by Nina LaCour
But still—doubts, doubts.
The car pulled up and we slid into the back. The driver eyed Mabel in the rearview mirror as she gave him her address.
He smiled, said something to her in Spanish, his tone so flirtatious I didn’t need a translation.
She rolled her eyes.
“México?” he asked her.
“Sí.”
“Colombia,” he said.
“One Hundred Years of Solitude is one of my favorite books.” I was embarrassed before the sentence was even finished. Just because he was from Colombia didn’t mean that he’d care.
He adjusted the mirror and looked at me for the first time.
“You like García Márquez?”
“I love him. Do you?”
“Love? No. Admire? Yes.” He turned right onto Valencia. A burst of laughter reached us from the sidewalk, still teeming with people.
“Cien años de soledad,” he said. “Your favorite? Really?”
“Is it that hard to believe?”
“Many people love that book. But you are so young.”
Mabel said something in Spanish. I slapped her leg and she grabbed my hand. Held it tight.
“I just said you were too smart for your own good,” she said.
“Oh.” I smiled at her. “Thanks.”
“Inteligente, okay,” he said. “Yes. But that is not why I ask.”
“All the incest?” I asked.
“Ha! That, too. But no.”
He pulled up to Mabel’s house, and I wished he would circle the block. Mabel was pressed against me—she’d let go of my hand but we were still touching—and I didn’t know why it felt so good but I knew I didn’t want it to stop. And the driver was trying to tell me something about the book I’d read so many times. The one I kept discovering and trying to understand better. I wished he’d circle all night. Mabel’s body and mine would relax into each other’s. The car would fill with ideas about the passionate, tortured Buendía family, the once-grand city of Macondo, the way García Márquez wove magic into so many sentences.
But he put the car in park. He turned around to see me better.
“I do not mean the difficulty. I do not mean the sex. I mean there are too many failings. Not enough hope. Everything is despair. Everything is suffering. What I mean is don’t be a person who seeks out grief. There is enough of that in life.”
And then it was over—the car ride and the discussion, Mabel’s body against mine—and we were letting ourselves into her garden and I was trying to call it back. The night was suddenly colder, and Courtney’s voice was in my head again.
I wanted it out.
We climbed the stairs to Mabel’s room and she shut the door.
“So was he right?” she asked me. “Are you the kind of person who seeks out grief? Or do you just like that book?”
“I don’t know,” I told her. “I don’t think I’m that kind of person.”
“I don’t either,” she said. “But it was an interesting thing to say.”
I thought that it was more likely the opposite. I must have shut grief out. Found it in books. Cried over fiction instead of the truth. The truth was unconfined, unadorned. There was no poetic language to it, no yellow butterflies, no epic floods. There wasn’t a town trapped underwater or generations of men with the same name destined to repeat the same mistakes. The truth was vast enough to drown in.
“You seem distracted,” Mabel said.
“Just thirsty,” I lied. “I’ll get us water.”
I walked barefoot down the stairs to the kitchen and flipped on the light. I crossed to the cabinet for the glasses and turned to fill them when I saw that on the island Ana had propped up her collage with a note in front of it that read, “Gracias, Marin. This was exactly what I needed.”
Black satin, the remnants of my dress, now made waves at the bottom of the canvas. It was a black night, a black ocean. But the kitchen light sparked flecks of fool’s gold stars, and out of the waves burst hand-painted shells, white and pink, the kind my mother loved.
I stared at it. Drank my glass of water and filled it up again. I kept looking for a long time, but I couldn’t think of a single thing it might mean.
chapter eight
I UNDERSTAND what a New York winter storm is now. We are safely inside my room, but outside snow pours—not drifts—from the sky. The ground is disappearing. No more roads, no more paths. The tree branches are heavy and white, and Mabel and I are dorm-bound. It was good that we went out early, good we came back when we did.
It’s only one, and we won’t be going anywhere for a long time.
“I’m tired,” Mabel says. “Or maybe it’s just good napping weather.”
I wonder if she’s dreading the rest of the hours in this day. Maybe she wishes she hadn’t come.
I think I’ll close my eyes, too, try to sleep away the sick feeling, the whisper that I am a waste of her time, her money, her effort.
But the whisper only gets louder. Mabel’s breaths deepen and steady with sleep, and I am awake, mind swarming. I didn’t answer her texts. I didn’t return her calls or even listen to her voice mails. She came all the way to New York to invite me home with her, and I can’t even tell her yes. A waste, a waste.
I lie like this for an hour, until I can’t do it any longer.
I can make this better.
There is still time left.
When I get back to my room twenty minutes later, I’m carrying two plates of quesadillas, perfectly browned on both sides, topped with sour cream and salsa. I have two grapefruit sparkling waters nestled between my elbow and my ribs. I push open my door, grateful to see Mabel awake. She’s sitting on Hannah’s bed, staring out the window. Pure white. The whole world must be freezing.
As soon as she sees me, she jumps up to help with the plates and bottles.
“I woke up starving,” she says.
“The stores here don’t have crema,” I say. “Hope sour cream is okay.”
She takes a bite and nods her approval. We open our cans: a pop, a hiss. I try to determine what the feeling is between us at the moment, and hope that something has changed, that we could be, for a little while, at ease with each other. We eat in hungry silence, punctuated by a couple comments about the snow.
I wonder if we will become okay again. I hope for it.
Mabel crosses to the darkening window to look at my peperomia.
“There’s pink on the edges of these leaves,” she says. “I didn’t notice before. Let’s see how it looks in your new pot.”
She reaches toward the bag from the pottery studio.
“Don’t look!” I say. “There’s something for you in there.”
“What do you mean? I saw everything you bought!”
“Not everything,” I say, grinning.
She’s happy, impressed with me. She’s looking at me the way she used to.
“I have something for you, too,” she says. “But it’s at home, so you’ll have to come back with me to get it.”
Without meaning to, I break our gaze.
“Marin,” she says. “Is there something I don’t know about? Some recently discovered family members? Some secret society or cult or something? Because as far as I know, you have no one. And I’m offering you something really huge and really good.”
“I know. I’m sorry.”
“I thought that you liked my parents.”
“Of course I like them.”
“Look at this,” she says, picking up her phone. “My mom texted it to me. It was going to be a surprise.”
She turns the screen toward me.
My name, painted in Ana’s whimsical lettering on a door.
“My own room?”
“They redid the whole thing for you.”
I know why she’s ang
ry. It should be so simple to say yes.
And I want to.
The walls of their guest room are vibrant blue, not a paint color but the pigment of the plaster itself. The wood floors are perfectly worn. You never have to worry about scratching them. I can imagine myself there, a permanent guest in my guest room, walking barefoot into the kitchen to pour myself mugs of coffee or glasses of water. I would help them make their delicious feasts, gather handfuls of sage and thyme from their front-porch herb garden.
I can imagine how it would look to live there, and I know the things I would do, but I can’t feel it.
I can’t say yes.
I have only just learned how to be here. Life is paper-thin and fragile. Any sudden change could rip it wide-open.
The swimming pool, certain shops on a certain street, Stop & Shop, this dorm, the buildings that house my classes—all of these are as safe as it gets, which is still not nearly safe enough.
When leaving campus, I never turn right because it would take me too close to the motel. I can’t fathom boarding a plane to San Francisco. It would be flying into ruins. But how could I begin to explain this to her? Even the good places are haunted. The thought of walking up her stairs to her front door, or onto the 31 bus, leaves me heavy with dread. I can’t even think about my old house or Ocean Beach without panic thrumming through me.
“Hey,” she says, voice soft. “Are you okay?”
I nod but I don’t know if it’s true.
The silence of my house. The food left, untouched, on the counter. The sharp panic of knowing I was alone.
“You’re shaking,” she says.
I need to swim. That plunge into water. That quiet. I close my eyes and try to feel it.
“Marin? What’s going on?”
“I’m just trying . . . ,” I say.
“Trying what?”
“Can you tell me something?”
“Sure.”
“Anything. Tell me about one of your classes.”
“Okay. I’m taking Art History? I think I might minor in it. I really love the Mexican art, which makes my mom so happy. Like Frida Kahlo. Her paintings are so . . . strong. There are all the self-portraits, close-ups of her face and shoulders with variations. Like sometimes she has animals with her, monkeys, a weird hairless dog, that kind of thing. And some are more simple. Is this right? Am I helping?”
I nod.
“My current favorite is called The Two Fridas. It’s pretty much the way it sounds. There are two versions of her, sitting next to each other on a bench. One is wearing a long white dress with an elaborate lace bodice and collar, and the other one is dressed in . . . I don’t remember exactly. Something more relaxed. But the thing that I really like about it is you can see their hearts. You can see right into their chests. Or maybe their hearts are outside their chests. It’s kind of gruesome, like most of her paintings, but it’s also really dramatic and beautiful.”
“I’d like to see it.”
“I can pull it up if you want me to. Hold on one second.”
I open my eyes.
We are in my room.
My hands are still.
She’s taking my computer off my desk and entering a search. She sits down next to me and positions the screen between us, resting it on one of my knees and one of hers. The painting is how she described it, but there’s also more. Behind the two Fridas are storm clouds, gray-blue and white.
“I can’t tell,” I say, “if the trouble is coming or if it’s passed and already left them.”
“Or maybe they’re in the middle of it,” she says. “Something is happening with the hearts.”
The hearts are connected by a thin red line. A vein. It’s bleeding onto the Frida in the white dress, who is holding a pair of scissors. I point to her heart.
“We’re looking inside her chest to see it,” I say. “And it looks painful. But the other one . . .” I point to her. “I think her heart’s outside her body. It’s still whole.”
“You’re right,” Mabel says.
Where the one in the white dress has scissors, this one has something else.
“What is she holding?”
“It’s a tiny portrait of Diego Rivera. She painted this during their divorce.”
“So it’s about losing him,” I say.
“Yeah, I guess,” she says. “That’s what my professor says. But doesn’t that make it too simple?”
I turn my head to look at Mabel.
“It’s better if it’s complicated?” I say.
She smiles. “Well, obviously.”
I take another look at the screen. “Maybe it really is as simple as it looks, though. She was one person before. She had a whole heart and the man she loved. She was at ease. And then something happened, and it changed her. And now she’s wounded.”
“Are you trying to tell me something?” Mabel says. “Are you finally answering me? If you need to do it this way, I’d be happy to find a bunch of paintings for you to analyze.”
“No,” I say. “I mean, yes—I know how she feels. But that’s not what I’m doing. I’m just looking at your painting.”
“The thing I most love about it,” Mabel says, “is how they’re holding hands right at the center of the painting. It’s so important. It’s what the whole thing’s about, I think.”
“It could mean so many different things.”
“Like what? I just think it means the Fridas are still connected. Even though she’s changed, she’s still the same person.”
“Yeah, it could mean that,” I say. “But it could also be something else. Like the whole one is trying to pull the wounded one back to her, as if she could undo what’s happened. Or the wounded one is guiding her old self into her new life. Or it could be that they’ve separated almost entirely from each other, and they are holding hands as a last moment of connection before they break apart completely.”
Mabel stares at the image.
“And why are you changing your major?” she asks.
“Because wouldn’t it be better,” I say, “if the hand-holding really just meant they were connected, and you didn’t have to think about the other possibilities?”
“No,” she says. “Not at all. That would not—in any way—be better than realizing that there are many ways to see one thing. I love this painting even more now.”
She sets the computer down on the bed. She stands up and glares down at me.
“Seriously,” she says. “Natural Sciences? ”
And then everything goes dark.
chapter nine
WE DECIDE WE SHOULDN’T WORRY because, even though it’s cold and getting colder in here, we have jackets and blankets. If it comes to it, we can pick locks and scavenge for candles. For now, we have a few tea lights from Hannah’s drawer.
Our cell phones still have some charge left, but we’re using them sparingly and there’s no Wi-Fi anyway.
“Remember when the power went out sophomore year?” Mabel asks.
“I made you listen to me read all night.”
“Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton.”
“Right. Those were dark poems.”
“Yeah, but they were fun, too.”
“They were defiant,” I say. I remember the sparks in them, I remember how the words made me feel dangerous and strong. “Lady Lazarus” and “Daddy” and all of Anne Sexton’s reimagined fairy tales.
“In my lit class we listened to a recording of Sylvia Plath. Her voice wasn’t what I thought it would sound like.”
I know those recordings. I used to listen to them online sometimes late at night. Every word she spoke was a dagger.
“What did you think she’d sound like?” I ask her.
She shrugs. “Like you, I guess.”
We drift into silence. The colder it gets, the more diffic
ult it is not to worry. What if we can’t pick locks? What if the electricity doesn’t come back on for days? What if we get too cold while sleeping and don’t wake up in time to save ourselves?
“Maybe we should turn our phones off,” I say. “In case we need them later.”
Mabel nods. She looks at her phone, and I wonder if she’s thinking about calling Jacob before she turns it off. The light of the screen casts across her face, but I can’t read her expression. Then she holds down a button and her face goes dark again.
I cross the room to look for mine. I don’t keep it near me all the time the way she does or the way I used to. I don’t get many texts or calls. I find it next to the bag of Claudia’s pottery. I pick it up, but before I can power it off it buzzes.
“Who is it?” Mabel asks.
“I don’t know,” I say. “An area code from here.”
“You should answer it.”
“Hello?”
“Don’t know how long you were planning on sticking it out,” a man says. “But I imagine it’s getting to be pretty chilly in there. And it looks mighty dark.”
I turn to the window. The groundskeeper is standing in the snow. I can barely see him but for the headlights of his truck.
“Mabel,” I whisper. She looks up from her phone and joins me at the window.
I pick up one of the tea lights and wave it in front of the window, a tiny hello I’m not sure he can see from there. He lifts his hand in a wave.
“The power’s out for you, too, though. Isn’t it?” I ask.
“Yes,” he says. “But I don’t live in a dormitory.”
We blow out the candles. We pull on our boots and grab our toothbrushes. And then we are out in the impossible cold, leaving trails of footprints in the snow from the dorm entrance to where his truck is idling.
He’s younger up close. Not young, but not old either.
“Tommy,” he says. He sticks out his hand and I shake it.
“Marin,” I say.
“Mabel.”
