We Are Okay(45)

“Thanks so much,” I told her parents as they left. I tried to sound casually grateful and not how I really felt—as though they had saved my life.

And Hannah kept saving me. She saved me with never asking questions, with instead reading to me about bees and botany and evolution. She saved me with clothes she loaned me and never took back. She saved me with seats next to her in the dining hall, with quick evasions when people asked me questions I couldn’t answer, with chapters read aloud and forced trips off campus and rides to the grocery store and a pair of winter boots.





chapter twenty-six



I TAKE A COUPLE PUSHPINS out of the jar on Hannah’s desk and approach my empty bulletin board. I pin the snowflake chain along the top of it and then text Hannah a picture. She texts back right away, two high fives with a heart between them.

It feels so good. I want to do more. I take my new pot out of its bag and set it on my desk. My peperomia is thriving, each leaf full and luminous. Carefully, I ease its roots out of the plastic cup it came in. I pour the leftover dirt into Claudia’s pot, and then place the roots in the middle, pressing the soil around it. I pour in some leftover water from a cup Mabel was using. I’ll need to get more soil when I can, but it’s enough for now.

I cross the room and turn to look at my desk. Two yellow bowls, a pink pot with a green leafy plant, a strand of paper snowflakes.

It’s pretty, but it needs something more.

I drag my desk chair over to my closet and stand on it so that I can reach the top shelf. I find the only thing up there: the photograph of my mother at twenty-two years old, standing in the sun. I borrow four of Hannah’s silver pushpins and choose the right spot on my bulletin board, just to the right of the snowflakes, and push the pins in against the corners of the photograph so that they hold it up without making any holes. It’s a big photograph, eight by ten probably, and it transforms the corner.

I’m not saying that it doesn’t scare me, to bring it into the light. My mother on Ocean Beach. Her sun-faded peach surfboard leaning under her arm. Her black wet suit and wet hair. Her squinting eyes and her huge smile.

It scares me, yes, but it also feels right.

I stare at her.

I try and I try and I try to remember.



A couple hours later, I take a long shower. I let the water run over me.

When I go back, whenever that will be, I’ll need to find something of Gramps’s to scatter or bury. I couldn’t laugh at Jones’s joke. Instead, it’s echoing the way true things always do when I’ve been trying to deny them. If your gramps had a grave, if your gramps had a grave. Enough time has passed by now that I know Mabel is right. But another version of the story springs up sometimes, one of him with pockets full of a few thousand dollars, gambling winnings he kept for himself, on his way to the Rocky Mountains.

I need to give him a grave in order to contain him. I need to bury something to anchor his ghost. One of these days, in some not-so-far future, I’ll take a trip into Jones’s garage and I’ll search through our old things and I’ll assemble a box of objects instead of ashes and I’ll find him a place to rest.

I rinse the conditioner out of my hair. I turn off the water and breathe in the steam.

He wore a gold chain around his neck on special occasions. I wonder if Jones bought it back for me.

I dry off and wrap myself in a towel. When I get back to my room, I look at my phone. It’s only two o’clock.



I take a cue from the list I made on my first night here alone and make soup. I chop vegetables and boil pasta, pour a carton of chicken stock into a pot.

Once I’ve combined all the ingredients and it’s time to wait while they cook, I turn to the second essay in the solitude book, but my mind is too full of different versions of the last summer’s story. There’s one where I fail him. Where I stop coming home so he stops making dinner, and I’m not around to see how much he needs me. And then there’s one where he fails me. Where I feel it—that he doesn’t want me there, that I’m in the way. So I stay away, for him and for me. So that I never face his rejection. So that I get to pretend I’m the most important thing to him, the way he is to me. Because if we have any sense of self-preservation, we do the best with what we’re given.

I was given cakes and cookies and rides to school. I was given songs and dinners at a table with brass candlesticks. I was given a man with a sensitive heart and a devious sense of humor and enough skill at cards to win me a year of private college—tuition and room and board—and I took all of those good things and told myself they made us special. Told myself they meant we were a family the way Mabel and Ana and Javier were, told myself that we weren’t missing anything.

We were masters of collusion, Gramps and I. In that, at least, we were together.



When yearbooks came out, I didn’t flip straight to the back like everyone else to find the seniors’ pages. Instead I started at the front. I looked through each page of freshman girls. I didn’t even know them but I took my time, as though they were my friends. I studied the club pages, the sophomores, the sports teams. The juniors and the dances, the teachers and the theme days. Then the first senior page was upon me, and I read every quote, stared hard at the baby pictures of all of these girls. So many bows on bald heads, so many tiny dresses and tiny hands, so many pages to linger on before I got to mine.