We Are Okay(39)

I thought of Ana and Javier, and how kindly they would look at me, and the things they might say, and how I would have to tell them what I’d discovered and how I knew that I couldn’t.

My voice was thick. “I think I’ll take a cab.”

“They seem concerned about you. They’ve been waiting for a long time.”

He must have been freezing.

I thought of his tears.

“We’ll get a cab for you, honey. If you’re sure that’s what you want.”





chapter twenty



“I’M HAVING TROUBLE UNDERSTANDING,” Mabel says. “Birdie was your mother?”

“Birdie was my mother. And all of the things that she sent him were things he already owned. And all of the letters she wrote him were things he wrote to himself. You write a letter, you get a letter.”

“Wouldn’t you have known if it was his handwriting?”

“I never saw the envelopes,” I say. “I didn’t even have a key to the mailbox.”

“Okay,” Mabel says. “Okay.”

“He had all of it. He had pictures of me and pictures of her. He had a fucking museum back there and he never showed me any of it. I could have known her. None of what we had was real. He wasn’t real.”

She’s forgotten to rub my hands; she’s just squeezing them.

“But it was just grief, right? He was real. He was just, I don’t know, brokenhearted.”

Was he? I thought he never lied to me. I thought I knew who he was, but he was a stranger all along, and how do I mourn a stranger? And if the person I loved wasn’t even a person, then how can he be dead? This is what happens when I let myself think too much. I squeeze shut my eyes. I want darkness, stillness, but light cuts in.

“Is he dead?” I ask her. My voice is a whisper, the smallest version of itself. This is the thing I’m most afraid to say. The craziest thing, the thing that makes me too much like him. “I don’t know if he’s dead.”

“Hey,” she says. “Look at me.”

“They said he drowned. But they didn’t find him. They never found him. Do bodies disappear that way? Really?”

“Look at me,” Mabel says, but I can’t. “Look at me,” she says again.

I’m looking at the seams of my jeans. I’m looking at the threads in the rug. I’m looking at my shaking hands that I’ve snatched back from hers, and I’m sure I must be losing my mind. Like Gramps, like poor Mr. Rochester’s locked-up wife, like the howling woman in the motel room next to mine.

“Marin, he died,” Mabel says. “Everyone knows that. We knew he was lost in the ocean. It was in the newspaper. We just didn’t know how it happened.”

“But how do we really know?”

“We just do,” she says. “We just know.”

We just know. We just know.

“But does it really happen like that?”

“Yes,” she says.

“But waves,” I say. “The tide,” I say.

“Yes. And currents that pull things under and send them far out. And rocks to get snagged on, and predators.”

“But are you sure?”

“I’m sure.”

“Those people who thought they saw him, they could have seen someone else.”

She doesn’t answer me.

“It was dark,” I say.

She’s quiet.

“Marin,” she says.

“It was really dark. You know how dark it is out there.”





chapter twenty-one


AUGUST




YOU GO THROUGH LIFE thinking there’s so much you need. Your favorite jeans and sweater. The jacket with the faux-fur lining to keep you warm. Your phone and your music and your favorite books. Mascara. Irish Breakfast tea and cappuccinos from Trouble Coffee. You need your yearbooks, every stiffly posed school-dance photo, the notes your friends slipped into your locker. You need the camera you got for your sixteenth birthday and the flowers you dried. You need your notebooks full of the things you learned and don’t want to forget. You need your bedspread, white with black diamonds. You need your pillow—it fits the way you sleep. You need magazines promising self-improvement. You need your running shoes and your sandals and your boots. Your grade report from the semester you got straight As. Your prom dress, your shiny earrings, your pendants on delicate chains. You need your underwear, your light-colored bras and your black ones. The dream catcher hanging above your bed. The dozens and dozens of shells in glass jars.

The cab was waiting outside the station.

The airport, I said, but no sound came out.

“The airport,” I said, and we pulled away.

You think you need all of it.

Until you leave with only your phone, your wallet, and a picture of your mother.





chapter twenty-two


AUGUST




I BARELY REMEMBER getting there. I walked up to the ticket counter and said I had a reservation.

“Do you have a flight number?”

I shook my head.

“Spell your name for me?”

I couldn’t think of a single letter. I wiped my palms on my jeans.