by Nina LaCour
Until, mid-descent, when Mabel reaches toward the control panel and presses a button that makes us jolt to a stop.
“What are you doing?”
“Let’s just see how it feels,” she says. “It might be good for you.”
I shake my head. This isn’t funny. The groundskeeper saw that we were fine. He drove away. We could be stuck here for days before he’d begin to worry. I search the control panel for a button that will get us moving again, but Mabel says, “It’s right here. We can press it whenever we want to.”
“I want to press it now.”
“Really?”
She isn’t taunting me. It’s a real question. Do I really want us to move again so soon. Do I really want to be back on the third floor with her, nowhere to go but back to my room, nothing waiting there for us that wasn’t there before, no newfound ease or understanding.
“Okay,” I say. “Maybe not.”
“I’ve been thinking about your grandpa a lot,” Mabel says.
We’ve been sitting on the elevator floor, each leaning against a separate wall, for a few minutes now. We’ve discussed the details of the buttons, the refracted light from the crystals on the chandelier. We’ve searched our vocabularies for the name of the wood and settled on mahogany. And now, I guess, Mabel thinks it’s time to move on to topics of greater importance.
“God, he was cute.”
“Cute? No.”
“Okay, I’m sorry. That sounds patronizing. I just mean those glasses! Those sweaters with the elbow patches! Real ones that he sewed on himself because the sleeves wore through. He was the real deal.”
“I know what you’re saying,” I tell her. “And I’m telling you that it isn’t right.”
The edge in my voice is impossible to miss, but I’m not sorry. Every time I think about him, a black pit blooms in my stomach and breathing becomes a struggle.
“Okay.” Her voice has become quieter. “I’m doing this wrong. That’s not even what I meant to say. I was trying to say that I loved him. I miss him. I know it’s only a fraction of how you must feel, but I miss him and I thought you might want to know that someone else is thinking about him.”
I nod. I don’t know what else to do. I want to get him out of my head.
“I wish there had been a memorial,” she says. “My parents and I kept expecting to hear about it. I was just waiting for the dates to book my ticket.” And now the edge is in her voice, because I didn’t respond the way I should have, I guess, and because he and I were each other’s only family. Mabel’s parents offered to help me plan a service, but I didn’t call them back. Sister Josephine called, too, but I ignored her. Jones left me voice mails that I never picked up. Because instead of grieving like a normal person, I ran away to New York even though the dorms wouldn’t be open for another two weeks. I stayed in a motel and kept the television on all day. I ate all my meals in the same twenty-four-hour diner and I kept no semblance of a schedule. Every time my phone rang the sound rattled my bones. But when I turned it off I was entirely alone, and I kept waiting for him to call, to tell me everything was fine.
And I was afraid of his ghost.
And I was sick with myself.
I slept with my head under blankets and each time I stepped outside in the daylight I thought I’d go blind.
“Marin,” Mabel says. “I came all the way here so that when I talked, you’d be forced to talk back.”
The television played soap operas. Commercials for car dealerships, paper towels, dish soap. Judge Judy and Geraldo. Always, Dove, Swiffer. Laugh tracks. Close-ups of tear-stained faces. Shirts unbuttoning, laughter. Objection, your honor. Sustained.
“I started to think you must have lost your phone. Or that you hadn’t taken it with you. I felt like a stalker. All of those calls and emails and text messages. Do you have any idea how many times I tried to reach you?” Her eyes tear up. A bitter laugh escapes her. “What a stupid question,” she says. “Of course you do. Because you got them all and just decided not to respond.”
“I didn’t know what to say,” I whisper. It sounds so inadequate, even to me.
“Maybe you could tell me how you came to that decision. I’ve been wondering what exactly I did to bring about that specific strategy.”
“It wasn’t strategic.”
“Then what was it? I’ve spent all this time telling myself that what you’re going through is so much bigger than you not talking to me. Sometimes it works. But sometimes it doesn’t.”
“What happened with him . . . ,” I say. “What happened at the end of the summer . . . It was more than you know.”
Amazing, how difficult these words are. They are barely anything. I know that. But they terrify me. Because even with the healing I’ve done, and the many ways in which I’ve pulled myself together, I haven’t said any of this out loud.
“Well,” she says. “I’m listening.”
“I had to leave.”
“You just disappeared.”
“No. I didn’t. I came here.”
The words make sense, but deeper than the words is the truth. She’s right. If Mabel’s talking about the girl who hugged her good-bye before she left for Los Angeles, who laced fingers with her at the last bonfire of the summer and accepted shells from almost-strangers, who analyzed novels for fun and lived with her grandfather in a pink, rent-controlled house in the Sunset that often smelled like cake and was often filled with elderly, gambling men—if she’s talking about that girl, then yes, I disappeared.
But it’s so much simpler not to look at it that way, so I add, “I’ve been here the whole time.”
“I had to fly three thousand miles to find you.”
“I’m glad you did.”
“Are you?”
“Yes.”
She looks at me, trying to see if I mean it.
“Yes,” I say again.
She pushes her hair behind her ear. I watch her. I’ve been trying not to look too closely. She was kind enough to pretend she didn’t notice me holding on to her scarf and hat earlier; I don’t need to test my luck. But again, it hits me: Here she is. Her fingers, her long, dark hair. Her pink lips and black eyelashes. The same gold earrings she never takes out, not even when she sleeps.
“Okay,” she says.
She presses a button and here is movement after so many minutes of suspension.
Down, down. I’m not sure I’m ready. But now we’re on the third floor, and Mabel and I reach for the gate at the same time, and our hands touch.
She pulls back before I know what I want.
“Sorry,” she says. She isn’t apologizing for pulling away. She’s apologizing for our accidental contact.
We used to touch all the time, even before we really knew each other. Our first conversation began with her grabbing my hand to examine my newly painted nails, gold with silver moons. Jones’s daughter, Samantha, ran a salon and she had her new hires practice on me. I told Mabel I could probably get her a discount on a manicure there.
She said, “Maybe you could just do it? It can’t be that hard.” So after school we went to Walgreens for nail polish and we sat in Lafayette Park while I made a mess of her fingertips and we laughed for hours.
Mabel’s ahead of me, almost to my doorway.
Wait.
Not enough has changed yet.
“Do you remember the first day we hung out?” I ask.
She stops walking. Turns to me.
“At the park?”
“Yes,” I say. “Yes. And I tried to paint your nails because you liked mine, and they turned out terribly.”
She shrugs. “I don’t remember it being that bad.”
“No. It wasn’t bad. Just my nail-painting skills.”
“I thought we had fun.”
“Of course we had fun. It’s what made us beco
me friends. You thought I’d be able to give you a manicure and I failed miserably, but we laughed a lot, and that’s how it all started.”
Mabel leans against the doorway. She stares down the hall.
“How it all started was in the first day of English, when Brother John had us analyze some stupid poem, and you raised your hand and said something so smart about it that suddenly the poem didn’t seem stupid anymore. And I knew that you were the kind of person I wanted to know. But what I didn’t know yet was that you can tell a girl you want to hang out with her because she said something smart. So I looked for an excuse to talk to you, and I found one.”
She’s never told me this before.
“It wasn’t about a manicure,” she says. She shakes her head as though the idea were absurd, even though it’s the only version of the story I’ve known until now. Then she turns and goes into my room.
“What have you been doing for dinner?” she asks.
I gesture toward the desk, where an electric kettle rests next to packages of Top Ramen.
“Well, let’s do it.”
“I bought food,” I say. “There’s a kitchen we can use.”
She shakes her head.
“It’s been a long day. Ramen is fine.”
She sounds so tired. Tired of me and the way I’m not talking.
I take my usual trip to the bathroom sink for water, and then plug in the electric kettle at my desk and set the yellow bowls next to it. Here comes another chance. I try to think of something to say.
But Mabel rushes in before me.
“There’s something I need to tell you.”
“Okay.”
“I met someone at school. His name is Jacob.”
I can’t help the surprise on my face.
“When?”
“About a month ago. You know the nine hundredth text and phone call you decided to ignore?”
I turn away from her. Pretend to check something on the kettle.
“He’s in my literature class. I really like him,” she says, voice gentler now.
I watch until the first puffs of steam escape, and then I ask, “Does he know about me?”
She doesn’t answer. I pour water into the bowls, over the dried noodles. Tear open the flavor packets. Sprinkle the powder over the surface. Stir. And then there is nothing to do but wait, so I’m forced to turn back.
“He knows that I have a best friend named Marin, who was raised by a grandfather I loved like my own. He knows that I left for school and a few days later Gramps drowned, and that ever since the night it happened my friend Marin hasn’t spoken to anyone back home. Not even to me.”
I wipe tears off my face with the back of one hand.
I wait.
“And he knows that things between us got . . . less clearly defined toward the end. And he’s fine with that.”
I search my memory for the way we used to talk about boys. What is it that I might have said back then? I would have asked to see a picture. I’m sure there are dozens on her phone.
But I don’t want to see his picture.
I have to say something.
“He sounds nice,” I blurt. And then I realize that she’s barely told me anything about him. “I mean, I’m sure you would choose someone nice.”
I feel her staring, but that’s all I have in me.
We eat in silence.
“There’s a rec room on the fourth floor,” I say when we’re finished. “We could watch a movie if you want.”
“I’m actually pretty tired,” she says. “I think I might just get ready for bed.”
“Oh, sure.” I glance at the clock. It’s just a few minutes past nine, and three hours earlier in California.
“Your roommate won’t mind?” she asks, pointing to Hannah’s bed.
“No, it’s fine.” I can barely get the words out.
“Okay, great. I’m going to get ready, then.”
She gathers her toiletries bag and her pajamas, picks up her phone quickly, as though I might not notice, and slips out of the room.
She’s away for a long time. Ten minutes pass, then another ten, then another. I wish I could do something besides sit and wait for her.
I hear her laugh. I hear her grow serious.
She says, “You have nothing to worry about.”
She says, “I promise.”
She says, “I love you, too.”
chapter five
MAY
I COPIED DOWN all the passages about ghosts I could find and spread them over the coffee table, sorted them, and read them each dozens of times. I was beginning to think that it was never the ghosts themselves that were important. Like Mabel had said, all they did was stand around.
It wasn’t the ghosts. It was the hauntings that mattered.
The ghosts told the governess that she would never know love.
The ghost told Jane Eyre that she was alone.
The ghost told the Buendía family that their worst fears were right: They were doomed to repeat the same mistakes.
I scribbled some notes and then I took Jane Eyre and stretched out on the couch. Along with my other favorite novel, One Hundred Years of Solitude, I’d read it more times than I could count. While One Hundred Years of Solitude swept me up in its magic and its images, its intricacies and its breadth, Jane Eyre made my heart swell. Jane was so lonely. She was so strong and sincere and honest. I loved them both, but they satisfied different longings.
Just as Rochester was about to propose, I heard Gramps downstairs jangling his keys, and a moment later he walked in whistling.
“Good mail day?” I asked him.
“You write a letter, you get a letter.”
“You two are so reliable.”
I ran downstairs to help him carry up the grocery bags and put the food away, and then I went back to Jane Eyre and he disappeared into his study. I liked to imagine him reading the letters in there by himself, in his recliner with his cigarettes and crystal ashtray. The window open to the salty air and his lips mouthing the words.
I used to wonder what kinds of letters he wrote. I’d caught glimpses of old poetry books stacked on his desk. I wondered if he quoted them. Or if he wrote his own verses, or stole lines and passed them off as his own.
And who was this Birdie? She must have been the sweetest of ladies. Waiting for Gramps’s letters. Composing her own to him. I pictured her in a chair on a veranda, sipping iced teas and writing with perfect penmanship. When she wasn’t writing to my grandfather, she was probably training bougainvillea vines or painting watercolor landscapes.
Or maybe she was wilder than that. Maybe she was the kind of grandma who cursed and went out dancing, who had a devious spark in her eyes that would rival Gramps’s. Maybe she would beat him at poker, smoke cigarettes with him late into the night once they found a way to be together instead of several states apart. Once I wasn’t holding him back anymore.
Sometimes the thought of that kept me up at night, gave me a sick feeling in my stomach. If it weren’t for me, maybe he’d leave San Francisco for the Rocky Mountains. Besides me, all he had here were Jones and Freeman and Bo, and he didn’t even seem to like them much anymore. They still played cards like they always did, but there was less laughter among them.
“May I interrupt your reading? I got something very special today,” Gramps said.
He was back in the living room, smiling at me.
“Show me.”
“Okay,” he said. “But I’m afraid you won’t be able to touch it. It’s fragile.”
“I’ll be careful.”
“You just sit here, and I’ll hold it up and show you.”
I rolled my eyes.
“Now, Sailor,” he said. “Don’t do that. Don’t be like that. This is something special.”
He looke
d pained, and I was sorry.
“I’ll only look,” I said.
He nodded.
“I’m excited,” I said.
“I’ll get it. Wait here.”
He came out with fabric folded in his hands, a deep green, and he let it unfurl and I saw it was a dress.
I cocked my head.
“Birdie’s,” he said.
“She sent you her dress?”
“I wanted to have something from her. I told her to surprise me. Does it count as a gift if you ask for it?”
I shrugged. “Sure.”
Something struck me about the dress. The straps were scalloped; white and pink embroidery decorated the waist.
“It looks like something a young woman would wear.”
Gramps smiled.
“Such a sharp girl,” he said approvingly. “This dress is from when she was young. She said she didn’t mind sending it, because she isn’t as slight as she used to be. It doesn’t fit her and it’s not appropriate for a lady of her age.”
He took another long look at the dress, and then he folded the sides in and rolled it down from the top so that it never left his hands. He hugged it to his chest.
“It’s beautiful,” I said.
Later, while he washed the dinner dishes and I dried, I asked, “Gramps, why don’t you ever talk about Birdie with the guys?”
He grinned at me. “Wouldn’t want to rub it in,” he said. “Not everyone can have what Birdie and I have.”
A few days later, I was on the floor in Mabel’s living room, looking through photo albums. “I was not the most beautiful newborn,” Mabel said.
“What are you talking about? You were perfect. A perfect little grasshopper. How about that one!” Ana pointed to a photograph of Mabel wrapped in a white blanket, yawning.
