We Are Okay(24)

I can’t tell if he’s lying. I should have thought about all the food in the dorm refrigerator before we left, but I can’t fathom going back out into the snow and the dark, walking all that way.

“Are you sure?” Mabel asks. “We could make it work for all of us. We don’t need that much.”

“No, no, I’m sure.” He takes a look in the canister again and frowns. Then he opens his freezer. “Jackpot!” He pulls out a bag of frozen dinner rolls.

“And the oven’s already preheated,” I say.

“Meant to be. I’m going to have a couple rolls and some slices of cheese. You’ll have pasta and the rest of the rolls and whatever else you see that pleases you.”

He opens the refrigerator so we can take a look. There isn’t much inside of it, but it’s clean and neatly arranged.

“Sounds great,” Mabel says, but I just nod.

This is the first time I’ve been in a home since leaving mine, and my eyes are adjusting to the dark, and every new thing I make out fills me with wonder.

A few dishes are in his sink; a pair of slippers rest by the doorway. The freezer has three photographs on it—a little boy, Tommy with some friends, a man in a military uniform. Books are strewn across the coffee table along with two video-game controllers.

Nothing in his refrigerator is labeled. Everything here is his own.

There was a blue-and-gold blanket that lived on Gramps’s recliner in the living room for my entire life. I spent so many winter hours nestled under it, reading my books, drifting to sleep. It was almost threadbare in some places, but it still brought me warmth.

I don’t know where it is now.

I want it.

“Marin,” Tommy says. “I needed to get ahold of you anyway. I’m heading off campus for Christmas and will likely be spending the night away. I’ll be with some friends in Beacon. Call me if anything goes wrong, and here are the numbers for the police and the fire station. Call these direct lines, not nine-one-one.”

“Okay. Thank you,” I say, careful not to look at Mabel. I wish I could ask if she knows what happened to all of our things. Did anyone save anything? Did they wonder where I was?

Ana and Javier. They waited in the police station for me. Where did they go next, once they discovered I was gone? The looks that must have been on their faces—I don’t even want to imagine it.

Why won’t I just say yes? Why won’t I fly home to them and apologize for my disappearing act and accept their forgiveness when they offer it and sleep in the bed they made for me in the room with my name on the door?

If I could undo that decision in the police station, I wouldn’t have left through the back. The two weeks in the motel would never have happened and the thought of diner coffee wouldn’t make me choke.

Tommy’s putting the frozen rolls in the oven. He’s sparking the flame of a burner using a match, saying, “Good thing it’s gas,” and Mabel is nodding yes and I am, too.

But I’m not hungry.

“I’m still feeling really cold for some reason,” I say. “I’m just going to sit by the fire if that’s okay.”

“Be my guest. As soon as these rolls are done I’m going to head to the back and you guys can make yourselves comfortable. I’ve got some presents to wrap and I was just waiting for an excuse to go to bed early. Power outage’ll do it.”

So I drift to an armchair and I look at the fire. And I think of all of these things from what used to be my home.

The blanket.

The copper pots, passed down from Gramps’s mother.

The round kitchen table and the rectangular dining table.

The chairs with their threadbare cushions and wicker backs.

My grandmother’s china, covered in tiny red flowers.

The mismatched mugs, the delicate teacups, the tiny spoons.

The wooden clock with its loud tick-tick-tick and the oil painting of the village Gramps was from.

The hand-tinted photographs in the hallway, the needlepoint pillows on the sofa, the ever-changing grocery list stuck to the refrigerator under a magnet in the shape of a Boston terrier.

The blanket, again, blue and gold and soft.

And now Tommy is saying good night and walking down the hallway, and Mabel is in the living room with me, setting small bowls of pasta onto the coffee table and lowering herself to the floor.

I eat without tasting anything. I eat even though I don’t know if I’m hungry.





chapter ten


JUNE




IT WAS A COUPLE WEEKS after the night at Ben’s and the Colombian driver, and Mabel and I decided to sneak out on our own. Ana and Javier always stayed up late, sometimes into the early morning, so I fell asleep a little after ten knowing that my phone would buzz hours later to announce her arrival and I’d slip out then.

Gramps cooked dinner at six o’clock most nights. We usually ate in the kitchen unless he made something fancy, in which case he’d tell me to set the dining room table, and we’d eat with shiny brass candlesticks between us. After dinner he washed and I dried until the kitchen was as clean as it could be given its age and constant use, and then Gramps drifted off to his back rooms to smoke cigarettes and write letters and read.

My phone buzzed and I left quietly, not knowing whether I was breaking a rule. It’s possible that Gramps would have been fine with Mabel and me going to the beach at night to sit and watch the waves and talk. I could have asked him, but we didn’t work that way.