Page 54 of We Are Okay

“We’ll get a cab for you, honey. If you’re sure that’s what you want.”

chapter twenty

“I’M HAVING TROUBLE UNDERSTANDING,”Mabel says. “Birdie was your mother?”

“Birdie was my mother. And all of the things that she sent him were things he already owned. And all of the letters she wrote him were things he wrote to himself.You write a letter, you get a letter.”

“Wouldn’t you have known if it was his handwriting?”

“I never saw the envelopes,” I say. “I didn’t even have a key to the mailbox.”

“Okay,” Mabel says. “Okay.”

“He had all of it. He had pictures of me and pictures of her. He had a fucking museum back there and he never showed me any of it. I could haveknownher. None of what we had was real.Hewasn’t real.”

She’s forgotten to rub my hands; she’s just squeezing them.

“But it was just grief, right? Hewasreal. He was just, I don’t know, brokenhearted.”

Was he?I thought he never lied to me. I thought I knew who he was, but he was a stranger all along, and how do I mourn a stranger? And if the person I loved wasn’t even a person, then how can he be dead? This is what happens when I let myself think too much. I squeeze shut my eyes. I want darkness, stillness, but light cuts in.

“Is he dead?” I ask her. My voice is a whisper, the smallest version of itself. This is the thing I’m most afraid to say. The craziest thing, the thing that makes me too much like him. “I don’t know if he’s dead.”

“Hey,” she says. “Look at me.”

“They said he drowned. But they didn’t find him. They never found him. Do bodies disappear that way? Really?”

“Look at me,” Mabel says, but I can’t. “Look at me,” she says again.

I’m looking at the seams of my jeans. I’m looking at the threads in the rug. I’m looking at my shaking hands that I’ve snatched back from hers, and I’m sure I must be losing my mind. Like Gramps, like poor Mr. Rochester’s locked-up wife, like the howling woman in the motel room next to mine.

“Marin, he died,” Mabel says. “Everyone knows that. We knew he was lost in the ocean. It was in the newspaper. We just didn’t know how it happened.”

“But how do we really know?”

“We just do,” she says. “We just know.”

We just know. We just know.

“But does it really happen like that?”

“Yes,” she says.

“But waves,” I say. “The tide,” I say.

“Yes. And currents that pull things under and send them far out. And rocks to get snagged on, and predators.”

“But are you sure?”

“I’m sure.”

“Those people who thought they saw him, they could have seen someone else.”

She doesn’t answer me.

“It was dark,” I say.

She’s quiet.