“Hi,” I said from the doorway.
How many times do you get the chance to do something over again, to do it over right? You only get to make one first impression, unless the person you meet possesses a rare and specific kind of generosity. Not the kind that gives you the benefit of the doubt, not the kind that says, Once I get to know her better she’ll probably be fine, but the kind that says, No. Unacceptable. The kind that says, You can do better. Now show me.
“You must be Marin!” her mom said. “We’ve been dying to meet you!”
“Now tell us,” said her stepdad. “Is it Marin like mariner, or Marin like the county.”
“The county,” I said. “It’s so nice to meet you.”
I shook their hands.
Hannah said, “Nice to meet you, Marin.” We smiled at each other as though the morning had never happened. “I hope you don’t mind that I claimed this side.”
“Not at all.”
“Did your family leave already?” Hannah’s mom asked.
“Actually, they couldn’t make it. I’m getting started with this independence thing a little early.”
Hannah’s stepdad said, “Well, put us to work! We’d love to help.”
“Do you have sheets?” her mom asked, folding Hannah’s bedspread over.
I shook my head no. The bare mattress glared at me. I wondered how many other things I hadn’t planned for.
“My mom packed me way too many sets,” Hannah said.
“Well, good thing!” her mom said.
Soon Hannah’s side of the room looked like she’d already lived there for months and mine was bare except for some red striped sheets, a soft pillow, and a cream-colored blanket.
“Thanks so much,” I told her parents as they left. I tried to sound casually grateful and not how I really felt—as though they had saved my life.
And Hannah kept saving me. She saved me with never asking questions, with instead reading to me about bees and botany and evolution. She saved me with clothes she loaned me and never took back. She saved me with seats next to her in the dining hall, with quick evasions when people asked me questions I couldn’t answer, with chapters read aloud and forced trips off campus and rides to the grocery store and a pair of winter boots.
chapter twenty-six
I TAKE A COUPLE PUSHPINS out of the jar on Hannah’s desk and approach my empty bulletin board. I pin the snowflake chain along the top of it and then text Hannah a picture. She texts back right away, two high fives with a heart between them.
It feels so good. I want to do more. I take my new pot out of its bag and set it on my desk. My peperomia is thriving, each leaf full and luminous. Carefully, I ease its roots out of the plastic cup it came in. I pour the leftover dirt into Claudia’s pot, and then place the roots in the middle, pressing the soil around it. I pour in some leftover water from a cup Mabel was using. I’ll need to get more soil when I can, but it’s enough for now.
I cross the room and turn to look at my desk. Two yellow bowls, a pink pot with a green leafy plant, a strand of paper snowflakes.
It’s pretty, but it needs something more.
I drag my desk chair over to my closet and stand on it so that I can reach the top shelf. I find the only thing up there: the photograph of my mother at twenty-two years old, standing in the sun. I borrow four of Hannah’s silver pushpins and choose the right spot on my bulletin board, just to the right of the snowflakes, and push the pins in against the corners of the photograph so that they hold it up without making any holes. It’s a big photograph, eight by ten probably, and it transforms the corner.
I’m not saying that it doesn’t scare me, to bring it into the light. My mother on Ocean Beach. Her sun-faded peach surfboard leaning under her arm. Her black wet suit and wet hair. Her squinting eyes and her huge smile.
It scares me, yes, but it also feels right.
I stare at her.
I try and I try and I try to remember.
A couple hours later, I take a long shower. I let the water run over me.
When I go back, whenever that will be, I’ll need to find something of Gramps’s to scatter or bury. I couldn’t laugh at Jones’s joke. Instead, it’s echoing the way true things always do when I’ve been trying to deny them. If your gramps had a grave, if your gramps had a grave. Enough time has passed by now that I know Mabel is right. But another version of the story springs up sometimes, one of him with pockets full of a few thousand dollars, gambling winnings he kept for himself, on his way to the Rocky Mountains.
I need to give him a grave in order to contain him. I need to bury something to anchor his ghost. One of these days, in some not-so-far future, I’ll take a trip into Jones’s garage and I’ll search through our old things and I’ll assemble a box of objects instead of ashes and I’ll find him a place to rest.
I rinse the conditioner out of my hair. I turn off the water and breathe in the steam.