Book Lovers

33

LIBBY SITS ON the front steps, wrapped in one of Brendan’s old sweatshirts, two cups of coffee steaming on the step beside her.

Neither of us speaks as I close the distance, but I can tell she’s spent the night crying, and I doubt I look any better.

She holds out a mug. “Might be cold by now.”

I take it and, after another strained second, perch on the step, dew seeping into my jeans.

“Should I go first?” she asks.

I shrug. We’ve never been this angry with each other — I don’t know what comes next.

“I’m sorry I didn’t tell you sooner,” she says, like she’s trying to shove the words through a too-narrow doorway.

All the way over here, I wondered if laying into her would give me some sense of control. But there’s no outcome to force here. What I want is slippery, uncatchable: those days when there was nothing between us, when we belonged together more than we belonged anywhere else. When it felt like I belonged.

“When did we start keeping things from each other?”

She looks surprised and hurt, almost impossibly small. “You’ve always kept things from me, Nora,” she says. “And I know you were trying to protect me, but it still counts when you pretend things are okay and they’re not. Or when you try to fix things without me knowing.”

“So is that what you’re doing?” I ask. “You kept the fact that you were moving away from me so that — what? It wouldn’t hurt until the last possible second?”

“That’s not what I was doing.” Fresh tears spring into her eyes. She burrows her fists against them, shoulders twitching.

“I’m sorry.” I touch her arm. “I’m not trying to be mean.”

She looks up, wiping her tears away. “I was trying,” she says, through a shuddering breath, “to win you over.”

“Libby, in what universe do you need to win me over? I’m sorry for making you feel incapable. I was trying to help, but I never thought you needed to be fixed. Never.”

“That’s not what I mean,” she says. “I wanted to win you over to . . .” She waves toward the meadow and the sun-dappled footbridges, the flowering bushes swaying in the breeze and the thick piney forest covering the rolling hills.

And then the rest of it clicks. The list wasn’t about Libby trying on her new life, and it wasn’t about saying some spectacular goodbye or making a last-ditch effort to save me from a life of sleeping alone with my laptop.

It was a sales pitch.

“Brendan wanted me to tell you right away,” she goes on. “But I thought that maybe — if you came here, if you saw what it could be like . . . I wanted you to come with us.” Her voice cracks. “And I thought if you realized what life could be here, maybe even met someone, you would want that too. But then you started spending time with Charlie, and — god, it’s been so long since I’ve seen you like that, Nora. I was going to let the whole thing go, but then you said he was staying . . . and it just seemed like . . . like you could want this too. Like I could have all this—and you.”

I feel so empty, wrung out, like I’ve been treading water for weeks only to realize the shore was a mirage.

This is Libby, who never asked for anything until a month ago, admitting what she really wants.

For me to follow her.

And I want to give her what she wants. I always want her to have everything she wants.

All the organized compartments in my mind came crashing down last night, and for the first time I see it all clearly. Not the tidy, controlled version of things, but the mess of it, when it all spills loose.

Libby and I have been caught in a slow boil of change for a long time, one path splitting into two. There’s no less room in my heart for her than the day she first came screaming into the world.

But there is less time. Less space in our daily lives. Other people. Other priorities. We’re a Venn diagram now, instead of a circle. I might’ve made all my decisions for her, but now that I’m here, I love my life.

“I was asked to apply for another editing job,” I get out.

Libby blinks rapidly, tears clinging to her sparkly blue eyes. “Wh-what?”

I stare at the tree line beyond the meadow. “Charlie’s job at Loggia,” I say. “They want someone local, and he’s staying here. So he mentioned it to Dusty’s editor. I’d be taking over some of his list, and then I’d start acquiring my own too.”

“It’s your dream,” Libby says breathlessly.

Something about that word sets off fireworks through my body. “I . . .” Nothing else comes out.

She reaches for my hands, squeezing them hard, her voice cracking: “You have to do it.”

My chest cramps as I study her, the only face I know better than mine.

“You have to,” she says through tears. “It’s what you want. It’s what you’ve always wanted, and — don’t put it off again, Nora. It’s your dream.”

“It’s not something I’ve . . .” I wave my hand in a vague spiral.

“Done before?” she says.

“And if it didn’t work out . . .”

“You can do it,” she tells me. “You can do it, Nora. And if you fail, who cares?”

“Well,” I say. “Me.”

Her arms coil around my neck. She shakes with something halfway between more sobs and giggles. “You’re going to have the world’s best guest room here,” she cries. “And if everything goes to shit there, you’ll come stay with us. I’ll take care of you, okay? I’ll take care of you how you’ve always, always taken care of me, Nora.”

I want to tell her how perfect these last three weeks have been.

I want to tell her this is the happiest I can remember being in so long, and it’s also the worst pain I’ve ever felt.

Because all those gaps between us are finally gone, but the impact of the collision has shaken every last remnant of the ice loose, leaving nothing but a soft, pulpy tenderness.

So all I can do is cry with her.

Somehow, it never occurred to me that this was an option: that two people, in the same hug, could both be allowed to fall apart. That maybe it’s neither of our jobs to keep a steel spine.

That we can both survive this pain without the other shouldering it.

“I don’t know how to be without you, Nora,” Libby squeaks. “I never thought I would be. And I know this is right for me and Brendan, but — fuck, I thought you and I would always be together. How is it possible for two people who belong together to belong in two different places?”

“Maybe I won’t even get the job,” I say.

“No,” Libby replies with force. “Don’t try to fix it. Don’t choose me over you, okay? We’ve done this for years, and it’s almost broken us. It’s time to just be sisters, Nora. Don’t fix it. Just be here with me, and say it fucking sucks.”

“It does.” I scrunch my eyes tight. “It fucking sucks.”

I didn’t know the power of those words. They fix nothing, do nothing, but just saying them feels like planting a stake into the ground, pinning us together at least for this moment.

It sucks, and I can’t change that, but I’m here, with my sister, and somehow we’ll get through it.

You can take the city person out of the city, but the city will always be in them. I think it’s the same for sisters. Anywhere we go, we won’t leave each other. We couldn’t even if we wanted to. And we don’t. We never will.

Brendan meets the home inspector at the house, but Libby and the girls stay back with me, giving him some much-needed quiet after his weeks as a solo parent.

They’re not moving in earnest until November, a month before Number Three’s due date. Until then, Brendan will be back and forth, getting the house ready.

Two and a half months. That’s how long we have left together, and it’s going to count.

We spend the morning wandering the woods, trying to keep the girls on the trail and googling “what does poison ivy look like” every forty-five seconds, never getting any closer to a concrete answer.

We take them to the fence, and the horses clomp over eagerly to be petted, despite our lack of bait. “I guess we know where you and I stand,” Libby jokes as the girls’ little fingers swipe down a chestnut mare’s pink snout.

Afterward, we take the tin buckets from the cottage’s cabinet out to the blackberry thicket at the edge of the meadow and pick and eat plump berries until our fingers and lips are stained purple and our shoulders are sunburnt.

By the time we arrive home, our knees smudged with dirt, Tala is fully asleep in my arms, sticky and warm, and we pour her onto the couch to keep napping. Bea leads us into the kitchen to explain the art of blind baking a pie crust for the blackberries — she and Brendan have watched a lot of Great British Baking Show this month — and I still feel like a city person, through and through, but maybe it’s possible to have more than one home. Maybe it’s possible to belong in a hundred different ways to a hundred different people and places.