Nina LaCour - We Are Okay

Soon. But not yet.

“Don’t disappear again,” she says. “Okay?”

Her hair is soft against my face.

“Promise me.”

“I promise.”

I start to turn, but she reaches back for my arm. She scoots her body closer into mine, until the full lengths of us are touching. With each breath, I feel winter passing.

I close my eyes, and I breathe her in, and I think about this home that belongs to neither of us, and I listen to the fire crackling, and I feel the warmth of the room and of her body, and we are okay.

We are okay.

THREE ORANGES.A bag of wheat bread. A note that reads, Out Christmas shopping. Don’t steal anything—I know where you live! Two mugs in front of a full electric coffeepot.

“Power’s back,” I say, and Mabel nods.

She points to the note. “Funny guy.”

“Yeah. But kind of sweet.”

“Completely.”

I don’t think I’ve ever fallen asleep in a dark place and woken to see it in the light for the first time. Last night I made out the objects but the color was missing. Now I see the windows, that their frames are painted a forest green. If it weren’t completely white outside, the shade of the paint would match the trees. The curtains are patterned with blue and yellow flowers.

“You think Tommy picked these out?” I ask.

“I hope he did,” Mabel says. “But no, I don’t think so.”

“Do you think he killed that deer?”

She turns toward the mantel as though the deer could speak and tell her.

“No. Do you?”

“No,” I say.

Mabel opens up the bag of bread and takes out four slices.

“I guess we can go back when we’re ready,” she says.

I pour us each a cup of coffee. I give her the better mug. I take the seat with the better view because I’ve always cared more about what I’m looking out at than she has.

The kitchen table’s legs are uneven; every time we lean forward it tilts. We drink our coffees black because he has no cream and we eat our toast dry because we can’t find butter or jam. And I look outside most of the time that we sit here, but sometimes I look at Mabel instead. The morning light on her face. The waves in her hair. The way she chews with her mouth the slightest bit open. The way she licks a crumb off her finger.

“What?” she asks, catching me smiling.

“Nothing,” I say, and she smiles back.

I don’t know if I still love her in the way that I used to, but I still find her just as beautiful.

She peels an orange, separates it in perfect halves, and gives one of them to me. If I could wear it like a friendship bracelet, I would. Instead I swallow it section by section and tell myself it means even more this way. To chew and to swallow in silence here with her. To taste the same thing in the same moment.

“I swear,” Mabel says, “I feel like I could eat all day.”

“I bought so much food. Do you think it went bad last night?”

“Doubtful. It’s freezing.”

Before long, we’re washing our breakfast dishes and leaving them on a dish towel to dry. We’re gathering up blankets from last night and setting them on the coffee table, folding the bed back in until it’s only a couch again. We’re standing in the empty space where the bed was, looking out the window at the snow.

“You think we’ll make it back?” Mabel asks.

“I hope so.”

We find a pen and write on the back of Tommy’s note, include lots of thank-yous and exclamation points.

“Ready?” I ask her.

“Ready,” she says.

But I don’t think it’s possible to prepare yourself for cold like this. It steals our breath. It chokes us.

“When we round that corner we’ll see the dorm.” That’s all I can get out—each breath hurts.

Tommy cleared the small road earlier this morning, but it’s slick and icy. We have to concentrate on each step. I watch my feet for so long. When I look up again the dorm is ahead of us in the distance, but to get there we have to step off the road Tommy cleared and into the perfect snow, and when we do we find how much has fallen. Snow is halfway up our calves, and we aren’t wearing the right pants for that. It seeps through. It hurts. Mabel’s shoes are thin leather boots, made for city streets in California. They’ll be drenched by the time we make it to the door, probably ruined.

Maybe we should have waited for Tommy to return and drive us back, but we’re out here now, so we keep going. I don’t know that I’ve ever seen such a clear sky, blue and piercing, sharp in a way I didn’t know the sky could be. Mabel’s lips are purple; shivering doesn’t begin to describe what my body’s doing. Now we’re close, though. The building towers above us, and I feel for the cold keys with fingers so stiff they can hardly bend to grasp them, and somehow I get the key into the lock but we can’t pull open the door. We scoop snow off the ground with our hands, kick it away with our boots, pull at the door until it pushes the rest away in an arc, like one wing of a snow angel, and then we let it shut behind us.

“Shower,” Mabel says in the elevator, and when we reach my floor I run into my room and grab the towels, and we step into separate shower stalls and pull off our clothing, too desperate for warmth to let the moment be awkward.

We stay under the water for so long. My legs and my hands are numb and then they’re burning and then, after a long time, a familiar feeling returns to them.

Mabel finishes first; I hear her water shut off. I give her some time to go back to my room. I’m not sorry to stay under the hot water for a little while longer.

Mabel’s right: The food is still cold. We’re side by side in the rec room, peering into the refrigerator, heat pumping through the vents.

“You bought all of this?” she asks.

“Yes,” I say, but I don’t need to. My name is still on everything.

“I vote chili,” she says.

“There’s corn bread to go with it. And butter and honey.”

“Oh my God , that sounds good.”

We open and shut all the drawers and cabinets until we’ve found a pot for the chili, a grater for the cheese, a baking pan for the corn bread, and plates and silverware.

As I’m pouring the chili into the pot, Mabel says, “I have some news. Good news. I’ve been waiting for the right moment.”

“Tell me.”

“Carlos is having a baby.”

“ What? ”

“Griselda’s five months pregnant.”

I shake my head in wonder. Her brother, Carlos, was away at college before the time Mabel and I became friends, so I’ve only met him a few times but . . . “You’re going to be an aunt,” I say.

“ Tía Mabel,” she says.

“Amazing.”

“Right?”

“Yeah.”

“They made us do this video conference call, my parents in the city, me at school, them in Uruguay—”

“Is that where they’re living now?”

“Yeah, until Griselda finishes her doctorate. I was annoyed, it took forever to get the call to work, and then when they finally showed up on my screen all I saw was her little belly. I started bawling. My parents were both bawling. It was awesome. And it came at a perfect time, because they were all emotional about clearing Carlos’s stuff out of his room. Not that they didn’t want to. They were just, like, Our son is all grown up and he’ll never be our little boy again! And then they were, like, Grandchild! ”

“They’ll be the best grandparents.”