Page 40 of We Are Okay

“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 Imetpeople. 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 aboutJane 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 she 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 couldfall 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.