We Are Okay(41)

“I promise, this is the last time I’ll ask. Just come home for a few days.”

If it weren’t for the lies he told me.

If Birdie had been an elderly woman with beautiful penmanship.

If his coats were all that hung in the closet and he’d known his lungs were black and he drank his whiskey without suspicion.

If I could stop dreaming up a deathbed scene where his hospital blankets are crisp over his stomach and his hands are holding mine. Where he says something like, See you on the other side, Sailor. Or, I love you, sweetheart. And a nurse touches my shoulder and tells me it’s over even though I can already see it by the peaceful stillness of him. Take your time, she says, so we just stay there, he and I, until the darkness falls and I am strong enough to leave the room without him.

“How am I supposed to leave you here?” Mabel asks.

“I’m sorry. I will go with you. Someday. But I can’t do it tomorrow.”

She picks at the frayed edges of the rug.

“Mabel.”

She won’t look at me.

Everything is quiet. I’d suggest going somewhere, just out for a walk even, but we’re both confounded by the cold. The moon is framed perfectly in the window, a crescent of white against black, and I can see by its clearness that it isn’t snowing anymore.

“I shouldn’t have only called and texted. I should have flown to you.”

“It’s okay.”

“He seemed sick for so long. Kind of frail or something.”

“I know.”

Her eyes tear over, and she looks out the window.

I wonder if she sees what I do. If she feels the same stillness.

Mabel, I want to say. We don’t have much time left.

Mabel.

There is me and there is you and the snow has finished falling. Let’s just sit here.



Sometime later, we stand side by side at the sinks in the bathroom. We look tired and something else, too. It takes me a minute to identify it. And then I know.

We look young.

Mabel smears toothpaste onto her toothbrush. She hands me the tube.

She doesn’t say Here you go. I don’t say Thank you.

I brush in the circular way you’re supposed to. Mabel brushes back and forth, hard. I watch my reflection and concentrate on giving each tooth enough time.

Standing like this in Mabel’s bathroom back home, we would never have been silent. There were always millions of things to talk about, each topic pressing in so that our conversations rarely began and ended but rather began and were interrupted and continued, strands of thoughts that got pushed aside and picked up later.

If our past selves got a glimpse of us now, what would they make of us?

Our bodies are the same but there’s a heaviness in Mabel’s shoulders, a weariness in the way my hip leans against the counter. A puffiness around her eyes, a darkness under mine. But more than those things, there’s the separateness of us.

I didn’t return Mabel’s nine hundred texts because I knew we’d end up like this no matter what. What happened had broken us even if it wasn’t about us at all. Because I know that for all her care and understanding, when this visit is over and she’s back in LA with Jacob and her new friends, sitting in her lecture halls or riding the Ferris wheel in Santa Monica or eating dinner by herself in front of an open textbook, she’ll be the same as she’s always been—fearless and funny and whole. She’ll still be herself and I’ll be learning who I am now.

She spits into the sink. I spit into the sink. We rinse our brushes, tap-tap, in close succession.

Both faucets run as we splash our faces.

I don’t know what she’s thinking about. I can’t even guess.

We walk back down the hallway, shut off the lights, and climb into opposite twin beds.

My eyes are open in the dark.

“Good night,” I say.

She’s quiet.

“I hope you don’t think,” she says, “that because of Jacob . . .” She looks at me for an indication that I understand. She gives up. “It’s not that I met him and forgot about you. I was trying to move on. You didn’t give me other options. The night before I was supposed to go out with him I tried sending you another text. Remember Nebraska? That’s what I wrote. I stayed up late hoping you’d answer me. I slept with the phone by my pillow. All it would have taken was one word from you and I wouldn’t have gone. I would have waited longer, but you shut me out,” she says. “I’m not trying to make you feel guilty. I understand now. Really. But I just need you to know how it happened. I’m happy now, with him, but I wouldn’t be with him if you’d have answered me.”

The pain when she says this, it’s not her fault. Deep in my chest is still an aching hollowness, vacancy, fear. I can’t imagine opening myself up to the rush of kissing her, can’t imagine her hands under my clothes.

“I’m sorry,” I say. “I know I’m the one who disappeared.”

I can still see the moon out the window. I can still feel the stillness of the night. I can hear Mabel saying that Gramps is dead—gone—sounding so certain and I try to feel that certainty, too.

I try not to think of her heartbreak, how I caused it, but I can’t keep it out and it rushes over me.

“I’m sorry,” I say again.