by Nina LaCour
And then I hear something. A car. I open my eyes—light sweeps across the ceiling.
It must be Tommy, checking on me or the building. I flip on my light and step to the window to wave.
But it isn’t a truck—it’s a taxi—and it’s stopping right here, in the circle in front of the entrance, and its doors are opening. All of its doors, all at once.
And I don’t care that it’s snowing; I throw open my window because there they are.
Mabel and Ana and Javier and the cab driver, opening the trunk.
“You’re here?” I yell.
They look up and call hello. Ana blows me kiss after kiss. I race out of my room and down the stairs. I pause at the landing and look out the window because in the seconds that have passed I’m sure I must be imagining this. Mabel left for the airport this morning. She should be in San Francisco now. But they are still here, Mabel and Ana with suitcases next to their feet and bags slung over their shoulders, Javier and the driver wrestling a giant cardboard box from the trunk. I’m back in the stairwell going down, down, skipping steps. I might be flying. And then I’m in the lobby and they’re approaching. The car is leaving, but they are still here.
“Are you mad?” Mabel asks. But I’m crying too hard to answer. And I’m too full of happiness to be embarrassed that I made them do this.
“Feliz Navidad!” Javier says, leaning the box against the wall, opening his arms wide to embrace me, but Ana reaches me first, her strong arms pulling me close, and then they are all around me, all of them, arms everywhere, kisses covering my head and my cheeks, and I’m saying thank you, over and over, saying it so many times that I can’t make myself stop until it’s just Javier’s arms left around me and he’s whispering shhh in my ear, rubbing my back with his warm hand, saying, “Shhh, mi cariño, we are here now. We are here.”
chapter thirty
ONCE WE’RE UPSTAIRS, we disperse, get to work. Mabel leads them to the kitchen, and I follow behind, exhausted but surrounded by light.
“The pots and pans are here,” she says. “And here are the utensils.”
“Baking trays?” Ana asks.
“I’ll look,” Mabel says.
But I remember where they are. I open the drawer under the oven.
“Here,” I say.
“We need a blender for the mole,” Javier says.
“I packed the immersion blender in my suitcase,” Ana tells him.
He sweeps her into his arms and kisses her.
“Girls,” Ana says, still in his embrace. “Will you set up the tree? We’ll finish our grocery list and get the prep started. We have about an hour before the cab comes back.”
“I found us a restaurant,” Javier tells me. “A special Christmas Eve menu.”
“What tree?” I ask.
Mabel points to the box.
We carry it into the elevator together and ride up to the rec room. We’ll eat our Christmas dinner in there at the table, sit on the couches, and look at the tree.
“We can sleep in here,” I say. “And give your parents my room.”
“Perfect,” she says.
We find a place for the tree by the window and open the box.
“Where did you get this?” I ask her, thinking of the tall pines they’ve always gotten and covered with hand-painted ornaments.
“It’s our neighbor’s,” Mabel says. “On loan.”
The tree comes in pieces. We stand up its middle section and then stick on the branches, longer pieces at the bottom and shorter as we build up, tier by tier. All white tinsel, all covered in lights.
“Moment of truth,” Mabel says, and plugs it in. Hundreds of tiny bulbs glow bright. “It’s actually really pretty.”
I nod. I step back.
He would carry the boxes so carefully out to the living room. Open their lids to tissue-paper-wrapped ornaments. Apple cider and sugar cookies. A pair of tiny angels, dangling between his finger and thumb as he searched for the right branch. Something catches in my chest. Breathing hurts.
“Jesus Christ,” I whisper. “Now, that’s a tree.”
The restaurant is an Italian place, white tablecloths and servers in black ties. We are surrounded by families and laughter.
Ana chooses the wine, and the waiter comes back with the bottle.
“How many will be enjoying the Cabernet this evening?”
“All of us,” Javier says, sweeping his arm across the table as though the four of us were a village, a country, the entire world.
“Wonderful,” the waiter says, as though drinking laws don’t exist during the holidays, or perhaps have never existed at all.
He pours wine into all of our glasses, and we order soups and salads and four different pastas, and no dish is spectacular but everything is good enough. Ana and Javier lead the conversation, full of gentle teasing of Mabel and one another, full of anecdotes and exuberance, and afterward we have a cab take us to Stop & Shop and wait as we race through the aisles, grabbing everything on the list. Javier curses the selection of cinnamon, saying they don’t have the real stuff; and Ana drops a carton of eggs and they break with a tremendous thwack on the floor, yellow oozing out; but apart from that, we get everything they are looking for and ride, smushed in the cab with our groceries and the heat blasting, back to the dorm.
“Is there anything we can do to help?” I ask after we have gotten the bags of groceries unpacked in the kitchen.
“No,” Javier says. “I have it under control.”
“My dad is the boss tonight. My mom is the sous chef. Our job is to stay out of their way.”
“Fair enough,” I say. We step into the elevator but neither of us presses the number of my floor.
“Let’s go to the top,” I say.
The view must be the same as it was the first night we were up here, but it looks crisper and brighter, and even though we can’t hear Ana and Javier as they chop and stir and laugh, I feel that we are less alone.
But maybe it doesn’t have to do with Ana and Javier at all.
“When did you decide to do this?” I ask her.
“We thought you’d come home with me. That was our only plan. But when I realized that there was a good chance I wasn’t going to convince you, we figured out that we could do this.”
“Last night,” I say. “When you were on the phone . . .”
She nods. “We were planning it out. They wanted me to tell you, but I knew that if I did you might give in and go back before you were ready.” She holds her hand up to the window. “We all understand. It makes sense why you don’t want to go back yet.”
She takes her hand away but the imprint is still there, a spot of warmth on the glass.
“When I was waiting for my parents at the airport, I kept thinking of something I wanted to ask you.”
“Okay,” I say.
She’s quiet.
“Go ahead.”
“I’ve just been wondering if there’s anyone here you’re interested in.”
She’s flushed and nervous, but trying to hide it.
“Oh,” I say. “No. I haven’t been thinking about things like that.”
She looks disappointed, but slowly, her expression changes.
“Let’s think about it now,” she says. “There must be someone out there.”
“You’re doing it again,” I say. “This is like the Courtney and Eleanor thing.”
She shakes her head. “It’s not like that. I just—it would make me feel better. It would make you feel better, too.”
“I don’t need to be with somebody in order for it to be okay that you have a boyfriend. It’s okay already.”
“Marin. I’m just asking you to think about it. I’m not saying you have to make some huge decision or fall in love or do anything that complicates your life.”
“I’m
fine as I am.”
But she isn’t backing down.
“Come on,” she says. “Think.”
This is a New York college—it isn’t Catholic school—and so many of the girls here wear little rainbow bracelets or pink triangle pins, so many of them talk casually about their ex-girlfriends or call the chair of the women’s studies program hot. I’ve never joined in, but it’s only because I don’t talk about the things I left behind. But I’ve noticed, I guess, even though I’ve tried to close myself off. I’ve noticed a couple girls in spite of myself.
“You’re thinking about someone,” Mabel says.
“Not really.”
“Tell me,” she says.
I can see how much she wants this, but I don’t want to do it. Even if there was someone, how could I keep telling myself that I’m fine with so little, that all I need is Hannah’s friendship and the pool and scientific facts and my yellow bowls and a borrowed pair of winter boots, if I spoke a girl’s name aloud? She’d become something I wished for.
“Is she pretty?”
It’s too much coming from her mouth and the look in her eyes is too earnest and I’m too overwhelmed to answer. I guess she needs this—for us to move on—but it feels like another loss. To think a new girl is pretty, and not in a way that lots of people in the world are pretty, but pretty in a way that might mean something to me. To look into Mabel’s dark eyes, try not to stare at her pink mouth or her long hair, and say that. To think that a girl who is practically a stranger could be the next person I love. To think she might take Mabel’s place.
But I think about Mabel’s warmth on the pullout sofa. I think about her body against mine and I know that a lot of what I felt that night was about her, but that some of it wasn’t. Maybe I am already hoping for that feeling again, with someone new. Maybe I just didn’t know it.
Something in me is cracking open, the light coming through is so bright it hurts, and the rest of me is still here, wounded, even though I know it’s all for the best.
“That night at the beach,” Mabel says. “And the days after, until school ended and all through the summer . . .”
“Yeah?”
“I thought I’d never love another person.”
“I thought that, too.”
“I guess we should have known better.”
“I don’t know about that,” I say.
I close my eyes. Here we are on Ocean Beach. Here’s the whiskey bottle in the sand and the sound of waves crashing and the cold wind and the darkness and Mabel’s smile against my collarbone. Here we are in that spectacular summer. We are different people now, yes, but those girls were magic.
“I’m glad we didn’t know better,” I say.
“I guess you’re right. It would have been simpler, but you know . . .”
Our eyes meet. We smile.
“Should we watch a movie or something?”
“Yes,” I say.
We take a last look out of the window at the night, and I send a silent wish to everyone out there for this kind of warmth. Then we are in the elevator. The mahogany walls, the chandelier. The doors shut us in and we begin the descent. And when they open again we are in the rec room, standing before a tinsel tree, glowing and white. It’s nothing like Gramps’s firs, but it’s perfect in its own way.
“Whoever she is, maybe I’ll meet her someday,” Mabel says.
“Maybe someday.”
I say it with so much uncertainty, but who knows, I guess. Someday is an open word. It could mean tomorrow or it could be decades away. If someone had told me while I was huddled under the motel blankets that Mabel and I would be together again someday, that I would tell her the story of what happened someday and feel a little better, a little less afraid, I wouldn’t have believed it. And it’s only been four months since then, which is not long to wait for someday.
I don’t say that maybe I’ll meet Jacob, even though I know that I should. It’s more likely and more imminent. But I can’t say it yet.
“Look.” Mabel’s in front of the TV, sorting through the movie choices. “It’s Jane Eyre. Have you seen this one?”
I shake my head. I’ve only seen the black-and-white version.
“What do you think? In honor of our night without electricity?” I hesitate, and she says, “Or we can go with something lighter.”
But why not? The story’s been on my mind, and I know it so well already. There will be no surprises, so I say yes.
It begins with Jane as a young woman, rushing from Thornfield, crying. Another shot, she’s alone against a bleak landscape. A sky on fire, thunder, rain. She thinks she’s going to die. And then the film goes back in time and she’s a little girl and we’re learning how everything started.
Gramps set up that tree every year. He pulled out the decorations his dead wife and dead daughter bought and pretended to be a man who had lost too much and survived it. He pretended, for me, that his mind and his heart were not dark and convoluted places. He pretended that he lived in a house with me, his granddaughter, for whom he baked and often drove to school and taught important lessons about how to treat stains and save money, when really he lived in a secret room with the dead.
Or maybe not. Maybe it’s more complicated.
There are degrees of obsession, of awareness, of grief, of insanity. Those days and nights in the motel room I weighed each of them against the other. I tried to make sense of what had happened, but each time I came up short. Each time I thought I may have understood, some line of logic snapped and I was thrust back into not knowing.
It’s a dark place, not knowing.
It’s difficult to surrender to.
But I guess it’s where we live most of the time. I guess it’s where we all live, so maybe it doesn’t have to be so lonely. Maybe I can settle into it, cozy up to it, make a home inside uncertainty.
Jane is at her cruel aunt’s deathbed now. She’s forgiving her and returning home. And here is Mr. Rochester, waiting for her, in all his Byronic heroism. She isn’t sure if she should trust him or fear him. The answer is both. There’s so much he hasn’t told her yet. There’s that wife of his, locked up in the attic. There are so many lies of omission. There’s the trick he’s going to play on her, the way he’ll pretend to be somebody else and snake his way into her heart. He’ll scare her. She’ll be right to be afraid.
There’s so much I could have found out if I’d gone home after the police station. I could have kept windows shut tight so that his ghost couldn’t get in and torn through all of my mother’s things. I could have touched every photograph. I could have combed his letters for clues about her. There must have been hints of the past in there, woven in with Gramps’s dreams of her life in Colorado. There would have been so much about her to discover, even if half of it wasn’t true.
“Here it comes,” Mabel says.
I feel it, too, getting closer—the proposal. First anguish and then love. Rochester doesn’t deserve her, but he loves her. He means what he says, but he’s a liar. I hope that this movie will keep the words as Brontë wrote them. They’re so beautiful. And yes—here they are.
“‘I have a strange feeling with regard to you. As if I had a string somewhere under my left ribs, tightly knotted to a similar string in you. And if you were to leave I’m afraid that cord of communion would snap. And then I’ve a notion that I’d take to bleeding inwardly.’”
“Like the vein in The Two Fridas,” Mabel whispers.
“Yeah.”
Jane says, “‘I am a free human being with an independent will, which I now exert to leave you.’”
And maybe she should go through with it, maybe she should leave. We already know it would spare her some heartache. But it feels so much better right now to say yes, to stay, and Mabel and I are swept up in it. For a little while, it takes me outside of myself. For a few minutes, Jane belie
ves that she’ll be happy, and I try to believe it, too.
Near the end of the movie, Ana and Javier come into the room, wrapped gifts in their arms. They set them under the tree and watch with us as Jane walks through the wreckage of Thornfield to find Rochester again.
They leave when the credits roll and then come back with a few more gifts.
“Is the package still in your bag?” I ask Mabel.
She nods and I find it. It looks unfinished against the festive wrapping paper of the presents they brought, but I’m glad to have something for them. I realize now why Mabel tried to wait to open hers and I’m sad that I don’t have something else to give her.
Javier laughs at the white tree. He shakes his head.
Ana shrugs. “It’s kitsch. It’s fun.”
Quiet descends. I can feel how late it is.
“Mabel,” Javier says. “Can you come with me for a moment?” and soon it’s only Ana and me on the sofa next to the glittering lights. And when Ana turns to me, I realize that our solitude has been orchestrated.
She says, “I have something I want to tell you.”
Her mascara has smudged under her eyes, but she doesn’t look tired.
“May I?” she asks, and takes my hand. I squeeze hers back, expect her to let go but she doesn’t.
She says, “I wanted to be your mother. From the first night I met you, I wanted that.”
Everything in me begins to buzz. My scalp and my fingers and my heart.
“You came into the kitchen with Mabel. You were fourteen. I already knew a couple things about you, my daughter’s new friend whose name was Marin, who lived alone with her grandfather, who loved reading novels and talking about them. I watched you look around. You touched the painted dove above the sink when you thought no one was looking.”
“I don’t like to anymore,” I find myself saying.
She looks confused.
“Read novels,” I say.
“You probably will again. But even if you don’t, it doesn’t matter.”