“COME WITH ME,” Mabel says.
Our talk is over. We’re on the floor across from each other, each of us leaning against a bed. I should feel a weight lifted now that I’ve told her everything, but I don’t. Not yet. Maybe in the morning some new feeling will settle.
“I promise, this is the last time I’ll ask. Just come home for a few days.”
If it weren’t for the lies he told me.
If Birdie had been an elderly woman with beautiful penmanship.
If his coats were all that hung in the closet and he’d known his lungs were black and he drank his whiskey without suspicion.
If I could stop dreaming up a deathbed scene where his hospital blankets are crisp over his stomach and his hands are holding mine. Where he says something like, See you on the other side, Sailor. Or, I love you, sweetheart. And a nurse touches my shoulder and tells me it’s over even though I can already see it by the peaceful stillness of him. Take your time, she says, so we just stay there, he and I, until the darkness falls and I am strong enough to leave the room without him.
“How am I supposed to leave you here?” Mabel asks.
“I’m sorry. I will go with you. Someday. But I can’t do it tomorrow.”
She picks at the frayed edges of the rug.
“Mabel.”
She won’t look at me.
Everything is quiet. I’d suggest going somewhere, just out for a walk even, but we’re both confounded by the cold. The moon is framed perfectly in the window, a crescent of white against black, and I can see by its clearness that it isn’t snowing anymore.
“I shouldn’t have only called and texted. I should have flown to you.”
“It’s okay.”
“He seemed sick for so long. Kind of frail or something.”
“I know.”
Her eyes tear over, and she looks out the window.
I wonder if she sees what I do. If she feels the same stillness.
Mabel, I want to say. We don’t have much time left.
Mabel.
There is me and there is you and the snow has finished falling. Let’s just sit here.
Sometime later, we stand side by side at the sinks in the bathroom. We look tired and something else, too. It takes me a minute to identify it. And then I know.
We look young.
Mabel smears toothpaste onto her toothbrush. She hands me the tube.
She doesn’t say Here you go. I don’t say Thank you.
I brush in the circular way you’re supposed to. Mabel brushes back and forth, hard. I watch my reflection and concentrate on giving each tooth enough time.
Standing like this in Mabel’s bathroom back home, we would never have been silent. There were always millions of things to talk about, each topic pressing in so that our conversations rarely began and ended but rather began and were interrupted and continued, strands of thoughts that got pushed aside and picked up later.
If our past selves got a glimpse of us now, what would they make of us?
Our bodies are the same but there’s a heaviness in Mabel’s shoulders, a weariness in the way my hip leans against the counter. A puffiness around her eyes, a darkness under mine. But more than those things, there’s the separateness of us.
I didn’t return Mabel’s nine hundred texts because I knew we’d end up like this no matter what. What happened had broken us even if it wasn’t about us at all. Because I know that for all her care and understanding, when this visit is over and she’s back in LA with Jacob and her new friends, sitting in her lecture halls or riding the Ferris wheel in Santa Monica or eating dinner by herself in front of an open textbook, she’ll be the same as she’s always been—fearless and funny and whole. She’ll still be herself and I’ll be learning who I am now.
She spits into the sink. I spit into the sink. We rinse our brushes, tap-tap, in close succession.
Both faucets run as we splash our faces.
I don’t know what she’s thinking about. I can’t even guess.
We walk back down the hallway, shut off the lights, and climb into opposite twin beds.
My eyes are open in the dark.
“Good night,” I say.
She’s quiet.