Sunlight Finds You

Chapter 1

Chapter 1

Eleanor is born in Rolla, Missouri, a week after Eleanor Roosevelt comes to Kansas City to campaign for her husband. Her mother admires Mrs. Roosevelt's courage, and her father likes the name but worries it will work against her, since many people in their part of Missouri have strong feelings about the Roosevelts. He suggests they call her Nora for short. Only later, when she meets Leonard, does she learn that Eleanor comes from Helen, meaning "shining light." Even at seventeen, Leonard has that kind of information just rolling around in his head. Nora doubts her mother ever knew the meaning, but she would have been pleased, since she loves sunlight more than most people do. She throws open the shades every morning, hates the long nights of winter, and once climbs a slope at the Lake of the Ozarks to photograph the water at sunset, only to be disappointed that the sparkle cannot be captured in black and white.

More than anything, Nora's mother does not tolerate lies. She regularly reminds Nora and her brother Bobby that liars die twice in the Lake of Fire, and that a lie is a lie is a lie, whether it comes from Hitler saying he only wants peace or from a woman who claims she has already paid her laundry bill. Because Nora admires and loves her mother, fears God's punishment, and most certainly does not want to have anything in common with Hitler, she tries hard not to lie to anyone. If pressed, she tells the truth.

In sixth grade, however, she tells a blatant lie, and though she does not perish, she still believes what follows alters the course of her life.

Her teacher that year is Mr. Pile, a man she loathes from the first day of class. He is nice enough to her because she is quick, studious, and a girl, but he torments the smallest and slowest boys with nicknames: Tom Bigby is called "Mr. Littleby," Ronald Bell "Mr. Fish," and Peter Schultz is addressed only as "Herr Schultz" in a thick German accent, at a time when no American wants to be thought of as German. Mr. Pile lectures from behind a podium with a handmade sign that reads "mr. pile" in spread-out letters, written in fountain pen so nothing can be erased, only added.

One winter morning at recess, Nora falls off the monkey bars. She is not hurt, but she muddies the hem of her skirt, and Mr. Pile gives her permission to go inside and rinse off the mud. By the time she gets the mud out, the bell has rung and the hall is quiet, but her class still has ten more minutes of recess. She realizes she has time to do something she very much wants to do. She ducks into the classroom, closes the door behind her, finds Mr. Pile's fountain pen in his top desk drawer, and with a few strokes changes the sign to read "mr. rude." Then she caps the pen, returns it, and goes back outside, showing Mr. Pile that she has gotten the mud out and thanking him. She does not feel bad one bit. She has not lied. She has only made the sign on the podium more honest.

Back at her desk, her classmates begin smiling and looking at one another while Mr. Pile, standing behind the podium, has no idea what is so funny. Nora is pleased to witness how scared he looks, realizing he is being laughed at. The good time continues until Wilma Cooper raises her hand. Wilma believes that because of her faith in Jesus, she has to be nice to everyone, and she sorrowfully points to the sign. Mr. Pile comes around to look for himself. By then no one is laughing. They can hear him breathing through his teeth. He raises one trembling finger and announces that whoever did this will be discovered.

Nora is not worried. Everyone in the class has been outside with him, except, briefly, for her, and Mr. Pile knows her only as a good, well-mannered, compliant girl with no reason to dislike him. Mr. Pile gives the class a page of math problems and steps into the hall, leaving the door open. Some of the boys whisper to one another, trying to guess who might have done it, but no one thinks of her. Mary Pank turns around, waits for Nora to look up, and whispers "Mr. Rude!" Nora smiles just enough to show she agrees it is funny, then goes back to work.

Then Mr. Pile comes back in quickly, staring straight at her. "Miss Chesnow," he says, and terror blooms. He asks whether, when she came inside during recess, she saw anyone coming or going from the room. She says no, and it is true: she has not seen herself. But she is aware of her classmates watching, and of their fear on her behalf. Mr. Pile asks one last time if she knows who altered the sign, and for just a moment she considers confessing. She thinks of something she recently read in a C. S. Lewis book: that you do not really know what you believe until the truth of it becomes a matter of life and death. In those moments, she is more afraid than she has ever been in her life, and she discovers that she does not truly believe her mother's warnings of eternal punishment. Or rather, she is willing to bet against them in the face of Mr. Pile's certain, and imminent, wrath. "No sir," she says, and manages to sound indignant. Unpracticed as she is, fear pushes her to excel.

Mr. Pile's eyes fill with shame. "I see. Forgive me." He retreats from her desk, dabs at his forehead with his handkerchief, and resumes class with a shaky voice. But what C. S. Lewis does not say, Nora reflects, is that after the danger passes, you might go back to not knowing what you believe and start to worry that you chose wrong. She spends the rest of the day in silent panic. At lunch, both Mary and Wilma express outrage that she has been unfairly accused. Nora says nothing, and feels even worse. After school she waits for her brother at her usual spot, watching fat snowflakes fall from the pearly sky, their beauty no consolation.

At home, her mother asks about her day. Nora says her day was fine, because in for a penny, in for a pound. Her mother looks up from her ironing, wincing as if in sudden pain. She has always said she can tell when someone is lying, and Nora holds her breath and waits. The look of pain leaves her mother's face. She smiles, reaches out to muss Nora's hair, and says she can go out and play if she changes her clothes and wears her warm hat. That night, Nora is not visited by demons, and she wakes to find, to her surprise, that she has not perished in her sleep.

On Monday, Mr. Pile does not call Tom, Ronald, or Peter any names but their own. He does not call on them at all, his pride too great for that, but at least some decent part of him realizes he should not be dishing out what he so clearly cannot take. Nora's relief turns to jubilance. She does not care that no one knows she is the one who taught the teacher a lesson. Everyone thinks Diana Prince is a regular army nurse, but she is secretly Wonder Woman. Nora has no magic lasso and no invisible jet, but she can lie with eyes of steel, and that feels like a superpower. Over the next few days, she plans an entire secret career of using this power to take down other villains.

The principal arrives

On Friday, the principal appears outside Mr. Pile's door, says Nora's name, and tells her she should gather her things. Her hands shake so much she can barely strap her books, though Mr. Pile himself seems only surprised. In the hallway, the principal touches her shoulder and speaks gently, saying her father is in his office. And Nora knows. Her father is a machinist at a metals plant, a man who goes to work even when he is sick. If she is in trouble, no matter how serious, her mother would have been the one to come.

She breaks into a run, ignoring the principal calling after her. Some people are like that with what scares them: if they know it is coming, they rush to it, because the dread is worse than the thing itself. The secretary looks at her with pity, then glances at a door a few feet from her desk. Nora moves past her, opens that door, and there is her father, a giant in a chair made for a child, the laces of one of his boots undone. He has been crying. Just seeing tearstains on her father's cheeks is like seeing water run uphill. She has entered a new world, with different rules. "Oh honey," he says, and holds out his arms.

Nora's mother collapsed while hanging clothes in the backyard. Mrs. Ritchie next door sees her fall and has to run and get her step stool so she can get over the fence and try to help, but by the time she does, Nora's mother is already dead. An aneurysm, her father says, a word unfamiliar to him as well. He explains as best he can, putting a fist by his left ear and shooting out his oil-stained fingers: a burst vessel in her brain. He cannot understand it. She is the best person he knows, young and healthy,

Chapter 2

Chapter: "Chapter 2"

For a year after their mother dies, the family grieves in peace, but soon relatives and neighbors start mentioning single women. The feeling is that the father needs help with Nora and Bobby, and plenty of women would want the job. He’s not yet thirty-five, good-looking, and though he left school in sixth grade, he’s naturally smart with machinery, which kept him employed through the Depression. He has good manners, good hygiene, doesn’t gamble or drink too much. Even with two kids, he’s a catch.

By the time he’s ready to meet some of these women, Nora is thirteen, old enough to babysit Bobby and even make dinner. Her specialty is macaroni and cheese with hot dog pieces; Bobby loves it, and they spend many Saturday nights eating it while listening to The Shadow or Inner Sanctum Mysteries. But their father comes home looking deflated and smelling of cigarettes, though he doesn’t smoke. If asked, he shrugs. Once, after a beer, he calls a woman a floozy. "I just miss your mother," he tells them. They understand. They don’t want him lonely, but it’s hard to imagine him with anyone else. Their parents were well suited: he didn’t share her religious faith, but he respected her simple ways and devotion. He said he mistrusted women who wore perfume, dyed their hair, or smiled at everything he said.

Then one Saturday he comes home late, looking dumbstruck. He tells Nora he had a lovely evening with a war widow named Mae. Nora pictures a skinny old woman in black, but Mae turns out to be twenty-six, stout and pretty, with bright red hair pinned up. She has a three-year-old daughter, Janet. The first time they meet, Mae tells Nora she’d just put Janet’s crib together when she found out her first husband wasn’t coming back. "I wanted to die as well," she says, and Nora likes that Mae speaks to her as if she’ll understand things a child wouldn’t. Mae says she’d love for Janet to have a daddy who can hug her, and maybe a brother and sister as part of the deal. Nora later finds out her father has already proposed.

Nora likes Mae, but she’s surprised her father is so taken with her, because Mae is the opposite of her mother in many ways. Both grew up on farms and were told the meek would inherit the earth, but while that consoled her mother, Mae takes it to mean she’ll inherit nothing and must reach for everything herself. She doesn’t nag or argue with the father, at least not in front of the kids. But not long after the wedding, Mae suggests they move to Florida. She has a friend who raved about St. Petersburg, saying it was up-and-coming, with opportunity, and you could leave your snow shovel behind. A few weeks later, Mae gets out a map and taps a red fingernail halfway up Florida’s western edge. "See? Right on the water. They call it Sunshine City." She leans close to Nora. "Nora, honey. I bet you will, too."

She’s right. They arrive in the summer of 1947, when St. Pete has around a hundred thousand people but is growing fast. Coming from Rolla, a ten-story building is a skyscraper. The first time they see an escalator, Bobby and Janet want to ride it up and down. None of them have ever seen the ocean or touched a palm tree. They move into a turquoise rental. Back in Missouri, that color would be strange, but in Florida, there’s a lime-green house and two pink ones on their block. Mae plants yellow roses outside, and with the windows open, Nora can smell them from inside. They live in Kenwood, not by the water, but the streets are flat and good for biking, and Bobby and Nora sometimes take the bus to the pier, spending their allowance on saltwater taffy or, once, a sea-glass necklace for Mae’s birthday.

Nora is nervous about starting ninth grade, but she’s hardly alone. On the first day, the teacher asks who just moved in from out of state, and maybe a third of the class raises a hand. She makes fast friends with Roberta, from Illinois, and Irene, from Pennsylvania. They don’t like the humidity, but Nora even likes that. Florida feels lush on her skin. The move eases her grief for her mother, though it doesn’t go away. Her brother, under his brash exterior, remains startled that they’ve gone on without her. He’s eleven when they move, and once, at a city park dock, a manatee with a pale scar on its back swims up. Their father says it probably survived a run-in with a motorboat. He strolls away humming. "I feel her with us here," Bobby says quietly. Nora doesn’t feel that. She feels their mother’s absence and feels sorry for her: the last thing she did was hang wet clothes on a freezing day. Her big dream was a window over the kitchen sink, and she never got it. "If you’re right," Nora says, "she’s probably mad we didn’t move here sooner." Bobby laughs, nodding. Their quiet mother would have been bewildered at first, but Nora thinks she would have come to love their new home, with its freedom and promise, the beaches and bright skies, everything growing in the warmth.

Looking back, Nora realizes St. Pete in 1947 wasn’t paradise for everyone. On sidewalks, anyone who isn’t white has to walk close to the street. "Giving whites the wall," it’s called. Separate schools. Separate beaches. Separate entrances for movie theaters. Downtown, you have to be white to try on clothes. Coming from Missouri, it’s all Nora has known. She didn’t really think about it, at least not until she met Leonard, or really, Leonard’s mother. Mrs. Lifton is also white, but she moved from New York. She likes Florida’s weather and lower cost of living, but she feels the state is stuck in the past. She spent a summer in Paris before the war, and the French didn’t understand segregation, wondering how Americans could live with themselves. When white Southerners tried to defend it, the French said, "La raison du plus fort est toujours la meilleure" — people in charge can always justify bad behavior.

The first time Nora and Mrs. Lifton really talk, they’re on the Liftons’ back patio while Leonard changes. Nora admires that patio. Their rental has a concrete slab with folding chairs, but the Liftons’ patio looks like another room, with a roof, a ceiling fan, and nicer furniture. They also have a kidney-shaped pool, unusual even for Florida. Beyond it lies Coffee Pot Bayou, sparkling blue, and on the other side, St. Pete proper. Mrs. Lifton guesses the bayou is shaped like a coffee pot from above, though no one seems sure.

Mrs. Lifton was a theater actress in New York. The second time they’re on the patio, Nora asks if she has pictures. Mrs. Lifton brings out a photo album and shows herself with flowers in her hair, wearing a long gown. "I was Ophelia," she says. Nora doesn’t know who that is, and Mrs. Lifton is patient. She points to a playbill for Othello from when she saw Paul Robeson play the lead during the war. "He got a standing ovation. He was brilliant." She has to explain who Othello and Paul Robeson are. When Nora understands Robeson is a black man and the leading lady is not, she’s shocked. Mrs. Lifton says she finds it shocking only because of how she grew up. Nora considers this opinion more than she would from someone else, because she’s dazzled by Mrs. Lifton. She thinks Mrs. Lifton resembles Katharine Hepburn, and when she says so, Mrs. Lifton laughs and tells her she was actually Hepburn’s understudy in college. She calls Hepburn "Kate." "She never missed a performance. But she was lovely to me. She still sends a Christmas card every year." Nora is getting ahead of herself, though. Mrs. Lifton makes an impression, but when Nora goes over, she’s there for Leonard.

She first sees Leonard on the first day of her sophomore year, her first day at St. Petersburg High. The school is the prettiest building she’s ever been in, like a Spanish castle with white stucco and a red clay roof. She often has to strain to hear her history teacher over the birds, since the classroom’s Juliet balcony overlooks the senior courtyard. As a sophomore, that courtyard is off-limits, but she can sit in the junior courtyard, and this is where she first sees Leonard. He sits by himself, reading a book, pink bougainvillea behind him. Even with his gaze lowered, she can see the angles of his face and the easy grace of his long body. She thinks: My God, who is that? Before the bell rings, a couple of boys walk up, and one says something that makes him smile. Seeing that, her fate is sealed. She knows she sounds shallow, but that’s what it is at first. Roberta ch

Chapter 3

Chapter: "Chapter 3"

Leonard drives a black Plymouth that belonged to his father, but it doesn't look like a hand-me-down. It's beautiful, no dents, all shine, with a dark red interior and a wide front seat. When they stop to eat at Triplett's Drive-In, they sit at the tables outside, and Leonard always remembers that she hates pickles, though she only mentioned it once. He doesn't know how to dance when she meets him, and when she tells him how much she loves dancing, he looks a little queasy. She offers to teach him, and he says he will learn, for her.

They practice at his house, where there is more space and less chaos. His mother lets them push back the furniture in the living room, where there is both a record player and a radio. Sometimes she watches from the doorway and tells them they look good. It is early October, after school, and even with fans going, they get overheated. It is Mrs. Lifton who suggests that Nora bring a suit and stay for a swim to cool off. The next time, Nora brings her suit, and Mrs. Lifton tells her to rinse off first, and that she can use the bathroom attached to the master bedroom while Leonard rinses off in the hall shower.

Nora marvels at this: three people living in the house, with two different bathrooms. She has never known people like this. She has never even taken a shower, because every place she has ever lived only had a tub. Mr. and Mrs. Lifton's bedroom leads to a second, smaller patio with a view of the pool and the bayou beyond. Leonard mentioned that his mother likes to sit there and read, and once, while changing in his parents' room, Nora rolls back the sliding glass door and goes out there by herself. She feels like Goldilocks, sitting on the love seat and looking out at the water. There is a bottle of nail polish on the table, labeled Lucky Rose, the same shade she noticed on his mother's toenails. A book is wedged between the love seat cushion and the wicker, and she slips it out to peek at the title: The Sun Also Rises. She has heard of Hemingway, knows he is considered a serious writer. She is impressed that this is the kind of book Mrs. Lifton would read on her little sunporch with no one watching, waiting for her toenails to dry.

She doesn't feel she can ask Mrs. Lifton about the book, or even mention it to Leonard, because she doesn't want either of them to know she was snooping. The next day, she tries to find The Sun Also Rises at the school library, and when she can't, the librarian gives her a scolding look and says it is an inappropriate book for a girl in high school. It is full of vulgarity, absolutely full of it. The librarian says she is surprised at Nora. Nora assures her she is surprised as well, says she saw someone reading it, that's all. The librarian frowns, hopes it wasn't another student, and tells Nora to find something more suitable. Nora can't bring herself to try the city library, worried she'd be chastised again, perhaps more firmly, with people behind her in line. She can't even ask Leonard if he's read it, because he might guess she knows his mother is reading it, and if he knows it's full of vulgarity, they would both die of humiliation. Still, she hates that she can't get her hands on a copy. She has a hard time believing Mrs. Lifton would read smut, even smut by a serious writer. But if that is the case, she too wants to read it, and be like Mrs. Lifton in this small way.

The Harvest Bash

Leonard and Nora make their dancing debut at the Harvest Bash, which is really a Halloween dance, but they can't call it that because some parents think anything having to do with Halloween is demonic. It is held on the last Saturday in October, with a prize for the best costumes. Leonard and Nora go as Prince Philip and Princess Elizabeth. Nora gets a little fake tiara from Webb's, and Leonard finds a hat that more or less looks like a Royal Navy hat. The real Princess Elizabeth is about to give birth, but they leave that part out.

By then, Leonard can jitterbug as well as anyone. Nora taught him the tabletop and the octopus, and what they call the big unfurl and furl-back. It was his idea to practice a move where he pushes her up over his shoulders and swings her around. They practice outside by the pool, and when his mother sees them through the window, she runs out and yells, "Oh be careful, Leonard! Don't drop her!" Nora isn't worried. The muscles in his back are firm as a tree trunk. Years later, when she helps a friend study for a massage therapy exam, she learns this muscle is the latissimus dorsi, the swimmer's muscle, and she thinks, oh yes, I know that. He never drops her. Not at their house, and not at the dance.

An hour into the dance, Nora loses her tiara, and Leonard loses his hat. No one knows who they are supposed to be. They laugh at the wrong guesses and keep having fun. But when the band plays "Blue Moon," they dance slow and close, and Nora knows she doesn't want to spend the whole evening surrounded by other people. He feels the same. Long before the costume contest winners are announced, they have already left for the beach.

Before Leonard, when Nora went out with other boys, she easily played the part of the Guardian of Virtue, moving a hand out from under her skirt or blouse, or verbally reminding her date of the kind of girl she wasn't. With Leonard, she loses all such power, and doesn't miss it. Alone in his car, she wants to devour him. She loves his voice, the way he says her name, the way he makes it clear when he's holding her or kissing her that he doesn't want to be anywhere else. He sometimes pulls back and looks at her, really looks at her, like there will be a test about her face in the morning and he'll have to draw every shadow and curve from memory. Every boy she knows uses the word necking, but Leonard is the first to truly focus on her neck, at least without leaving a hickey. He moves his lips down one side of her neck while two fingertips slide down the other, back up to her ear, again and again, until it feels like her very teeth are ringing. When she is alone with him, she feels a humming current between them, a thing in itself, as alive and real as either one of them.

But she can think of nothing more terrifying, or personally calamitous, than getting pregnant. If given a choice, she would prefer being hit by a car, killed by polio, or eaten alive by a shark. Really. She has thought about it. At least she would be remembered fondly. Night after night, they pull away from each other, worn out. The misery is new and bewildering. Her friends talk of managing lust in their boyfriends, not of being driven mad by it themselves. Leonard doesn't judge her for it, not at all. But she wouldn't want anyone else to know.

The Beach

The night of the dance, they have been parked at the beach for maybe fifteen minutes when Nora loses all sense of propriety. If any other boy tried doing to her what she starts to do to Leonard, that boy would have gotten slapped. Leonard takes hold of both her hands and whispers, "What are you doing, Nora? What are you wanting?" She understands that all she has to do is say the truth, and it will happen. Terror rushes in. She tells him she is sorry and retreats to her side of the car. She says sorry again, and means it, because she can tell by his voice and the look on his face that she has put him in physical pain.

"I'm going for a swim," he says. "I'll be right back."

"Okay," she says. She wants to cry. He doesn't want her to come with him. He gets out of the car and runs barefoot across the sand, right into the water. The moon is out, and because of his white pants, she can keep sight of him until the cresting waves reach his waist. She gets out and walks around to the front of the car, leaning on the hood, watching for him, worried, though she knows he is an excellent swimmer. This worry, she understands, is connected to her longing for him, which isn't, at the heart of it, caused by his physical beauty or the muscles of his back. What she feels is bigger than that. Encompassing.

He emerges from the water and walks back toward her, rubbing his eyes, the white pants soaked and clinging. He stands next to her without saying anything, but reaches over and takes her hand. His fingers are still wet and cool from the sea.

"I won't do that to you again," she says.

"Okay," he says. "I'm not mad, Nora."

After a while, he makes an L with his left hand, raising it to the moon. "It's waning." She asks how he can tell, and he says if the moon sits in your left hand, it's waning, and if it sits in your right, it's working its

Chapter 4

For the Harvest Bash dance of her junior year, Nora and Leonard go as Phyllis and Walter from Double Indemnity. Leonard wears an old suit jacket so worn his mother jokes he could cut a bullet hole in it, and she mixes red poster paint, corn syrup, and cocoa powder to fake a bloodstain. Bobby lends him a cap gun. Nora borrows a rayon gown from Mrs. Lifton that looks just like Phyllis’s jumpsuit, and buys a cheap drugstore wig to match the one in the movie. On the night of the dance, she hasn’t told her father or Mae who they’re dressed as, hoping they’ll guess. Her father gets it right away and laughs so hard he has to sit down. Mae snaps pictures with her Brownie camera, and everyone clowns around with the cap gun. Wearing the silky dress, even with the cheap wig, Nora feels glamorous and can’t wait to get to the dance.

They never make it inside.

As soon as they get out of the car in the school parking lot, bright headlights snap on and eggs start flying. Nora takes a hit straight in the eyes, and yolks sting her bare arms. Leonard steers her back into the car, locks the doors, and starts the engine, but he’s been hit in the eyes too and needs a minute to see. The yipping and laughter of their attackers fades behind a revving engine. Leonard grabs her shoulder and asks if she’s okay. She says yes, meaning she’s alive. She can’t think of anyone who has it in for them; it might be random, almost Halloween.

Leonard offers to take her home, but Nora knows her father will be furious when she walks in covered in egg and bleeding. She asks to help wash the car first. At a service station, an attendant gives them rags and a bucket of soapy water, and they scrub together, one on each side. Standing back to look at the car, Nora feels a little better. No permanent damage. There will be other dances.

But Leonard seems preoccupied. His parents are at the Liebermans’ Halloween party and always stay late; it isn’t even seven thirty. He doesn’t have to say what he’s suggesting. Nora has never once been inside the Lifton house without his mother home, and both sets of parents would never allow it. She’s never even seen his room. But she agrees, and laughs when she says “Yo-kay!”

In the Lifton House

The house is dark and quiet. They leave their wet shoes in the entry. Leonard’s plan: they’ll both use the hallway shower so his parents won’t notice the bathroom off their room. He’ll put out his robe, she can borrow something from his mother’s closet from the back, and they’ll be gone before anyone comes home.

It is a good plan. They should have followed it.

On the way to the house, Nora has hatched a plan of her own. She suggests they shower together, promising to keep her underwear on. Leonard looks at the floor, the ceiling, rubs his jaw. He knows he can trust her, and she trusts him completely. As far as she’s concerned, there will be no consequence. This gift of an evening will be their secret alone.

Because of the running water, they don’t hear the car in the drive or the front door opening. A sudden knock on the bathroom door makes Nora’s heart still. Leonard puts a finger to his lips, but she knows it’s too late. Her wet shoes are still by the front door. Leonard turns off the water.

“Leonard.” His father’s tone is sharp. “Is Nora in there with you?”

Nora puts her hands in front of her eyes like a fool. Leonard starts to explain about the eggs, but his father cuts him off: he doesn’t care about any of that. Get dressed and come out. Leonard whispers that it’ll be okay, but Nora knows it will not be. She lifts the toilet lid because she’s sure she’ll throw up.

Leonard tells his father they don’t have dry clothes. A pause. Then his father orders Leonard to put on a towel and go to his room, and Nora to do the same. Mrs. Lifton will be waiting for her in the hall.

Mrs. Lifton

When Nora opens the bathroom door, Mrs. Lifton is standing there in a witch costume: a sleeveless black dress, a translucent cape, green makeup on her face and neck. She doesn’t look like herself. Nora tries to apologize, but Mrs. Lifton slices the air with her hand and says, “Don’t. I don’t want to hear it.” Nora starts to cry.

Mrs. Lifton leads her to the bedroom and lays out a white blouse and a purple skirt Nora has never seen her wear. While Nora dresses, Mrs. Lifton goes into her own bathroom and says nothing. It is that silence, more than anything, that makes Nora cry harder. She thinks of the little patio she’ll never see again. She’ll be banished from their beautiful home like a dog who peed on the rug.

Mrs. Lifton drives her home. Nora sobs in the passenger seat, her wet hair dampening the borrowed blouse. She gives directions to Kenwood. At a stoplight she tries to apologize again; Mrs. Lifton just shakes her head. At the next light, she reaches over and gives Nora a consoling pat, still silent.

When they turn onto Nora’s street, most porch lights are out. An unlit jack-o'-lantern grins from the picture window. Nora points to her house, and Mrs. Lifton parks. “Are your parents home?” Yes. Nora hopes to hurry in before anyone sees her wet hair or the too-long skirt. She tells Mrs. Lifton, sincerely, how sorry she is.

Mrs. Lifton puts her palm to her chest and breathes in through her nose, exhaling quickly, twice. It’s an exercise she used to do before going onstage when she was anxious. She nods toward the house. “This won’t be pleasant for either of us.”

The Deal

Only then does Nora realize Mrs. Lifton intends to talk to her parents. Terror grips her. She doesn’t fear her father’s physical wrath; he long ago stopped using his belt and rarely even yells. But she is certain that if he knows what Leonard’s parents came home to, he won’t love her anymore. He might say he loves her and is only disappointed, but the disappointment would never go away. Even now, she knows she is not wrong to think this.

Nora begs Mrs. Lifton to let her go inside alone, but Mrs. Lifton refuses. She has to tell them. Then she asks Nora, stricken, whether she might already be… she can’t say the word. Nora understands and insists she can’t be, that things didn’t go that far, that they didn’t let them, that she doesn’t want a baby at all. Mrs. Lifton studies her face and decides she believes her.

She still has to tell them. “You’re in over your head. If you were to end up in trouble, and your parents knew we hid this from them, we would be complicit. Leonard is our son, our responsibility. And he should not have taken advan—"

“It was my idea,” Nora says.

Mrs. Lifton leans back, staring at her like she’s a cobra with bared fangs. She still has to tell them, because she told her husband she would. Then she finally explains why she’s the one sitting here instead of Leonard’s father. She smacks her hand against the steering wheel, again and again:

“I...have...been...de...fend...ing...you.”

For I don’t know how long, she tells Nora, she has been telling John he was wrong about her, that they didn’t have to worry. She likes a tranquil home, a tranquil marriage. But she argued with him, over and over, for Nora, for Leonard, told him Nora was a nice girl and good for Leonard. Now she’s in an impossible position.

Nora insists she is a nice girl, even now, though she wonders if something is monstrous in her, if Leonard’s father had been able to see it all along.

Mrs. Lifton lets her cry, then offers a deal. One condition: Nora must have nothing to do with Leonard, permanently. No telephone calls. Nothing, not even at school. If she can’t promise and mean it, they’ll go into the house right now and get it over with.

Nora looks up at the house, now garish in her eyes, the turquoise paint loud, the roses tinselly in the orange globe light, the porch railing still unfixed. She thinks about all that wonder, all that luck. When she’s older and out of the house, she could bear her father knowing. But Leonard would already be gone. She says, “We’ll break things off.”

Mrs. Lifton corrects her: no “we.” Nora must stay away no matter what Leonard says. She knows her son can be intractable and impulsive. She needs to count on Nora.

Nora feels actual pain radiating from the center of her chest. “What about school?” she asks. She can’t imagine a world where she doesn’t love Leonard, can’t imagine watching him grow old from a distance. But Mrs. Lifton’s terms are absolute: if she hears of them spending any time together, anywhere, she’ll call Nora’s father immediately and tell him about the water party.

Nora looks into Mrs. Lifton’s pitying, watchful eyes. “I’ll stay away from him. I promise.” Her voice is steady. At the time, scared as she is, she believes she is telling the truth.