Book Lovers

36

WHEN I STEP out of the building into the crisp September afternoon, a flurry of pink and orange hurls itself at me. Libby’s lemon-lavender scent wraps around my shoulders as she squeals, “You did it!”

“If by it,” I say, “you mean ‘completed the first step of an interview process that might go nowhere,’ then I sure did.”

She pulls back, beaming. Her hair has faded almost entirely back to blond, but her clothes are as colorful as ever. “What’d they say?”

“They’ll be in touch,” I reply.

She threads her arm through mine and turns me up the sidewalk. “You’ve got it.”

Nerves jostle in my stomach. “I feel like it’s the first day of school, I’m naked, and I forgot my locker combination. Wait — no, it’s the last day of school, and I never went to math, plus all those other things.”

“The uncertainty is good for you,” she says. “You really want this, Sissy. That’s a good thing. Now let’s go, I’m famished. Do you have the list?”

“Oh, do you mean this list?” I say, producing the laminated sheet she made of everything we need to eat, drink, and do before she leaves.

Most days, I see her. For lunch, or a walk to the playground by her place, or to sit on the living room floor packing stuffed animals and tiny overalls into cardboard boxes. (Sometimes I cry over particularly tiny onesies that used to belong to Bea, then to Tala, and will soon be inherited by Number Three.)

One Saturday, we take the girls to the Museum of Natural History and spend two and a half hours in the room with the huge whale. Another night, Brendan and Libby and I meet at our favorite pizza place in Dumbo and we stay out on the patio talking until the staff is cleaning up for the night.

We overpay to have our caricatures drawn at Central Park. We ask a tourist to take our family picture at Bethesda Fountain. We meet for crepes, Sunday after Sunday, at Libby’s favorite spot in Williamsburg.

And then November comes.

They leave on a Thursday, bright and early. The girls are so sleepy that we’re able to plop them into the U-Haul without much fanfare, and secretly I’m disappointed. It kills me to hear them crying over the words Aunt Nono, but to not hear them might be worse.

Brendan and I hug goodbye, and then he climbs into the rental truck to give me and Libby some privacy.

“Run!” I stage-whisper to Libby, and he shoots me a smile before pulling the door shut.

Libby’s already crying. She said she woke up crying. I didn’t, but then again, I’m not sure I slept.

The third time I jolted awake, I got online and made appointments with both a therapist and a sleep specialist, then ordered four books that promised to have “helped millions in [my] exact situation!”

It was almost nice to have something else to focus on in the dead of night.

“We’ll talk all the time,” Libby promises. “You’re going to be sick of me.” There’s an iciness to the wind, and I lift her chilly fingertips to breathe warmth into them.

She rolls her eyes, laughing tearily. “Still such an utter Mom.”

“You’re one to talk.” I bend down to kiss her belly. “Be good, Number Three, and Auntie Nono will bring you a present when she visits. A motorcycle, maybe, or some party drugs.”

“I don’t know what to say.” Libby’s voice cracks.

I pull her into a hug. “This sucks.”

She relaxes in my arms. “This does indeed suck.”

“But it also rules,” I point out. “You’re going to have a big-ass house, and windows that don’t face that old guy who never wears pants, and you’re going to have a garden and you’ll wear those overpriced prairie dresses when you host dinner parties with fresh floral arrangements on every surface, and your kids are going to stay out late catching fireflies with the neighbor kids, and Brendan’s probably going to learn how to, like, chop wood and get ripped and carry you around like you’re in a romance novel.”

“And then you’re going to visit,” Libby cuts in. “And we’re going to stay up all night talking. We’re going to drink one too many gin and tonics, and I’m going to convince you to sing Sheryl Crow with me at Poppa Squat’s karaoke night, and we’re going to go to a real Christmas tree farm, not just a tent in an alleyway, and we’re going to show the girls Philadelphia Story, and they’re going to say, Hey, am I mistaken, or is Cary Grant kind of being an asshole? Why wouldn’t she end up with Jimmy Stewart?”

“And we’ll have to tell them that some people simply have bad taste,” I agree solemnly.

“Or that sometimes, there are not one but two hot men vying for your heart, and you have to spin in a circle and choose one at random, then marry the other off to his coworker.”

“Babe?” Brendan calls from the truck, grimacing apologetically.

Libby nods in understanding and we draw apart, still gripping each other’s forearms like we’re preparing to spin in circles at full speed and don’t want inertia to pull us apart. Pretty accurate, actually.

“This isn’t goodbye,” she says.

“Of course not,” I say. “Nadine Winters never remembers to say hello or goodbye.”

“Also we’re sisters,” she says. “We’re stuck together.”

“That too.”

She lets go of me and climbs up into the truck.

As they pull away, my eyes fill up. At least the tears held off this long. At least I earned them.

The white and orange of the U-Haul melt together until it’s like I’m looking at a watercolor painting that’s been left out in the rain, my family disintegrating into colorful streaks. I watch the blur of them shrink away. One block. Then two. Then three. Then they turn, and they’re gone, and it feels like I’m a concrete slab that’s just been cracked in half, only to realize my insides never quite set.

I’m mush.

I’m crying hard now. Not cute little sniffs. Ugly gasping breaths. People walk by on the sidewalk. Some give me a wide berth. Others shoot me sympathetic looks. As one woman around my age passes, she holds out a tissue to me without so much as slowing her pace and I clutch it like a baby blanket, unable to do anything but cry harder and laugh, my abdomen ricocheting between the two.

It’s like Mom used to say: You’re not a true New Yorker until you’re willing to feel your emotions out in the open, and only now, having made a firm decision to stay, have I crossed that last threshold.

I drop onto Libby’s stoop — her former stoop — laughing and crying so hysterically I can no longer discern one from the other. Only once my phone starts to ring do I manage to get any kind of hold on myself.

I sniff, clearing out some of my tears, as I free my phone from my pocket and read the screen. “Libby?” I answer. “Is everything okay?”

“What’s up?” she says.

“Nothing?” I smear the backs of my hands across my eyes. “You?”

“Not a lot,” she sighs. “I just missed you. Thought I’d call and say hi.”

Warmth fills my chest. It creeps into my fingers and toes, until there is so much of it, it hurts. I’m overfilled. No one person should ever have quite so much love in their body at one time.

“What’s New York look like right now?” she asks.

They’ve been gone eight minutes. “Did Brendan’s foot fall off onto the gas pedal or something?”

“Just tell me,” she says. “I want to hear you describe it.”

I look around at the hustle and bustle, the trees pushing out their first spurts of reds and yellows across their leaves. A man unloading crates of fruit at the bodega across the street. An old lady with jet-black hair under a white rhinestoned cowboy hat picking through the DVDs for sale on some guy’s folding table. (Libby and I took a glance before we parted ways and realized eighty-five percent of the collection featured Keanu Reeves, which begs the question: did this man and Keanu Reeves have some great falling-out?)

I smell kebab cooking down the street, and in the distance car horns blare, and a woman who may or may not be an actress I’ve seen on SVU hurries past in huge sunglasses, walking a tiny, prancing Boston terrier.

“Well?” Libby says.

It looks like home. “Same old, same old.”

“I knew it.” I can hear her smiling.

She wanted me to go with her, but she’s happy that I’m getting what I want.

I wanted her to stay, but I hope she finds everything she’s looking for and more.

Maybe love shouldn’t be built on a foundation of compromises, but maybe it can’t exist without them either.

Not the kind that forces two people into shapes they don’t fit in, but the kind that loosens their grips, always leaves room to grow. Compromises that say, there will be a you-shaped space in my heart, and if your shape changes, I will adapt.

No matter where we go, our love will stretch out to hold us, and that makes me feel like . . . like everything will be okay.