Book Lovers

23

I LEAVE THE LIBRARY on shaky legs, heart racing like I’m forty minutes deep into spin class. I’ve gone hours without checking my phone, and the usual emails have accumulated — one from my boss, who rarely honors the concept of the weekend, and a slew from clients who feel similarly — along with a string of texts from Libby.

I squint against the sunlight to see the pictures she sent of the progress she made today. The Goode Books café now looks snug and cozy, and the window display of SUMMER FAVORITES is lined in twinkly lights. In most of the pictures, Sally stands off to one side, beaming, but in one wonky shot that includes a good portion of someone’s thumb, Libby stands with arms flung wide and a huge smile on her face, silky pink bun lopsided atop her head.

Her heart-shaped face looks more or less the same as when she was fourteen years old and got accepted into the high school art show: proud, confident, capable. Even with all the weirdness between us, it makes me so happy to see her like that.

Looks amazing! I tell her. You’re a wunderkind!! Can’t even tell it’s the same place!!!

Thanks! she replies. Everything all right? Not like you to be late.

I was supposed to meet her at Poppa Squat’s ten minutes ago. I type back, All good. Be there in a minute.

I just have a call to make first. I stop at one of the green benches along the street, the metal hot from baking in the sun, and dig through my purse for the phone number Shepherd gave me. Maybe it’s old-school of me to follow up with someone to let him know I’m not interested, but Shepherd’s a nice guy. He deserves better than long-form ghosting.

The line rings three times before someone picks up, a woman’s voice saying, “Dent, Hopkins, and Morrow. How may I help you?”

After a second of confusion, I say, “I’m looking for Shepherd?”

“I’m sorry,” she says, “there’s no one here by that name.”

“Um, can I — who is this?” I say.

“This is Tyra,” she says, “at the law offices of Dent, Hopkins, and Morrow.”

“I must . . . have the wrong number.” I hang up and feel around in my purse until I find a receipt with chicken-scratch numbers on it. This is the one Shepherd gave me. The number I just called . . . must’ve been the one Sally gave me. For your sister. I dug up the number she asked for.

I could use some food to soak up the gallon of coffee I drank today, but it’s not just over-caffeination making my hands shake as I type the name of the law office into a Google search.

When the results appear, it’s like someone injected ice into my veins.

Dent, Hopkins & Morrow: Family Law Attorneys

Libby asked Sally . . . for the number of a divorce lawyer? For an instant, the street, the stone walkway, the pale blue sky, the world feels like it’s being shredded into ribbons. My lungs are overinflated, something large and heavy blocking anything from getting in or out.

I’m back in our old apartment, in those terrible weeks after Mom died, watching Libby fall apart, holding her tight while she sobs, until she can’t breathe, until she’s gagging.

I’m drowning in her pain, my own hardening, calcifying into my heart.

I don’t want to be alone, she sometimes gasps, or else, We’re alone. We’re all alone, Nora.

I’m holding her tight, burying my mouth in her hair and promising she’s wrong, that she’ll never be alone.

I have you, I tell her. I’ll always have you.

All those nights I jarred awake and found it all still there waiting for me: Mom gone. No money. Libby breaking.

Sometimes she cried in her sleep. Other times I woke while she was in the bathroom, and the cold spot in the bed beside me sent me into a panic.

In those days, pain waited like a shadowy monster, towering over our bed, and instead of shrinking night by night, it grew, feeding on us, getting fat with our grief.

Early one morning, we lay wrapped under the blankets and I smoothed my sister’s strawberry hair, and she whispered, I just don’t want to be here anymore. I want it to stop.

And that same cold panic grew too big for my body, swelling, throbbing angrily.

Without thinking about money or work or school or any of the millions of practicalities for which I’d become responsible, I said, Then let’s go somewhere.

And we did.

Bought round-trip, middle-of-the-week, red-eye tickets to Los Angeles. Checked into a seedy motel whose dead bolt didn’t work and wedged the desk chair under the knob while we slept each night.

Every morning, we took a cab to the beach and stayed there until dinner, always something cheap and greasy. We took some of Mom’s ashes and dumped them in the ocean when no one was looking, then ran away, shrieking and laughing, unsure whether we’d just broken a law.

Later, we’d split the rest of the ashes between the East River and the Hudson, bits of Mom on either side of our city, hemming us in, holding us. But we weren’t ready to let go of that much of her yet.

For one whole week, Libby didn’t cry, and then, on the plane home, during takeoff, she looked out the window, watching the water shrink beneath us, and whispered, When will it stop hurting?

I don’t know, I told her, knowing she’d see I was lying. That I believed it would never stop, not ever.

She descended into ugly, wrenching sobs, and the other passengers shot tired glares in our direction. I ignored them, pulled Libby into my chest. Let it out, sweet girl, I murmured, just like Mom used to say to us.

A flight attendant either overestimated our ages or took pity on us, and discreetly dropped off two miniature liquor bottles.

Through her hiccups, Libby chose the Bailey’s. I drank the gin.

Ever since that day, I couldn’t so much as smell it without thinking about holding tight to my sister, about missing Mom so much that she felt closer than she had in weeks.

Maybe that’s why it’s the only thing I really drink. Feeling that hole in your heart is better than feeling nothing at all.

I blink clear of the memory, but the pain in my chest, the ache deep in my hands don’t let up. I sink onto the hot metal of the bench and count out the seconds of my inhalations, matching them to my exhalations.

That was the last trip Libby and I took. It was the last trip I’ve taken, period, aside from that one ill-fated weekend in Wyoming with Jakob.

Once I got our debt under control, I started setting aside money here and there so I could take Libby somewhere amazing, like Milan or Paris, when she graduated from college. Once, she had all kinds of ambition, but after we lost Mom, it seemed like that all dried up. She stopped helping out at Freeman’s and cycled through a few other potential career paths, but none of them held her attention.

I spent her college years over her shoulder, pushing her, reading her essays for her, making her flash cards. We fought more than before, our new roles chafing on us, her endless grief warping from anger to exhaustion and back again. Sometimes, even years later, she still cried in her sleep.

And then she met Brendan, and she decided not to finish school.

When she told me they were engaged, I wasn’t surprised. All I could think about was that teenage girl, terrified of being alone.

I worried that she was too young, that she was making the decision more out of a need for security than because it was what she wanted deep down. But the truth is, she seemed happy. For the first time in years, I had my sister back.

Brendan settled her. I didn’t like that she’d given up the event-planning job I’d pulled strings to get her, but the hunted look left my sister’s eyes, and I could finally breathe.

For years, she was finally okay, and all the work — all the missed birthday parties, all the early-morning meetings, all the relationships that never got off the ground because of my schedule — it was all so fucking worth it.

She was okay.

Now she’s dodging her husband’s calls and talking to a divorce attorney. Spending three weeks away from him. And maybe that’s why it suddenly matters so much that I’m a workaholic. Not because Libby doesn’t approve but because she needs me. She needs me and I haven’t been there.

Fear rips through me as violent as a wildfire, but ice-cold.

Hidden there, under my rigidly manufactured sense of control and my checklists and my steel exterior, there is always fear.

Libby was wrong when she told Sally I am just like Mom. Mom worked nonstop to chase something she wanted. For me, it’s running endlessly trying to escape the past.

Fear of the money running out again. Of hunger. Of failure. Of wanting anything badly enough that it will destroy me when I can’t have it. Of loving someone I can’t hold on to, of watching my sister slip through my fingers like sand. Of watching something break that I don’t know how to fix.

I am afraid, always, of the kind of pain I know we won’t survive a second time.

I focus on the pressure of the ground beneath my soles, digging myself into place.

One by one, action items slide into a tidy column in my mind.

Find the best divorce lawyer money can buy.

Find Libby an apartment she can afford on her own, or else one we can share with the girls. (Could we all fit in Charlie’s rent-stabilized place?)

Get a counselor to help her through this.

Possibly hire a hit man. Or maybe not a hit man, but at least someone who can exact minor revenge — drinks thrown in Brendan’s face, keys dragged up the side of his car — depending on what exactly happened, hard as it is to imagine him doing anything but staring lovingly at Libby while rubbing her swollen feet.

And then the final item on the list and the most immediate: Bring Libby as much happiness as possible right now. Make her feel safe enough to open up to me.

My shoulders drop back into place. My lungs relax. Now that I know what’s wrong, I can fix it.

“You know you can tell me anything,” I say. “Right?”

Libby looks up from the mayo-ketchup mixture we’ve been dipping our Poppa Squat’s fries in and snorts. “Dude,” she says flatly. “Not this again. Focus on your own life, Sissy.”

Rather than throwing a barb back, I let it go. “What’s next on the list?”

She relaxes. “I’m glad you asked, because I have an amazing idea.”

“How many times do I have to tell you?” I say. “A water park made out of alcohol is not a good idea.”

“Agree to disagree.” She swipes her hands together, dusting the salt off her fingertips. “But that’s not what I’m talking about. I figured out how to save the bookstore.”

“How many bronze statues can one town square have?”

“A ball,” Libby says. “A Blue Moon Ball. Like in Once.”

I feel my brow creasing. “Is there even a blue moon this month?”

“Not the point.”

“Right, because the point is . . .”

“A huge fundraising opportunity!” she says. “Sally knows someone who owns an events company. He can get us a dance floor and a sound system, and then we get volunteers to decorate and bring pies for a bake sale. We do the whole thing out in the town square, just like in the book.”

“This is a lot of work,” I say hesitantly.

“We won’t be doing it alone,” she insists. “Sally already put out calls to everyone in her wine exchange, and Amaya will work the bar, and Gertie—”

“The anarchist barista?” I clarify.

“—offered to make flyers for us to spread around Asheville. Mug and Shot will turn into a pop-up soda fountain. Plus they already have a liquor license, so they can do a couple of hard soda drinks. Half the town’s already on board.” She snatches my hand against the sticky bar. “It’ll be a piece of cake. A piece of pie, really. The only thing is . . .”

“Uh-oh,” I say at her wince.

“It’s fine if we can’t make it happen!” she says quickly. “But Sally and I thought it would be cool to do a virtual Q and A with Dusty. And then maybe have some signed stock on hand, for her to promote. Only if she wouldn’t mind! And only if you don’t mind asking her.”

She presses her palms together, begging or praying.

“This is how you want to spend the next two weeks?” I say, skeptical. “Not resting? Not reading and watching movies and lying out in the sun?”

“Desperately.”

Whether it’s a distraction or a way for her to exercise control or a chance to try a new life, this is what she wants, so this is what she gets.

“I’ll ask Dusty.”

Libby throws her arms around my neck, kissing my head a dozen times over. “We’re doing it! We’re saving a local business.”

I’m not convinced, but she’s happy, and Libby’s happiness has always been my drug of choice.