We Are Okay

by Nina LaCour

  Upstairs in my room, I assemble the snacks on Hannah’s desk. It looks abundant, just as I’d hoped. And then my phone buzzes with a text.

  I’m here.

  It isn’t even six o’clock yet—I should still have a half hour at least—and I can’t help but torture myself by scrolling up to see all of the texts Mabel sent before this one. Asking if I’m okay. Saying she’s thinking of me. Wondering where the fuck am I, whether I’m angry, if we can talk, if she can visit, if I miss her. Remember Nebraska? one of them says, a reference to a plan we never intended to keep. They go on and on, a series of unanswered messages that seize me with guilt, until I’m snapped out of it by the phone ringing in my hand.

  I startle, answer it.

  “Hey,” she says. It’s the first time I’ve heard her voice since everything happened. “I’m downstairs and it’s fucking freezing. Let me in?”

  And then I am at the lobby door. We are separated by only a sheet of glass and my shaking hand as I reach to turn the lock. I touch the metal and pause to look at her. She’s blowing into her hands to warm them. She’s faced away from me. And then she turns and our eyes meet and I don’t know how I ever thought I’d be able to smile. I can barely turn the latch.

  “I don’t know how anyone can live anywhere this cold,” she says as I pull open the door and she steps inside. It’s freezing down here, too.

  I say, “My room is warmer.”

  I reach for one of her bags carefully, so our fingers don’t touch. I’m grateful for the weight of it as we ride the elevator up.

  The walk down the hallway is silent and then we get to my door, and once inside she sets down her suitcase, shrugs off her coat.

  Here is Mabel, in my room, three thousand miles away from what used to be home.

  She sees the snacks I bought. Each one of them, something she loves.

  “So,” she says. “I guess it’s okay that I came.”

  chapter two

  MABEL IS FINALLY WARM ENOUGH. She tosses her hat onto Hannah’s bed, unwraps her red-and-yellow scarf. I flinch at the familiarity of them. All of my clothes are new.

  “I’d make you give me a tour, but there’s no way I’m going back out there,” she says.

  “Yeah, sorry about that,” I say, still fixed to her scarf and hat. Are they as soft as they used to be?

  “You’re apologizing for the weather?” Her eyebrows are raised, her tone is teasing, but when I can’t think of anything witty to say back, her question hovers in the room, a reminder of the apology she’s really come for.

  Three thousand miles is a long way to travel to hear someone say she’s sorry.

  “So what are your professors like?”

  Thankfully, I manage to tell her about my history professor, who swears during lessons, rides a motorcycle, and seems much more like someone you’d meet at a bar than in a lecture hall. This topic doesn’t make me a gifted conversationalist, but at least it makes me adequate.

  “At first I kept thinking all my professors were celibate,” I say. She laughs. I made her laugh. “But then I met this guy and he shattered the illusion.”

  “What building is his class in? We can do a window tour.”

  Her back is to me as she peers out at my school. I take a moment too long before joining her.

  Mabel.

  In New York. In my room.

  Outside, the snow covers the ground and the benches, the hood of the groundskeeper’s truck, and the trees. Lights on the pathways glow even though nobody’s here. It looks even emptier this way. So much light and only stillness.

  “Over there.” I point across the night to the furthermost building, barely lit up.

  “And where’s your lit class?”

  “Right here.” I point to the building next to us.

  “What else are you taking?”

  I show her the gym where I swim laps every morning and try, unsuccessfully, to master the butterfly stroke. I swim late at night, too, but I don’t tell her that. The pool is always eighty degrees. Diving in feels like plunging into nothing, not the icy shock I’ve known forever. No waves cold enough to numb me or strong enough to pull me under. At night the pool is quiet, and I swim laps and then just float, watching the ceiling or closing my eyes, all the sounds foggy and distant, the lifeguard keeping watch.

  It helps me get calm when the panic starts.

  But when it’s too late at night and the pool is closed and I can’t stop my thoughts, it’s Hannah who can steady me.

  “I just read the most interesting thing,” she’ll say from her bed, her textbook resting in her lap. And then she reads to me about honeybees, about deciduous trees, about evolution.

  It takes me a while, usually, to be able to listen. But when I do, I discover the secrets of pollination, that honeybees’ wings beat two hundred times per second. That trees shed their leaves not according to season, but according to rainfall. That before all of us there was something else. Eventually, something will take our place.

  I learn that I am a tiny piece of a miraculous world.

  I make myself understand, again, that I am in a dorm room at a college. That what happened has happened. It’s over. Doubt pushes in, but I use our twin beds and desks and closets, the four walls around us, the girls who neighbor us on both sides and the ones who neighbor them, the whole building and the campus and the state of New York to fend doubt off.

  We are what’s real, I tell myself as I fall asleep.

  Then, at six a.m., when the pool opens, I go swimming.

  A movement calls me back. Mabel, tucking her hair behind her ear. “Where’s the dining hall?” she asks.

  “You can’t see it from this window, but it’s across the courtyard in the back.”

  “What’s it like?”

  “Decent.”

  “I mean the people. The scene.”

  “Pretty mellow. I usually sit with Hannah and her friends.”

  “Hannah?”

  “My roommate. Do you see the building with the pointy roof? Behind those trees?”

  She nods.

  “That’s where my anthropology class is. It’s probably my favorite.”

  “Really? Not lit?”

  I nod.

  “Because of the professors?”

  “No, they’re both good,” I say. “Everything in lit is just too . . . ambiguous, I guess.”

  “But that’s what you like. All the differences in interpretation.”

  Is that true? I can’t remember.

  I shrug.

  “But you’re still an English major.”

  “No, I’m undeclared now,” I say. “But I’m pretty sure I’m going to switch to Natural Sciences.”

  I think I see a flash of annoyance cross her face, but then she smiles at me.

  “Bathroom?” she asks.

  “Follow me.”

  I lead her around the corner, then return to my room.

  Three days suddenly feels so long. Unfathomable, all the minutes Mabel and I will need to fill. But then I see her scarf on the bed, her hat next to it. I pick them up. They’re even softer than I remembered and they smell like the rosewater Mabel and her mom spray everywhere. On themselves and in their cars. In all the bright rooms of their house.

  I hold on to them and keep holding even when I hear Mabel’s footsteps approach. I breathe in the rose, the earthiness of Mabel’s skin, all the hours we spent in her house.

  Three days will never be enough.

  “I have to call my parents,” Mabel says from the doorway. I set down her things. If she noticed me holding them, she isn’t going to acknowledge it. “I texted them from the airport, but they’re so nervous about this. They kept giving me tips about driving in the snow. I kept saying, ‘I’m not going to be the one driving.’”

  She puts her phone to her ear
, but even from across the room I can hear when they answer, both Ana’s voice and Javier’s, exuberant and relieved.

  The briefest fantasy: Mabel appears at the doorway, catches sight of me. She sits next to me on the bed, takes the hat, and sets it down. Takes the scarf from my hands and wraps it around my neck. Takes my hands and warms them in hers.

  “Yes,” she says, “the plane was fine. . . . I don’t know, it was pretty big. . . . No, they didn’t serve food.”

  She looks at me.

  “Yes,” she says. “Marin’s right here.”

  Will they ask to talk to me?

  “I have to go check on something,” I tell her. “Say hi for me.”

  I slip out the door and down the stairs to the kitchen. I open the refrigerator. Everything is exactly as I left it, neatly labeled and arranged. We could make ravioli and garlic bread, quesadillas with beans and rice on the side, vegetable soup, a spinach salad with dried cranberries and blue cheese, or chili with corn bread.

  I spend long enough away that by the time I get back Mabel has hung up.

  chapter three

  MAY

  I SLEPT THROUGH MY ALARM, woke to Gramps singing to me from the living room. A song about a sailor dreaming, about Marin, his sailor girl. His accent was slight—he’d lived in San Francisco since he was nine—but when he sang, he became unmistakably Irish.

  He tapped on my door, sang a verse loudly just outside.

  Mine was the front bedroom, overlooking the street, while Gramps occupied two rooms in the back of the house. Between us were the living room and dining room and kitchen, so we could pretty much do whatever we wanted without fear that the other would be listening. He never came into my room; I never went into his. That might sound unfriendly, but it wasn’t. We spent plenty of time together in the in-between rooms, reading on the sofa and the easy chair; playing cards in the dining room; cooking together; eating at the round kitchen table, so small that we never had to ask the other to pass the salt and our knees bumped so often we didn’t bother apologizing. Our hampers were in the hall by the bathroom and we took turns doing laundry, leaving neatly folded stacks on the dining room table for the other to take whenever the time was right. Maybe parents or spouses would have taken the clothes and opened up the other one’s drawers, but we were not father and daughter. We were not spouses. And in our house, we enjoyed our togetherness but we enjoyed our apartness, too.

  His song trailed off as I opened my door to his wide-knuckled, age-spotted hand, holding out coffee in the yellow mug. “You’ll need a ride today. And from the looks of you, you’ll need this coffee.” Yellow morning light, beating through the curtains. Blond hair in my eyes until I pushed it away.

  A few minutes later we were in the car. The news was all about a prisoner of war who had been brought back, and Gramps kept saying, “What a shame. Such a young boy,” and I was glad he had something to engage himself because I was thinking about last night.

  About Mabel and all of our other friends, cross-legged in the sand, part shadowed, part lit in the bonfire glow. It was May already. We’d all be leaving one another, going to other places in the fall; and now that the season was changing, rushing toward graduation, everything we did felt like a long good-bye or a premature reunion. We were nostalgic for a time that wasn’t yet over.

  “So young,” Gramps was saying. “To endure a thing like that. And people can be so heartless.”

  He set his blinker on as we approached the drop-off zone at Convent. I held my coffee cup out so it wouldn’t slosh as he turned.

  “Look at that,” he said, pointing at the dashboard clock. “Two minutes to spare.”

  “You’re my hero,” I told him.

  “You be good,” he said. “And careful—don’t let the sisters know we’re heathens.”

  He grinned. I took my last sips.

  “I won’t.”

  “Take an extra helping of the blood of Christ for me, will you?”

  I rolled my eyes, set my empty mug on the seat.

  I shut the door and leaned down to wave at him, still delighted by his own jokes, through the rolled-up window. He made his face fake-somber and crossed himself before laughing and driving away.

  In English, we were talking about ghosts. About whether they were there at all, and if they were, whether they were as evil as the governess in The Turn of the Screw thought.

  “Here are two statements,” Sister Josephine said. “One: The governess is hallucinating. Two: The ghosts are real.” She turned and wrote both on the board. “Find evidence in the novel for both of these. Tomorrow, we’ll discuss as a class.”

  My hand shot up. “I have a third idea.”

  “Oh?”

  “The staff is conspiring against her. An elaborate trick.”

  Sister Josephine smiled. “Intriguing theory.”

  Mabel said, “It’s complicated enough with two,” and a few other people agreed with her.

  “It’s better if it’s complicated,” I said.

  Mabel turned in her desk to face me. “Wait. Excuse me? It’s better if it’s complicated?”

  “Of course it is! It’s the point of the novel. We can search for the truth, we can convince ourselves of whatever we want to believe, but we’ll never actually know. I guarantee that we can find evidence to argue that the staff is playing a trick on the governess.”

  Sister Josephine said, “I’ll add it to the list.”

  After school, Mabel and I split up our science assignment on the 31, hopped off around the corner from Trouble Coffee, and went in to celebrate our excellent time management with two cappuccinos.

  “I keep thinking about ghosts,” I said as we walked alongside the pastel houses with flat facades and square windows. “They show up in all my favorite books.”

  “Final essay topic?”

  I nodded. “But I have to figure out a thesis.”

  “The only thing I like about The Turn of the Screw is the governess’s first sentence.” Mabel paused to tug on her sandal strap.

  I closed my eyes and felt the sun on my face. I said, “‘I remember the whole beginning as a succession of flights and drops, a little seesaw of the right throbs and the wrong.’”

  “Of course you would know it by heart.”

  “Well, it’s amazing.”

  “I thought the whole thing would be that way, but it’s just confusing and pointless. The ghosts—if there are ghosts—don’t even do anything. They just show up and stand around.”

  I opened our iron gate and we climbed the stairs to the landing. Gramps was calling hello before we’d even closed the door behind us. We set down our coffees, shrugged off our backpacks, and went straight to the kitchen. His hands were covered in flour; Wednesdays were his favorite because there were two of us to bake for.

  “Smells delicious,” Mabel said.

  “Say it in Spanish,” Gramps said.

  “Huele delicioso. What is it?” Mabel said.

  “Chocolate Bundt cake. Now say, ‘The chocolate Bundt cake smells delicious.’”

  “Gramps,” I said. “You’re exoticizing her again.”

  He lifted his hands, busted. “I can’t help it if I want to hear some words in a beautiful language.”

  She laughed and said the sentence, and many other sentences with only a few words I understood, and Gramps wiped his hands on his apron and then touched them to his heart.

  “Beautiful!” he said. “Hermosa!”

  And then he headed out of the kitchen and saw something that made him stop. “Girls. Please sit.”

  “Uh-oh. The love seat,” Mabel whispered.

  We crossed to the faded red love seat and sat together, waiting to discover the subject of that afternoon’s lecture.

  “Girls,” he said again. “We have to talk about this.” He picked up one of the to-go cups that
we’d set on the coffee table, held it with disdain. “When I was growing up, none of this stuff was here. Trouble Coffee. Who names an establishment ‘Trouble’? A bar, sure, maybe. But a café? No. Mabel’s parents and I spend good money to send you girls to a nice school. Now you want to stand in lines to buy lunch and spend far too much on a cup of coffee. How much did this cost?”

  “Four dollars,” I said.

  “Four? Each?” He shook his head. “Let me offer you a helpful piece of advice. That is three dollars more than a cup of coffee should be.”

  “It’s a cappuccino.”

  He sniffed the cup. “They can call it whatever they want to call it. I have a perfectly good pot in the kitchen and some beans that are fresh enough for anyone.”

  I rolled my eyes, but Mabel was ardent in her respect for elders.

  “It was a splurge,” she said. “But you’re right.”

  “Four dollars.”

  “Come on, Gramps. I smell the cake. Shouldn’t you check on it?”

  “You’re a sly girl,” he said to me.

  “No,” I said. “Only hungry.”

  And I was. It was torture to wait for the cake to cool, but when it did, we devoured it.

  “Save a sliver for the fellas!” Gramps implored us, but for four old guys, his friends were the pickiest eaters I’d ever known. Like the girls at school, they were off gluten one week only to suddenly be on it again if the meal was enticing enough. They were laying off sugar or carbs or caffeine or meat or dairy, but maybe a little butter was fine now and then. When they broke their own rules, they complained about it. Took bites of Gramps’s sweets and declared them too sugary.

  “They don’t deserve this cake,” I said between bites. “They won’t appreciate it like we do. Maybe you should mail a piece to Birdie. Overnight it.”

  “Does she know about your baking?” Mabel asked him.

  “I may have mentioned it once or twice.”

  “One bite of this and she’ll be yours forever,” Mabel said.