Page 48 of We Are Okay

His eyes were yellow as daisies. He’d been coughing up blood. He looked like a skeleton, sitting there next to me.

He shook his head and said, “You’ve always been a smart girl.”

It was a summer of trying not to think too deeply. A summer of pretending that the end wasn’t coming. A summer when I got lost in time, when I rarely knew what day it was, rarely cared about the hour. A summer so bright and warm it made me believe the heat would linger, that there would always be more days, that blood on handkerchiefs was an exercise in stain removal and not a sign of oblivion.

It was a summer of denial. Of learning what Mabel’s body could do for mine, what mine could do for hers. A summer spent in her white bed, her hair fanned over the pillow. A summer spent on my red rug, sunshine on our faces. A summer when love was everything, and we didn’t talk about college or geography, and we rode buses and hopped in cars and walked city blocks in our sandals.

Tourists descended onto our beach, sat in our usual places, so we borrowed Ana’s car and crossed the Golden Gate to find a tiny piece of ocean to have for ourselves. We ate fish-and-chips in a dark pub that belonged in a different country, and we collected beach glass instead of shells, and we kissed in the redwoods, we kissed in the water, we kissed in movie theaters all over the city during matinees and late-night showings. We kissed in bookstores and record stores and dressing rooms. We kissed outside of the Lexingtonbecause we were too young to get in. We looked inside its doors at all the women there with short hair and long hair, lipstick and tattoos, tight dresses and tight jeans, button-ups and camisoles, and we pictured ourselves among them.

We didn’t talk about Mabel’s departure, which was to come half a month before mine. We didn’t talk about the blood on the handkerchiefs or the coughs that ricocheted from the back of my house. I didn’t tell her about the paperwork and the new ATM card, and I barely thought about them—only when I found myself without Mabel, only in the darkest and most silent hours—and when I did, I pushed the thoughts away.

But it turns out that even the fiercest denial can’t stop time. And there we were, at her house. There, in her foyer, were the suitcases and duffel bags she’d packed when I wasn’t looking. They’d be loading the car the next morning. Ana and Javier invited me to come on the round-trip drive to Los Angeles, but I couldn’t bear the thought of returning without her, the only backseat passenger, and Mabel looked relieved when I said no.

“I think I would have cried the whole way,” she told me in her room that night. “I might cry the whole way anyway, but if I’m alone you won’t have to watch me do it.”

I tried to smile but I failed. The trouble with denial is that when the truth comes, you aren’t ready.

We opened her laptop. We looked for directions fromLos Angeles to Dutchess County. It was a forty-hour drive. We said forty hours didn’t seem like that much; we’d expected it to be longer. We could meet in Nebraska and then it would only be twenty hours for each of us.No problem, we said, but we couldn’t meet each other’s eyes.

It was the middle of the night when Mabel whispered, “We aren’t going to meet in Nebraska, are we?”

I shook my head. “We don’t even have cars.”

“There are the breaks,” she said. “We’ll both come home for those.”

“Everyone says four years, but really it’s just a few months at a time, and then a few months home every summer.”

She nodded. She ran her hand along the side of my face.

And the morning came too soon. So much brightness, so much clatter in the kitchen. I knew I wouldn’t be able to stomach anything, so I put on my clothes and I left before breakfast. I listened to the same heartbroken song the entire bus ride home, because it was still a summer when sadness was beautiful.

chapter sixteen

OUR TIME IS RUNNING OUT,and I’m not ready. I’m feeling the dorm’s emptiness again. It’s settling in, that it’s not going to transform for Christmas, that it’s going to look exactly the same as it does now, only one person emptier. It won’t be warmer inside or blink with lights or smell like pine. It won’t fill with Gramps’s songs. Where did our ornaments go? The little angel bell. The painted horse, the tiny tree, the letterMstitched with sequins.

It’s noon, and then it’s one. I keep looking at my phone because I don’t want the time to sneak up on me.

It’s two, and my body is heavy and sinking, and I can’t shake the feeling that everything is ending all over again; only it’s worse this time because I know what awaits me when it’s over.

It’s two thirty.

There’s still so much I need to tell her.

She hasn’t asked me anything else about Gramps. She hasn’t mentioned the name Birdie since last night. I know that feeling—of not wanting to know—but at the same time I think that she would listen if I started. I think we’re playing a game without meaning to. We both want the other one of us to go first.

It’s three before I say anything, but then I have to start. I force myself to start.

“I need to tell you what happened after you left,” I say.

We are back in my room, sitting on the rug, looking through a stack of Hannah’s magazines. I see pages of perfect houses and perfect outfits but I can’t concentrate on any of the words that accompany them.

Mabel closes her magazine and sets it down. She looks at me.

chapter seventeen

AUGUST

THE MORNINGS AFTER SHE LEFT,I woke up early. I don’t know why. I wanted to sleep the days away, but I couldn’t. The fog was heavy over the rooftops and telephone wires and trees, and I would make myself tea and then go back to my room to read and wait until the sun broke through.