“And there’s no way out of it?” I rub my forehead. “I mean, if it’s money—”
“I don’t want out of it, Nora.” She crosses her arms over her chest. “I made this decision.”
“But you just said it happened fast. You haven’t had time to think about this.”
“As soon as we decided Brendan would apply for the job, it felt right,” she says. “We’re tired of being on top of each other. We’re tired of sharing one bathroom — we’re tired of being tired. We want to spread out. We want our kids to be able to play in the woods!”
“Because Lyme disease is such a blast?” I demand.
“I want to know that if something goes wrong, we’re not trapped on an island with millions of other people, all trying to get away.”
“I’m on that island, Libby!”
Her face goes white, her voice shattering. “I know that.”
“New York’s our home. Those millions of other people are — are our family. And the museums, and the galleries, and the High Line, skating at Rockefeller Center — the Broadway shows? You’re fine just giving all that up?”
Giving me up.
“It’s not like that, Nora,” she says. “We just started looking at houses and everything came together—”
“Holy shit.” I turn away, dizzy. My arms are heavy and numb, but my heart is clattering around like a bowling ball on a roller coaster. “Do you already own this house?”
She doesn’t reply.
I spin back. “Libby, did you buy a house without even telling me?”
She says softly, “We don’t close until the end of the week.”
I step backward, swallowing, like I can force everything that’s already been said back down, reverse time. “I have to go.”
“Where?” she demands.
“I don’t know.” I shake my head. “Anywhere else.”
I recognize this street: a row of fifties-style ranches with well-tended gardens, pine-covered mountains jutting up at their backs.
The sun’s melting into the horizon like peach ice cream, and the smell of roses drifts over the breeze. A few yards over, a half dozen kids run, shrieking and laughing, through a sprinkler.
It’s beautiful.
I want to be anywhere else.
Libby doesn’t follow me. I didn’t expect her to.
In thirty years, I’ve never walked away from a fight with her—she’s been the one I’ve had to chase, when things were bad at school or she’d gone through a particularly rough breakup in those dark, endless years after we lost Mom.
I’m the one who follows.
I just never thought I’d have to follow her so far, or lose her entirely.
It’s happening again. The stinging in my nose, the spasms in my chest. My vision blurs until the flower bushes go bleary and the kids’ laughter warbles.
I head toward home.
Not home, I think.
My next thought is so much worse: What home?
It reverberates through me, rings of panic rippling outward. Home has always been Mom and Libby and me.
Home is striped blue-and-white towels on the hot sand at Coney Island. It’s the tequila bar where I took Libby after her exams, to dance all night. Coffee and croissants in Prospect Park.
It’s falling asleep on the train despite the mariachi band playing ten feet away, Charlie Lastra digging through his wallet across the car.
Only it’s not that anymore. Because without Mom and Libby, there is no home.
So I’m not running toward anything. Just away.
Until I see Goode Books down the block, lights glowing against the bruised purple sky.
The bells chime as I step inside, and Charlie looks up from the LOCAL BESTSELLERS, his surprise morphing into concern.
“I know you’re working.” My voice comes out throttled. “I just wanted to be somewhere . . .”
Safe?
Familiar?
Comfortable?
“Near you.”
He crosses to me in two strides. “What happened?”
I try to answer. It feels like fishing line’s wound around my airway.
Charlie pulls me into his chest, arms coiling around me.
“Libby’s moving.” I have to whisper to get the words out. “She’s moving here. That’s what this was all about.” The rest wrenches upward: “I’m going to be alone.”
“You’re not alone.” He draws back, touching my jaw, his eyes almost vicious in their intensity. “You’re not, and you won’t be.”
Libby. Bea. Tala. Brendan.
It knocks the wind out of me.
Christmas.
New Year’s.
Field trips to the natural history museum.
Sitting in front of a huge Jackson Pollock at the Met, asking the girls to please make us rich beyond our wildest dreams with their finger painting.
Laughing at Serendipity until whipped cream comes out our noses. All the memories, and all those future moments, all together, with Mom’s memory hovering close.
It’s slipping away.
The stinging in my nose. The weight in my chest. The pressure behind my eyes.
Charlie tugs me back into the office. “I’ve got you, Nora,” he promises quietly. “I’ve got you, okay?”
It’s like a dam has broken. I hear the strangled sound in my throat and my shoulders start to shake, and then I’m crying.
Tidal waves hitting me, every word obliterated under a current so powerful there’s no fighting it.
I’m dragged under.
“It’s okay,” he whispers, rocking me back and forth. “You’re not alone,” he promises, and beneath it I hear the unsaid rest: I’m here.
For now, I think.
Because nothing — not the beautiful and not the terrible — lasts.
32
NOW I UNDERSTAND why I didn’t cry for all those years. I want it to stop. I want the pain tamped down, divided into manageable pockets.
All this time I thought being seen as monstrous was the worst thing that could happen to me.
Now I realize I’d rather be frigid than what I really am, deep down, every second of every day: weak, helpless, so fucking scared it’s going to come apart.
Scared of losing everything. Scared of crying. That once I start, I’ll never be able to stop, and everything I’ve built will crumble under the weight of my unruly emotions.
And for a long time, I don’t stop.
I cry until my throat hurts. Until my eyes hurt. Until there aren’t any tears left and my sobs settle into hiccups.
Until I’m numb and exhausted. By then, the office has gone dark except for the old banker-style lamp on the desk.
When I close my eyes, the roaring in my ears has faded, leaving behind the steady thud of Charlie’s heartbeat.
“She’s leaving,” I whisper, testing it out, practicing accepting it as truth.
“Did she say why?” he asks.
I shrug within his arms. “All the normal reasons people leave. I just — I always thought . . .”
His thumb hooks my jaw again and he angles my eyes to his.
“All my exes, all my friends — half the people I work with,” I say. “They’ve all moved on. And every time, it was okay, because I love the city, and my job, and because I had Libby.” My voice wobbles. “And now she’s moving on too.”
When Mom died and we lost the apartment, it was like our whole history got swallowed up. The city and each other, that’s all Libby and I have left of her.