by Nina LaCour
chapter twenty-five
SEPTEMBER
I SHOWED UP on the day of freshman orientation, accompanied by no one, a duffel over my shoulder stuffed with my clothes, some crackers, and the picture of Birdie. I saw Hannah’s alarm when I appeared in our doorway. Then I saw her catch herself and smile.
She held out her hand, but her shock had taken me by the shoulders and shaken. I was here, at a school, surrounded by girls my own age. No one screamed at the television. No one stood for hours at their windows. No one avoided turning the tap for fear of ghosts.
I told myself, Pull it together.
I was a normal girl. I was not the kind to cause alarm. I was the kind who showered daily and wore clean clothes and answered the phone when it rang. When danger approached, I crossed the street. When mornings came, I ate breakfast.
This person who stood in the doorway wasn’t me.
I shook Hannah’s hand. I made my face smile.
“I must look like a disaster!” I said. “I’ve had a rough couple weeks. I’m going to set my stuff down and find the showers.”
Did I see relief pass over her? I hoped so. I went to unzip my duffel but thought of all the dirty clothes stuffed inside, of the smell they’d emit, and thought better.
“I’m going to find the laundry, too,” I said.
“Second floor,” Hannah told me. “And the bathrooms are right around the corner. We did the family tour this morning.”
I smiled again.
“Thanks,” I said.
Most of the showers were in a row, locker-room style, but I found one full bathroom with a door that locked. I pulled off my shirt and my pants, let them drop to the floor. This place was so much cleaner than where I’d been.
I stepped out of my underwear, unclasped my bra. The girl in the mirror was feral. Puffy face, wild eyes, greasy hair. No wonder Hannah was shocked. I was shocked, too.
But I didn’t have soap or shampoo. It was enough to make me cry. Water could only do so much.
I wanted a room full of steam and the smell of lavender or peach.
There was liquid soap on the wall by the sink. I pumped as much as one hand could hold and then opened the shower door with the other. As if by magic, sitting on a shelf were containers of hotel shampoo, conditioner, and soap. I turned the tap and washed the yellow chemical soap down the drain. As the water warmed, I examined the little hotel bottles. Eucalyptus. I stepped under the water and closed myself into the square, mint-green-tiled space. Its smallness was comforting. All I heard was water falling, water echoing.
Eucalyptus filled the room.
I shampooed and rinsed until the bottle was empty. I washed my face and my body with the soap. I let the conditioner stay in for a very long time. In California, we were always worried about droughts, always conserving water. But I was far away.
“I’m far away,” I whispered.
I stayed longer. The hot water lasted forever. I knew I could wash away the dirt and the grease, but the wildness in my eyes was more difficult, and that was the worst part.
I told myself to just breathe.
I breathed in.
I breathed out.
Over and over. Until I wasn’t aware I was in the shower, in the dorms, in New York. Until I wasn’t aware of anything.
Putting dirty clothes back on was a sacrilege. I chose the least worn of them and stuffed the rest into the washer with detergent from the vending machine. Then I went to find the student store, desperate for something else to wear in the meantime.
The store was chaos. Parents and their kids swarmed through the aisles, admiring knickknacks, complaining over the cost of textbooks. The incoming freshmen whined and fretted; everything was the most important thing ever. I was invisible, moving silently among them toward the clothing section, the only solitary person there.
What I found filled me with awe.
I had no idea such school spirit could exist.
There were T-shirts and polo shirts and sweatshirts and sweatpants and shorts. Panties and boxers and bras. Pajamas and tank tops and socks and flip-flops. Even a dress! All of them emblazoned with the school colors and mascot. All of them so clean.
I bought an armful, over three hundred dollars’ worth of clothes. As I swiped the ATM card, I tamped down the knowledge that my funds would run out. Not soon, but not too long from then either. Unless I found a way to start putting some money back in the account, I would be broke in a year.
I asked to use the dressing room on my way out and pulled on the clean bra and underwear. The panties had a picture of the mascot across the butt. They were fun, even if only I would ever see them. The bra was sportier than any I’d ever had, but it was cute anyway. The day was hot so I chose the terrycloth shorts, grateful that my blondness allowed me to show my legs even when I hadn’t shaved them for a while. Last came a T-shirt, the creases still there from how it was folded.
I looked at myself in the full-length mirror.
My hair was clean and straight, still a little damp. My clothes fit me fine. I smelled like a spa. I looked like any other girl.
I stopped by the laundry room on the way back, but instead of putting my clothes in the dryer, I threw them into the trash.
Hannah was in her room when I showed up again, and this time her parents were there, too. Her mom was putting sheets on her bed. Her stepdad was hanging a framed poster from a Broadway production of Rent.
“Hi,” I said from the doorway.
How many times do you get the chance to do something over again, to do it over right? You only get to make one first impression, unless the person you meet possesses a rare and specific kind of generosity. Not the kind that gives you the benefit of the doubt, not the kind that says, Once I get to know her better she’ll probably be fine, but the kind that says, No. Unacceptable. The kind that says, You can do better. Now show me.
“You must be Marin!” her mom said. “We’ve been dying to meet you!”
“Now tell us,” said her stepdad. “Is it Marin like mariner, or Marin like the county.”
“The county,” I said. “It’s so nice to meet you.”
I shook their hands.
Hannah said, “Nice to meet you, Marin.” We smiled at each other as though the morning had never happened. “I hope you don’t mind that I claimed this side.”
“Not at all.”
“Did your family leave already?” Hannah’s mom asked.
“Actually, they couldn’t make it. I’m getting started with this independence thing a little early.”
Hannah’s stepdad said, “Well, put us to work! We’d love to help.”
“Do you have sheets?” her mom asked, folding Hannah’s bedspread over.
I shook my head no. The bare mattress glared at me. I wondered how many other things I hadn’t planned for.
“My mom packed me way too many sets,” Hannah said.
“Well, good thing!” her mom said.
Soon Hannah’s side of the room looked like she’d already lived there for months and mine was bare except for some red striped sheets, a soft pillow, and a cream-colored blanket.
“Thanks so much,” I told her parents as they left. I tried to sound casually grateful and not how I really felt—as though they had saved my life.
And Hannah kept saving me. She saved me with never asking questions, with instead reading to me about bees and botany and evolution. She saved me with clothes she loaned me and never took back. She saved me with seats next to her in the dining hall, with quick evasions when people asked me questions I couldn’t answer, with chapters read aloud and forced trips off campus and rides to the grocery store and a pair of winter boots.
chapter twenty-six
I TAKE A COUPLE PUSHPINS out of the jar on Hannah’s desk and approach my empty bulletin board. I pin the snowflake chain along the top of i
t and then text Hannah a picture. She texts back right away, two high fives with a heart between them.
It feels so good. I want to do more. I take my new pot out of its bag and set it on my desk. My peperomia is thriving, each leaf full and luminous. Carefully, I ease its roots out of the plastic cup it came in. I pour the leftover dirt into Claudia’s pot, and then place the roots in the middle, pressing the soil around it. I pour in some leftover water from a cup Mabel was using. I’ll need to get more soil when I can, but it’s enough for now.
I cross the room and turn to look at my desk. Two yellow bowls, a pink pot with a green leafy plant, a strand of paper snowflakes.
It’s pretty, but it needs something more.
I drag my desk chair over to my closet and stand on it so that I can reach the top shelf. I find the only thing up there: the photograph of my mother at twenty-two years old, standing in the sun. I borrow four of Hannah’s silver pushpins and choose the right spot on my bulletin board, just to the right of the snowflakes, and push the pins in against the corners of the photograph so that they hold it up without making any holes. It’s a big photograph, eight by ten probably, and it transforms the corner.
I’m not saying that it doesn’t scare me, to bring it into the light. My mother on Ocean Beach. Her sun-faded peach surfboard leaning under her arm. Her black wet suit and wet hair. Her squinting eyes and her huge smile.
It scares me, yes, but it also feels right.
I stare at her.
I try and I try and I try to remember.
A couple hours later, I take a long shower. I let the water run over me.
When I go back, whenever that will be, I’ll need to find something of Gramps’s to scatter or bury. I couldn’t laugh at Jones’s joke. Instead, it’s echoing the way true things always do when I’ve been trying to deny them. If your gramps had a grave, if your gramps had a grave. Enough time has passed by now that I know Mabel is right. But another version of the story springs up sometimes, one of him with pockets full of a few thousand dollars, gambling winnings he kept for himself, on his way to the Rocky Mountains.
I need to give him a grave in order to contain him. I need to bury something to anchor his ghost. One of these days, in some not-so-far future, I’ll take a trip into Jones’s garage and I’ll search through our old things and I’ll assemble a box of objects instead of ashes and I’ll find him a place to rest.
I rinse the conditioner out of my hair. I turn off the water and breathe in the steam.
He wore a gold chain around his neck on special occasions. I wonder if Jones bought it back for me.
I dry off and wrap myself in a towel. When I get back to my room, I look at my phone. It’s only two o’clock.
I take a cue from the list I made on my first night here alone and make soup. I chop vegetables and boil pasta, pour a carton of chicken stock into a pot.
Once I’ve combined all the ingredients and it’s time to wait while they cook, I turn to the second essay in the solitude book, but my mind is too full of different versions of the last summer’s story. There’s one where I fail him. Where I stop coming home so he stops making dinner, and I’m not around to see how much he needs me. And then there’s one where he fails me. Where I feel it—that he doesn’t want me there, that I’m in the way. So I stay away, for him and for me. So that I never face his rejection. So that I get to pretend I’m the most important thing to him, the way he is to me. Because if we have any sense of self-preservation, we do the best with what we’re given.
I was given cakes and cookies and rides to school. I was given songs and dinners at a table with brass candlesticks. I was given a man with a sensitive heart and a devious sense of humor and enough skill at cards to win me a year of private college—tuition and room and board—and I took all of those good things and told myself they made us special. Told myself they meant we were a family the way Mabel and Ana and Javier were, told myself that we weren’t missing anything.
We were masters of collusion, Gramps and I. In that, at least, we were together.
When yearbooks came out, I didn’t flip straight to the back like everyone else to find the seniors’ pages. Instead I started at the front. I looked through each page of freshman girls. I didn’t even know them but I took my time, as though they were my friends. I studied the club pages, the sophomores, the sports teams. The juniors and the dances, the teachers and the theme days. Then the first senior page was upon me, and I read every quote, stared hard at the baby pictures of all of these girls. So many bows on bald heads, so many tiny dresses and tiny hands, so many pages to linger on before I got to mine.
As soon as I turned the page I saw myself.
Instead of leaving a blank space where my baby picture was meant to be, the editors made my senior portrait big enough to take up both spaces. All around me were my classmates as babies and then as their current selves; and then there I was, as though I had entered the world at eighteen in a black sleeveless blouse and a stiff smile. I thought I couldn’t be the only one, but I got to the end, and I was. Even Jodi Price, adopted at eight, had a baby picture. Even Fen Xu, whose house had burned down the year before.
Those days and nights at the motel, I thought I was afraid of his ghost, but I wasn’t.
I was afraid of my loneliness.
And how I’d been tricked.
And the way I’d convinced myself of so much: that I wasn’t sad, that I wasn’t alone.
I was afraid of the man who I’d loved, and how he had been a stranger.
I was afraid of how I hated him.
How I wanted him back.
Of what was in those boxes and what I might someday discover and the chance I may have lost by leaving them behind.
I was afraid of the way we’d lived without opening doors.
I was afraid we had never been at home with each other.
I was afraid of the lies I’d told myself.
The lies he’d told me.
I was afraid that our legs under the table had meant nothing.
The folding of laundry had meant nothing.
The tea and the cakes and the songs—all of it—had meant nothing.
chapter twenty-seven
I AM AFRAID he never loved me.
chapter twenty-eight
THE WINTER SKY is bright gray and sharp. I see a bird come and go outside the window, a thin branch snap and drop.
I should have gone with her.
chapter twenty-nine
I’M SITTING ON TOP OF MY BED, leaning against the wall, watching the snow fall again. I want the thunder of ocean, a day that’s cold but dry, the feeling that comes with heavy clouds in the distance. Relief from the drought. The novelty of being homebound. Wood in the fireplace, heat and light.
I didn’t ask Jones what he meant when he said he kept the real stuff. If he meant my shells. Or the blue-and-gold blanket. Or the kitchen table with its collapsible leaves and the chairs that go with it. I try to imagine a future apartment. My own kitchen with decorations on the wall. Shelves with my collection of Claudia’s pottery.
I don’t know if I see the table and chairs and the blanket. I don’t know if I want to.
If I keep looking out the window, I’ll see the snow settle on the paths again, cover the trees where hints of branches have started to show through.
I find a documentary online about an old woman who makes pottery every day from her home on a farm. I prop the computer on my desk chair and pull my blankets up and watch it. In ten days, it will be time to call Claudia. I hope she’ll still want me. There are all of these close-up shots of the potter’s hands in the clay. I can’t wait to feel that.
My body is so still. This movie is so quiet. I want to swim, but I can’t. It will be more than three weeks before everyone comes back and the pool is reopened and I feel that plunge, that rush. But I need to do something. Now. My limbs are begging
me.
So I pause the movie and I stand up and go out in the hall. I take off my slippers and feel the carpet under my feet. I stare down the long, empty hallway, and then I’m running. I run until I’m at the very end, and then I run back, and I need something more, so this time, I open my mouth and my lungs and I yell as I run. I fill this designated historical building with my voice. And then I push open the door to the stairway and in here my voice echoes. I run to the top, not to take in the view but to feel myself moving, and I run and I yell and I run, until I’ve gone up and down each hallway of each floor. Until I’m panting and sweaty and satiated in some small but vital way.
I go back into my room and collapse on my bed. The sky is changing, becoming darker. I’m going to lie here, in this silent place, and stare out the window until the night turns black. I’ll witness each color in the sky.
And I do. I feel peaceful.
But it’s only five thirty, and there are ten more days until I can call Claudia, twenty-three more days until everyone comes back here.
I was okay just a moment ago. I will learn how to be okay again.
I turn the movie back on and watch until the end, and the credits roll and stop and the screen changes. There’s a list of documentaries I might like. I hover over them to see what they’re about, but I don’t care enough to click on one. I lie back instead. I look at the dark ceiling and think about the door shutting between Mabel and me. She waved good-bye to me from inside the cab. Her boots were dry by then—we’d set them right next to the radiator and left them there all night—but they were blotchy and warped. I wonder if she’ll put them in the trash when she gets home.
She should be arriving home around now. I get up to reach for my phone. If she texts me, I want to get her message right as it comes in. I want my reply to reach her right away. I lie back down with my phone next to me. I close my eyes and wait.