She shakes her head. “It’s not like that. I just—it would make me feel better. It would make you feel better, too.”
“I don’t need to be with somebody in order for it to be okay that you have a boyfriend. It’s okay already.”
“Marin. I’m just asking you to think about it. I’m not saying you have to make some huge decision or fall in love or do anything that complicates your life.”
“I’m fine as I am.”
But she isn’t backing down.
“Come on,” she says. “Think.”
This is a New York college—it isn’t Catholic school—and so many of the girls here wear little rainbow bracelets or pink triangle pins, so many of them talk casually about their ex-girlfriends or call the chair of the women’s studies program hot. I’ve never joined in, but it’s only because I don’t talk about the things I left behind. But I’ve noticed, I guess, even though I’ve tried to close myself off. I’ve noticed a couple girls in spite of myself.
“You’re thinking about someone,” Mabel says.
“Not really.”
“Tell me,” she says.
I can see how much she wants this, but I don’t want to do it. Even if there was someone, how could I keep telling myself that I’m fine with so little, that all I need is Hannah’s friendship and the pool and scientific facts and my yellow bowls and a borrowed pair of winter boots, if I spoke a girl’s name aloud? She’d become something I wished for.
“Is she pretty?”
It’s too much coming from her mouth and the look in her eyes is too earnest and I’m too overwhelmed to answer. I guess she needs this—for us to move on—but it feels like another loss. To think a new girl is pretty, and not in a way that lots of people in the world are pretty, but pretty in a way that might mean something to me. To look into Mabel’s dark eyes, try not to stare at her pink mouth or her long hair, and say that. To think that a girl who is practically a stranger could be the next person I love. To think she might take Mabel’s place.
But I think about Mabel’s warmth on the pullout sofa. I think about her body against mine and I know that a lot of what I felt that night was about her, but that some of it wasn’t. Maybe I am already hoping for that feeling again, with someone new. Maybe I just didn’t know it.
Something in me is cracking open, the light coming through is so bright it hurts, and the rest of me is still here, wounded, even though I know it’s all for the best.
“That night at the beach,” Mabel says. “And the days after, until school ended and all through the summer . . .”
“Yeah?”
“I thought I’d never love another person.”
“I thought that, too.”
“I guess we should have known better.”
“I don’t know about that,” I say.
I close my eyes. Here we are on Ocean Beach. Here’s the whiskey bottle in the sand and the sound of waves crashing and the cold wind and the darkness and Mabel’s smile against my collarbone. Here we are in that spectacular summer. We are different people now, yes, but those girls were magic.
“I’m glad we didn’t know better,” I say.
“I guess you’re right. It would have been simpler, but you know . . .”
Our eyes meet. We smile.
“Should we watch a movie or something?”
“Yes,” I say.
We take a last look out of the window at the night, and I send a silent wish to everyone out there for this kind of warmth. Then we are in the elevator. The mahogany walls, the chandelier. The doors shut us in and we begin the descent. And when they open again we are in the rec room, standing before a tinsel tree, glowing and white. It’s nothing like Gramps’s firs, but it’s perfect in its own way.
“Whoever she is, maybe I’ll meet her someday,” Mabel says.
“Maybe someday.”
I say it with so much uncertainty, but who knows, I guess. Someday is an open word. It could mean tomorrow or it could be decades away. If someone had told me while I was huddled under the motel blankets that Mabel and I would be together again someday, that I would tell her the story of what happened someday and feel a little better, a little less afraid, I wouldn’t have believed it. And it’s only been four months since then, which is not long to wait for someday.
I don’t say that maybe I’ll meet Jacob, even though I know that I should. It’s more likely and more imminent. But I can’t say it yet.
“Look.” Mabel’s in front of the TV, sorting through the movie choices. “It’s Jane Eyre. Have you seen this one?”
I shake my head. I’ve only seen the black-and-white version.
“What do you think? In honor of our night without electricity?” I hesitate, and she says, “Or we can go with something lighter.”
But why not? The story’s been on my mind, and I know it so well already. There will be no surprises, so I say yes.