We Are Okay

by Nina LaCour

  “How will you live without this?” he said as we bit into our burritos. “Is there even Mexican food in New York?”

  “Honestly? I have no idea.”

  It was past eight when I got home, and immediately, I felt the stillness.

  “Gramps?” I called, but just like the night before, he didn’t answer.

  His door was closed. I knocked and waited. Nothing. The car was out front. I took the stairs to the basement in case he was doing laundry, but the machines were silent.

  In the kitchen, the eggs I’d left him were untouched in their bowl, the tea bag dry in the cup.

  Ocean Beach. I would look for him there. I grabbed a sweater and went out to the street. The sky was darkening and the headlights on the Great Highway shone as I darted across. I ran onto the sand and up through the dunes. Beach grass grazed my ankles, a flock of birds flew overhead, and then I was passing the warning sign that everybody ignored, even though the danger it warned of was undeniably true. I thought of Gramps’s soaking pants legs, of his skeleton body, of the blood on the handkerchiefs. I had a clear view of the water now, but not enough light to make out details. I wished for my mother’s friends, but skilled as they were, even they didn’t surf at dusk.

  There were a few clusters of people out walking, a couple lone figures with dogs. No old men that I could see. I turned back.

  Inside again, I knocked on his door.

  Silence.

  Panic tilted my vision.

  A succession of flights and drops. The right throbs and the wrong.

  This was my mind, playing tricks on me. I was being hysterical. Gramps left the house all the time, and I had barely been home all summer, so why would he be here now, for me? I stood right on the other side of his door. “Gramps!” I screamed. It was so loud he couldn’t have slept through it, and when silence still followed, I told myself that everything was fine.

  In the kitchen, I put a pot of water on the stove. Before the water reaches a boil, he will be here. I dropped the pasta in and set the timer. Before the ten minutes are up. I melted some butter. I wasn’t hungry, but I would eat it anyway, and by the time I was done, he would walk through the door and call out my name.

  The clock ticked. I ate as slowly as I could. But then the bowl was empty, and I was still alone. I didn’t know what was happening. I was trying to understand. I was crying, trying not to cry.

  I picked up the phone and dialed Jones’s house. I made my voice steady. “Nope,” Jones said. “Saw him yesterday. I’ll be seeing him tomorrow.” I called Bo. “Poker’s tomorrow night,” he told me. I went back to his door. I banged so hard I could have knocked it down, but there was that knob, and I knew all I had to do was turn it.

  Instead I picked up my phone again. Javier answered.

  “You’ve looked everywhere?” he asked me.

  “Not in his room. His door is closed.”

  I heard the confusion in Javier’s pause.

  “Open it, Marin,” he finally said. “Go ahead and open it.”

  “But what if he’s in there?” My voice was so small.

  “It will be slow crossing Market, but we’ll be there as soon as we can.”

  “I’m alone,” I said. I didn’t even know what I was saying.

  “I am calling the police. They’ll probably be there before we will. You just wait. We are coming to you. We can do it together. We’re leaving now.”

  I didn’t want him to hang up, but he did, and my hands were shaking and I was facing the closed door. I turned away from it, toward the picture of my mother. I needed her. I took it off the wall. I needed to see it better. I would take it out of its glass frame. Maybe holding it in my hands would help me remember. Maybe I would feel her with me.

  At the coffee table, I knelt on the carpet and lifted the small metal tabs that held the frame back in place. I lifted the cardboard, and there was the yellowed back of the photograph, with a line in Gramps’s handwriting: Birdie on Ocean Beach, 1996. My vision doubled, then righted itself. The dark pressed against me.

  Maybe my mind was taking me in convoluted directions. Maybe Birdie was just like sweetheart or honey, a name that could apply to anyone.

  I opened his doors for the first time.

  Here I was, in his study. In the fifteen years I’d lived there, I’d never stepped inside. One wall was lined with shelves and on the shelves were boxes and boxes of letters. Hands shaking, I reached for one. The envelope was addressed to his PO box. The handwriting was his own.

  I unfolded the paper.

  Daddy, it said. The mountains look beautiful today. When are you going to visit me? Just for a little while? Marin has school and her own friends. You can leave her for a couple weeks. I stopped reading. I turned to the letter behind it. Addressed to Claire Delaney, Colorado, no stamp, never sent. I pulled out the paper. You know I can’t do that. Not yet. But soon. Soon. I grabbed another box of letters. They were all from him to her, or from her to him. They were all in his handwriting. They dated back so many years. I was trying to read, but my vision kept blurring.

  I heard faraway sirens. I left his study and walked into his bedroom.

  It smelled like cigarettes and tea. It smelled like him. His bed was made and everything was tidy. It struck me for the first time, how wrong it was that I’d never seen it. How wrong to have been shut out. The door to his closet was open, all of his sweaters folded with precision. I opened a dresser drawer to the shirts I’d washed and folded for him a couple days before. I opened a smaller drawer and saw his stacks of handkerchiefs. I knew I was looking for something, but I didn’t know what.

  The sirens were getting louder. And then I saw it. A worn velvet armchair, sitting against a door.

  I pushed the chair away.

  I turned the knob.

  It was a small space, somewhere between a room and a closet, and it was dark until I saw the chain dangling from the ceiling and pulled it, and light shone across all of my mother’s things. They were preserved as if for a museum in clear bags with cedar blocks, labeled SHIRTS, PANTS AND SHORTS, UNDERGARMENTS AND SWIMWEAR, DRESSES, SHOES. SCHOOL PAPERS, NOTES AND LETTERS, POSTERS AND SOUVENIRS, BOOKS AND MAGAZINES. Photographs of her covered the expanse of one wall. Every square inch, all these images he never showed me. She was a little girl in ruffles, a teenager in ripped jeans, a young woman in bathing suits and wet suits, a young mother holding a baby—holding me.

  The sirens stopped. There was a pounding at the door.

  “Police!” they yelled.

  In every picture, my mother was a stranger. I didn’t know where Gramps was, but I knew I could never see him again. Never.

  There must have been a crash as the front door burst open.

  There must have been footsteps, coming toward me.

  They must have been calling for anyone who was home.

  But nobody hurried me as I took it all in. Nobody said anything as I turned back to the clothing, took the bag marked DRESSES, and unzipped it, just to be sure, and found the deep green fabric. It unfurled like it did that day he held it up for me and didn’t let me touch it.

  I let it drop to the floor. I turned around.

  Two police officers stood watching me.

  “Are you Marin Delaney?”

  I nodded.

  “We got a call saying you needed help.”

  My body was heavy with longing, my heart—for the first time—full of hate.

  They were waiting for me to say something.

  “Take me away from here,” I said.

  “We’ll go over to the station,” one of the cops told me.

  “Sure you don’t want to grab a sweater?” the other one asked.

  I shook my head.

  “Sorry about this,” he said as I climbed into the backseat behind a metal grate. “It’s a quick ride.”

 
They sat me in a chair in an office. They brought me a glass of water and then another. They left me alone and then came back.

  “Was he acting erratic?” one of them asked.

  I didn’t know. He was acting like Gramps.

  They waited.

  “What does it mean to act erratic?”

  “I’m sorry, honey. Do you need a minute? We just need all the information on record.”

  “Let’s just move on to the next question,” the other one said. “Do you know if your grandfather has a history of mental illness?”

  I laughed. “You saw that room.”

  “Any other indications?”

  “He thought his friends were poisoning his whiskey,” I said. “So there’s that.”

  I couldn’t bring myself to talk about the letters. They were there if they wanted to see them.

  “What makes you believe that your grandfather may be missing?”

  What did it mean, to be missing? What did it mean, to believe? All I knew was green fabric, unfurling. Eggs, untouched. Secret rooms and photographs. Tea and coffee and cigarettes. A made bed. A pair of slippers. Silence. The thousands of secrets he kept from me.

  “I think he had cancer,” I said. “There was blood on the handkerchiefs.”

  “Cancer,” one of them said, and wrote it down.

  I looked at his notepad. Everything I told them was there, as though my answers really meant something, as though they would reveal the truth.

  “Blood on handkerchiefs,” I said. “Will you write that, too?”

  “Sure, honey,” he said, and wrote the words down neatly.

  “We have a couple witnesses who saw an old man going into the water at Ocean Beach,” the other said, and I already knew it, I guess. How easily the ocean must have swept him away. I already knew it but I felt my body go rigid, as though I were the dead one. “We have a search team out there now trying to find him. But if he’s the one they saw, he’s been missing for more than eight hours.”

  “Eight hours? What time is it?”

  The office’s only window was into the hallway. Outside, it must have been daylight.

  “There are a couple people in the lobby waiting for you. Mr. and Mrs. Valenzuela.”

  I thought of Gramps being swallowed by the water. It would have been so cold. No wet suit. Just his thin T-shirt, his bare arms. His thin skin, all his scratches and bruises.

  “I’m really tired,” I said.

  “I’m sure they could drive you home.”

  I never wanted to see him again. I never would. And yet—how would I step foot inside our house without him? The loss snuck up on me, black and cavernous.

  I thought of Ana and Javier, and how kindly they would look at me, and the things they might say, and how I would have to tell them what I’d discovered and how I knew that I couldn’t.

  My voice was thick. “I think I’ll take a cab.”

  “They seem concerned about you. They’ve been waiting for a long time.”

  He must have been freezing.

  I thought of his tears.

  “We’ll get a cab for you, honey. If you’re sure that’s what you want.”

  chapter twenty

  “I’M HAVING TROUBLE UNDERSTANDING,” Mabel says. “Birdie was your mother?”

  “Birdie was my mother. And all of the things that she sent him were things he already owned. And all of the letters she wrote him were things he wrote to himself. You write a letter, you get a letter.”

  “Wouldn’t you have known if it was his handwriting?”

  “I never saw the envelopes,” I say. “I didn’t even have a key to the mailbox.”

  “Okay,” Mabel says. “Okay.”

  “He had all of it. He had pictures of me and pictures of her. He had a fucking museum back there and he never showed me any of it. I could have known her. None of what we had was real. He wasn’t real.”

  She’s forgotten to rub my hands; she’s just squeezing them.

  “But it was just grief, right? He was real. He was just, I don’t know, brokenhearted.”

  Was he? I thought he never lied to me. I thought I knew who he was, but he was a stranger all along, and how do I mourn a stranger? And if the person I loved wasn’t even a person, then how can he be dead? This is what happens when I let myself think too much. I squeeze shut my eyes. I want darkness, stillness, but light cuts in.

  “Is he dead?” I ask her. My voice is a whisper, the smallest version of itself. This is the thing I’m most afraid to say. The craziest thing, the thing that makes me too much like him. “I don’t know if he’s dead.”

  “Hey,” she says. “Look at me.”

  “They said he drowned. But they didn’t find him. They never found him. Do bodies disappear that way? Really?”

  “Look at me,” Mabel says, but I can’t. “Look at me,” she says again.

  I’m looking at the seams of my jeans. I’m looking at the threads in the rug. I’m looking at my shaking hands that I’ve snatched back from hers, and I’m sure I must be losing my mind. Like Gramps, like poor Mr. Rochester’s locked-up wife, like the howling woman in the motel room next to mine.

  “Marin, he died,” Mabel says. “Everyone knows that. We knew he was lost in the ocean. It was in the newspaper. We just didn’t know how it happened.”

  “But how do we really know?”

  “We just do,” she says. “We just know.”

  We just know. We just know.

  “But does it really happen like that?”

  “Yes,” she says.

  “But waves,” I say. “The tide,” I say.

  “Yes. And currents that pull things under and send them far out. And rocks to get snagged on, and predators.”

  “But are you sure?”

  “I’m sure.”

  “Those people who thought they saw him, they could have seen someone else.”

  She doesn’t answer me.

  “It was dark,” I say.

  She’s quiet.

  “Marin,” she says.

  “It was really dark. You know how dark it is out there.”

  chapter twenty-one

  AUGUST

  YOU GO THROUGH LIFE thinking there’s so much you need. Your favorite jeans and sweater. The jacket with the faux-fur lining to keep you warm. Your phone and your music and your favorite books. Mascara. Irish Breakfast tea and cappuccinos from Trouble Coffee. You need your yearbooks, every stiffly posed school-dance photo, the notes your friends slipped into your locker. You need the camera you got for your sixteenth birthday and the flowers you dried. You need your notebooks full of the things you learned and don’t want to forget. You need your bedspread, white with black diamonds. You need your pillow—it fits the way you sleep. You need magazines promising self-improvement. You need your running shoes and your sandals and your boots. Your grade report from the semester you got straight As. Your prom dress, your shiny earrings, your pendants on delicate chains. You need your underwear, your light-colored bras and your black ones. The dream catcher hanging above your bed. The dozens and dozens of shells in glass jars.

  The cab was waiting outside the station.

  The airport, I said, but no sound came out.

  “The airport,” I said, and we pulled away.

  You think you need all of it.

  Until you leave with only your phone, your wallet, and a picture of your mother.

  chapter twenty-two

  AUGUST

  I BARELY REMEMBER getting there. I walked up to the ticket counter and said I had a reservation.

  “Do you have a flight number?”

  I shook my head.

  “Spell your name for me?”

  I couldn’t think of a single letter. I wiped my palms on my jeans.

  At the station, the officers said, �
��You sure you don’t know where he is?”

  “I was in bed when he left.”

  “Miss? Will you spell it?”

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I can’t spell my name.”

  “I’m sorry,” I told them. “I made him eggs but he didn’t eat them.”

  “I found a reservation for Marin Delaney. SFO to LGA. But it’s for the twenty-third.”

  “I’m early,” I said.

  “I can see that you’re upset,” they said.

  “Let me see if I can get you on a flight today,” she said. “There will be a fee.”

  I took out the ATM card.

  The heat—it swallowed me up when I arrived in New York. All my life, hot days came with cooler breezes, but even with the sun setting, the air was thick and relentless.

  I boarded a bus from the airport. I didn’t know which direction I was going in, but it didn’t really matter. I watched out the window until I saw a motel sign lighting up the dark. HOME AWAY FROM HOME, it said. I rang the bell to get off at the next stop. The moment I stepped into the lobby, I knew it was no place to be. I should have left, but I crossed the room anyway.

  “You over eighteen?” the man behind the counter asked me.

  “Yes,” I said.

  He looked at me. “I’m gonna need ID.”

  I handed him my driver’s license.

  “How long you staying?”

  “I’ll check out on the twenty-third.”

  He ran my card, nodded, handed me a key.

  I climbed the stairs and walked down a corridor to find room 217. I startled at the room before mine—a man stood in its window, staring.