Page 53 of We Are Okay

“Was he acting erratic?” one of them asked.

I didn’t know. He was acting like Gramps.

They waited.

“What does it mean to act erratic?”

“I’m sorry, honey. Do you need a minute? We just need all the information on record.”

“Let’s just move on to the next question,” the other one said. “Do you know if your grandfather has a history of mental illness?”

I laughed. “You saw that room.”

“Any other indications?”

“He thought his friends were poisoning his whiskey,” I said. “So there’s that.”

I couldn’t bring myself to talk about the letters. They were there if they wanted to see them.

“What makes you believe that your grandfather may be missing?”

What did it mean, to be missing? What did it mean, to believe? All I knew was green fabric, unfurling. Eggs, untouched. Secret rooms and photographs. Tea and coffee and cigarettes. A made bed. A pair of slippers. Silence. The thousands of secrets he kept from me.

“I think he had cancer,” I said. “There was blood on the handkerchiefs.”

“Cancer,” one of them said, and wrote it down.

I looked at his notepad. Everything I told them was there, as though my answers really meant something, as though they would reveal the truth.

“Blood on handkerchiefs,” I said. “Will you write that, too?”

“Sure, honey,” he said, and wrote the words down neatly.

“We have a couple witnesses who saw an old man going into the water at Ocean Beach,” the other said, and I already knew it, I guess. How easily the ocean must have swept him away. I already knew it but I felt my body go rigid, as though I were the dead one. “We have a search team out there now trying to find him. But if he’s the one they saw, he’s been missing for more than eight hours.”

“Eighthours? What time is it?”

The office’s only window was into the hallway. Outside, it must have been daylight.

“There are a couple people in the lobby waiting for you. Mr. and Mrs. Valenzuela.”

I thought of Gramps being swallowed by the water. It would have been so cold. No wet suit. Just his thin T-shirt, his bare arms. His thin skin, all his scratches and bruises.

“I’m really tired,” I said.

“I’m sure they could drive you home.”

I never wanted to see him again. I never would. And yet—how would I step foot inside our house without him? The loss snuck up on me, black and cavernous.

I thought of Ana and Javier, and how kindly they would look at me, and the things they might say, and how I would have to tell them what I’d discovered and how I knew that I couldn’t.

My voice was thick. “I think I’ll take a cab.”

“They seem concerned about you. They’ve been waiting for a long time.”

He must have been freezing.

I thought of his tears.