Entering Normal: A Novel (Ballantine Reader's Circle) - Softcover

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Anne D. LeClaire is a novelist and short story writer who teaches and lectures on writing and the creative process. She has also worked as a radio broadcaster, a journalist, an op-ed columnist for The Cape Cod Times, and a correspondent for The Boston Globe. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, Redbook, and Yankee magazine among others. She is the mother of two adult children and lives in Cape Cod, Massachusetts.

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In the tradition of "The Good Mother and "The Deep End of the Ocean, Anne D. LeClaire delivers a heartbreaking-and breathtaking-novel of two very different but equally loving mothers who face the most painful of losses and then find the courage not only to go on but to find meaning and hope in their lives.
Rose Nelson is a middle-aged woman with a broken past, a sorrow from which she cannot recover. Secretly guilty about her role in her teenaged son's death five years ago, she has sealed herself off from life, enveloped by a grief that has slowly eaten away at her relationship with her husband.
Against her will, Rose is drawn into the world she has avoided when Opal Gates and her five-year-old son, Zack, move in next door. Determined to start an independent life for herself, twenty-year-old Opal has left her family and the father of her son in North Carolina. But when she quickly begins an affair with Tyrone Miller, a part-time mechanic and local musician, Opal unwittingly breaks the tacit rules of both her family and her new hometown.
Initially, Rose cannot bear the sight of Opal and her son. But later when Zack is injured, she instinctively lies to protect Opal from a single mistake that changes the lives of everyone involved.
Faced with a custody suit brought by Zack's father and her own parents, Opal faces a trial in which each choice she has made will be used as ammunition in the battle to take Zack away from her.
Confronting such devastating loss and the questions it poses are at the heart of "Entering Normal. How does one go on after great tragedy? What is a family? What sacrifices must a mother be willing to make for her child? And how can a good mothersometimes make bad choices?
"Entering Normal is a story of family, a novel about courage, loss, risk, and betrayal. It is a story that goes to the heart of love.

"From the Hardcover edition.

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chapter 1

hrose

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.

The itching is worse now. She raises Ned’s arm carefully, edges out of bed, almost makes it.

“S’matter?”

“Bathroom. Go back to sleep.” She freezes, willing his breath- ing to return to its heavy, half-snoring rhythm, then, using the il- lumination from the night-light at the top of the stairs, makes her way to the hall. The shadowy outline of Todd’s door beckons in the dim light, and she almost allows herself to give in, to sit in his room and wait.

It has been a long time.

Months have passed since she sat there and hoped for a sign from Todd. Hoped, not prayed. She has long since lost her belief in the power of prayers or God; the most she can hold on to is hope, and even that has dimmed lately. Five years. If she is going to get some sign from him, feel some connection, wouldn’t it have come by now? But even the dimming of active hope does not bring the resolution or the peace she might have expected, only more pain. She fears this deficiency of hope is bringing her one more step closer to really losing him. Memory and grief are all she has left, and after a while even memory dims. In spite of her attempts to hold on in her mind, the whole of him is beginning to fade.

In the bathroom she catches sight of herself in the mirror and, without glasses, sees a younger version of herself, her face firmer, without lines. She is trying to learn to look at herself with corrected vision, trying to see the truth of her aging face, which looks more and more like her mother’s. She opens the cabinet and removes the bottle of Jergens, slathers it across her belly,...