybe make sense of—all the things that had happened behind those walls. It was an abandoned building now, the yellow paint old and curling off the sides like an old skin, the front porch split in two. But it had once been Turning Winds, a group home for unwanted girls, the temporary residence for Ozzie and Grace and Monica and Nora throughout their last two years of high school, a place that, for a while at least, had afforded them the only sense of safety they had ever known.

After graduation, Nora had been the only one of them to stay in Willow Grove. She hadn't wanted to leave, hadn't felt the tug and pull of the outside world the way the others had. Some nights, though, she wished she had. Some nights she wondered if her life would be different if she'd cobbled together the courage to strike out in a similar way, to carve her own path through the vast unknown. What things would she have seen? What would she have done? Who would she have turned into, aside from the wrong person?

The last time she had gone down to the house and stood there looking at it, she'd had to cup her hands under the curve of her rib cage as her heart beat steadily beneath it. If she didn't hold on to it, she thought, if she didn't gather herself around it and keep it safe, it would split open completely.

“Jesus, time flies, doesn't it?” Ozzie asked. “Can you believe we're in our fucking
thirties
now?”

“Actually,” Nora said softly, “I'm thirty-two today.”

“What? Wait, what's today?”

“September sixth.”

“Oh my God, I totally forgot it was your birthday!” Ozzie
laughed again. “Holy shit, Nora! How weird is it that the day I call you—after all this time—it's your fucking birthday? I mean, how crazy is that?”

Nora smiled. Along with her fondness for cursing, Ozzie had always believed in crazy, inexplicable things—things that had to do with fate and the meanings of names and the way the planets aligned with each other to keep the world spinning. The only facts that made any sense, she used to say, were the ones that we had no answers for. Back then Nora had thought she agreed with her. Now she wasn't so sure.

“So how
are
you?” Ozzie's voice was soft all of a sudden. “What's your life like? Oh my God, do you still collect first lines?”

A flush of joy washed over Nora as Ozzie recalled her favorite thing to do in high school. Nora had still been in the throes of her silent stage when she first arrived at Turning Winds—a period of selective mutism that had begun when she was twelve years old and that, the doctors said, would end only when Nora decided it would end. It had ultimately taken a little over four years. But those silent years had not stifled her in any way. In fact, Nora thought they had actually saved her. She disappeared into books instead of talking, reading whatever she could get her hands on. Her fascination with first lines started almost immediately, after she came across Alice Walker's novel
The Color Purple
and read the first eight words:
“You better not never tell nobody but God.”
They had made her suck in air, and she'd given in right then and there, sitting down on the library floor between the fiction stacks to read the whole book from cover to cover. She'd collected over two hundred first lines since then, each of them a small, quiet joy in its own right. There was something about the infinite promise
that the first line of a book held, as if the weight of everything that came afterward rested upon it. First lines were one of the bravest things she knew. They toed the line, bent their knees, and jumped—right into the abyss, taking you with them. Good ones did, anyway. Nora had gotten into a bad habit of not bothering to read the rest of the book if the first line failed to measure up to her standards. Which, she understood, probably meant that she had missed out on a great number of wonderful books. But that was the way it was for her.

She still had the same blue and green notebook she'd started her collection with; in fact, she'd taken it out of her underwear drawer just the other day, jotting down a first line she'd found while shelving a copy of
The Chronicles of Narnia
at work:
“There was a boy called Eustace Clarence Scrubbs, and he almost deserved it.”
It had made her laugh out loud, and she'd taken the book home with her that night to read. Now, as she stared at the notebook on her bedside table, the whole thing felt stupid and childish. Another reminder of the person she still was.

“No,” she said. “I haven't done any of that first-line stuff in a long time.”

“Ohhh.” Ozzie sounded crestfallen. “I used to
love
it when you would tell us first lines! God, I wish I remembered some of them.”

“Yeah. Well.” Nora heard her voice drift off. “What about you? Where do you live now?”

“Amherst. Up in Massachusetts. The winters'll make your balls turn blue, but my house is the sweetest little thing in the world. We raise our own chickens and vegetables in the backyard. My kids love it.”

A string in Nora's heart tugged. “You have kids?”

“Three of them. All under the age of six. Can you believe it?”

Nora stood up. She had not known she was holding her breath until she exhaled, a sudden, forcible movement. “Are you married, too?” she asked, steadying herself against the edge of her dresser.

“Yup.”

“No, you're not!”

Ozzie was the only one out of all four of them who had insisted, had
sworn,
that she would never get married. Kids, maybe. But only after she'd gone and seen the world, driven some stake into the ground of a piece of uncharted territory and claimed it for her own. But marriage? Chaining one's self to another human being until you died? Never. What happened? Nora wondered. How did something you had once been so sure of suddenly become negotiable?

“I am.” Ozzie's voice got quiet. “Almost twelve years now. And you know what, Nora? I'm still not sure I did the right thing. I mean, I love him and everything, but, Jesus Christ . . . I really don't fucking
know
sometimes.” She paused. “Do you know what I'm talking about? I mean, what about you? Are you married now? Kids?”

“No, not married.” Nora headed down the narrow hallway of the apartment. Her sneakers made a peeling sound against the hardwood floor as she walked over to the living room window; her fingers closed around the soft pouch of her earlobe as her heart beat a little faster. “But I'm dating a great guy. It's been almost a year now.”