“The rug’s looking better and better,” I say.
“Getting cold feet?”
I feel myself smile, and when I look at her she’s smiling back at me already.
“I can do the rest,” she says, picking up a pillowcase. “You go get ready.”
Like Jane Eyre, I carry a candle to light my way. But when I get to the bathroom and look in the mirror, all I see is myself. Despite the darkness, the long shadows, the quiet, this room is free of intruders and ghosts. I splash icy water on my face, dry it with a towel Tommy left out for us. I brush my teeth, I pee, I wash my hands, and pull my hair back in a rubber band I brought with me. I think of Jane Eyre with Mr. Rochester, of how much she loved him and how certain she was that they could never be together, and I think of how in a couple of minutes I’ll be in bed with Mabel. I tried to make it sound like it was nothing, but it is something—I know that. She knows it.
Maybe her hesitation wasn’t about Jacob at all. It could just have been over the ways we’ve changed. It could be that she’s still too angry to think about the weight of my body on the same mattress, the accidental contact we’ll make throughout the night when we’re too lost in sleep to keep to one side or the other.
I take the candle and head back to the living room. She’s already in bed, on her side facing the edge. I can’t see her face but I think her eyes are closed. I climb onto the other side. The springs groan. No sense in pretending she could sleep through the noise of it.
“Good night,” I whisper.
“Good night,” she says.
Our backs are to each other’s. We’re as far apart as two people could be on a mattress this size. The space between us is worse than our awkwardness, worse than not knowing what she’s thinking during our long stretches of silence.
I think I hear something.
I think she’s crying.
And here are things I’d forgotten, resurfacing. Text messages she sent.
Did you meet someone?
You can tell me if you did.
I just need to know.
There were others, too, but I can’t remember them. In the beginning her texts were knives, slicing holes in the cocoon of motel must and diner coffee and the view of the street out my window. But after school started, after Hannah, I was a stranger with a secondhand phone and someone named Mabel had the wrong number.
That girl she was trying to reach—she must have been running from something. She must have been someone special, for her friend to keep trying so hard. Too bad she was gone now.
We never talked about what would happen to us.
That was another one.
The way we used to kiss. How I would catch her looking at me from across the room. Her grin, my blush. Her thigh, soft, against my cheek. I had to deny all of it, because it was part of a life that was over.
All I can hear is the crackle of the fire. She may not have really been crying—I may have imagined it—but I can feel it now, the way I hurt her. Maybe it’s all of this remembering or talking about books and paintings again or being with Mabel, but I can feel the ghost of me creeping back. Remember me? she’s asking.
I think I do.
And that girl would have comforted Mabel. She would have touched her as though a touch were something simple. So I lift my hand, search for a safe place on Mabel’s body. Her shoulder. I touch her there, and before I have time to wonder if it’s unwanted, Mabel’s hand covers mine, holding it in place.
chapter twelve
JUNE
LATER THAT DAY, after Gramps had caught us with the whiskey and Mabel and I had spent the school hours blushing every time we saw each other, after Gramps had made a casserole for dinner and there had been more quiet between us than usual, he asked me to sit down on the love seat.
I nodded.
“Sure,” I said, but my chest filled with ice.
I didn’t know how I’d answer the questions he was about to ask me. Everything was too new. I followed him into the living room and took my seat. He stood in front of me, towering, not even a hint of a smile, only worry and sadness and something verging on panic.
“Listen,” he said. “I want to tell you about different kinds of love.”
I braced myself for his disapproval. I had rarely felt it before, and never for anything substantial. And I braced myself, too, for my anger. Because as unexpected as Mabel’s kiss had been, and as nervous and unsettled as I’d felt ever since, I knew that what we did wasn’t wrong.
“You may have gotten the wrong impression,” he continued. “About Birdie and me. It isn’t like that between us.”
I felt a laugh escape me. It was out of relief, but he didn’t take it that way.
“It may be difficult to believe,” he said. “I know it may have come across as . . . romantic, because of how I act when I get her letters. Because of that dress she sent me. But sometimes two people have a deep connection. It makes romance seem trivial. It isn’t about anything carnal. It’s about souls. About the deepest part of who you are as a person.”
He seemed so worried, so nervous. All of my relief slipped away, and concern replaced it.
“Okay, Gramps,” I said. “Whatever it is, I’m glad that you have her.”
He took his handkerchief out of his pocket and carefully unfolded it. He patted his forehead, his upper lip. I had never seen him so worked up about anything.
“Really,” I said. “Don’t worry about what I think. I just want you to be happy.”
“Sailor,” he said. “If I didn’t have her, I would be lost.”
I wasn’t enough of a companion. I wasn’t any kind of anchor. I felt the blow of it but I swallowed the hurt and said, “I’m sure she feels the same for you.”
He studied my face. It felt like he was looking through me to something else. He nodded, slowly.
“It’s true. Maybe even more so,” he said. “I need her and she needs me. Boy, does she need me.”
Maybe he was going to say more, but the doorbell rang, the card game was about to begin, so I got up and went down to open the gate. Usually I would clear the kitchen when they came, but I was afraid that something was wrong with Gramps. I wanted to know that he was back to himself. I finished drying the dishes on the rack as they poured their first drinks and started to play. Then I left for a while but couldn’t stop worrying, so I went back to make myself tea.
As the water heated up, I saw Jones take Gramps’s bottle, pour a little more into his glass.
Gramps eyed the glass, then eyed Jones.
“What’s that for?”
“You were empty.”
Jones glanced at the other two. Freeman was shuffling more times than necessary, but Bo met Jones’s eyes.
“No need to hurry me up,” Gramps said. “I’m getting there fine on my own.” His voice was low, almost a growl.
Bo shook his head. Something was a shame, but I didn’t know what.
Jones cleared his throat. He swallowed.
“It’s just a drink, Delaney,” he finally said.
Gramps looked up at Jones, his eyes fierce, for the entire time that Freeman dealt the cards. The other guys picked up their hands, putting what they received in order, but Gramps just stared, daring Jones to look back.
I didn’t know what was happening, but I wanted it to end.
“Gramps?” I said.
He jerked toward me as though he’d forgotten I was there.
“I was wondering . . . ,” I said, not knowing where my sentence would end. “Maybe . . . Will you drive me to school tomorrow? I might feel like sleeping in.”
“Sure, Sailor,” he said.
He turned back to the table. He picked up his cards. Everyone was quiet, no heckling, not a single joke.
“I’ll bet five,” Gramps said.
Jones folded.
I went back into my room with the tea and tried to forget.
Mabel and I texted for hours. We didn’t make plans to sneak out and meet. We didn’t even talk. Hearing the other’s voice would have been bright and dangerous, so instead we tapped out messages.
What were we thinking?
I don’t know.
Did you like it?
Yes.
Me too.
We texted about a song we liked and some random YouTube videos, about a poem we read in English that day, and what we would do if we were faced with the end of the world. We texted about Mabel’s uncle and his husband, who lived on three acres in New Mexico, and how we would make our way there, build a tepee, and dig a well and grow our food and make the most of what time we had left.
The end of the world never sounded so good.
I know!
I kind of want it to happen. Is that bad?
We could do all that stuff even without the apocalypse.
Good point.
So it’s a plan?
Yes.
It was almost two a.m. by the time we said good night. I smiled into my pillow, closed my eyes, wished for the feeling to last. I saw our futures unfolding, all pink clouds and cacti and bright sun and forever.
And then I got up and went to the kitchen for water. I filled the glass and gulped it down, then headed toward the bathroom. The door to Gramps’s room was ajar. Light was shining through the narrow space. I walked softly past it and then I heard something rustle and turned back. Gramps was at his desk, his brass lamp burning, his pen moving furiously across his paper. I was quiet, but I could tell—I could have called his name and he wouldn’t have looked up. I could have banged the pots and pans together.
He was writing his love letters, I told myself, but it didn’t look like love.
He finished a page and cast it aside, started a next one. He was hunched forward and furious. I turned toward the bathroom and locked the door behind me.
He was only writing love letters, I thought.
Only love letters. Love letters.
chapter thirteen
IN THE STILLNESS of this unfamiliar living room, another memory surfaces.
A couple nights after graduation, we all met on Ocean Beach. Everyone was acting wild, like it was the end of everything. Like we’d never see one another again, and maybe, in some cases, that was true.
I found Mabel and joined her on a blanket just in time to hear the punch line of a joke I already knew. I smiled while everybody laughed, and she looked so beautiful in the bonfire glow.
We all looked so beautiful.
I could say the night felt magical, but that would be embellishment. That would be romanticization. What it actually felt like was life. We weren’t thinking of what would happen next. No one talked about the way the summer was supposed to unfold or the places we’d find ourselves in the fall. It was as if we had made a pact to be in the moment, or like being in the moment was the only way to be. Telling jokes, telling secrets. Ben had his guitar and for a while he played and we just listened as the fire sparked and the waves crashed and subsided. I felt something on my hand. Mabel’s finger, tracing my knuckles. She slipped her thumb under my palm. I could have kissed her, but I didn’t.
Now, her hand on mine after so long apart, here in Tommy’s house and nowhere close to sleep, I wonder what might have changed if I had. If one of us had made the fact of us common knowledge, we would have become something to be discussed and decided upon. Maybe there would have been no Jacob. Maybe her photograph would be on my bulletin board. Maybe we wouldn’t be here now, and I would be in California in her parents’ orange-walled living room, sipping hot chocolate by the Christmas tree.
But probably not. Because even though it was only a couple months later that Gramps left me, when I tried to call back that night it no longer felt like life.
When I think of all of us then, I see how we were in danger. Not because of the drinking or the sex or the hour of the night. But because we were so innocent and we didn’t even know it. There’s no way of getting it back. The confidence. The easy laughter. The sensation of having left home only for a little while. Of having a home to return to.
We were innocent enough to think that our lives were what we thought they were, that if we pieced all of the facts about ourselves together they’d form an image that made sense—that looked like us when we looked in the mirror, that looked like our living rooms and our kitchens and the people who raised us—instead of revealing all the things we didn’t know.
Mabel lets go of my hand and kicks back the covers. She sits up, so I do the same.
“I guess I’m not ready to fall asleep yet,” she says.
It’s so warm now that I’m glad to have the covers off. We sit on the bed and lean against the cushioned back of the sofa. We’re watching the firelight flicker across the room, and Mabel is pulling her hair back, twisting it in circles and then letting it go, and I feel like the night might last forever and I would be okay with that.
“Where did you stay when you got here? I mean before the dorms. It’s something I’ve been wondering.”
I didn’t expect this, but I want to give her the answer. I take a long look at the ceiling and I nod in case she’s watching me. I need a moment to steady my heart so I can speak. By the time I look back she’s shifted. Her head is resting on her hand and she’s watching me with a look I don’t know if I’ve ever seen on her before. She’s so still and so patient.
“I found a motel.”
“Close by?”
“Sort of. I think it was like twenty minutes away. I got on a bus from the airport and I rode the line until I saw a place out the window.”
“What was it like?”
“Not nice.”
“Why did you stay?”
“I guess it never occurred to me that I could leave.”
I think about walking into the room, the way it smelled—worse than stale, worse than unclean. I thought I might be able to exist there without touching anything, but then hours passed and it turned out I was wrong.
“It was a hotel where people live when they don’t have anywhere else to go,” I tell Mabel. “Not a place where people stay on vacation.” I pull the blanket over me, even though I’m not cold. “It scared me. But I was already scared.”
“That’s not what I pictured.”
“What did you think?”
“I thought maybe you got to move into the dorms early or something. Did you meet people?”
“At the motel?”
She nods.
“I wouldn’t say that I met people. I had a lot of neighbors. Some of them became familiar.”
“I mean did you hang out with them?”
“No.”
“I thought you must have met people.”
I shake my head.
“I thought they were helping you through everything.”
“No,” I say. “I was alone there.”
In her face something is shifting. A set of facts to replace all the guessing I made her do. I want to give her more.
“There was a woman next door to me who howled,” I say. “At cars that went by, at people who passed. After I checked into my room she howled for a few straight hours.”
“What was wrong with her?”
“I don’t know. She sounded like a wolf. I kept wondering then—I’m still wondering now—if there was a time when she realized that something was going wrong. Inside her, I mean. When she could feel herself slipping away, something new creeping in. If she could have stopped it, or if it just . . . happened. It made me think about Jane Eyre. Remember?”
“The crazy woman. Mr. Rochester’s first wife.”
“I felt like Jane when she sees her in the mirror. I was afraid. I’d listen to her at night and sometimes I felt like I understood what s
he was trying to say. I was afraid I’d turn into her.”
The fact of her was scary enough, but the fact of me, in an identical room, just as alone as she was, that was the worst part. There was only a wall between us, and it was so thin it was almost nothing. Jane, too, was once locked up in a room with a ghost. It was terrifying, the idea that we could fall asleep girls, minty breathed and nightgowned, and wake to find ourselves wolves.
“I can see why you don’t want to read much right now.”
I nod. “Before, they were just stories. But now, they keep swarming back, and all of them feel more terrible.”
She looks away and I wonder if it’s because I’m telling her things she can’t relate to. Maybe she thinks I’m being dramatic. Maybe I am. But I know that there’s a difference between how I used to understand things and how I do now. I used to cry over a story and then close the book, and it all would be over. Now everything resonates, sticks like a splinter, festers.
“You were alone,” she says. “For all those days.”
“Does that change anything?”
She shrugs.
“You thought I met new people and didn’t need you?”
“It was the only explanation I could think of.”
I will tell her anything as long as she keeps asking questions. It’s the darkness and the warmth. The feeling of being in someone else’s home, in neutral territory, nothing mine and nothing hers, no clues about each other in the blankets or the firewood or the photographs on the mantel.
It makes my life feel far away, even though I’m right here.
“What else do you want to know?” I ask her.
“I’ve been wondering about Birdie.”
She shifts, and the springs pop and settle. My hands lie heavy in my lap. Her face is still watchful and willing. I can still breathe.
“Okay,” I say. “What about Birdie?”
“Does she know what happened? No one was there to check the mail and find her letters. By now, they’d all be sent back, and I keep wondering if anyone told her that he died.”