We Are Okay(29)

I could say the night felt magical, but that would be embellishment. That would be romanticization. What it actually felt like was life. We weren’t thinking of what would happen next. No one talked about the way the summer was supposed to unfold or the places we’d find ourselves in the fall. It was as if we had made a pact to be in the moment, or like being in the moment was the only way to be. Telling jokes, telling secrets. Ben had his guitar and for a while he played and we just listened as the fire sparked and the waves crashed and subsided. I felt something on my hand. Mabel’s finger, tracing my knuckles. She slipped her thumb under my palm. I could have kissed her, but I didn’t.

Now, her hand on mine after so long apart, here in Tommy’s house and nowhere close to sleep, I wonder what might have changed if I had. If one of us had made the fact of us common knowledge, we would have become something to be discussed and decided upon. Maybe there would have been no Jacob. Maybe her photograph would be on my bulletin board. Maybe we wouldn’t be here now, and I would be in California in her parents’ orange-walled living room, sipping hot chocolate by the Christmas tree.

But probably not. Because even though it was only a couple months later that Gramps left me, when I tried to call back that night it no longer felt like life.

When I think of all of us then, I see how we were in danger. Not because of the drinking or the sex or the hour of the night. But because we were so innocent and we didn’t even know it. There’s no way of getting it back. The confidence. The easy laughter. The sensation of having left home only for a little while. Of having a home to return to.

We were innocent enough to think that our lives were what we thought they were, that if we pieced all of the facts about ourselves together they’d form an image that made sense—that looked like us when we looked in the mirror, that looked like our living rooms and our kitchens and the people who raised us—instead of revealing all the things we didn’t know.



Mabel lets go of my hand and kicks back the covers. She sits up, so I do the same.

“I guess I’m not ready to fall asleep yet,” she says.

It’s so warm now that I’m glad to have the covers off. We sit on the bed and lean against the cushioned back of the sofa. We’re watching the firelight flicker across the room, and Mabel is pulling her hair back, twisting it in circles and then letting it go, and I feel like the night might last forever and I would be okay with that.

“Where did you stay when you got here? I mean before the dorms. It’s something I’ve been wondering.”

I didn’t expect this, but I want to give her the answer. I take a long look at the ceiling and I nod in case she’s watching me. I need a moment to steady my heart so I can speak. By the time I look back she’s shifted. Her head is resting on her hand and she’s watching me with a look I don’t know if I’ve ever seen on her before. She’s so still and so patient.

“I found a motel.”

“Close by?”

“Sort of. I think it was like twenty minutes away. I got on a bus from the airport and I rode the line until I saw a place out the window.”

“What was it like?”

“Not nice.”

“Why did you stay?”

“I guess it never occurred to me that I could leave.”

I think about walking into the room, the way it smelled—worse than stale, worse than unclean. I thought I might be able to exist there without touching anything, but then hours passed and it turned out I was wrong.

“It was a hotel where people live when they don’t have anywhere else to go,” I tell Mabel. “Not a place where people stay on vacation.” I pull the blanket over me, even though I’m not cold. “It scared me. But I was already scared.”

“That’s not what I pictured.”

“What did you think?”

“I thought maybe you got to move into the dorms early or something. Did you meet people?”

“At the motel?”

She nods.

“I wouldn’t say that I met people. I had a lot of neighbors. Some of them became familiar.”

“I mean did you hang out with them?”

“No.”

“I thought you must have met people.”

I shake my head.

“I thought they were helping you through everything.”

“No,” I say. “I was alone there.”

In her face something is shifting. A set of facts to replace all the guessing I made her do. I want to give her more.

“There was a woman next door to me who howled,” I say. “At cars that went by, at people who passed. After I checked into my room she howled for a few straight hours.”

“What was wrong with her?”

“I don’t know. She sounded like a wolf. I kept wondering then—I’m still wondering now—if there was a time when she realized that something was going wrong. Inside her, I mean. When she could feel herself slipping away, something new creeping in. If she could have stopped it, or if it just . . . happened. It made me think about Jane Eyre. Remember?”

“The crazy woman. Mr. Rochester’s first wife.”

“I felt like Jane when she sees her in the mirror. I was afraid. I’d listen to her at night and sometimes I felt like I understood what she was trying to say. I was afraid I’d turn into her.”