TWENTY-SEVEN
Two Thousand, Two Hundred, and Eighty Miles
Their mom didn’t return all at once. Zadie and Finn sat with her as she lay on the couch, propped up by tasseled pillows, watching her drip, drip, drip back into her body. Every time a new memory came to her, the flesh between her eyebrows would crease, and she would sound it out. At first her speech was slow and halting, like sleep talk, but the more she spoke, the more fluid it became. When Nora turned to Zadie with an impish grin and said, “Knock, knock,” Zadie knew she was going to be okay.
By that evening, Nora was more like her spiked-punch self. She remembered her daughters’ names and would break into a huge smile every time she said them out loud. When a funny story came back to her, she told it like it was the first time, and her daughters laughed because she was laughing. Zadie still had questions, but she didn’t want to break the spell of that moment.
Zadie and Finn stayed with Nora all day and night. They slept in her bed. Zadie woke briefly in the middle of the night to find her sister cuddled up against Nora’s right shoulder, dozing peacefully. She watched them for a few moments, their chests rising and falling in time with each other. Then Zadie felt the little Star stir inside her.
It’s okay,it seemed to say.
Zadie rested one hand on her abdomen, then slipped her head under her mother’s other arm.
Finn couldn’t take her eyes off her. Maybe it was the way the wind was spinning her mom’s hair into rope, the way her freckles looked darker in the sun, the way her toes curled as a wave washed over her feet; or maybe it was because Finn was afraid that if she looked away, Nora would vanish.
She had yet to understand why their mom had left. At first she was so happy to see Nora, so happy to be back in her own body, that she hadn’t even given it a second thought. But as the initial excitement wore off, she found herself wanting to know more. She was trying to be patient. Nora’s memory had completely unspooled. It was only natural that it would take time to gather it all up. Still, her curiosity had made her restless.
She watched her mother roll up her pant legs and wade into the sea until it cut her off at the knees. Finn followed. The salt water momentarily stung the abrasions on her feet, but soon they were so cold she could barely feel them. Memories were carried to her on the wind—foghorns, seals barking, children’s delighted squeals—but she paid them no attention. She couldn’t focus on the past right now, only the present.
After they’d toweled off and put on warm socks, the Wilders sat in the open back of Zadie’s station wagon while Nora rifled through her box of cassettes. “I can’t believe you kept these,” she marveled.
“I figured you’d want them back eventually,” Zadie answered. Finn could see her sister blushing. She didn’t like anyone knowing how sentimental she actually was.
“Thank you.” Nora leaned over and gave her older child a kiss on the forehead. Zadie smiled quickly, then looked away.
Their mom closed the lid of the box and pushed it aside. Then something came over her. Hot tears sprang to her eyes. “I’m so sorry, girls. I don’t think I’ll ever forgive myself for what I did to you.”
“Will you tell us what happened?” Finn asked. She put her armaround her mother and listened with bated breath as Nora told the story of her migration.
Two thousand, two hundred, and eighty miles. That’s how far Nora had traveled. It sounded far, but it was nothing compared to the 44,000 miles Arctic terns fly from Iceland to the Antarctic and back again. Every year they circumnavigate the Earth, chasing summer to ensure that the first thing their chicks glimpse of this world is the sun.
Zadie, she explained, had been born on a brilliant spring morning. The sun was still bright the following afternoon when Nora took her daughter back to her little apartment and asked herself for the hundredth time:How did I get here?She had no memory of most of the 2,280 miles she’d traveled from Earnest to San Antonio. She had barely any memory of her hometown at all. It was as if her life had begun the moment she crossed the Texas–New Mexico border.
And when she crossed that same border eighteen years later heading in the opposite direction, her life began all over again.
She’d stayed in Texas longer than she should have. Most birds nest for a few months, then return home, but Nora wasn’t a bird. She couldn’t push her child out of a tree and watch it fall, hoping that its fledgling wings would keep it aloft. She’d raised her kids for as long as she could before it was finally her, not her daughters, who was forced into flight.
When she’d arrived back in Earnest—even as she’d hugged her sister for the first time in almost twenty years—she’d felt something was missing. But it seemed the harder she tried to remember, the easier it was to forget.
Nora spent the next five years searching for anything that would make her feel whole. Many days she would wander off into the woods while Jenna was at work and weave branches together without thinking about why she was doing it or for whom. It was the only thing that distracted her from the alarming emptiness in her heart.
Nora said she could finally see how these two seemingly separatelives fit together. She could see the jagged lines where one ended and the other began, and the remaining holes in her memory began to fill in. What she saw made her want to cry.
When she was finished, Finn exhaled. Her mom’s fascination with birds had taken on a whole new significance. “Youmigrated?”
Nora appeared equally bemused by the revelation. “It’s the only way I know how to explain it. I felt this… pull. I’ve felt it my whole life. I just never knew what it was. I didn’t say anything, because I didn’t understand it myself, and I didn’t want to scare you guys.”
Finn had felt the same pull. It had driven her into the wilderness barefoot and to the nest their mother had built on the ocean cliffs. She’d felt something like it as she sped down the highway on the back of a motorcycle. “Is that why you got in the accident?”
“The accident?” Nora’s face went blank for a moment. “Oh, yeah. The motorcycle. I was trying to get back to you guys.”
“So youdidremember us?”
“Sometimes I would get these flashes.” Nora’s eyes glistened like melting ice. “Most of the time, I had no idea who you were, but that night, something clicked. I knew I had only a small window before I forgot you again.”
“So you tried to get home.”
“I tried, but I couldn’t.”