We Are Okay

In the groundskeeper’s home, Marin and Mabel lie silently on the fold-out couch. Marin remembers a party shortly after her high school graduation, an event at which everyone seemed beautiful and connected and present in the firelight. She recalls Mabel holding her hand and her decision not to kiss Mabel; she wonders if things would have been different if she had, if the public knowledge of their relationship would have been enough to tie them together after Gramps’s death. She struggles to reconnect with the Marin of that moment, thinking that they were all innocent of the painful surprises they’d all experience as they got older.

Mabel cannot sleep, so she asks Marin about the time right after she arrived in New York. She thinks Marin moved into the dorms early and met new friends. Marin tells Mabel of the dirty motel she stayed in and the woman in the room next to her who would howl like a wolf for hours. She notices that this information changes the way Mabel feels about Marin’s disappearance.

Mabel asks about Birdie; she wonders if anyone told her that Gramps had died. Marin says, “There was no Birdie,” and hopes Mabel will ask more (132).