“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.”
“They’re already buying stuff for the baby. Everything is gender neutral because it’s going to be a surprise.”
I think of Mabel and her little niece or nephew. About her traveling to Uruguay to meet this new life. And watching a person grow, from inside a round belly, to a baby, to a kid who can tell her things. I think of Ana and Javier, so excited, remembering who they were when Carlos was young.
I almost gasp.
I don’t know if I’ve ever thought this way about the expansiveness of a life. I think about it as it is in the wider world—in nature and time, in centuries and galaxies—but to think of Ana and Javier being young and in love, having their first baby, and watching him grow up, get married, move across the world. Knowing that they’ll soon have another descendant to love. Knowing that they’ll grow older as time passes, they’ll become old the way Gramps was, with gray hair and a tremble in his step, so much love still in their hearts—this astonishes me. I am capsized.