He wore a gold chain around his neck on special occasions. I wonder if Jones bought it back for me.
I dry off and wrap myself in a towel. When I get back to my room, I look at my phone. It’s only two o’clock.
I take a cue from the list I made on my first night here alone and make soup. I chop vegetables and boil pasta, pour a carton of chicken stock into a pot.
Once I’ve combined all the ingredients and it’s time to wait while they cook, I turn to the second essay in the solitude book, but my mind is too full of different versions of the last summer’s story. There’s one where I fail him. Where I stop coming home so he stops making dinner, and I’m not around to see how much he needs me. And then there’s one where he fails me. Where I feel it—that he doesn’t want me there, that I’m in the way. So I stay away, for him and for me. So that I never face his rejection. So that I get to pretend I’m the most important thing to him, the way he is to me. Because if we have any sense of self-preservation, we do the best with what we’re given.
I was given cakes and cookies and rides to school. I was given songs and dinners at a table with brass candlesticks. I was given a man with a sensitive heart and a devious sense of humor and enough skill at cards to win me a year of private college—tuition and room and board—and I took all of those good things and told myself they made us special. Told myself they meant we were a family the way Mabel and Ana and Javier were, told myself that we weren’t missing anything.
We were masters of collusion, Gramps and I. In that, at least, we were together.
When yearbooks came out, I didn’t flip straight to the back like everyone else to find the seniors’ pages. Instead I started at the front. I looked through each page of freshman girls. I didn’t even know them but I took my time, as though they were my friends. I studied the club pages, the sophomores, the sports teams. The juniors and the dances, the teachers and the theme days. Then the first senior page was upon me, and I read every quote, stared hard at the baby pictures of all of these girls. So many bows on bald heads, so many tiny dresses and tiny hands, so many pages to linger on before I got to mine.
As soon as I turned the page I saw myself.
Instead of leaving a blank space where my baby picture was meant to be, the editors made my senior portrait big enough to take up both spaces. All around me were my classmates as babies and then as their current selves; and then there I was, as though I had entered the world at eighteen in a black sleeveless blouse and a stiff smile. I thought I couldn’t be the only one, but I got to the end, and I was. Even Jodi Price, adopted at eight, had a baby picture. Even Fen Xu, whose house had burned down the year before.
Those days and nights at the motel, I thought I was afraid of his ghost, but I wasn’t.
I was afraid of my loneliness.
And how I’d been tricked.
And the way I’d convinced myself of so much: that I wasn’t sad, that I wasn’t alone.
I was afraid of the man who I’d loved, and how he had been a stranger.
I was afraid of how I hated him.
How I wanted him back.
Of what was in those boxes and what I might someday discover and the chance I may have lost by leaving them behind.
I was afraid of the way we’d lived without opening doors.
I was afraid we had never been at home with each other.
I was afraid of the lies I’d told myself.
The lies he’d told me.
I was afraid that our legs under the table had meant nothing.
The folding of laundry had meant nothing.
The tea and the cakes and the songs—all of it—had meant nothing.
chapter twenty-seven
I AM AFRAID he never loved me.
chapter twenty-eight
THE WINTER SKY is bright gray and sharp. I see a bird come and go outside the window, a thin branch snap and drop.
I should have gone with her.
chapter twenty-nine
I’M SITTING ON TOP OF MY BED, leaning against the wall, watching the snow fall again. I want the thunder of ocean, a day that’s cold but dry, the feeling that comes with heavy clouds in the distance. Relief from the drought. The novelty of being homebound. Wood in the fireplace, heat and light.
I didn’t ask Jones what he meant when he said he kept the real stuff. If he meant my shells. Or the blue-and-gold blanket. Or the kitchen table with its collapsible leaves and the chairs that go with it. I try to imagine a future apartment. My own kitchen with decorations on the wall. Shelves with my collection of Claudia’s pottery.
I don’t know if I see the table and chairs and the blanket. I don’t know if I want to.