Page 68 of We Are Okay

“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 smileagainst 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.Somedayis 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 onlybeen 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’sJane 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 lessonsabout 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 wealllive, 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 homeafter 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 inThe Two Fridas,” Mabel whispers.