Nina LaCour - We Are Okay

So I pause the movie and I stand up and go out in the hall. I take off my slippers and feel the carpet under my feet. I stare down the long, empty hallway, and then I’m running. I run until I’m at the very end, and then I run back, and I need something more, so this time, I open my mouth and my lungs and I yell as I run. I fill this designated historical building with my voice. And then I push open the door to the stairway and in here my voice echoes. I run to the top, not to take in the view but to feel myself moving, and I run and I yell and I run, until I’ve gone up and down each hallway of each floor. Until I’m panting and sweaty and satiated in some small but vital way.

I go back into my room and collapse on my bed. The sky is changing, becoming darker. I’m going to lie here, in this silent place, and stare out the window until the night turns black. I’ll witness each color in the sky.

And I do. I feel peaceful.

But it’s only five thirty, and there are ten more days until I can call Claudia, twenty-three more days until everyone comes back here.

I was okay just a moment ago. I will learn how to be okay again.

I turn the movie back on and watch until the end, and the credits roll and stop and the screen changes. There’s a list of documentaries I might like. I hover over them to see what they’re about, but I don’t care enough to click on one. I lie back instead. I look at the dark ceiling and think about the door shutting between Mabel and me. She waved good-bye to me from inside the cab. Her boots were dry by then—we’d set them right next to the radiator and left them there all night—but they were blotchy and warped. I wonder if she’ll put them in the trash when she gets home.

She should be arriving home around now. I get up to reach for my phone. If she texts me, I want to get her message right as it comes in. I want my reply to reach her right away. I lie back down with my phone next to me. I close my eyes and wait.

And then I hear something. A car. I open my eyes—light sweeps across the ceiling.

It must be Tommy, checking on me or the building. I flip on my light and step to the window to wave.

But it isn’t a truck—it’s a taxi—and it’s stopping right here, in the circle in front of the entrance, and its doors are opening. All of its doors, all at once.

And I don’t care that it’s snowing; I throw open my window because there they are.

Mabel and Ana and Javier and the cab driver, opening the trunk.

“ You’re here? ” I yell.

They look up and call hello. Ana blows me kiss after kiss. I race out of my room and down the stairs. I pause at the landing and look out the window because in the seconds that have passed I’m sure I must be imagining this. Mabel left for the airport this morning. She should be in San Francisco now. But they are still here, Mabel and Ana with suitcases next to their feet and bags slung over their shoulders, Javier and the driver wrestling a giant cardboard box from the trunk. I’m back in the stairwell going down, down, skipping steps. I might be flying. And then I’m in the lobby and they’re approaching. The car is leaving, but they are still here.

“Are you mad?” Mabel asks. But I’m crying too hard to answer. And I’m too full of happiness to be embarrassed that I made them do this.

“ Feliz Navidad! ” Javier says, leaning the box against the wall, opening his arms wide to embrace me, but Ana reaches me first, her strong arms pulling me close, and then they are all around me, all of them, arms everywhere, kisses covering my head and my cheeks, and I’m saying thank you, over and over, saying it so many times that I can’t make myself stop until it’s just Javier’s arms left around me and he’s whispering shhh in my ear, rubbing my back with his warm hand, saying, “Shhh, mi cariño , we are here now. We are here.”

ONCE WE’RE UPSTAIRS,we disperse, get to work. Mabel leads them to the kitchen, and I follow behind, exhausted but surrounded by light.

“The pots and pans are here,” she says. “And here are the utensils.”

“Baking trays?” Ana asks.

“I’ll look,” Mabel says.

But I remember where they are. I open the drawer under the oven.

“Here,” I say.

“We need a blender for the mole,” Javier says.

“I packed the immersion blender in my suitcase,” Ana tells him.

He sweeps her into his arms and kisses her.

“Girls,” Ana says, still in his embrace. “Will you set up the tree? We’ll finish our grocery list and get the prep started. We have about an hour before the cab comes back.”

“I found us a restaurant,” Javier tells me. “A special Christmas Eve menu.”

“What tree?” I ask.

Mabel points to the box.

We carry it into the elevator together and ride up to the rec room. We’ll eat our Christmas dinner in there at the table, sit on the couches, and look at the tree.

“We can sleep in here,” I say. “And give your parents my room.”

“Perfect,” she says.

We find a place for the tree by the window and open the box.

“Where did you get this?” I ask her, thinking of the tall pines they’ve always gotten and covered with hand-painted ornaments.

“It’s our neighbor’s,” Mabel says. “On loan.”

The tree comes in pieces. We stand up its middle section and then stick on the branches, longer pieces at the bottom and shorter as we build up, tier by tier. All white tinsel, all covered in lights.

“Moment of truth,” Mabel says, and plugs it in. Hundreds of tiny bulbs glow bright. “It’s actually really pretty.”

I nod. I step back.

He would carry the boxes so carefully out to the living room. Open their lids to tissue-paper-wrapped ornaments. Apple cider and sugar cookies. A pair of tiny angels, dangling between his finger and thumb as he searched for the right branch. Something catches in my chest. Breathing hurts.

“ Jesus Christ, ” I whisper. “ Now, that’s a tree .”

The restaurant is an Italian place, white tablecloths and servers in black ties. We are surrounded by families and laughter.

Ana chooses the wine, and the waiter comes back with the bottle.

“How many will be enjoying the Cabernet this evening?”

“All of us,” Javier says, sweeping his arm across the table as though the four of us were a village, a country, the entire world.

“Wonderful,” the waiter says, as though drinking laws don’t exist during the holidays, or perhaps have never existed at all.

He pours wine into all of our glasses, and we order soups and salads and four different pastas, and no dish is spectacular but everything is good enough. Ana and Javier lead the conversation, full of gentle teasing of Mabel and one another, full of anecdotes and exuberance, and afterward we have a cab take us to Stop & Shop and wait as we race through the aisles, grabbing everything on the list. Javier curses the selection of cinnamon, saying they don’t have the real stuff; and Ana drops a carton of eggs and they break with a tremendous thwack on the floor, yellow oozing out; but apart from that, we get everything they are looking for and ride, smushed in the cab with our groceries and the heat blasting, back to the dorm.

“Is there anything we can do to help?” I ask after we have gotten the bags of groceries unpacked in the kitchen.

“No,” Javier says. “I have it under control.”

“My dad is the boss tonight. My mom is the sous chef. Our job is to stay out of their way.”