We Are Okay

Marin sits alone in her dorm room and watches the snow outside. She thinks about missing the ocean and California. She wonders what Jones kept from her grandfather’s house. She tries to visualize a future home of her own and struggles to see if it will contain some of these items. She finds a documentary about an old woman potter and thinks about how much she wants the owner of the pottery shop to call her for a job.

Restless, she runs up and down the hallways, yelling to fill the space. She feels better after doing so, but realizes it’s only 5:30 at night, with 10 days remaining until she can call about the job and 23 more days until people will return to campus. She lies in bed and thinks about Mabel’s departure. Enough time has passed that Mabel should be arriving home soon; Marin makes sure to keep her phone close so that she can reply immediately when Mabel texts to say she’s home. She hears a car outside and figures it’s the groundskeeper checking on her. Instead, it’s a taxi; Mabel, Ana, and Javier climb out of the taxi and unload suitcases and packages from the trunk.

Marin runs to meet them, crying, “too full of happiness to be embarrassed that [she] made them do this” (218). They all embrace, Ana and Javier kissing and soothing Marin while she cries and thanks them repeatedly.

Marin leads Ana, Javier, and Mabel upstairs. Ana and Javier investigate the kitchen and assemble supplies to cook Christmas dinner the next day. Mabel and Marin set up the artificial Christmas tree they’ve brought with them. For dinner, Javier and Ana take the girls to an Italian restaurant with a special Christmas Eve dinner menu and wine. After dinner, they go to a grocery store so that Ana and Javier buy groceries for the next day.

Marin asks Mabel when they decided to come to New York. Mabel says their only plan had been for Marin to come back to California, but once they figured out that she’d refuse, they decided to come to New York instead. Mabel says her parents wanted her to tell Marin, but she feared that Marin would say yes and return before she was ready to.

Mabel asks if there’s anyone at school whom Marin is romantically interested in. She says no and that she doesn’t need to be dating someone for her to be okay with Mabel having a boyfriend. Mabel pushes, and Marin thinks about the number of out lesbians and bisexual women on campus. She thinks of a few who she’s noticed but reflects to herself that actually thinking about the attraction or acknowledging it would add the burden of wanting to the pain she already feels. She thinks about her relationship with Mabel and the feeling of sleeping next to another person and realizes some bright new emotion is coming through the cracks of her grief.

They reflect on their night on the beach and how impossible it felt then that they could ever love another person. They find the movie Jane Eyre on TV and watch it. Marin thinks about Gramps at Christmas and how he’d gone through the motions of being a healed, stable person for her. She thinks maybe she can find comfort even in a place of not knowing the truth about her grandfather.

Ana and Javier come into the lounge with Christmas gifts and watch the end of the movie. Javier asks Mabel to come with him for a moment, and Marin finds herself alone with Ana. Ana says that, from the first night she’d met Marin, she’d wanted to be her mother. She understands the complex emotions Marin has been feeling since learning her grandfather’s secrets: “tragedy,” “heartbreak,” and “betrayal” (231). She still wants to be Marin’s mother and they have been waiting for a time to tell her that they want her to be a part of their family. Ana holds Marin while she cries, lovingly, urging her to say yes to joining them. Marin says yes.

The chapter ends with a memory Marin has of being held by her mother as a toddler. The whole world—all of the good and bad—were already out there, but she was shielded from the truth of it by her mother’s embrace.