Entering Normal Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Acknowledgments

  Praise

  PROLOGUE

  FALL

  CHAPTER 1 - ROSE

  CHAPTER 2 - ROSE

  CHAPTER 3 - OPAL

  CHAPTER 4 - ROSE

  CHAPTER 5 - NED

  CHAPTER 6 - ROSE

  CHAPTER 7 - OPAL

  CHAPTER 8 - OPAL

  CHAPTER 9 - ROSE

  CHAPTER 10 - OPAL

  CHAPTER 11 - ROSE

  CHAPTER 12 - NED

  CHAPTER 13 - OPAL

  CHAPTER 14 - ROSE

  CHAPTER 15 - OPAL

  CHAPTER 16 - ROSE

  CHAPTER 17 - OPAL

  WINTER

  CHAPTER 18 - OPAL

  CHAPTER 19 - ROSE

  CHAPTER 20 - NED

  CHAPTER 21 - ROSE

  CHAPTER 22 - OPAL

  CHAPTER 23 - ROSE

  CHAPTER 24 - NED

  SPRING

  CHAPTER 25 - OPAL

  CHAPTER 26 - ROSE

  CHAPTER 27 - OPAL

  CHAPTER 28 - ROSE

  CHAPTER 29 - OPAL

  SUMMER

  CHAPTER 30 - NED

  CHAPTER 31 - OPAL

  CHAPTER 32 - ROSE

  CHAPTER 33 - OPAL

  CHAPTER 34 - NED

  CHAPTER 35 - ROSE

  CHAPTER 36 - OPAL

  CHAPTER 37 - ROSE

  CHAPTER 38 - NED

  CHAPTER 39 - ROSE

  CHAPTER 40 - ROSE

  CHAPTER 41 - OPAL

  CHAPTER 42 - OPAL

  CHAPTER 43 - ROSE

  Entering Normal

  A Conversation with Anne LeClaire

  Reading Group Questions and Topics for Discussion

  LEAVING EDEN

  PROLOGUE

  CHAPTER 1 - 1992

  Tallie’s Book

  About the Author

  OTHER BOOKS BY ANNE D. L E CLAIRE

  Copyright Page

  in memory of sandra lee

  Just give me one thing that

  I can hold on to

  To believe in

  This living is a hard way to go

  JOHN PRINE “Angels from Montgomery”

  Acknowledgments

  Many people helped me write this book, and I am indebted to them for their encouragement and guidance.

  I owe a special thank-you to:

  The Virginia Center for Creative Arts for multiple residencies that provided me with the time and space to write major portions of this book.

  My agent Deborah Schneider, who, besides being wonderfully supportive and a person of great integrity, wields a magic wand.

  At Ballantine, Maureen O’Neal and Gina Centrello and Kim Hovey. No author ever found herself in better hands. Their enthusiasm and commitment made all the difference.

  Jacquelyn Mitchard, who insisted on the title, supported me when I was discouraged, and never once wavered in her belief. Marilyn Kallet for her kind words and skillful eyes. Margaret Moore for asking the right questions and holding me steady. Jebba Handley, Ginny Reiser, Ann Stevens, and Lorraine Brown for listening to excerpts early on and never waning in their enthusiasm. Mauny Plum, for opening her heart so that I would “get it right.” Diane Bliss of Luscious Louie’s for keeping me in cookies.

  The following gave generously of their time and expertise: Judge Robert A. Scandurra; Kathleen Snow, Esq.; Pamela B. Marsh, Esq.; Dr. James Kawalski; Gretchen Kolb at the Rocking Unicorn; Captain Billy Flynn and Firefighter Joel Goucher at the Harwich Fire Department; Dave Coomber; Kyle Shiver; Rob Zapple; Pat Vreeland at Chatham High School; and Mimi Gulacsi, R.N. at the Cape Cod Hospital.

  And—as always—love and thanks to Hillary, Hope, and Chris. For everything.

  More praise for Entering Normal

  “Exquisite . . . A beauty . . . If you love the feel of Anne Tyler’s novels, then this has your name all over it.”

  —Daily Mirror (London)

  “It’s an ancient truth, the axiom that tells us that what life does not offer us in the way of pain, we’ll provide for ourselves. Anne LeClaire’s fine, deceptively gentle new book, Entering Normal, takes that truth, shakes it, cradles it, and turns it on end. . . . This story of a life-changing friendship between generations is so full of risk and wisdom, I’m jealous that I didn’t write it myself.”

  —JACQUELYN MITCHARD

  “In rich and limpid prose, LeClaire shifts the point of view . . . focusing on the small acts that get us through the day, or the night, or not. A woman’s book in the best possible sense, this will leave readers warmed and satisfied.”

  —Booklist

  “Entering Normal is anything but normal. It is a masterpiece in story weaving and easily becomes a guilt-free addiction as soon as the first page is turned.”

  —Harwich Oracle

  “Moving and sensuous . . . It will linger in the minds of its readers for months, even years, because it is about profoundly human and mythic themes. . . . Entering Normal is in the grand tradition of the English novel where all effort is exerted in the creation of characters who live completely within their own skins. . . . A story of great tragedy, loss, and transformation.”

  —CapeWomen magazine

  “A heartbreaking—and breathtaking—story . . . This book is endearing and enduring. . . . As the story unfolds, it’s hard to put down, just from the sheer weight of emotion it evokes. Good writing is in the details, and this book is filled with those subtle touches that speak to every mother’s heart. . . . Entering Normal is a story of a family, a novel about courage, loss, risk, and betrayal. It is a story that goes to the heart of what mothers call unconditional love.”

  —Martha’s Vineyard Times (MA)

  PROLOGUE

  THE SUN HAS BEEN IN AND OUT ALL DAY. NOW IT FINDS cracks in the clouds and threads through in ribbons, what Gram Gates used to call fingers of God.

  Opal welcomes the fingers. They constitute a celestial hand beckoning her forward, and even though she will be the first to tell you she does not believe in any god and most certainly not the Presbyterian god of her grandma, she will gratefully take them as a sign of astral endorsement.

  Opal lives by signs. She counts on them the way other people put their faith in heaven or weathermen or the possibility of everlasting love. She believes in them absolutely and holds tight to her conviction despite the number of people who offer the opinion that there is no sign by which one can foretell the future, no omen to warn of the disasters entire lives are hell-spent avoiding—or pursuing.

  In two days she has covered stretches of six states and is now on the central section of the Massachusetts turnpike, nerves high-wired from too many Hershey bars and too much drive-thru coffee in thin paper cups. Her eyelids sting from lack of sleep.

  She hopes she is heading directly north, but she can’t shake the feeling that she took a wrong turn somewhere back in New York. If Billy were along, sure thing he’d have picked up a road map somewhere along the line, but Opal can’t be bothered. This is one way they differ along gender lines. He’s a man but willing to be dependent; she’s a girl and scorns it. If she has misjudged direction, it won’t be the first time in her life. By twenty she has made more than her share of wrong turns, and yet, for a fact, she does not regret a one. Certainly she doesn’t regret the misstep that brought her Zack. Billy, now there was a big mistake. But not Zack. Never Zack. And so, perhaps in some sense, not even Billy.

  She glances in the rearview mirror, checks the backseat, lets her eyes rest too long for caution on her five-year-old son. Tucked in between the cartons that hold her doll makings and as many of their belongings as she’d dared pack, he’s out
cold, his pomegranate mouth slightly open, chocolate smudges on his chin. Even in sleep, he keeps a tight hold on his stuffed tiger. Watching him she feels a familiar jolt in her stomach, the sharp, sweet terror of motherhood.

  She returns her attention to the road, catches sight in the mirror of a car bearing down from the rear. She eases up on the accelerator, eyes the speedometer. She’s below the legal limit; still her breath doesn’t come right until the vehicle is close enough to see it’s neither a cop nor Billy’s black Ram pickup. While she slows for the car to pass, she thinks again that there will be hell to pay when her parents hear what she’s done.

  “You’ve told them you’re going?” Billy asked the night before she left.

  “Yes.”

  “And they know where you’re heading?”

  Again she lied, said yes. Of course she hadn’t said a word to them about her plans. Particularly to her mama. Melva’s projected response comes to her with depressing predictability: the sniffy self-righteous rant about how once again they are so disappointed in her, how once more Opal has been reckless, acted irresponsibly, let them down. The echo of Melva’s voice presses against her, cold and hollow as fog. She opens the window an inch or two to bring in fresh air, to breathe.

  The story she came up with for Billy is that she needs some time away to think. She’s just taking Zack to Ohio to visit an aunt on her daddy’s side.

  Actually, she hasn’t a clue as to her destination.

  If she were alone, without the responsibility of Zack, she would have just taken off and driven until she had a sign that said plain, This here is the place. But with Zack along, she knew she would need a concrete plan. And so the night before they left, she rolled one of the dice from Billy’s Monopoly game. It came up a three. A good sign. Six would be too many for Zack; one was nowhere near enough for her. So the plan is to head out and keep going until she has used up three tanks of gas—exactly three tanks, no cheating, not even if she comes upon a place that looks promising after she has gone through two and a half. She brought the die along for good luck, and now it sits on the dash, keeping company with a half dozen Happy Meal figures, an empty coffee cup, a yellow plastic rose she plucked from her grandma’s hall arrangement, and an amethyst crystal in the shape of a pyramid that the lady said contained a chip of real opal.

  She checks the fuel gauge. The needle edges toward empty, the final gallon of her third tank. She tries to collect her mind to see an exit or some other sign that will reveal to her what her next step should be. If her faith is to be repaid, she will catch sight of one soon.

  Opal’s belief in signs riles Billy. He thinks it’s stupid and is fixed on conveying that opinion to her. “Raylee,” he said to her just before Zack was born, back before she changed her name. “Raylee, you can’t go living your life looking for signs. It’s just about the dumbest thing I ever heard.”

  “It’s not dumb at all,” she said. “You hear me, Billy Steele. Not dumb at all. You’ll come to my way of thinking. You just wait and see.”

  “How am I going to see if I don’t believe in what I’m seeing?”

  “Well, that’s exactly what I mean. You won’t be prepared .”

  In the past six years they have had that conversation more often than she can bear to remember. While she has given up trying to convince him that there are signs everywhere if you’ll just open your eyes and look, signs holding important information, her own belief remains resolute. When you come right down to it, what else is there?

  The clouds have lifted now, and the sun beats on the Buick’s hood. She cranks the window down another notch, checks the backseat again. She needs music, something upbeat yet mellow. Taj Mahal would go a long way toward steadying her caffeine-stoked nerves, but she hesitates, worried the tape will wake Zack. Then, just as the needle on the gas gauge trembles into the red, just when she is praying she’ll reach the next exit before she runs dry, just at that moment she sees the sign: ENTERING NORMAL. She laughs right out loud and the tiny nugget that has been caught in her chest ever since she buckled the seat belt around Zack and left New Zion, that hard little pea just melts away. As she flicks the right turn signal and veers into the exit lane, she feels the gambler’s high, the wallop that comes when you’ve bet your stake against house odds and won. For two and a half days she’s been thinking about the consequences of her actions, and now, as the old Buick rolls down the ramp toward a new life in a town named Normal, she doesn’t care what Billy or her parents will say.

  “Well now, haven’t I just done it,” Opal says aloud. “I’ve done it and screw all consequences.”

  She is going toward something, and even though she doesn’t know exactly what it is, she trusts it. The weight of the past six years shifts, then lifts, and although she can’t recall the last time she experienced the pure and simple sensation, she feels beneath her breastbone a combination of happiness and heartburn that might very well be hope.

  FALL

  CHAPTER 1

  ROSE

  NED IS SNORING, A THICK THUNDER THAT ROLLS UP from his chest. His arm is flung over Rose’s ribs, and she takes a breath against the heft of it, the pressure that recently seems to have increased.

  Back in the middle of summer, she mentioned getting twin beds, but his response was sharp. Typical Ned. “Whadda you crazy?” She explained how his arm made it hard for her to breathe, how she felt pinned down by it. “We’ve slept in the same bed for thirty-five years, Rosie,” he said, his gaze level. “Exactly when did my arm get so heavy?” Not willing to go where that subject might lead, she dropped it flat.

  He snores again, a long, rippling snort with a catch in the middle, like he is swallowing his breath. It’s a wonder more women don’t kill their husbands. Half asleep, she imagines herself picking up the pillow, holding it over his open mouth.

  What on earth is the matter with her, thinking something crazy like that? Ned is a good man. Where she would be without him she hates to think. She gives him a slight nudge, just enough to make him stop snoring, but not enough to wake him. The last thing in the world she needs right now is for him to wake and ask her what’s wrong.

  What’s wrong?

  This is a question she doesn’t want him to ask, not when all that is wrong swirls through the room, hangs above her face like smoke. The digital clock on the nightstand glows 1:40, red numerals that remind her of eyes, the alert eyes of some nocturnal animal. The time changes to 1:41. She wishes they still had their old dial-face clock, the one that didn’t need resetting every time there was a power failure. Very carefully she lifts Ned’s arm from its hold across her ribs and scratches her stomach, hard.

  It’s still there. It’s bigger. Maybe.

  The itchy spot first appeared toward the end of September, the same week Opal Gates and her boy moved into the house next door. At first Rose figured it was an insect bite of some kind, or dry skin, what with the furnace coming on in the evening now. Yesterday she finally took a reluctant look at it—she doesn’t much like looking at her stomach—and even without her reading glasses she was able to see the small, raised welt right over the mole on her stomach. Red circled out from the brown center. Definitely a bite she decided, pushing away darker possibilities conjured up by the Cancer Society leaflets she’s read in Doc Blessing’s waiting room, their bold letters enumerating the Seven Deadly Signs.

  She doesn’t think it is anything significant. If something important was going on in your body, you’d know it. No, she’s sure it’s just an insect bite. They are into October now, late for mosquitoes, but it’s been a particularly mild fall, the first frost not coming until the last of September.

  She lies in the dark, reminded suddenly of the mosquito bites she used to get summers at Crystal Lake when she was a girl, great welts that rose on her arms and legs and ankles until she looked like she had a tropical disease. “Don’t scratch,” her mother would say as she swabbed them with calamine lotion. “It makes it worse.” Rose scratched the bites until they bled.
Then, the summer she was sixteen, she fell in love with her best friend’s cousin, and just like that she stopped scratching mosquito bites. Instead she dug her thumbnail directly across the swollen spot and then again in the opposite direction, forming the shape of a cross, her magic remedy, better than calamine.

  Lord, she hasn’t thought about those things in years. Rachel’s cousin. The thin, dark boy from out of town who made all their mothers edgy. What was his name? Randy? Roy? She struggles futilely to reclaim it from the chasm of memory. His name she can’t dredge up, but the image of him surfaces as if she had seen him only last week. This was the summer of Elvis—someone else who made their mothers nervous—and he wore his hair in a DA just like the singer. He drove a motorcycle and—even in summer—dressed all in black. Rose remembers his leather jacket, the zippers at the wrists. The risks she had taken for him. She remembers the night she lied to her mother, the first falsehood she can recall telling, how she said she was going to Rachel’s and had pedaled her blue Raleigh over to the lake where he waited. When he kissed her, his tongue pushed insistently between her lips, filling her with a confusion of fear and desire—startling, hot desire—until she opened her mouth to him. As if, even in sleep, he can read her mind, Ned’s arm drops back across her ribs, tightens its hold.

  It was on the same spot at Crystal Lake, enfolded by the scent of pine and her cologne, that Ned asked her to marry him. Two years after she kissed the boy with the Elvis hair, she lay in Ned’s arms, let him caress her, heard him promise to love her forever, eagerly returned the vow.

  Forever. What is forever? How long has it been since she believed it possible to hold on to someone or something for eternity? How could she have known then that love is not as resilient as one might think? That loss and pain and life take a toll beyond what she could have imagined? That Ned’s sinewy arms, which held her so tenderly that summer night by the lake, would grow cumbersome over the years?

  Crystal Lake. When she was a child, long before she lay in Ned’s young arms or before she kissed a dangerous dark-haired boy whose name she has forgotten, years before she taught Todd how to swim in its water, she and Rachel would go ice-skating there. Once, while tightening her skates, she lost a glove, a red mitten knitted by her grandmother that one of the older boys swooped up and skated away with. By the time she went home, her fingers were deadened with the cold. At first it didn’t hurt, just a tingling numbness as if they had gone to sleep; but later, when her mother took her fingers between her palms and rubbed the heat back into chilled flesh, chafed the numbness away, then the pain began.