by Nina LaCour
“I want something more . . . alert.”
All the seniors had been tasked with submitting a baby photo for the yearbook, and the deadline was soon. Eleanor, that year’s editor, grew closer to a nervous breakdown with each day that passed. Her voice over the intercom during the daily announcements had become shrill. “Please,” she’d say. “Please just email me something soon.”
“Have you chosen yours yet?” Ana asked, returning to the sofa to get back to the drawing she was doing.
“We don’t have any.”
She turned to a new page in her sketchbook.
“None?”
“I don’t think so. He’s never shown me anything.”
“May I draw you?”
“Really?”
“Just a ten-minute sketch.”
She patted the sofa cushion next to her and I sat. She studied my face before she touched charcoal to paper. She looked at my eyes, my ears, the slant of my nose, my cheekbones and my neck and the tiny freckles across my cheeks that no one ever noticed. She reached out and untucked my hair from behind one of my ears so that it fell forward.
She began to draw, and I looked at her as if I were drawing her, too. Her eyes and her ears and the slant of her nose. The flush in her cheeks and her laugh lines. The flecks of lighter brown in the darker brown of her eyes. She’d turn to her page and then look up at some part of me. I found myself waiting, each time she glanced down, for her to look at me again.
“Okay, I found two,” Mabel said. “This one says I’m ten months and I finally look like a human. This one is less baby, more toddler, but it’s pretty cute, if I do say so myself.”
She dangled them in front of us.
“Can’t lose,” Ana said, beaming at the sight of them.
“I vote baby,” I said. “Those chubby thighs! Adorable.”
She went off to scan and send it, and Ana and I were alone in the living room.
“Just a few more minutes,” she told me.
“Okay.”
“Want to see?” she asked when she was done.
I nodded, and she laid the book in my lap. The girl on the page was me and she wasn’t. I’d never seen a drawing of myself before.
“Look.” Ana showed me her hands, covered in charcoal. “I need to wash up, but I’m thinking about something. Follow me?” I followed her across the room to the kitchen where she turned the brass faucet handle with her wrist and let the water run over her hands. “I think he must have something to share with you. Even if he doesn’t have many photos, he’s bound to have at least one or two.”
“What if he didn’t end up with my mom’s stuff?”
“You’re his granddaughter. You were almost three when she died, yes? He would have had a photograph of his own by then.” She dried her hands on a bright green dish towel. “Ask him. I think, if you ask him, he will find something.”
When I got home, Gramps was drinking tea in the kitchen. I knew it was then or never. I would lose the courage if I waited until morning.
“So we’re supposed to turn in baby pictures for yearbook. For the senior pages. I’m wondering, do you think you have one somewhere?” I shifted my weight from one foot to the other. I heard my voice go high-pitched and shaky. “Or, like, it doesn’t have to be baby baby. I could be two or three in it. Just little. I think we don’t have any, which is fine, but I’m supposed to ask.”
Gramps was very still. He stared into his teacup.
“I’ll look through some storage. See if I can find something.”
“That would be great.”
He opened his mouth to say something, but must have changed his mind. The next day after school when I came inside, he was waiting for me in the living room. He didn’t look at me.
“Sailor,” he said. “I tried but—”
“It’s okay,” I rushed in.
“So much was lost.”
“I know.” I was sorry I was making him say this, sorry to have brought back memories of what was lost. I thought of the way he yelled at my counselor. “You remind me to remember them?”
“Really, Gramps.” He still couldn’t look at me. “Really. It’s fine.”
I’d known better, but had asked anyway. I was sick with the way I’d upset him and sick, also, with the way I’d let myself hope for something that didn’t exist.
I walked along Ocean Beach for a long time, until I reached the rocks below the Cliff House, and then I turned around. When I was back where I started, I still wasn’t ready to go home, so I sat on a dune and watched the waves in the afternoon sun. A woman with long brown hair and a wet suit was nearby, and after a while she came to sit next to me.
“Hey,” she said. “I’m Emily. I was one of Claire’s friends.”
“Yeah, I recognize you.”
“He’s been coming here more often, right?” She pointed to the water’s edge, and there was Gramps in the distance, walking alone. “I hadn’t seen him for a long time. Now I see him almost every week.”
I couldn’t answer her. Besides his trips to the grocery store and his clockwork poker games, Gramps’s comings and goings were mysteries to me. I’d run into him on the beach a few times, but I wasn’t usually here at this time in the afternoon.
“He was a good surfer,” she said. “Better than a lot of us, even though he was older.”
Gramps never talked to me about surfing, but sometimes he’d make comments about the waves that showed he knew a lot about the water. I had suspected that he’d been a surfer at some point in his life, but I hadn’t ever asked him.
“There was this day,” Emily said. “A couple months after Claire died. Do you know this story?”
“I might?” I said, even though I didn’t know any stories. “Tell it to me anyway.”
“None of us had seen him out there since we’d lost her. It was a Saturday, and so many of us were out. He appeared with his board on the sand. Some of us saw him, and we knew that we had to do something. To show our respect, let him see our grief. So we got out of the water. We called out to the others, who hadn’t seen him. It didn’t take long until there was only him in the water, and all of us were lined up on the sand in our suits, watching. We stayed like that for a long time. I don’t remember how long, but we stayed like that until he was done. When he finished, he paddled back, tucked his board under his arm, and walked right past us, like we were invisible. I don’t even know if he noticed us there.”
He was closer to us now, but I knew that he wouldn’t look around and see me and I decided against calling to him. A wave crashed in, took him by surprise, but he barely tried to dodge it. It soaked his pants legs up to the knees, but he kept walking as though nothing had happened.
Emily’s brow furrowed.
“I know I don’t need to tell you this,” she said. “But it can be dangerous out here. Even just walking.”
“Yeah,” I said, and I felt fear rush in, compounding my guilt. Did I dredge up memories he’d worked hard to forget? Did I drive him out here with my request? “I should say something to him about it.”
She kept watching him. “He already knows.”
chapter six
WE’RE WAITING AT THE BUS STOP in the snow.
Mabel was already showered and dressed by the time I woke up. I opened my eyes and she said, “Let’s go somewhere for breakfast. I want to see more of this town.” But I knew that what she really wanted was to be somewhere else, where it wasn’t the two of us trapped in a room thick with the things we weren’t saying.
So now we’re on the side of a street covered in white, trees and mountains in every direction. Once in a while a car passes us and its color stands out against the snow.
A blue car.
A red car.
“My toes are numb,” Mabel says.
“Mine, too.”
A black
car, a green one.
“I can’t feel my face.”
“Me, neither.”
Mabel and I have boarded buses together thousands of times, but when the bus appears in the distance it’s entirely unfamiliar. It’s the wrong landscape, the wrong color, the wrong bus name and number, the wrong fare, and the wrong accent when the driver says, “You heard about the storm, right?”
We take halting, interrupted steps, not knowing how far back we should go or who should duck into a row first. She steps to the side to make me lead, as though just because I live here I know which seat would be right for us. I keep walking until we’re out of choices. We sit in the center of the back.
I don’t know what a storm here would mean. The snow is so soft when it falls, nothing like hail. Not even like rain so hard it wakes you up or the kind of wind that hurls tree branches into the streets.
The bus inches along even though there’s no traffic.
“Dunkin’ Donuts,” Mabel says. “I’ve heard of that.”
“Everyone likes their coffee.”
“Is it good?”
I shrug. “It’s not like the coffee we’re used to.”
“Because it’s just coffee-coffee?”
I pull at a loose stitch in the fingertip of my glove.
“I actually haven’t tried it.”
“Oh.”
“I think it’s like diner coffee,” I say.
I stay away from diners now. Whenever Hannah or her friends suggest going out to eat, I make sure to get the name of the place first and look it up. They tease me for being a food snob, an easy misunderstanding to play along with, but I’m not that picky about what I eat. I’m just afraid that one day something’s going to catch me by surprise. Stale coffee. Squares of American cheese. Hard tomatoes, so unripe they’re white in the center. The most innocent things can call back the most terrible.
I want to be closer to a window, so I scoot down the row. The glass is freezing, even through my glove, and now that we’re closer to the shopping district, lights line the street, strung from streetlamp to streetlamp.
All my life, winter has meant gray skies and rain, puddles and umbrellas. Winter has never looked like this.
Wreathes on every door. Menorahs on windowsills. Christmas trees sparkling through parted curtains. I press my forehead to the glass, catch my reflection. I want to be part of the world outside.
We reach our stop and step into the cold, and the bus pulls away to reveal a lit-up tree with gold ornaments in the middle of the square.
My heart swells.
As anti-religion as Gramps was, he was all about the spectacle. Each year we bought a tree from Delancey Street. Guys with prison tattoos tied the tree to the roof of the car, and we heaved it up the stairs ourselves. I’d get the decorations down from the hall closet. They were all old. I didn’t know which ones had been my mother’s and which were older than that, but it didn’t matter. They were my only evidence of a family larger than him and me. We might have been all that was left, but we were still a part of something bigger. Gramps would bake cookies and make eggnog from scratch. We’d listen to Christmas music on the radio and hang ornaments, then sit on the sofa and lean back with our mugs and crumb-covered plates to admire our work.
“Jesus Christ,” he’d say. “Now, that’s a tree.”
The memory has barely surfaced, but already it’s begun. The doubt creeps in. Is that how it really was? The sickness settles in my stomach. You thought you knew him.
I want to buy gifts for people.
Something for Mabel. Something to send back for Ana and Javier. Something to leave on Hannah’s bed for when she returns from break or to take with me to Manhattan if I really go to see her.
The window of the potter’s studio is lit. It seems too early for it to be open, but I squint and see that the sign in the window says COME IN.
The first time I came here was in the fall, and I was too nervous to look closely at everything. It was my first time out with Hannah and her friends. I kept telling myself to act normal, to laugh along with everyone else, to say something once in a while. They didn’t want to spend too long inside—we were wandering in and out of shops—but everything was beautiful and I couldn’t imagine leaving empty-handed.
I chose the yellow bowls. They were heavy and cheerful, the perfect size for cereal or soup. Now every time Hannah uses one she sighs and says she wishes she’d bought some for herself.
No one is behind the counter when Mabel and I walk in, but the store is warm and bright, full of earth tones and tinted glazes. A wood-burning stove glows with heat, and a scarf is slung over a wooden chair.
I head toward the shelves of bowls first for Hannah’s gift. I thought I’d buy her a pair that matched mine, but there are more colors now, including a mossy green that I know she’d love. I take two of them and glance at Mabel. I want her to like this place.
She’s found a row of large bells that dangle from thick rope. Each bell is a different color and size, each has a pattern carved into it. She rings one and smiles at the sound it makes. I feel like I’ve done something right in taking her here.
“Oh, hi!” A woman appears from a doorway behind the counter, holding up her clay-covered hands. I remember her from the first time. For some reason it hadn’t occurred to me then that she was the potter, but knowing it makes everything even better.
“I’ve seen you before,” she says.
“I came in a couple months ago with my roommate.”
“Welcome back,” she says. “It’s nice to see you again.”
“I’m going to set these on the counter while I keep looking,” I say, holding out the green bowls.
“Yes, sure. Let me know if you need me. I’ll just be back here finishing something up.”
I set the bowls next to a stack of postcards inviting people to a three-year-anniversary party. I would have thought the store had been here longer. It’s so warm and lived-in. I wonder what she did before she was here. She’s probably Mabel’s parents’ age, with gray-blond hair swept back in a barrette and lines by her eyes when she smiles. I didn’t notice if she wore a wedding ring. I don’t know why, but I feel like something happened to her, like there’s pain behind her smile. I felt it the first time. When she took my money, I felt like she wanted to keep me here. I wonder if there’s a secret current that connects people who have lost something. Not in the way that everyone loses something, but in the way that undoes your life, undoes your self, so that when you look at your face it isn’t yours anymore.
“Who are the bowls for?” Mabel asks.
“Hannah.”
She nods.
“I want to get your parents a present, too,” I say. “Do you think they’d like something from here?”
“Anything,” she says. “Everything here is so nice.”
We look at some things together and then I make another round and Mabel drifts back to the bells. I see her check the price of one of them. Ana and Javier keep flowers in every room of their house, so I take a closer look at a corner of vases.
“How’s this?” I ask her, holding up a round one. It’s a dusty-pink color, subtle enough that it would work in their brightest rooms.
“Perfect,” she says. “They’ll love it.”
I choose a gift for myself, too: a pot for my peperomia, in the same color as Ana and Javier’s vase. I’ve kept my little plant in its plastic pot for too long, and this will look so much prettier.
The potter is sitting at the counter now, making notes on a piece of paper, and when I take the vase up to her I’m seized with the wish to stay. I hand her my ATM card when she gives me the total, and then I work up the courage to ask.
“I was wondering,” I say as she wraps the first bowl up in tissue paper. “By any chance, are you hiring?”
“Oh,” she says. “I wish! But it’
s just me. It’s a tiny operation.”
“Okay,” I say, trying not to sound too disappointed. “I just really love your shop so I thought I’d ask.”
She pauses her wrapping. “Thank you.” She smiles at me. Soon she’s handing me the bag with the wrapped-up vase and dishes, and Mabel and I head back onto the snowy street.
We hurry past a pet store and a post office and into the café, both of us shivering. Only one table is occupied and the waitress looks surprised to see us. She takes a couple menus from a stack.
“We’re closing up early because of the storm,” she says. “But we can get you fed before then if you can make it quick.”
“Sure,” I say.
“Yeah,” Mabel says. “That’s fine.”
“Can I get you started with some coffee or orange juice?”
“Cappuccino?” I ask.
She nods.
“Same for me,” Mabel says. “And I’ll just have a short stack of pancakes.”
I scan the menu. “Eggs Benedict, please.”
“Thank you, ladies,” she says. “And just, excuse my reach for a second . . .”
She leans over our table and turns the sign in the window so that it says CLOSED on the outside. But on our side, perfectly positioned between Mabel’s place and mine, it says OPEN. If this were a short story, it would mean something.
The waitress leaves and we turn back to the window. The snow is falling differently; there’s more of it in the sky.
“I can’t believe you live in a place this cold.”
“I know.”
We watch in silence. Soon, our coffees arrive.
“It’s so pretty, though,” I say. “Isn’t it?”
“Yeah. It is.”
She reaches for the dish of sugar packets, takes out a pink one, a white one, a blue. She lines them up, then reaches for more. I don’t know what to make of her nervous hands and faraway expression. Her mouth is a tight line. At another point in my life, I would have leaned across the table and kissed her. At a point further back, I would have sabotaged her, scattered the packets across the table. If I were to go all the way to when we first knew each other, I would have built a careful pattern of my own and both of ours would have expanded until they met in the middle.
