It was almost two a.m. by the time we said good night. I smiled into my pillow, closed my eyes, wished for the feeling to last. I saw our futures unfolding, all pink clouds and cacti and bright sun and forever.
And then I got up and went to the kitchen for water. I filled the glass and gulped it down, then headed toward the bathroom. The door to Gramps’s room was ajar. Light was shining through the narrow space. I walked softly past it and then I heard something rustle and turned back. Gramps was at his desk, his brass lamp burning, his pen moving furiously across his paper. I was quiet, but I could tell—I could have called his name and he wouldn’t have looked up. I could have banged the pots and pans together.
He was writing his love letters, I told myself, but it didn’t look like love.
He finished a page and cast it aside, started a next one. He was hunched forward and furious. I turned toward the bathroom and locked the door behind me.
He was only writing love letters, I thought.
Only love letters. Love letters.
chapter thirteen
IN THE STILLNESS of this unfamiliar living room, another memory surfaces.
A couple nights after graduation, we all met on Ocean Beach. Everyone was acting wild, like it was the end of everything. Like we’d never see one another again, and maybe, in some cases, that was true.
I found Mabel and joined her on a blanket just in time to hear the punch line of a joke I already knew. I smiled while everybody laughed, and she looked so beautiful in the bonfire glow.
We all looked so beautiful.
I could say the night felt magical, but that would be embellishment. That would be romanticization. What it actually felt like was life. We weren’t thinking of what would happen next. No one talked about the way the summer was supposed to unfold or the places we’d find ourselves in the fall. It was as if we had made a pact to be in the moment, or like being in the moment was the only way to be. Telling jokes, telling secrets. Ben had his guitar and for a while he played and we just listened as the fire sparked and the waves crashed and subsided. I felt something on my hand. Mabel’s finger, tracing my knuckles. She slipped her thumb under my palm. I could have kissed her, but I didn’t.
Now, her hand on mine after so long apart, here in Tommy’s house and nowhere close to sleep, I wonder what might have changed if I had. If one of us had made the fact of us common knowledge, we would have become something to be discussed and decided upon. Maybe there would have been no Jacob. Maybe her photograph would be on my bulletin board. Maybe we wouldn’t be here now, and I would be in California in her parents’ orange-walled living room, sipping hot chocolate by the Christmas tree.
But probably not. Because even though it was only a couple months later that Gramps left me, when I tried to call back that night it no longer felt like life.
When I think of all of us then, I see how we were in danger. Not because of the drinking or the sex or the hour of the night. But because we were so innocent and we didn’t even know it. There’s no way of getting it back. The confidence. The easy laughter. The sensation of having left home only for a little while. Of having a home to return to.
We were innocent enough to think that our lives were what we thought they were, that if we pieced all of the facts about ourselves together they’d form an image that made sense—that looked like us when we looked in the mirror, that looked like our living rooms and our kitchens and the people who raised us—instead of revealing all the things we didn’t know.
Mabel lets go of my hand and kicks back the covers. She sits up, so I do the same.
“I guess I’m not ready to fall asleep yet,” she says.
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.”