Nina LaCour - We Are Okay

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.

“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.”