In New York. In my room.
Outside, the snow covers the ground and the benches, the hood of the groundskeeper’s truck, and the trees. Lights on the pathways glow even though nobody’s here. It looks even emptier this way. So much light and only stillness.
“Over there.” I point across the night to the furthermost building, barely lit up.
“And where’s your lit class?”
“Right here.” I point to the building next to us.
“What else are you taking?”
I show her the gym where I swim laps every morning and try, unsuccessfully, to master the butterfly stroke. I swim late at night, too, but I don’t tell her that. The pool is always eighty degrees. Diving in feels like plunging into nothing, not the icy shock I’ve known forever. No waves cold enough to numb me or strong enough to pull me under. At night the pool is quiet, and I swim laps and then just float, watching the ceiling or closing my eyes, all the sounds foggy and distant, the lifeguard keeping watch.
It helps me get calm when the panic starts.
But when it’s too late at night and the pool is closed and I can’t stop my thoughts, it’s Hannah who can steady me.
“I just read the most interesting thing,” she’ll say from her bed, her textbook resting in her lap. And then she reads to me about honeybees, about deciduous trees, about evolution.
It takes me a while, usually, to be able to listen. But when I do, I discover the secrets of pollination, that honeybees’ wings beat two hundred times per second. That trees shed their leaves not according to season, but according to rainfall. That before all of us there was something else. Eventually, something will take our place.
I learn that I am a tiny piece of a miraculous world.
I make myself understand, again, that I am in a dorm room at a college. That what happened has happened. It’s over. Doubt pushes in, but I use our twin beds and desks and closets, the four walls around us, the girls who neighbor us on both sides and the ones who neighbor them, the whole building and the campus and the state of New York to fend doubt off.
We are what’s real, I tell myself as I fall asleep.
Then, at six a.m., when the pool opens, I go swimming.
A movement calls me back. Mabel, tucking her hair behind her ear. “Where’s the dining hall?” she asks.
“You can’t see it from this window, but it’s across the courtyard in the back.”
“What’s it like?”
“Decent.”
“I mean the people. The scene.”
“Pretty mellow. I usually sit with Hannah and her friends.”
“Hannah?”
“My roommate. Do you see the building with the pointy roof? Behind those trees?”
She nods.
“That’s where my anthropology class is. It’s probably my favorite.”
“Really? Not lit?”
I nod.
“Because of the professors?”
“No, they’re both good,” I say. “Everything in lit is just too . . . ambiguous, I guess.”
“But that’s what you like. All the differences in interpretation.”
Is that true? I can’t remember.
I shrug.
“But you’re still an English major.”
“No, I’m undeclared now,” I say. “But I’m pretty sure I’m going to switch to Natural Sciences.”
I think I see a flash of annoyance cross her face, but then she smiles at me.
“Bathroom?” she asks.
“Follow me.”
I lead her around the corner, then return to my room.
Three days suddenly feels so long. Unfathomable, all the minutes Mabel and I will need to fill. But then I see her scarf on the bed, her hat next to it. I pick them up. They’re even softer than I remembered and they smell like the rosewater Mabel and her mom spray everywhere. On themselves and in their cars. In all the bright rooms of their house.
I hold on to them and keep holding even when I hear Mabel’s footsteps approach. I breathe in the rose, the earthiness of Mabel’s skin, all the hours we spent in her house.
Three days will never be enough.
“I have to call my parents,” Mabel says from the doorway. I set down her things. If she noticed me holding them, she isn’t going to acknowledge it. “I texted them from the airport, but they’re so nervous about this. They kept giving me tips about driving in the snow. I kept saying, ‘I’m not going to be the one driving.’”
She puts her phone to her ear, but even from across the room I can hear when they answer, both Ana’s voice and Javier’s, exuberant and relieved.
The briefest fantasy: Mabel appears at the doorway, catches sight of me. She sits next to me on the bed, takes the hat, and sets it down. Takes the scarf from my hands and wraps it around my neck. Takes my hands and warms them in hers.
“Yes,” she says, “the plane was fine. . . . I don’t know, it was pretty big. . . . No, they didn’t serve food.”
She looks at me.
“Yes,” she says. “Marin’s right here.”
Will they ask to talk to me?