by Nina LaCour
Gramps shook his head and laughed, and Mabel and I were soon stuffed and happy, traipsing back out as Jones, the first of Gramps’s buddies, arrived, holding his lucky card deck in one hand and his cane in the other.
I took a minute to talk to him.
“Agnes is having surgery on her hand again Tuesday,” he told me.
“Do you guys need any help with anything?”
“Samantha’s taking some days off from the salon,” he said.
“Maybe I’ll come by and say hi.”
Samantha was Jones and Agnes’s daughter, and she’d been so nice to me in the months I lived with them when I was eight and Gramps had to spend some time in the hospital. She drove me to school and back every day, and even after Gramps came home she helped us, picking up his new prescriptions and making sure we had food in the house.
“She’d love to see you.”
“All right,” I said. “We’re headed to the beach. Try to hold on to your money.”
Mabel and I walked the four blocks to the beach. We slipped off our sandals where the road met the sand and carried them up a dune, weaving through patches of beach grass and the green-and-rust-colored ice plants. We sat at a safe distance from the water while the flocks of gray-and-white sanderlings pecked at the shore. At first it looked like no one was out there, but I knew to watch and to wait, and soon, I saw them: a pair of surfers in the distance, now mounting their boards to catch a wave. We watched them against the horizon line, rising and falling. An hour passed, and we lost sight of them over and over, and each time found them again.
“I’m cold,” Mabel said when the fog set in.
I scooted closer to her until the sides of our bodies touched. She gave me her hands, and I rubbed them until we were warm. She wanted to go home, but the surfers were still in the water. We stayed until they reached the sand, tucked their boards under their arms, turquoise and gold against their wet suits. I waited to see if one of them would know me.
They got closer, a man and a woman, both squinting to see if I was who they thought I’d be.
“Hey, Marin,” the man said.
I lifted my hand.
“Marin, I have something for you.” The woman unzipped her backpack and pulled out a shell. “Claire’s favorite kind,” she said, pressing it into my palm.
Then they were past us, making their way to the parking lot.
“You haven’t asked me what I’m writing about,” Mabel said.
The shell was wide and pink, covered in ridges. Dozens like it filled three large mason jars in my bedroom, all of them gifts. She held out her hand and I dropped it in.
“Jane Eyre. Flora and Miles. Basically everyone in A Mercy.” She ran her thumb over the shell’s ridges and then gave it back. She looked at me. “Orphans,” she said.
Gramps never spoke about my mother, but he didn’t have to. All I had to do was stop by the surf shop or show up at the beach at dawn, and I’d be handed free Mollusk shirts and thermoses full of tea. When I was a kid, my mom’s old friends liked to wrap their arms around me, pet my hair. They squinted in my direction as I approached and beckoned me toward them on the sand. I didn’t know all of their names, but every one of them knew mine.
I guess when you spend a life riding waves—knowing that the ocean is heartless and millions of times stronger than you are, but still trusting that you’re skilled enough or brave enough or charmed enough to survive it—you become indebted to the people who don’t make it. Someone always dies. It’s just a matter of who, and when. You remember her with songs, with shrines of shells and flowers and beach glass, with an arm around her daughter and, later, daughters of your own named after her.
She didn’t actually die in the ocean. She died at Laguna Honda Hospital, a gash on her head, her lungs full of water. I was almost three. Sometimes I think I can remember a warmth. A closeness. A feeling of being in arms, maybe. Soft hair against my cheek.
There is nothing to remember of my father. He was a traveler, back somewhere in Australia before the pregnancy test. “If only he knew about you,” Gramps would say when I was little and wondering. “You would be his treasure.”
I thought of the grief as simple. Quiet. One photograph of Claire hung in the hallway. Sometimes I caught Gramps looking at it. Sometimes I stood in front of it for several minutes at a time, studying her face and her body. Finding hints of myself in her. Imagining that I must have been nearby, playing in the sand or lying on a blanket. Wondering if, when I was twenty-two, my smile would be anywhere close to that pretty.
Once in a meeting at Convent, the counselor asked Gramps if he talked about my mother with me. “Remembering the departed is the only way to heal,” she said.
Gramps’s eyes lost their sparkle. His mouth became a tight line.
“Just a reminder,” the counselor said more quietly, then turned to the computer screen to get back to the matter of my unexcused absences.
“Sister,” Gramps said, his voice low and venomous. “I lost my wife when she was forty-six. I lost my daughter when she was twenty-four. And you remind me to remember them?”
“Mr. Delaney,” she said. “I am truly sorry for your loss. Both of your losses. I will pray for your healing. But my concern here is for Marin, and all I ask is that you share some of your memories with her.”
My body went tense. We were called in because they were concerned about my “academic progress,” but I was getting As or Bs in all my classes and all they had on me was that I’d cut a couple periods. Now I realized that this meeting was actually about a story I’d written, a story in English about a girl raised by sirens. The sirens were guilt-ridden over murdering the girl’s mother, so they told the girl stories about her, made her as real as they could, but there was always a hollowness to the girl that they couldn’t fill. She was always wondering.
It was only a story, but sitting in the counselor’s office I realized I should have known better. I should have written about a prince raised by wolves after he lost his father to the woods or whatever, something less transparent, because teachers always thought everything was a cry for help. And young, nice teachers like Sister Josephine were the worst.
I knew I had to change the subject or the counselor would start talking about my story. “I’m really sorry about the classes I missed, okay?” I said. “It was poor judgment. I got too swept up in my social life.”
The counselor nodded.
“May I count on you not to do this again?” she asked. “You have before school and after school. The lunch period. Evenings. Weekends. The majority of your hours are free to spend however you and your grandfather see fit. But during class periods we expect—”
“Sister,” Gramps said, his voice a growl again, as if he hadn’t heard anything we’d been saying. “I’m sure that painful things have happened to you. Even marrying Jesus can’t entirely shield you from the realities of life. I ask you now to take a moment to remember those terrible things. I remind you, now, to remember them. There. Don’t you feel healed? Maybe you should tell us about them. Don’t you feel, don’t you feel . . . so much better? Do they fill you with fondness? Do you find yourself joyful?”
“Mr. Delaney, please.”
“Would you care to dazzle us with a tale of redemption?”
“All right, I can see—”
“Would you like to sing a song of joy for us now?”
“I apologize for upsetting you, but this is—”
Gramps stood, puffed out his chest.
“Yes,” he said. “This is entirely inappropriate of me. Almost as inappropriate as a nun offering counsel regarding the deaths of a spouse and a child. Marin is getting excellent grades. Marin is an excellent student.” The counselor leaned back in her office chair, stoic. “And Marin,” Gramps said, triumphant, “is coming with me!”
He turned and swung open the door.
&nbs
p; “Bye,” I said, as apologetically as I could.
He stormed out. I followed him.
The car ride home was a one-man comedy act comprised of every nun joke Gramps could remember. I laughed at the punch lines until he didn’t really need me anymore. It was a monologue. When it was over I asked him if he’d heard from Birdie today, and he smiled.
“You write two letters, you get two letters,” he said.
And then I thought of the tears in Sister Josephine’s eyes when I was reading my story to the class. How she thanked me for being so brave. And okay, maybe it wasn’t entirely imagined. Maybe the sirens gave the girl shells that filled her underwater room. Maybe the story came from some part of me that wished I knew more, or at least had actual memories instead of feelings that may have only been inventions.
chapter four
MABEL IS LEARNING as much about Hannah as our room can tell her. The pile of papers on her desk, her immaculate bed-making. The signed posters from Broadway shows and her bright, plush comforter.
“Where’s she from?”
“Manhattan.”
“This is the prettiest blue,” Mabel says, admiring the Persian rug between our beds, worn enough to show its age but still soft underfoot.
She stands in front of the bulletin board, asking me about the people in the photographs. Megan, from down the hall. Davis, her ex-boyfriend who is still her friend. Some girls, also from home, whose names I don’t remember.
“She likes quotes,” Mabel says.
I nod. “She reads a lot.”
“This Emerson quote is everywhere. I saw it on a magnet.”
“Which one?”
“‘Finish each day and be done with it. You have done what you could. Some blunders and absurdities no doubt crept in; forget them as soon as you can.’”
“I can see why. Who doesn’t need to be reminded of that?”
“Yeah, I guess so,” Mabel says.
“Hannah’s really like that,” I say. “Things don’t seem to get to her. She’s kind of . . . straightforward, I guess. But in the best way. In a way that’s really smart and kind.”
“So you like her.”
“Yeah. I like her a lot.”
“Great,” she says, but I can’t tell if she means it. “Okay, let’s move on to you. What kind of plant is this?”
“A peperomia. I got it at a plant sale on campus and I’ve kept it alive for three months. Impressive, right?”
“Good job.”
“I know.”
We smile at each other. It feels almost natural between us.
“These are nice bowls,” she says, taking one off my windowsill.
Besides the photograph of my mother that lives in a folder in my closet, the bowls are the best things I own. They’re a perfect shade of yellow, not too bright, and I know where they came from and who made them. I like how substantial they are, how you can feel the weight of the clay.
“One of the first lectures my history professor gave us was about this guy William Morris. He said that everything you own should be either useful or beautiful. It’s a lot to aspire to, but I figured why not try? I saw these in a potter’s studio a couple days afterward and I bought them.”
“They’re so pretty.”
“They make everything feel kind of special. Even cereal and ramen,” I say. “Which are both major components of my diet.”
“Pillars of nutrition.”
“What do you eat at school?”
“My dorms are different. Like mini-apartments. We have three rooms and then a common space with a living room and kitchen. Six of us share it so we cook lots of big batches of things. My roommate makes the best lasagna. I have no idea how it’s as good as it is—she just uses pre-shredded cheese and bottled sauce.”
“At least she has that going for her.”
“What do you mean?” she asks.
Before she gave up on me, Mabel sent me a litany of reasons not to like her roommate. Her terrible taste in music, her loud snoring, her tumultuous love life and messiness and ugly decorations. Remind me why you didn’t join me in sunny Southern California? she wrote. And also: Please! Come make this girl disappear and steal her identity!
“Oh,” she says now, remembering. “Right. Well, it’s been a while. She’s grown on me.” She turns to see what else she can comment on, but the plant and bowls are the extent of my furnishings.
“I’m planning on getting more stuff soon,” I say. “I just need to find a job first.”
Concern flashes across her face. “Do you have . . . ? I can’t believe I never thought about this. Do you have any money?”
“Yeah,” I say. “Don’t worry. He left me some, just not that much. I mean, enough for now, but I have to be careful.”
“What about tuition?”
“He had already paid for this year.”
“But what about the next three years?”
This shouldn’t be so difficult to talk about. This part should be easy. “My counselor here says we should be able to make it work. With loans and financial aid and scholarships. She says as long as I do well, we should be able to figure it out.”
“Okay,” she says. “That sounds good, I guess.”
But she still looks concerned.
“So,” I say. “You’re here for three nights, right?”
She nods.
“I thought maybe tomorrow or the next day we could take the bus to the shopping district. There isn’t too much there, but there’s the studio where I bought those bowls and a restaurant and a few other shops.”
“Yeah, sounds fun.”
She’s staring at the rug now, not yet back to herself.
“Marin,” she says. “I should just tell you now that I’m here with a motive, not for vacation.”
My heart sinks, but I try not to let it show. I look at her and wait.
“Come home with me,” she says. “My parents want you to come.”
“Go for what? Christmas?”
“Yeah, Christmas. But then to stay. I mean, you’d come back here, of course, but you could go back to my house for breaks. It could be your house, too.”
“Oh,” I say. “When you said motive, I thought something else.”
“Like what?”
“I don’t know.”
I can’t bring myself to say that I thought it meant she didn’t really want to see me, when really she’s asking to see me more.
“So will you say yes?”
“I don’t think I can.”
Her eyebrows rise in surprise. I have to look away from her face.
“I guess that’s a lot to ask you all at once. Maybe we should just start with Christmas. Fly back with me, spend a couple days, see how you feel. My parents will pay for your flight.”
I shake my head. “I’m sorry.”
She’s thrown off. This was supposed to go differently. “I have three days to convince you, so just think about it. Pretend you didn’t say no. Pretend you haven’t answered yet.”
I nod, but I know that—no matter how much I want to—it would be impossible for me to go back.
She crosses to Hannah’s side of the room and looks at everything again. She unzips her duffel bag and sifts through what’s she’s brought. And then she’s back at the window.
“There’s another view,” I say. “From the top floor. It’s really pretty.”
We ride the elevator up to the tower. Stepping out with Mabel, I realize it’s the kind of place the governess in The Turn of the Screw would find rife with ghostly possibilities. I try not to think about stories much anymore, though, especially stories about ghosts.
From the tower windows we can see the rest of the campus, a panoramic view. I thought talking might come easier for us up here, where there’s more to see, but I’m still tongue-tied and
Mabel is still silent. Angry, probably. I can see it in her shoulders and the way she isn’t looking at me.
“Who’s that?” she asks.
I follow her pointing hand to someone in the distance. A spot of light.
“The groundskeeper,” I say.
We keep watching as he gets closer, stopping every few steps and crouching down.
“He’s doing something along the path,” Mabel says.
“Yeah. I wonder what.”
When he reaches the front of our building, he steps back and looks up. He’s waving at us. We wave back.
“Do you know each other?”
“No,” I say. “But he knows I’m here. I guess he’s kind of in charge of keeping track of me. Or at least of making sure I don’t burn the school down or throw a wild party or something.”
“Both highly likely.”
I can’t muster a smile. Even with the knowledge that it’s dark outside and light up here, it’s hard to believe that he can see us. We should be invisible. We are so alone. Mabel and I are standing side by side, but we can’t even see each other. In the distance are the lights of town. People must be finishing their workdays, picking up their kids, figuring out dinner. They’re talking to one another in easy voices about things of great significance and things that don’t mean much. The distance between us and all of that living feels insurmountable.
The groundskeeper climbs into his truck.
I say, “I was afraid to ride the elevator.”
“What do you mean?”
“It was before you got here. On my way to the store. I was about to ride the elevator down but then I was afraid that I’d get stuck and no one would know. You would have gotten here and I wouldn’t have had any reception.”
“Do the elevators here get stuck?”
“I don’t know.”
“Have you heard of them getting stuck?”
“No. But they’re old.”
She walks away from me, toward the elevator. I follow her.
“It’s so fancy,” she says.
Like so much of this building, every detail is ornate. Etched brass with leaf motifs and plaster swirls above the door. Places aren’t this old in California. I’m used to simple lines. I’m used to being closer to the ground. Mabel presses the button and the doors open like they’ve been waiting for us. I pull the metal gates apart and we step inside where the walls are wood paneled, lit by a chandelier. The doors close and we’re in the space for the third time today but, for the first time, we are in the moment together.
