I shake my head. I hadn’t even thought about it for so long.
“Courtney’s at NYU.”
I laugh. “That’s never going to happen.”
“Eleanor’s at Sarah Lawrence.”
“I never really got to know her.”
“Yeah, me neither, but she’s really funny. How far is Sarah Lawrence from here?”
“What are you trying to do?”
“I just don’t want you to be alone.”
“And Courtney and Eleanor are somehow going to fix that?”
“Okay,” she says. “You’re right. I’m acting desperate.”
I stand up to clear our dishes, but after I stack them, I just set them aside. I sit back down, swipe my hand across the table to sweep away the crumbs.
“I want to hear more,” I say. “We got off track.”
“I already told you about my favorite classes. . . .”
“Tell me about Jacob,” I say.
She blinks, hard.
“We don’t have to talk about him.”
“It’s okay,” I say. “He’s a part of your life. I want to hear about him.”
“I don’t even know how serious it is,” she says, but I know that she’s lying. The way she talks to him at night. The way she says I love you.
I look at her and wait.
“I can show you a picture,” she says. I nod.
Out comes her phone. She swipes a few times and then decides on one. They’re sitting next to each other at the beach, shoulders touching. He’s wearing sunglasses and a baseball cap, so I’m not sure what I’m supposed to be seeing. I look at the image of her instead. Her wide smile, her hair in a braid over her shoulder, her bare arms, and the way she’s leaning into him.
“You guys look happy together,” I say. It comes out true and simple. It comes out without bitterness or regret.
“Thanks,” Mabel whispers.
She takes the phone back. She puts it in her pocket.
A minute passes. Maybe a few of them.
Mabel takes the plates I stacked to the sink. She washes them, both plates, both bowls, and the pot and the pan, and the silverware. At some point I get up and find a dish towel. She scrubs the splattered chili off the stove while I dry everything and put it away.
chapter fifteen
JULY AND AUGUST
IT WAS A SUMMER OF STAYING OUT LATE, a summer of wandering. It was no longer a given that I’d be home for dinner, as though Gramps and I were practicing for our near futures without each other. Some nights early on he left food out for me. Once or twice I called to tell him I’d bring leftovers from something Javier made. Slowly, the dinners tapered off altogether. I feared he wasn’t eating, but he wouldn’t admit to it when I asked him. One day I went to the basement to do the laundry and found one of his socks was stuffed with bloody handkerchiefs. Seven of them. I laid them out one by one and used the tricks he taught me. I waited by the washer for its full cycle, hoping it would work. All seven came out clean, but my throat stayed tight, my stomach ached.
I folded them, one by one, in little squares. I carried them upstairs on the top of the pile. Gramps was in the dining room when I got there, pouring himself a glass of whiskey.
He eyed the folded laundry.
“How’ve you been feeling, Gramps?”
He cleared his throat.
“So-so,” he said.
“Have you been to the doctor?”
He snorted—my suggestion was ridiculous—and I remembered a time in junior high when I came home from health class and talked to him about the dangers of smoking.
“This conversation is very American,” he’d said.
“We live in America.”
“That we do, Sailor. That we do. But wherever in the world we live, something’s gonna get us in the end. Something gets us every time.”
I hadn’t known then how to argue his point.
I should have tried harder.
“You never touch this stuff,” he said now, holding up the bottle of whiskey. “Right?”
I shook my head.
“Besides that one time, I mean,” he said.
“That was the only time.”
“Good,” he said. “Good.” He twisted the top back onto the bottle and picked up his glass. “You have a couple minutes? I have some things to show you.”
“Sure.”
He gestured toward the dining table where some papers were spread out. He said, “Sit with me.”
In front of me were documents from my soon-to-be college, thanking us for our payment in full for the first two semesters. There was an envelope with my social security card and my birth certificate. I didn’t know he had them. “And this,” he said, “is the information for your new bank account. It looks like a lot of money. It is a lot of money. But it will run out. After you’re gone, no more four-dollar coffee. This is food and bus-fare money. Textbooks and simple clothing.”
My heart pounded. My eyes burned. He was all I had.
“Here is your new ATM card. The code is four-oh-seven-three. Write that down somewhere.”
“I can just use my normal card,” I said. “From the account I share with you.” I looked again at the dollar amount on the statement. It was more money than I had ever seen belong to us. “I don’t need all this.”
“You do,” he said. Then he paused and cleared his throat. “You will.”
“But all I care about is having you.”
He leaned back in his chair. Took off his glasses. Cleaned them. Put them back on.
“Sailor.”
His eyes were yellow as daisies. He’d been coughing up blood. He looked like a skeleton, sitting there next to me.
He shook his head and said, “You’ve always been a smart girl.”
It was a summer of trying not to think too deeply. A summer of pretending that the end wasn’t coming. A summer when I got lost in time, when I rarely knew what day it was, rarely cared about the hour. A summer so bright and warm it made me believe the heat would linger, that there would always be more days, that blood on handkerchiefs was an exercise in stain removal and not a sign of oblivion.
It was a summer of denial. Of learning what Mabel’s body could do for mine, what mine could do for hers. A summer spent in her white bed, her hair fanned over the pillow. A summer spent on my red rug, sunshine on our faces. A summer when love was everything, and we didn’t talk about college or geography, and we rode buses and hopped in cars and walked city blocks in our sandals.
Tourists descended onto our beach, sat in our usual places, so we borrowed Ana’s car and crossed the Golden Gate to find a tiny piece of ocean to have for ourselves. We ate fish-and-chips in a dark pub that belonged in a different country, and we collected beach glass instead of shells, and we kissed in the redwoods, we kissed in the water, we kissed in movie theaters all over the city during matinees and late-night showings. We kissed in bookstores and record stores and dressing rooms. We kissed outside of the Lexington because we were too young to get in. We looked inside its doors at all the women there with short hair and long hair, lipstick and tattoos, tight dresses and tight jeans, button-ups and camisoles, and we pictured ourselves among them.
We didn’t talk about Mabel’s departure, which was to come half a month before mine. We didn’t talk about the blood on the handkerchiefs or the coughs that ricocheted from the back of my house. I didn’t tell her about the paperwork and the new ATM card, and I barely thought about them—only when I found myself without Mabel, only in the darkest and most silent hours—and when I did, I pushed the thoughts away.
But it turns out that even the fiercest denial can’t stop time. And there we were, at her house. There, in her foyer, were the suitcases and duffel bags she’d packed when I wasn’t looking. They’d be loading the car the next morning. Ana and Javier invited
me to come on the round-trip drive to Los Angeles, but I couldn’t bear the thought of returning without her, the only backseat passenger, and Mabel looked relieved when I said no.
“I think I would have cried the whole way,” she told me in her room that night. “I might cry the whole way anyway, but if I’m alone you won’t have to watch me do it.”
I tried to smile but I failed. The trouble with denial is that when the truth comes, you aren’t ready.
We opened her laptop. We looked for directions from Los Angeles to Dutchess County. It was a forty-hour drive. We said forty hours didn’t seem like that much; we’d expected it to be longer. We could meet in Nebraska and then it would only be twenty hours for each of us. No problem, we said, but we couldn’t meet each other’s eyes.
It was the middle of the night when Mabel whispered, “We aren’t going to meet in Nebraska, are we?”
I shook my head. “We don’t even have cars.”
“There are the breaks,” she said. “We’ll both come home for those.”
“Everyone says four years, but really it’s just a few months at a time, and then a few months home every summer.”
She nodded. She ran her hand along the side of my face.
And the morning came too soon. So much brightness, so much clatter in the kitchen. I knew I wouldn’t be able to stomach anything, so I put on my clothes and I left before breakfast. I listened to the same heartbroken song the entire bus ride home, because it was still a summer when sadness was beautiful.
chapter sixteen
OUR TIME IS RUNNING OUT, and I’m not ready. I’m feeling the dorm’s emptiness again. It’s settling in, that it’s not going to transform for Christmas, that it’s going to look exactly the same as it does now, only one person emptier. It won’t be warmer inside or blink with lights or smell like pine. It won’t fill with Gramps’s songs. Where did our ornaments go? The little angel bell. The painted horse, the tiny tree, the letter M stitched with sequins.
It’s noon, and then it’s one. I keep looking at my phone because I don’t want the time to sneak up on me.
It’s two, and my body is heavy and sinking, and I can’t shake the feeling that everything is ending all over again; only it’s worse this time because I know what awaits me when it’s over.
It’s two thirty.
There’s still so much I need to tell her.
She hasn’t asked me anything else about Gramps. She hasn’t mentioned the name Birdie since last night. I know that feeling—of not wanting to know—but at the same time I think that she would listen if I started. I think we’re playing a game without meaning to. We both want the other one of us to go first.
It’s three before I say anything, but then I have to start. I force myself to start.
“I need to tell you what happened after you left,” I say.
We are back in my room, sitting on the rug, looking through a stack of Hannah’s magazines. I see pages of perfect houses and perfect outfits but I can’t concentrate on any of the words that accompany them.
Mabel closes her magazine and sets it down. She looks at me.
chapter seventeen
AUGUST
THE MORNINGS AFTER SHE LEFT, I woke up early. I don’t know why. I wanted to sleep the days away, but I couldn’t. The fog was heavy over the rooftops and telephone wires and trees, and I would make myself tea and then go back to my room to read and wait until the sun broke through.
Then I would go to Ocean Beach.
I’d sit by myself in the spot where Mabel and I used to hang out and stare out at the water. I was trying to remember my mother. I didn’t think of it that way for all those years I’d been doing it, but it was clear to me by then. The waves would come in, and I would try to remember the way she must have looked up on her surfboard, how she would have dragged it behind her as she came back to shore, how she would have waved to me with her other hand. Maybe I sat right here with her friends. Maybe the buried memories of those days are what led me back each time.
It was mid-August, and Mabel had left just a few days before, and I was supposed to leave in a little over two weeks. That morning was quiet, only a couple of guys surfing in the distance. When they got out of the water they stood around talking, and at one point I saw them look over at me. I could feel what they were saying. Two of them were telling a third who I was.
It felt so unfair, that they could remember her and I couldn’t. Maybe if I closed my eyes, just listened. I knew that smells triggered memories, so I breathed in deep. And then I heard a voice. It was one of the guys. The other two were gone.
“Marin,” he said. “Right?”
“Yes.”
I squinted up at him, wondered if my hair reminded him of hers. I thought he might tell me about something intangible. An aura I gave off or a gesture I made.
“What are you waiting around for?”
“Nothing,” I said.
But it wasn’t true. I was waiting for a faraway nostalgia to take him over, the way it always did with all the others. I almost held out my hand, sure he’d drop shells in. Maybe the feeling of them in my palm would do it.
“I heard you looked a lot like your mom, but this is ridiculous.”
He didn’t sound dreamy at all, but I smiled anyway and said thanks.
“I’ve got a van in the lot and some time to spare,” he said.
My body tensed. In spite of the lead in my stomach, in spite of the way I was sinking into the sand, darkness rushing in, I made my voice stronger. “Who are you even?” I asked.
“I’m Fred,” he said.
“Never even heard of you.”
I turned to the ocean and watched the waves crash. The more focused I was on them, the louder they were, the closer they became. When a wave reached the toe of my shoe, I stood up.
I was alone, just like I’d hoped, but it felt terrible.
I needed something.
Ana, I thought, but that was stupid. Ana was not mine.
I needed a warm place, music, sweet-smelling rooms.
Traffic parted for me; the darkening sky held its light until I unlocked my door and rushed upstairs.
“Gramps,” I called. “Emergency! I need cake!”
He wasn’t in the living room or the dining room. The kitchen was empty, nothing on the stove or in the oven.
“Gramps?”
I stood still and listened. Quiet. He must have been out, I thought, but I found myself at the door of his study. I saw him. Couldn’t believe it but there he was at his desk. Cigarette smoldering in the crystal ashtray, pen in hand, staring blankly off.
“Gramps?”
“Not a good time.”
His voice wasn’t even his voice.
“Sorry,” I said, backing away.
I found my way to the love seat. I wanted a lecture about anything. The correct name for a coffee establishment. The duplicity of nuns. The difference between carnal desire and the love for someone’s soul.
I wanted to touch knees under the table.
I wanted him to tell me about my mother.
Night fell and he didn’t come out. He didn’t make dinner. I sat on the love seat, perfectly still, until my back got sore and my feet fell asleep and I had to stand to get the blood rushing again. I got ready for bed and then I went to my room in the front of the house, where nobody ever went but me.
chapter eighteen
“MARIN,” she says. “Please talk to me.”
I guess I’ve gone silent. I didn’t even realize it.
“I miss him,” I whisper. It isn’t what I expected to say; it just comes out. I don’t even know if it’s true. I do miss him, but then I don’t.
She scoots closer.
“I know,” she says. “I know. But you’re trying to tell me something. I want to hear it.”
Her knee is so clos
e to mine. She isn’t afraid to touch me now that we’ve held each other all night. I love her, but there is no going back. No bonfires on the beach. No mouths pressed together. No hungry fumblings. No fingers through her hair. But maybe I can go further back, to a less complicated time when cute was an accurate description of my grandfather and Mabel was simply my best friend.
I want to tell her, but I can’t do it yet. The words are stuck.
“Tell me something,” I say.
“What?”
“Anything.”
Tell me about heat.
Tell me about the beach.
Tell me about a girl who lives in a house with her grandfather, about a house that’s full of easy love, about a house that isn’t haunted. Hands covered in cake flour and air that smells sweet. Tell me about the way the girl and her grandfather did each other’s laundry and left it folded in the living room, not because there were secrets, but because that’s just the way they were: simple and easy and true.
But before she can say anything, the words come.
“None of it was real,” I tell her.
She scoots closer, our thighs touch. She takes my hands in hers like we used to do on the beach, like I’m freezing and she can warm me.
“None of what was real?”
“Him,” I whisper.
“I don’t understand,” she says.
“He had a walk-in closet behind his room. It’s where he really lived. It was filled with all this stuff.”
“What kind of stuff?”
“Letters, to start. They were all written by him. He signed her name, but he wrote all of them.”
“Marin, I don’t . . .”
chapter nineteen
AUGUST
GRAMPS’S LEAVING WOKE ME UP. The door shutting, footsteps down the stairs. I peered out to the street and saw him turn the corner in the direction of the store, or Bo’s house, or any number of the places he disappeared to during his walks through the neighborhood.
I’d slept in. It was already eleven when I got into the shower. Once out, I boiled some eggs and left two in a bowl for him. I made tea for myself and then placed a second bag into a teacup for him to find when he returned. I read on the sofa for a while. Then I went out. I spent the rest of the day in Dolores Park with Ben and Laney, throwing the ball for her, laughing with Ben, going over every shared memory from the last seven years of our lives. We tied Laney to a pole outside Ben’s favorite taqueria and watched all the hipsters stop and pet her.