Book Lovers

4

I WAKE, HEART RACING, skin cold and damp. My eyes snap open on a dark room, jumping from an unfamiliar door to the outline of a window to the snoring lump beside me.

Libby. The relief is intense and immediate, an ice bucket dumped over me all at once. The whirring of my heart starts its signature post-nightmare cooldown.

Libby is here. Everything must be okay.

I piece together my surroundings.

Goode’s Lily Cottage, Sunshine Falls, North Carolina.

It was only the nightmare.

Maybe nightmare isn’t the right word. The dream itself is nice, until the end.

It starts with me and Libby coming into the old apartment, setting down keys and bags. Sometimes Bea and Tala are with us, or Brendan, smiling good-naturedly while we fill up every gap with frantic chatter.

This time, it’s just the two of us.

We’re laughing about something — a play we just saw. Newsies, maybe. From dream to dream, those details change, and as soon as I sit up, breathing hard in the dark of this unfamiliar room, they fritter off like petals on a breeze.

What remains is the deep ache, the yawning canyon.

The dream goes like this:

Libby tosses her keys into the bowl by the door. Mom looks up from the table in the kitchenette, legs curled under her, nightgown pulled over them.

“Hey, Mama,” Libby says, walking right past her toward our room, the one we shared when we were kids.

“My sweet girls!” Mom cries, and I bend to sweep a kiss across her cheek on my way to the fridge. I make it all the way there before the chill sets in. The feeling of wrongness.

I turn and look at her, my beautiful mother. She’s gone back to reading, but when she catches me staring, she breaks into a puzzled smile. “What?”

I feel tears in my eyes. That should be the first sign that I’m dreaming — I never cry in real life — but I never notice this incongruity.

She looks the same, not a day older. Like springtime incarnate, the kind of warmth your skin gulps down after a long winter.

She doesn’t seem surprised to see us, only amused, and then concerned. “Nora?”

I go toward her, wrap my arms around her, and hold tight. She circles me in hers too, her lemon-lavender scent settling over me like a blanket. Her glossy strawberry waves fall across my shoulders as she runs a hand over the back of my head.

“Hey, sweet girl,” she says. “What’s wrong? Let it out.”

She doesn’t remember that she’s gone.

I’m the only one who knows she doesn’t belong. We walked in the door, and she was there, and it felt so right, so natural, that none of us noticed it right away.

“I’ll make tea,” Mom says, wiping my tears away. She stands and walks past me, and I know before I turn that when I do, she won’t be there anymore.

I let her out of my sight, and now she’s gone. I can never stop myself from looking. From turning to the quiet, still room, feeling that painful emptiness in my chest like she’s been carved out of me.

And that’s when I wake up. Like if she can’t be there, there’s no point in dreaming at all.

I check the alarm clock on the bedside table. It’s not quite six, and I didn’t fall asleep until after three. Even with my sister’s snores shivering through the bed, the house was too quiet. Crickets chirped and cicadas sang in a steady rhythm, but I missed the one-off honk of an annoyed cabdriver, or the sirens of a fire truck rushing past. Even the drunk guys shouting from opposite sides of the street as they headed home after a night of barhopping.

Eventually, I downloaded an app that plays cityscape sounds and set it in the windowsill, turning it up slowly so it wouldn’t jar Libby awake. Only once I’d reached full volume did I drift off.

But I’m wide awake now.

My pang of homesickness for my mother rapidly shape-shifts into longing for my Peloton.

I am a parody of myself.

I pull on a sports bra and leggings and trip downstairs, then tug on my sneakers and step out into the cool darkness of morning.

Mist hovers across the meadow, and in the distance, through the trees, the first sprays of purply pinks stretch along the horizon. As I cross the dewy grass toward the footbridge, I lift my arms over my head, stretching to each side before picking up my pace.

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.

Once our timers are set, Libby starts on brunch.

She’s been a vegetarian since she was little, and after Mom died, I became one too, by default. Financially, it didn’t make sense to buy two different versions of everything. Also, meat’s expensive. From a purely mathematical standpoint, vegetarianism made sense for two newly orphaned girls of twenty and sixteen.

Even after Libby moved in with Brendan, it stuck. During her aspiring-chef phase, she won him over to a plant-based diet. So while it’s tempeh frying in the pan beside the eggs she’s scrambling for us, it smells like bacon. Or at least enough like bacon to appeal to someone who hasn’t had the real thing in ten years.

When the timer goes off, Libby shoos me off to rinse, warning me not to look in the mirror “or else.”

Because I’m so bad at lying, I follow her orders, then take over the job of transferring brunch into the oven to keep warm while she rinses her dye.

With her hair wrapped in a towel, she takes me onto the deck to trim mine. Every few seconds, she makes an inauspicious “huh” sound.

“Really instilling confidence in me, Libby,” I say.

She snips some more at the front of my face. “It’s going to be fine.”

It sounds a little too much like she’s giving herself a pep talk for my liking. After I’ve chopped her hair into a long bob — most of it air-dried by now — we go inside for the big reveal.

After matching deep breaths, preparing our egos for a humbling, we step in front of the bathroom mirror together and take it in.

She’s given me feathery bangs somewhere between fringe and curtain, and somehow they make the ash-brown color read more Laurel Canyon free spirit than dirty dishwater.

“You really are sickeningly good at everything, you know that, right?” I say.

Libby doesn’t reply, and when my gaze cuts toward hers, a weight plummets through me. She’s staring at the reflection of her Pepto-Bismol-pink waves with tears welling in her eyes.

Shit. A huge and obvious misfire. Libby may generally favor a bold look, but I forgot to factor in how pregnancy tends to affect her self-image.

“It’ll start rinsing out in a few washes!” I say. “Or we can go back to the store and get a different color? Or find a good salon in Asheville — my treat. Really, this is an easy fix, Lib.”

The tears are reaching their breaking point now, ready to fall.

“I just remembered you begging Mom to let you get pink hair when you were in ninth grade,” I go on. “Remember? She wouldn’t let you, and you went on that hunger strike until she said you could do dip-dye?”

Libby turns to me, lip quivering. I have a split second to wonder if she’s about to attack me before her arms fling around my neck, her face burying into the side of my head. “I love it, Sissy,” she says, her sweet lemon-lavender scent engulfing me.

The roaring panic-storm settles in me. The tension dissolves from my shoulders. “I’m so glad,” I say, hugging her back. “And you really did an amazing job. I mean, I’m not sure what would ever possess a person to choose this color, but you made it work.”

She pulls back, frowning. “It’s as close to your natural color as I could find. I always loved your hair when we were kids.”

My heart squeezes tight, the back of my nose tingling like there’s too much of something building in my skull and it’s starting to seep out.

“Oh no,” she says, looking back into the mirror. “It just occurred to me: what am I supposed to say when Bea and Tala ask to dye theirs into unicorn tails? Or shave their heads entirely?”

“You say no,” I say. “And then, the next time I’m babysitting, I’ll hand over the dye and clippers. Afterward I’ll teach them how to roll a joint, like the sexy, cool, fun aunt I am.”

Libby snorts. “You wish you knew how to roll a joint. God, I miss weed. The maternity books never prepare you for how badly you’re going to miss weed.”

“Sounds like there’s a hole in the market,” I say. “I’ll keep an eye out.”

“The Pothead’s Guide to Pregnancy,” Libby says.

“Marijuana Mommy,” I reply.

“And its companion, Doobie Daddies.”

“You know,” I say, “if you ever need to complain about your lack of weed, or pregnancy — or anything else — I’m here. Always.”

“Yep,” she says, eyes back on her reflection, fingers back in her hair. “I know.”