We Are Okay

by Nina LaCour

It wasn’t the ghosts. It was the hauntings that mattered. The ghosts told the governess that she would never know love. The ghost told Jane Eyre that she was alone.

I wonder if there’s a secret current that connects people who have lost something.

I thought that it was more likely the opposite. I must have shut grief out. Found it in books. Cried over fiction instead of the truth. The truth was unconfined, unadorned. There was no poetic language to it, no yellow butterflies, no epic floods. There wasn’t a town trapped underwater or generations of men with the same name destined to repeat the same mistakes. The truth was vast enough to drown in.

I eat without tasting anything. I eat even though I don’t know if I’m hungry.

All I can hear is the crackle of the fire. She may not have really been crying—I may have imagined it—but I can feel it now, the way I hurt her. Maybe it’s all of this remembering or talking about books and paintings again or being with Mabel, but I can feel the ghost of me creeping back. Remember me? she’s asking.

It was almost two a.m. by the time we said good night. I smiled into my pillow, closed my eyes, wished for the feeling to last.

He shook his head and said, “You’ve always been a smart girl.”

YOU GO THROUGH LIFE thinking there’s so much you need. Your favorite jeans and sweater. The jacket with the faux-fur lining to keep you warm. Your phone and your music and your favorite books. Mascara. Irish Breakfast tea and cappuccinos from Trouble Coffee.

We were masters of collusion, Gramps and I. In that, at least, we were together.

I was afraid of my loneliness.

I was afraid of how I hated him. How I wanted him back.

I AM AFRAID he never loved me.

I should have gone with her.

“Are you mad?” Mabel asks. But I’m crying too hard to answer. And I’m too full of happiness to be embarrassed that I made them do this.

“Jesus Christ,” I whisper. “Now, that’s a tree.”