Nina LaCour - We Are Okay

It’s so warm now that I’m glad to have the covers off. We sit on the bed and lean against the cushioned back of the sofa. We’re watching the firelight flicker across the room, and Mabel is pulling her hair back, twisting it in circles and then letting it go, and I feel like the night might last forever and I would be okay with that.

“Where did you stay when you got here? I mean before the dorms. It’s something I’ve been wondering.”

I didn’t expect this, but I want to give her the answer. I take a long look at the ceiling and I nod in case she’s watching me. I need a moment to steady my heart so I can speak. By the time I look back she’s shifted. Her head is resting on her hand and she’s watching me with a look I don’t know if I’ve ever seen on her before. She’s so still and so patient.

“I found a motel.”

“Close by?”

“Sort of. I think it was like twenty minutes away. I got on a bus from the airport and I rode the line until I saw a place out the window.”

“What was it like?”

“Not nice.”

“Why did you stay?”

“I guess it never occurred to me that I could leave.”

I think about walking into the room, the way it smelled—worse than stale, worse than unclean. I thought I might be able to exist there without touching anything, but then hours passed and it turned out I was wrong.

“It was a hotel where people live when they don’t have anywhere else to go,” I tell Mabel. “Not a place where people stay on vacation.” I pull the blanket over me, even though I’m not cold. “It scared me. But I was already scared.”

“That’s not what I pictured.”

“What did you think?”

“I thought maybe you got to move into the dorms early or something. Did you meet people?”

“At the motel?”

She nods.

“I wouldn’t say that I met people. I had a lot of neighbors. Some of them became familiar.”

“I mean did you hang out with them?”

“No.”

“I thought you must have met people.”

I shake my head.

“I thought they were helping you through everything.”

“No,” I say. “I was alone there.”

In her face something is shifting. A set of facts to replace all the guessing I made her do. I want to give her more.

“There was a woman next door to me who howled,” I say. “At cars that went by, at people who passed. After I checked into my room she howled for a few straight hours.”

“What was wrong with her?”

“I don’t know. She sounded like a wolf. I kept wondering then—I’m still wondering now—if there was a time when she realized that something was going wrong. Inside her, I mean. When she could feel herself slipping away, something new creeping in. If she could have stopped it, or if it just . . . happened . It made me think about Jane Eyre . Remember?”

“The crazy woman. Mr. Rochester’s first wife.”

“I felt like Jane when she sees her in the mirror. I was afraid. I’d listen to her at night and sometimes I felt like I understood what she was trying to say. I was afraid I’d turn into her.”

The fact of her was scary enough, but the fact of me, in an identical room, just as alone as she was, that was the worst part. There was only a wall between us, and it was so thin it was almost nothing. Jane, too, was once locked up in a room with a ghost. It was terrifying, the idea that we could fall asleep girls, minty breathed and nightgowned, and wake to find ourselves wolves.

“I can see why you don’t want to read much right now.”

I nod. “Before, they were just stories. But now, they keep swarming back, and all of them feel more terrible.”

She looks away and I wonder if it’s because I’m telling her things she can’t relate to. Maybe she thinks I’m being dramatic. Maybe I am. But I know that there’s a difference between how I used to understand things and how I do now. I used to cry over a story and then close the book, and it all would be over. Now everything resonates, sticks like a splinter, festers.

“You were alone,” she says. “For all those days.”

“Does that change anything?”

She shrugs.

“You thought I met new people and didn’t need you?”

“It was the only explanation I could think of.”

I will tell her anything as long as she keeps asking questions. It’s the darkness and the warmth. The feeling of being in someone else’s home, in neutral territory, nothing mine and nothing hers, no clues about each other in the blankets or the firewood or the photographs on the mantel.

It makes my life feel far away, even though I’m right here.

“What else do you want to know?” I ask her.

“I’ve been wondering about Birdie.”

She shifts, and the springs pop and settle. My hands lie heavy in my lap. Her face is still watchful and willing. I can still breathe.

“Okay,” I say. “What about Birdie?”

“Does she know what happened? No one was there to check the mail and find her letters. By now, they’d all be sent back, and I keep wondering if anyone told her that he died.”

“There was no Birdie,” I say.

Confusion flashes across her face.

I wait for the next question.

“But, the letters . . .”

Ask me.

“I guess . . . ,” she says. “I guess it was too sweet of a story. All of those love letters to someone he never even met. I guess . . . ,” she says again. “He must have been really lonely to make something like that up.”

She won’t meet my eyes. She doesn’t want me to tell her anything more, at least not right now. I know what it’s like to not want to understand, so we’re quiet while her last sentence spins and spins in my head. And I think, I was lonely . I was. Touching knees under the table wasn’t enough. Love-seat lectures were not enough. Sugary things, cups of coffee, rides to school were not enough.

An ache expands in my chest.

“He didn’t need to be lonely.”

Mabel’s brow furrows.

“I was there. He had me, but he wrote letters instead.”

She finally looks at me again.

“ I was lonely,” I say.

And then I say it again, because I told myself lies for so long, and now my body is still and my breath is steady and I feel alive with the truth.

Before I know what’s happening, Mabel is pulling me close. I think I remember what this feels like. I try not to think of the last time we held each other, which was the last time I was held by anybody. Her arms are around me so tight that I can’t even hug her back, so I rest my head on her shoulder and I try to stay still so that she won’t let go.

“ Let’s sleep ,” she whispers into my ear, and I nod, and we break apart and lie down again.

I face away from her for a long time so that she won’t see my sadness. To be held like that, to be let go. But then the ghost of me starts whispering again. She’s reminding me of how cold I’ve been. How I’ve been freezing. She’s saying that Mabel’s warm and that she loves me. Maybe a love that’s different than it used to be, but love all the same. The ghost of me is saying, Three thousand miles. That’s how much she cares. She’s telling me it’s okay.

So I turn over and find Mabel closer to me than I’d realized. I wait a minute there to see if she’ll move away, but she doesn’t. I wrap my arm around her waist, and she relaxes into me. My head nestles in the curve behind her neck; my knees pull up to fit the space behind hers.

She might be asleep. I’ll only stay here for a couple of minutes. Only until I thaw completely. Until it’s enough to remind me what it feels like to be close to another person, enough to last me for another span of months. I breathe her in. Tell myself I need to turn away.