“Why don’t you tell me how you really feel?”
She tucks her nose into the steam rising from her mug. “Sorry, I didn’t mean it like that.”
“Like you would love nothing more than to put Charlie Lastra on a ship bound to permanently circle the earth?”
“It’s not that! It’s just . . .” She scoots around in her chair. “I guess it changes how I see him. He qualifies for the list now.”
“How helpful.”
“Nora.” She sets her mug in the grass. “If you’re really this excited about him, you should explore it. I can’t remember the last time you actually were excited about someone. No, wait, I can. It was a full ten years ago.”
The deep pain, like a pulsing phantom limb, doesn’t feel quite so severe as it usually does when I think about Jakob. I meant what I told Charlie — that it wasn’t about missing my ex so much as the loneliness of being unable to trust myself with anyone.
“It doesn’t matter what we ‘explore,’ ” I say. “We know how this ends.”
Libby squeezes my arm. “You don’t know. You can’t, until you try.”
“This isn’t a movie, Libby,” I say. “Love isn’t enough to change the details of a person’s life, or — or their needs. It doesn’t make everything fall into place. I don’t want to give up everything.”
I can’t let myself do that.
There’s still no happy ending for a woman who wants it all, the kind who lies awake aching with furious hunger, unspent ambition making her bones rattle in her body.
My cozy West Village apartment with its huge windows. The café on the corner that knows my order. All four seasons on the Central Park mall.
The job at Loggia, I think, the image of their gallery-white offices and balsa wood floors burning bright in my mind.
Knowing my sister is okay. Waking every night believing to my core that I’m safe. That nothing can get me.
How does a vast, uncontrollable feeling like love fit into that?
It’s a loose cog in a delicate machine.
When I look back to Libby, her lips are parted, her brows knit together. “Love?” She repeats the word in a small voice.
I look back toward the cottage, gleaming in the sun, surrounded by lazily twirling butterflies. “Hypothetically.” I lie to my sister. She lets me.
In the early afternoon, Bea and Tala come bounding up the hillside — Bea in frilly pink and Tala in navy overalls. My heart soars, and to no one’s surprise, tears rush to Libby’s eyes as I help her off the blanket. They scream Mommy in their impossibly high voices and hurl themselves at her legs, where she peppers their tangled hair with kisses.
“I missed you so, so, so much,” she tells them. Tala looks grumpy and resentful as she wraps her arms around Libby’s leg, and Bea, of course, immediately starts crying like she’s in bad need of a nap, and then Brendan comes huffing up behind them, looking roughly twenty-three times as tired as Charlie Lastra ever has.
When his and Libby’s eyes catch, their smiles are calm. Not overjoyed, but relieved: like they’ve slipped back into the current and don’t have to work quite so hard.
The final ounces of anxiety I’ve been carrying around dissipate in an instant. These two people love each other. Whatever I thought was going on between them, they’re okay.
They belong together, in some mysterious way, and they both seem to know it.
While Libby finishes her penance with the girls, Brendan pulls me into one of his famously awkward and excruciatingly earnest side hugs. “Good flight?” I ask.
“There were some tears,” he says warily.
“Oh, were they showing Mamma Mia! on the plane again?” I say. “You know you can’t handle anything with Meryl in it at that altitude.”
Right then, the girls pry themselves from Libby and barrel at me, screaming, not quite in unison, “Nono!”
“My favorite girls in the whole world!” I say, catching them.
Tala screeches, “We flew on the airplane!”
“You did?” I sweep her onto my hip and squeeze Bea’s hand. “Who drove? You or Bea?”
Bea giggles. It is, very likely, the sound that the earth made the first time it saw the sun come up.
“Noooo.” Tala shakes her head, irritated by my incompetence. Honestly, when she’s grumpy, it’s the cutest thing in the world. May all our sour moods be so adorable.
I guide them across the grass, away from Libby and Brendan so they can have a second alone. Brendan looks like he could use a few years in a cryogenic chamber, whereas Libby is grabbing his ass like that is not at all what she needs.
“Hey. I forget,” I say, leading the girls toward the flowers nestled around the footbridge. “How do you feel about butterflies?”
They have a lot of thoughts, and they’re sure to scream them all.
31
LIBBY CHOOSES A dinner spot in downtown Asheville, a chic Cuban restaurant with a rooftop patio. Yesterday’s storm left the air cool and breezy, a huge relief after the last three sweaty weeks.
The city is lit up below us, halfway between quaint village and bustling metropolis, and the food is divine. Brendan and I split a bottle of wine and Libby even has a couple sips, moaning as she swishes them around in her mouth.
“It kind of feels like we’re in New York, doesn’t it?” she says, eyes misty. “If you close your eyes, just the sounds of all these people, and that feeling in the air.”
Brendan’s mouth screws up like he’s considering disagreeing with her, but I just nod along. It doesn’t feel like New York, but with all of us together, it almost feels like home.
I feel an improbable wave of nostalgia at the thought of running up or down the stairs to a train platform, hearing that metallic shriek, feeling the wind gust through the stairwell, and not knowing if I’ve arrived in the nick of time or if my train just went screaming past.
What’s the weirdest thing you miss about the city? I text Charlie.
He writes back, It used to be having access to a Dunkin’ Donuts within three blocks at all times.
I smile at my phone. The DD-to-person ratio there has to be like one to five. What else?
I miss Eataly, he says, but I wouldn’t call it weird.
If you didn’t miss Eataly, we could never speak again. Because you’d be in prison, where you’d belong.
Relieved to have dodged that bullet, he says. Also not weird but I think a lot about the first day in spring that’s actually kind of warm. How everyone’s out at once, and it feels like we’re all almost drunk from the sun. People in the park in shorts and bikini tops, eating Popsicles, even though it’s like fifty degrees out.
Charlie, I reply. Those things are all objectively amazing.
He takes a while on his next reply. Early-morning commute mariachi bands, he says, or opera singers, or any singing group really. I know it’s not a popular stance, but I fucking love when I’m almost asleep on the train, and suddenly five guys are singing their hearts out.
I love watching everyone’s reactions. There are always some people who are kind of feeling it, and some who look like they’re plotting murder, and then the ones who pretend it’s not happening. I always tip because I don’t want to live in a world where no one’s doing that.
I can’t think of a greater symbol of hope than a person who’s willing to drag themselves out of bed and sing at the top of their lungs to a group of strangers trapped on a train. That tenacity should be rewarded.