Nina LaCour - We Are Okay

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.”

“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.