I turned the key and stepped in.
Worse than stale. Worse than unclean.
I tried to open the windows to get the smell out, but they only opened three inches, and the air outside was still thick and hot. The curtains were stiff, coated in something. The carpet was splotchy and worn, the comforter torn. I put my photograph in its folder down on the chair along with my wallet and my phone.
Next door to me, a woman started howling and didn’t stop. Below me, someone blasted telenovelas. I heard something break. It’s possible that some of the rooms were occupied by regular people, down on their luck, but my wing was full of the broken, and I was at home among them.
By then it was late and I hadn’t eaten anything. I was amazed that I could be hungry, but my stomach was churning and growling, so I crossed the street to the diner. I sat myself, like the sign told me to. I ordered a grilled cheese and french fries and a chocolate shake. I feared nothing would fill me up.
It was pitch-black when I headed back across the street. I asked the motel clerk for a toothbrush. She told me there was a drugstore across the street, but then handed me a travel kit that someone had left behind, still enclosed in plastic, with a tiny toothbrush and a tiny tube of paste. I walked past my neighbor, still staring out the window. As I splashed water on my face, I thought I heard Gramps singing, but when I turned the faucet off there was nothing.
I went back outside. I knocked on the door next to mine.
The man opened it.
He had sunken cheeks and bloodshot eyes. He was the kind of person I’d cross the street to steer clear of.
“I need to ask you something,” I said. “If you see an old man outside my room, will you knock on the wall to let me know?”
“Sure,” he said.
And then I fell asleep, knowing he was watching.
Three nights later I heard a tap above my head. Would he be bloodstained, would he be ghostly? Outside it was quiet. There was no one. My neighbor’s vacant eyes peered through the screen. I knew that he hadn’t moved for a long time. It wasn’t he who had knocked. Maybe a rodent, burrowing through walls. Maybe my mind, playing tricks. Maybe someone upstairs. Maybe him, haunting me.
He sang each time I turned on the faucet, so I stopped using the water.
There were only six days left before I could move into the dorms. At the drugstore, I bought a gallon of water for drinking and toothbrushing. I bought a bottle of hand sanitizer. I bought a pack of white T-shirts and a pack of white underwear. I bought baby powder for the oil in my hair.
I ordered split pea soup.
Scrambled eggs.
Coffee.
I used the ATM card.
I tipped eighteen percent.
I said thank you.
They said, “See you tonight.”
“See you in the morning.”
“The cherry pie is special today.”
I said thank you.
I said see you.
I looked both ways.
I crossed the street.
I turned on the television. Judge Judy. Laugh tracks. Always. Dove. Swiffer.
I pulled back the blankets, ignored the stains. I burrowed under like a rodent in a wall. I kept trying to find the right position. I made myself very still. I made my eyes shut.
“You’re okay,” I told myself.
“Shhh,” I said.
chapter twenty-three
“COME WITH ME,” Mabel says.
Our talk is over. We’re on the floor across from each other, each of us leaning against a bed. I should feel a weight lifted now that I’ve told her everything, but I don’t. Not yet. Maybe in the morning some new feeling will settle.
“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.
“I know,” Mabel says. “I understand.”
“Thank you for coming,” I say.
The hours stretch on, and I fall in and out of sleep, and at some point she slips out of bed and out of the room. She stays away for a long time, and I try to stay awake until she comes back, but I just wait and wait and wait.
When I wake up again at the first light of the morning, she’s back in Hannah’s bed, sleeping with her arm covering her eyes as if she could stave off the day.
chapter twenty-four
WHEN I OPEN MY EYES AGAIN, she isn’t here. I’m seized with panic that I’ve missed her altogether, that she’s already gone and I haven’t gotten to say good-bye.
But here is her duffel open in the middle of my floor.
The thought of her slinging it over her shoulder and walking out is enough to make me double over. I have to fill the minutes between now and then with as much as I can.
I climb out of bed and take out the gifts I bought. I wish I had wrapping paper or at least some ribbon, but the tissue paper will have to do. I put on a bra and change into jeans and a T-shirt. I brush my hair. For some reason I don’t want to be in my pajamas when I walk her down the stairs.
“Hey,” she says from the doorway.
“Good morning,” I say, trying not to cry. “I’ll be right back.”
I rush through peeing and brushing my teeth so that I can be back there, with her. I catch her before she zips up her suitcase.
“I was thinking we could wrap this in your clothes,” I say, and hand her the vase I bought for her parents. She takes it from me and nestles it into her things. She goes to reach for the zipper but I stop her.
“Close your eyes and hold out your hands,” I say.
“Shouldn’t I wait?” she asks.
“Lots of people exchange gifts on Christmas Eve.”
“But the thing I got you is—”
“I know. It doesn’t matter. I want to see you open it.”
She nods.
“Close your eyes,” I say again.
She closes them. I look at her. I wish her everything good. A friendly cab driver and short lines through security. A flight with no turbulence and an empty seat next to her. A beautiful Christmas. I wish her more happiness than can fit in a person. I wish her the kind of happiness that spills over.
I place the bell into her open palms.
She opens her eyes and unwraps it.
“You noticed,” she says.
“Ring it.”
She does, and the tone lingers and we wait quietly until it’s over.
“Thank you,” she says. “It’s so pretty.”
She slings her bag over her shoulder, and it hurts just as much as I expected it to. I follow her into the elevator. When we get to the door, the cab is waiting in a sea of white.
“You’re sure, right?” she asks.
“Yeah,” I say.
She looks out the window.
She bites a nail.
“You’re sure you’re sure?”
I nod.
She takes a deep breath, manages a smile.
“Okay. Well. I’ll see you soon.”
She steps toward me and hugs me tight. I close my eyes. There will come a time soon—any second—when she’ll pull away and this will be over. In my mind, we keep ending, ending. I try to stay here, now, for as long as we can.
I don’t care that her sweater is scratchy. I don’t care that the cab driver is waiting. I feel her rib cage expand and retract. We stay and stay.
Until she lets me go.
“See you soon,” I say, but the words come out thick with despair.
I’m making the wrong choice.
The glass door opens. Cold rushes in.
She steps outside and shuts the door behind her.
When I lived with Jones and Agnes, it was their daughter, Samantha, who made me breakfast. Wheat bread and applesauce, every morning. We ate matching meals, perched on the stools in their kitchen. She’d look over my homework if I had questions, but I remember not wanting to ask for much help. She’d always scrunch up her forehead and say how it had been a long time since she learned this stuff. She’d figure it out eventually and talk me through it, but it was more fun to ask about her magazines because she delighted in talking about them. I learned what DUIs were because Paris Hilton and Nicole Richie both got them. The news of Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes’s wedding was everywhere. I learned what to wait for with each new issue’s release.
I rarely saw Jones and Agnes until after school, because they slept late and entrusted Samantha with my morning care. She was always nice to me after that. She always did my nails for free.
I don’t have her number anymore. It’s been a long time since she’s lived with her parents. I wish I had it now. I call the salon, just in case she’s there early doing work before it opens, but the phone rings and rings and then goes to voice mail. I listen to her voice slowly stating the hours and location.
I pace the room for a while, waiting for it to be ten in San Francisco. As soon as it’s one here, I press call.
“It’s you,” Jones says when I say hello.
“Yeah,” I say. “It’s me.”
“Where are you?”
“School.”
He’s quiet.
“I see,” he says. “You spending the holiday with some fellow troublemakers?”
He’s probably running inventory of who I could be with, envisioning a few of us here, a scrappy team of orphans and outcasts.
“Something like that,” I say.
I should have prepared something to say to him. The truth is, I only called so that I could remind him—and myself, maybe—that I’m still a part of the world. It feels like now or never with him, and I’m not sure if I want to lose what’s left of the life Gramps and I shared. I used to be sure, but now I’m not.
I’m about to ask how Agnes is, but he speaks before I get the words out.
“I have everything,” he says. “Just so you know. Whether you want it or not, everything is here in the garage waiting for you. Not the beds or the refrigerator or nothin’ like that. But the real stuff. The owner arranged an estate sale after the place was vacant thirty days. But the guys and I, we bought it all.”
I close my eyes: brass candlesticks; the blue-and-gold blanket; my grandmother’s china with the tiny red flowers.
“We all feel real bad about it,” he says. “Feel like we shoulda done something. For you.”
“What about the letters?”
Quiet.
He clears his throat.
“They’re here. The landlord gave us the, uh
, more personal stuff.”
“Can you get rid of them?”
“I can do that.”
“Keep the photographs, though. Okay?”
“Mm-hm,” he says.
I think of all of those pictures that Gramps kept for himself. My jaw clenches with the wrongness of it. He should have sat next to me and shown me. He should have said, Now, I think this was the time that . . . or Oh yes, I remember this day . . . He should have told me all the ways in which I reminded him of her. He should have helped me remember her. He never should have let me forget.
Jones is still quiet. I hear his throat clearing.
“Your gramps, he was in a hospital a long time ago, when you stayed with us. Not sure if you remember. It almost killed him, so we didn’t want to send him back there. Wish I could say that was the right decision. Wish I could say I didn’t realize it got so bad again. Wish I could say that.”
I breathe in and out. It requires effort. “I thought he was sick.”
“Well, he was. Just in more ways than you thought.”
He clears his throat again. I wait.
“Sometimes it’s difficult,” he says, “to know the right thing to do.”
I nod even though he can’t see me. There’s no arguing with a statement like that, even if a different future is unfurling in my head—one where I knew what Gramps’s prescriptions were for, and I watched to make sure he took them, and he took me along to his appointments and his doctors told me what to watch for.
I need to find something kind to say, something instead of these thoughts of how Gramps failed me, how Jones failed us. He knows it already; I can hear it in his voice.
“Merry Christmas Eve, Jones,” I finally say, wanting the conversation to end.
“You get religious all of a sudden? If your gramps had a grave, he’d be turning in it.”
It’s a rough joke, the kind they used to make in my kitchen.
“It’s just something to say,” I tell him. Out the window, the snow is starting again. Not stormlike, just scattered flakes drifting. “Give Agnes and Samantha my love, Jones. And tell the fellas I say hello.”
After I hang up, I cut open Hannah’s envelope and something flutters out. It unfolds in its descent: a paper chain of snowflakes, each one white and crisp. There is no message inside. It’s exactly what it appears to be.