On the far side of the footbridge, the path winds into the woods, and I break into an easy jog, the air’s moisture pooling in all my creases. Gradually, the post-dream ache starts to ease.
Sometimes, it feels like no matter how many years pass, when I first wake up, I’m newly orphaned.
Technically, I guess we’re not orphans. When Libby got pregnant the first time, she and Brendan hired a private investigator to find our father. When he did, Libby mailed dear old Dad a baby shower invitation. She never heard back, of course. I don’t know what she expected from a man who couldn’t be bothered to show up to his own kid’s birth.
He left Mom when she was pregnant with Libby, without so much as a note.
Sure, he also left a ten-thousand-dollar check, but to hear Mom tell it, he came from so much money that that was his idea of petty change.
They’d been high school sweethearts. She was a sheltered, homeschooled girl with no money and dreams of moving to New York to become an actress; he was the wealthy prep school boy who impregnated her at seventeen. His parents wanted Mom to terminate the pregnancy; hers wanted them to get married. They compromised by doing neither. When they moved in together, both sets of parents cut them off, but his turned over his inheritance as a parting gift, a sliver of which he’d bequeathed to us on his way out the door.
She used the nest egg to move us from Philly to New York and never looked back.
I push the thoughts away and lose myself in the delicious burn of my muscles, the thudding of my feet against pine-needle-dusted earth. The only two ways I’ve ever managed to get out of my head are through reading and rigorous exercise. With either, I can slip out of my mind and drift in this bodiless dark.
The trail curves down a forested hillside, then turns to follow a split-rail fence, beyond which a pasture stretches out, glowing in the first spears of light, the horses dotting the field backlit, their tails swishing at the gnats and flies that float and glimmer in the air like gold dust.
There’s a man out there too. When he sees me, he lifts a hand in greeting.
I squint against the fierce light, my stomach rising as I place him as the coffee shop Adonis. The small-town leading man.
Do I slow down?
Is he going to come over here?
Should I call out and introduce myself?
Instead I choose a fourth option: I trip over a root and go sprawling in the mud, my hand landing squarely in something that appears to be poop. A lot of it. Like, maybe a whole family of deer has specifically marked this spot as their shit palace.
I clamber onto my feet, gaze snapping toward Romance Novel Hero to find that he’s missed my dramatic performance. He’s looking at (talking to?) one of the horses.
For a second, I contemplate calling out to him. I play the fantasy out to its logical conclusion, this gloriously handsome man reaching to shake my hand, only to find my palm thoroughly smeared with deer pellets.
I shudder and turn down the path, picking up my jog.
If, eventually, I meet the exceptionally handsome horse whisperer, then great, maybe I can make progress on the list and check off number five. If not . . . well, at least I have my dignity.
I brush a strand of hair out of my face, only to realize I’ve used the scat-hand.
Scratch that part about dignity.
“I forgot how peaceful it is grocery shopping without a four-year-old, like, lying on the ground and licking the tile,” Libby sighs, moseying down the toiletries aisle like an aristocrat taking a turn about the garden in Regency-era England.
“And all the space — the space,” I say, far more enthusiastically than I feel. I’ve been able to forestall Libby seeing the droopy city center of Sunshine Falls by insisting on having Hardy drive us to the Publix a few towns over, but I’m still in preemptive damage-control mode, as evidenced by the fifteen minutes I spent pointing out various trees on the ride over.
Libby stops in front of the boxed dyes, a brilliant smile overtaking her face. “Hey, we should choose each other’s makeover looks! Like hair color and cut, I mean.”
“I’m not cutting my hair,” I say.
“Of course you’re not,” she says. “I am.”
“Actually, you’re not.”
She frowns. “It’s on the list, Sissy,” she says. “How else are we supposed to transform via montage into our new selves? It’ll be fine. I cut the girls’ hair all the time.”
“That explains Tala’s Dorothy Hamill phase.”
Libby smacks me in the boob, which is completely unfair, because you can’t hit a pregnant lady’s boob, even if she’s your little sister.
“Do you really have the emotional resilience to leave a checklist unchecked?” she says.
Something in me twitches.
I really do fucking love a checklist.
She pokes me in the ribs. “Come on! Live a little! This will be fun! It’s why we’re here.”
It is decidedly not why I’m here. But the reason I’m here is standing right in front of me, a melodramatic lower lip jutted out, and all I can think about is the month ahead of us, marooned in a town that’s nothing like the one she’s expecting.
And even aside from that, historically, Libby’s crises can be tracked by dramatic changes in appearance. As a kid, she never changed her hair color — Mom made a big deal about how rare and striking Lib’s strawberry blond waves were — but Libby showed up to her own wedding with a pixie cut she hadn’t had the night before. A couple days later, she finally opened up to me about it, admitted she’d had a burst of cold-feet-bordering-on-terror and needed to make another dramatic (though less permanent) decision to work through it.
I personally would’ve gone with a color-coded pro-con list, but to each her own.
The point is, Libby’s clearly reckoning with the arrival of this new baby and what it will mean for her and Brendan’s already strained finances and tight quarters. If I push her to talk about it now, she’ll clam up. But if I ride it out with her, she’ll talk about it when she’s ready. That aching, pulsing space between us will be sealed shut, a phantom limb made whole again.
That’s why I’m here. That’s what I want. Badly enough that I’ll shave my head if that’s what it takes (then order a very expensive wig).
“Okay,” I relent. “Let’s get made over.”
Libby lets out a squeal of happiness and pushes up on her tiptoes to kiss my forehead. “I know exactly what color you’re getting,” she says. “Now turn around, and don’t peek.”
I make a mental note to schedule a hair appointment for the day I fly home to New York.
By the time we return to the cottage that afternoon, the sun is high in the cloudless blue sky, and as we hike the hillside, sweat gathers in every inconvenient place, but Libby chatters along, unbothered. “I’m so curious what color you picked for me,” she says.
“No color,” I reply. “We’re just going to shave your head.”
She squints through the light, her freckled nose wrinkling. “When will you learn that you’re so bad at lying that it’s not worth even trying?”
Inside, she sits me down in a kitchen chair and slathers my hair in dye. Then I do the same, neither of us showing our hand. At the time, I felt so confident in my choice, but seeing how eye-burningly vibrant the color looks caked over her head, I’m less sure.