“There was no Birdie,” I say.
Confusion flashes across her face.
I wait for the next question.
“But, the letters . . .”
Ask me.
“I guess . . . ,” she says. “I guess it was too sweet of a story. All of those love letters to someone he never even met. I guess . . . ,” she says again. “He must have been really lonely to make something like that up.”
She won’t meet my eyes. She doesn’t want me to tell her anything more, at least not right now. I know what it’s like to not want to understand, so we’re quiet while her last sentence spins and spins in my head. And I think, I was lonely. I was. Touching knees under the table wasn’t enough. Love-seat lectures were not enough. Sugary things, cups of coffee, rides to school were not enough.
An ache expands in my chest.
“He didn’t need to be lonely.”
Mabel’s brow furrows.
“I was there. He had me, but he wrote letters instead.”
She finally looks at me again.
“I was lonely,” I say.
And then I say it again, because I told myself lies for so long, and now my body is still and my breath is steady and I feel alive with the truth.
Before I know what’s happening, Mabel is pulling me close. I think I remember what this feels like. I try not to think of the last time we held each other, which was the last time I was held by anybody. Her arms are around me so tight that I can’t even hug her back, so I rest my head on her shoulder and I try to stay still so that she won’t let go.
“Let’s sleep,” she whispers into my ear, and I nod, and we break apart and lie down again.
I face away from her for a long time so that she won’t see my sadness. To be held like that, to be let go. But then the ghost of me starts whispering again. She’s reminding me of how cold I’ve been. How I’ve been freezing. She’s saying that Mabel’s warm and that she loves me. Maybe a love that’s different than it used to be, but love all the same. The ghost of me is saying, Three thousand miles. That’s how much she cares. She’s telling me it’s okay.
So I turn over and find Mabel closer to me than I’d realized. I wait a minute there to see if she’ll move away, but she doesn’t. I wrap my arm around her waist, and she relaxes into me. My head nestles in the curve behind her neck; my knees pull up to fit the space behind hers.
She might be asleep. I’ll only stay here for a couple of minutes. Only until I thaw completely. Until it’s enough to remind me what it feels like to be close to another person, enough to last me for another span of months. I breathe her in. Tell myself I need to turn away.
Soon. But not yet.
“Don’t disappear again,” she says. “Okay?”
Her hair is soft against my face.
“Promise me.”
“I promise.”
I start to turn, but she reaches back for my arm. She scoots her body closer into mine, until the full lengths of us are touching. With each breath, I feel winter passing.
I close my eyes, and I breathe her in, and I think about this home that belongs to neither of us, and I listen to the fire crackling, and I feel the warmth of the room and of her body, and we are okay.
We are okay.
chapter fourteen
THREE ORANGES. A bag of wheat bread. A note that reads, Out Christmas shopping. Don’t steal anything—I know where you live! Two mugs in front of a full electric coffeepot.
“Power’s back,” I say, and Mabel nods.
She points to the note. “Funny guy.”
“Yeah. But kind of sweet.”
“Completely.”
I don’t think I’ve ever fallen asleep in a dark place and woken to see it in the light for the first time. Last night I made out the objects but the color was missing. Now I see the windows, that their frames are painted a forest green. If it weren’t completely white outside, the shade of the paint would match the trees. The curtains are patterned with blue and yellow flowers.
“You think Tommy picked these out?” I ask.
“I hope he did,” Mabel says. “But no, I don’t think so.”
“Do you think he killed that deer?”
She turns toward the mantel as though the deer could speak and tell her.
“No. Do you?”
“No,” I say.
Mabel opens up the bag of bread and takes out four slices.
“I guess we can go back when we’re ready,” she says.
I pour us each a cup of coffee. I give her the better mug. I take the seat with the better view because I’ve always cared more about what I’m looking out at than she has.
The kitchen table’s legs are uneven; every time we lean forward it tilts. We drink our coffees black because he has no cream and we eat our toast dry because we can’t find butter or jam. And I look outside most of the time that we sit here, but sometimes I look at Mabel instead. The morning light on her face. The waves in her hair. The way she chews with her mouth the slightest bit open. The way she licks a crumb off her finger.
“What?” she asks, catching me smiling.
“Nothing,” I say, and she smiles back.
I don’t know if I still love her in the way that I used to, but I still find her just as beautiful.
She peels an orange, separates it in perfect halves, and gives one of them to me. If I could wear it like a friendship bracelet, I would. Instead I swallow it section by section and tell myself it means even more this way. To chew and to swallow in silence here with her. To taste the same thing in the same moment.
“I swear,” Mabel says, “I feel like I could eat all day.”
“I bought so much food. Do you think it went bad last night?”
“Doubtful. It’s freezing.”
Before long, we’re washing our breakfast dishes and leaving them on a dish towel to dry. We’re gathering up blankets from last night and setting them on the coffee table, folding the bed back in until it’s only a couch again. We’re standing in the empty space where the bed was, looking out the window at the snow.
“You think we’ll make it back?” Mabel asks.
“I hope so.”
We find a pen and write on the back of Tommy’s note, include lots of thank-yous and exclamation points.
“Ready?” I ask her.
“Ready,” she says.
But I don’t think it’s possible to prepare yourself for cold like this. It steals our breath. It chokes us.
“When we round that corner we’ll see the dorm.” That’s all I can get out—each breath hurts.
Tommy cleared the small road earlier this morning, but it’s slick and icy. We have to concentrate on each step. I watch my feet for so long. When I look up again the dorm is ahead of us in the distance, but to get there we have to step off the road Tommy cleared and into the perfect snow, and when we do we find how much has fallen. Snow is halfway up our calves, and we aren’t wearing the right pants for that. It seeps through. It hurts. Mabel’s shoes are thin leather boots, made for city streets in California. They’ll be drenched by the time we make it to the door, probably ruined.
Maybe we should have waited for Tommy to return and drive us back, but we’re out here now, so we keep going. I don’t know that I’ve ever seen such a clear sky, blue and piercing, sharp in a way I didn’t know the sky could be. Mabel’s lips are purple; shivering doesn’t begin to describe what my body’s doing. Now we’re close, though. The building towers above us, and I feel for the cold keys with fingers so stiff they can hardly bend to grasp them, and somehow I get the key into the lock but we can’t pull open the door. We scoop snow off the ground with our hands, kick it away with our boots, pull at the door until it pushes the rest away in an arc, like one wing of a snow angel, and then we let it shut behind us.
“Shower,” Mabel says in
the elevator, and when we reach my floor I run into my room and grab the towels, and we step into separate shower stalls and pull off our clothing, too desperate for warmth to let the moment be awkward.
We stay under the water for so long. My legs and my hands are numb and then they’re burning and then, after a long time, a familiar feeling returns to them.
Mabel finishes first; I hear her water shut off. I give her some time to go back to my room. I’m not sorry to stay under the hot water for a little while longer.
Mabel’s right: The food is still cold. We’re side by side in the rec room, peering into the refrigerator, heat pumping through the vents.
“You bought all of this?” she asks.
“Yes,” I say, but I don’t need to. My name is still on everything.
“I vote chili,” she says.
“There’s corn bread to go with it. And butter and honey.”
“Oh my God, that sounds good.”
We open and shut all the drawers and cabinets until we’ve found a pot for the chili, a grater for the cheese, a baking pan for the corn bread, and plates and silverware.
As I’m pouring the chili into the pot, Mabel says, “I have some news. Good news. I’ve been waiting for the right moment.”
“Tell me.”
“Carlos is having a baby.”
“What?”
“Griselda’s five months pregnant.”
I shake my head in wonder. Her brother, Carlos, was away at college before the time Mabel and I became friends, so I’ve only met him a few times but . . . “You’re going to be an aunt,” I say.
“Tía Mabel,” she says.
“Amazing.”
“Right?”
“Yeah.”
“They made us do this video conference call, my parents in the city, me at school, them in Uruguay—”
“Is that where they’re living now?”
“Yeah, until Griselda finishes her doctorate. I was annoyed, it took forever to get the call to work, and then when they finally showed up on my screen all I saw was her little belly. I started bawling. My parents were both bawling. It was awesome. And it came at a perfect time, because they were all emotional about clearing Carlos’s stuff out of his room. Not that they didn’t want to. They were just, like, Our son is all grown up and he’ll never be our little boy again! And then they were, like, Grandchild!”
“They’ll be the best grandparents.”
“They’re already buying stuff for the baby. Everything is gender neutral because it’s going to be a surprise.”
I think of Mabel and her little niece or nephew. About her traveling to Uruguay to meet this new life. And watching a person grow, from inside a round belly, to a baby, to a kid who can tell her things. I think of Ana and Javier, so excited, remembering who they were when Carlos was young.
I almost gasp.
I don’t know if I’ve ever thought this way about the expansiveness of a life. I think about it as it is in the wider world—in nature and time, in centuries and galaxies—but to think of Ana and Javier being young and in love, having their first baby, and watching him grow up, get married, move across the world. Knowing that they’ll soon have another descendant to love. Knowing that they’ll grow older as time passes, they’ll become old the way Gramps was, with gray hair and a tremble in his step, so much love still in their hearts—this astonishes me. I am capsized.
Despite the sweetness of the news, loneliness, bottomless and black, rushes in.
I want to know what Gramps felt when he learned my mom was pregnant. She was young, and the boy wasn’t in the picture, but surely, Gramps must have felt some gladness in spite of it. I wonder if, once the shock passed, he whooped and danced at the thought of me.
She tells me more about Carlos and Griselda’s plans, what the due date is, what names she likes.
“I’m making lists,” she says. “I’ll read them to you. I mean, I’m sure they’ll come up with their own but what if I find the perfect name?”
I’m trying to stay here with her in her happiness.
“I’d love to hear them,” I say.
“Oh no!” she says, pointing.
The chili got too hot—it’s bubbling and spilling over. We turn it down to a simmer. The corn bread still has twenty minutes to go.
I listen to her ideas about nurseries and what she’ll do in lieu of a baby shower since she won’t be able to travel that far during the spring semester. I last as long as I can, I do, I just can’t shake the loneliness.
So when there’s a break in the conversation, when it seems like the topic of her niece or nephew has passed, I sit at the table and she sits across from me.
“You said he was cute,” I say. “Gramps was.”
Her brow furrows. “I apologized for that.”
“No,” I say. “I’m sorry. Tell me again.”
She looks at me.
“Please.”
She shrugs.
“He was just . . . always doing these adorable things. Like polishing those candlesticks. Who does that?”
He would sit at the round table in the kitchen, humming along with the radio, shining the brass until it shone.
“And playing cards with his friends all day, like it was their job or something, saying it kept his mind sharp when really it was about drinking whiskey and having company, right? And winning money?”
I nodded. “He won more often than the others. I think that’s how he sent me here. A couple decades of winning at small-stakes poker.”
She smiles.
“All of those sweets he made. How he loved when I spoke Spanish, and the songs he sang, and the lectures he gave us. I wish we had listened better. I feel like there was so much more we could have learned from him.” She shoots me a quick glance and says, “At least I could have learned so much more. I don’t want to speak for you.”
“No,” I say. “I’ve thought of that, too. It was impossible to know what the subject of the lecture would be until he started it. And some of them felt so random at the time, but maybe they weren’t. Once, he did a three-day series on stain removal.”
“Like, for laundry?”
“Yeah, but with lots of variations. It went beyond clothes. How to get a stain out of a carpet, when to use fizzy water and when to use bleach, how to test to see if the colors would bleed.”
“Amazing.”
“Yeah, but I really learned it. I can get stains out of anything.”
“I’ll keep that in mind,” she says. “Don’t be surprised if you get packages of my laundry.”
“What have I started?”
We smile; the joke settles.
“I miss his face,” Mabel says.
“Me, too.”
The deep lines by his eyes and mouth, in the center of his forehead. His short, coarse eyelashes and ocean-blue eyes. His nicotine-stained teeth and his wide grin.
“And how he loved jokes,” she says, “but always laughed the hardest at his own.”
“It’s true.”
“There are so many other things, too, that are harder to put into words. I could try, if you want me to.”
“No,” I say. “It’s enough.”
I stop my mind from taking me back to that last night and my discoveries. Instead, I play each thing that Mabel said over and picture them all, one by one, until they turn into other memories, too. How it sounded when he walked the hall in his plaid slippers, how clean and short he kept his fingernails, the low rattle of his throat clearing. A soft glow settles in, a whisper of what used to be. It fends off some of the loneliness.
And then I think of something else Mabel said.
“Why were they clearing out Carlos’s room?”
She cocks her head.
“For you. I already told you they redid it.”
“But I thought you meant the guest room.”
“That room is tiny. And it’s for guests.”
“Oh,” I say. A mechanical ding blares. “I guess I just assumed . . .”
The ding repeats. It’s the oven timer. I’d almost forgotten where we were. I don’t know what I’m trying to say anyway, so I check on our corn bread and find it risen and golden.
Something is shifting inside me. A heavy cloud passing. A glimpse of brightness. My name painted on a door.
After searching a row of drawers I discover a worn oven mitt, covered in illustrated gingerbread men. I show Mabel.
“How seasonally appropriate,” she says.
“Right?”
It’s so threadbare the pan’s heat seeps through, but I manage to drop the loaf on the stovetop before it hurts too much. The scent fills the room.
We spoon chili into mismatched bowls from the cabinet and heap them with sour cream and pre-shredded cheese. We spoon out the honey for the corn bread, unwrap the butter.
“I want to hear about your life,” I say. I know I should have told her this months ago. I should have told her yesterday and the day before that.
Mabel tells me about Los Angeles, about all of the name-dropping that goes on around her, about how lost she felt in her first few weeks there, but how lately she’s been feeling more at home. We look up the website for Ana’s gallery, and Mabel tells me about her most recent art show. I scroll through butterfly images, each wing made of fragments of photographs and then hand-dyed in rich pigments until the photographs are unrecognizable.
“I could tell you what they’re about,” she says. “But I’m sure you can figure it out on your own.”
I ask her who she’s heard from, and she tells me that Ben’s liking Pitzer. She says he’s been asking about me. He’s been worried, too. They keep saying they’ll get together one weekend, but that Southern California is huge. Going anywhere takes forever, and they’re both settling into their own new routines anyway. “It feels good to know he’s there, though. Not too far away if I needed a friend from home.” She pauses. “You remember that there are other people in New York, too, right?”