Landline

CHAPTER 35

The sun was rising when they left Denver, and now Omaha was a blinding white below them. Georgie gripped her armrests through the landing and stood up in her seat before the seat belt light went off.

She’d done it. She was here now. She was close.

Alice. Noomi. Neal.

The Omaha airport seemed abandoned. The coffee shop was closed. And the little magazine stand. Always before, when Georgie’d walked past the security checkpoint, Neal’s parents—or just his mom—had been waiting right there, in the little row of chairs.

There was only one person sitting there today. A young woman in a heavy purple parka. She jumped out of her chair and started running toward Georgie. Then someone else ran past Georgie the other way—the boy from the Denver airport who’d lent her his phone.

The girl jumped into his arms, and he swung her in an ecstatic, lop-sided circle. The joy of it hit Georgie like a shock wave. The boy’s duffel bag fell to the ground. His face disappeared in the girl’s long, wavy dark hair.

Georgie walked past them, holding her breath.

Keep moving. So close. It’s almost over.

The main terminal was empty except for the dozen or so people from Georgie’s plane and a security guard. If the girls were here, Georgie would have let them run ahead. Alice could even have done cart-wheels, if she wanted. There was no one in the building to bother.

Georgie started running down the escalator. She was close. So close. She ran to the exit and pushed through the revolving door—then stopped.

Everything was covered in snow.

Like—well, like on TV. The parking garage across the street looked like a gingerbread house topped with thick white icing.

The snow looked as soft as icing. Smooth, but almost furry. She pushed through the doors and stepped outside, feeling chilled through after her first inhale. (Her T-shirt wasn’t any protection from the cold. Her skin wasn’t any protection.)

God. Oh my God. Have the girls seen this?

Georgie leaned over an empty planter, pressing her hand into the snow, watching her fingers make four canyons. The snow was light, but kept its form. She moved her palm up, shaping a soft curve.

She expected the snow to feel cold, but it didn’t. Not at first. Not until it started to melt between her fingers. She’d brushed some onto her feet, and they were cold now, too. She tried stamping the snow off her ballet flats, and looked up and down the drive for the taxi stand. There weren’t even any cars.

Georgie folded her arms and walked down the sidewalk, looking for a sign.

“Can we help you find something?” someone said.

Georgie turned. It was the ecstatic young couple. Still hanging on each other, as if neither of them could quite believe the other was finally here.

“Taxi stand?” Georgie said.

“You’re looking for a taxi?” the boy asked. The man. She should probably call him a man. He must be twenty-two, twenty-three; his hair was already thinning.

“Yeah,” Georgie said.

“Did you call for one?”

“Uh.” Georgie was shivering, but she was trying not to let on. “No. Should I call for one?”

The boy looked at the girl.

“There aren’t really taxis here,” the girl said apologetically—but also like Georgie might be an idiot. “I mean, there are a few, if you call ahead. . . . But it’s Christmas.”

“Oh,” Georgie said. “Right.” She looked up and down the drive again. “Thanks.”

“Do you need to use my phone?” the boy offered.

“That’s okay,” Georgie said, turning toward the door. “Thanks again.”

She heard them talking quietly. She heard the boy say something about Joseph and Mary and no room at the inn. “Hey, do you need a ride somewhere?” he called out to Georgie.

She looked back at them. The boy was grinning. The girl looked concerned. They were probably part of some fresh-faced Nebraska death cult who hung out at airports on holidays, picking up strays.

“Yes,” she said. “Thank you.”

“You don’t have a bag?” the girl asked.

“No,” Georgie said, then couldn’t think of anything to say next that could possibly make her lack of bag/coat/socks make sense.

“All right,” the boy said. (Georgie still couldn’t call him a man.) “Where to?”

“Ponca Hills,” she said.

The boy turned to the girl. They were all sitting in the front of an old red truck, the girl squished in the middle. The heat didn’t work, and the front windshield was already fogged over. He wiped it with the sleeve of his green canvas coat.

“That’s out north,” the girl said, taking out her phone. “What’s the address?”

The address, the address . . . “Rainwood Road,” Georgie said, relieved to remember even part of Neal’s parents’ address, then hoped that Rainwood Road didn’t stretch the entire length of the city.

The girl typed it into her phone. “Okay,” she said to the boy. “Turn right up here.”

Georgie wondered how long they’d been apart.

The boy kept kissing the girl’s head and squeezing her leg. Georgie looked out the window to give them privacy—and because the whole city looked like some sort of fairy wonderland. She’d never seen anything like it.

The idea that this just fell from the sky.

And then looked like that. Like Tinker Bell had painted it on. How did people ever get used to it?

Georgie didn’t realize at first that it must be difficult to drive in. They were moving slowly, but the truck still slid through a red light. “I can’t believe you drove in this,” the boy said.

“I wasn’t going to leave you at the airport,” his girlfriend said. “I was careful.”

He grinned and kissed her again. Georgie wondered if they were getting close to Neal’s neighborhood. Almost no one else was on the road. A few people were out shoveling.

They must be close. Georgie recognized that park. That bridge. That bowling alley. The girl gave the boy directions. Georgie recognized a pizza place that she and Neal had walked to. “We’re close,” she said, leaning forward and resting a hand on the dash.

“Rainwood should be your next right,” the girl said.

“Yeah . . . ,” the boy agreed. But the truck stopped moving.

His girlfriend looked up from her phone. “Oh.”

Georgie looked up the hill, but didn’t see what the problem was.

The boy sighed and scrubbed at his dirty blond hair, then turned to Georgie. “We might get halfway up that hill. But I’m not sure we’d get down. Or out.”

“Oh . . . ,” Georgie said. “Well. It’s close. I can walk from here, I know the way.”

They both looked at her like she was crazy.

“You’re not wearing a coat,” he said.

“You’re not even wearing shoes,” the girl said.

“I’ll be fine,” Georgie assured them. “It’s five blocks, tops. I won’t freeze to death.” She said it like she knew something about freezing to death, which she clearly didn’t.

“Wait a minute.” The boy got out of the truck, then hopped back inside thirty seconds later with his duffel bag. He unzipped it, and clothes spilled out. He started heaping them in the girl’s lap. “Here,” he said, pulling out a thick, gray wool sweater. “Take this.”

“I can’t take your sweater,” Georgie said.

“Take it. You can mail it back to me—my mom sews my address inside everything. Take it, it’s no big deal.”

“Just take it,” the girl said.

“I’m trying to think if I have extra boots. . . .” He shoved his clothes back into the bag. “I might have some waders in the back.”

The girl rolled her eyes, and for a minute she looked just like Heather.

“Or—why don’t you tell me where you’re going?” he said to Georgie. “I’ll run up to the house and come back with your shoes and your coat or whatever.”

“No,” Georgie said. She pulled the sweater on over her head. “You’ve done enough, thank you.”

“You can’t walk through the snow barefoot,” he insisted.

“I’ll be fine.” Georgie opened the passenger door.

He opened his door, too.

“Oh for Christ’s sake,” the girl said. “You can wear my boots.” She reached for the floor. Georgie noticed she was wearing a small engagement ring. “You can have them. I don’t even like them.”

“Absolutely not,” Georgie said. “What if you get stuck in the snow?”

“I’ll be fine,” she said. “He’d carry me across the city before he let me get my feet wet.”

The boy grinned at the girl. The girl rolled her eyes again and finished pulling off her boots. “Just take them,” she said. “He’s got it in his head that you’re our Christmas mission. If we don’t help you, he’ll never get his wings.”

Georgie took the boots. Knockoff Uggs. They looked about her size.

She kicked off her patent leather ballet flats—a birthday gift from Seth, so undoubtedly expensive. (Seth always bought Georgie clothes for Christmas, usually to replace the most pathetic item in her wardrobe. Good thing he didn’t know about her bras.) “You can have these,” Georgie said, “if you want them.”

The girl looked dubious.

“We’ll wait here for a while,” the boy said. “Come back if you need help.”

Right, Georgie thought, putting on the boots. If my husband doesn’t recognize me. If my in-laws don’t live there anymore. If everyone I know is either dead or not born yet because I ruined time. . . . “Thank you.”

“Merry Christmas,” the boy said.

“Be careful,” his fiancée warned. “There might be ice.”

“Thank you.” Georgie swung her legs out of the truck and jumped onto the ground, catching the door as her feet slid out from beneath her.

No one had shoveled yet on Rainwood Road. Georgie vaguely remembered that there weren’t any sidewalks; she and Neal had walked in the street that time they went to get pizza, their hands swinging between them.

The snow came up to the top of Georgie’s calves—she had to lift her feet high to make any progress. Her ears and eyelids were freezing, but after a block of climbing, her cheeks were flushed, and she was panting.

God, she’d never even been able to imagine this much cold before.

How could people live someplace that so obviously didn’t want them? All that romance about snow and seasons . . . You shouldn’t have to make a special effort not to die every time you left your house.

Everything was so quiet, Georgie’s breath sounded thunderous. She looked back, but she couldn’t see the red truck anymore. She couldn’t see any signs of life. It was easy to imagine that every house she passed was empty.

Georgie felt tears in her eyes and tried to pretend it was because of the cold, or the fatigue, and not because of what was waiting for her—or not waiting for her—at the top of the hill.

CHAPTER 36

Neal grew up in a brick colonial house with a circular driveway. His mom was overly proud of it; the first time Georgie visited, a few months after they got engaged, his mom told her the driveway was one of the reasons they’d bought the house.

“I don’t get it,” Georgie said later, after she’d snuck up from the basement to Neal’s room, and he’d shoved her up against the wall, under his Eagle Scout certificate. “It’s like there’s a road in your front yard,” she said. “How is that a good thing?” Neal had huffed a smile into her ear, then pushed the neck of her pajamas open with his nose.

Georgie walked up the drive now, wrecking the postcard perfection of the snowy front yard with her tracks.

She opened the storm door and knocked—the front door pushed open under her hand. Because in Omaha, apparently, nobody even closed their front doors. Georgie could hear Christmas music and people talking. She knocked again, peeking into the house.

When no one answered, she stepped cautiously into the foyer. The house smelled like apple-cinnamon Glade and pine needles. “Hello?” Georgie said, too quietly. Her voice was shaking, she’d tracked in snow—she felt like she was breaking in.

She tried it a bit louder: “Hello?”

The door from the kitchen opened partway, and the music—“Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas”—swelled. Neal stepped out. Half a room away from her.

Neal.

Milk chocolate hair, pale skin, a red sweater she’d never seen before. A look on his face she’d never seen before. Like he didn’t know her at all.

He stopped.

The kitchen door swung to and fro behind him.

“Neal,” Georgie whispered.

His mouth was open. Lovely mouth, lovely matching lips, lovely dents like handholds for Georgie’s teeth.

His eyebrows were low and stern, and when he closed his jaw, there was a tense pulse in the corners of his cheeks.

“Neal?”

Five seconds passed. Ten. Fifteen.

Neal right there. In jeans and blue socks and a strange sweater.

Was he happy to see her? Did he even know her? Neal?

The door flew open behind him. “Daddy? Grandma says—”

Alice walked into the room, and Georgie felt like someone had just kicked her in the back of the knees.

Alice jumped. Just like kids do in the movies. For joy. “Mommy!” She ran for Georgie.

Georgie’s phone slid out of her hand as she dropped to the floor.

“Mommy!” Alice shouted again, landing in Georgie’s arms. “Are you our Christmas present?”

Georgie held Alice so tight, it probably hurt, and covered the side of the girl’s face with kisses. Georgie didn’t see the kitchen door open again, but she heard Noomi squeal and meow, and then there were two of them in her arms, and Georgie was falling sideways off her knees, trying to hold on.

“Missed you,” she said between kisses, blinded by pink skin and yellow-brown hair. “Missed you so much.”

Alice pulled back, and Georgie tightened her arm around her. But Neal was lifting Alice up and away. “Daddy,” Alice said, “Mommy’s here. Were you surprised?”

Neal nodded and lifted Noomi up, too, setting them both aside. Noomi meowed in protest.

Neal held his hands out to Georgie, and she took them. (So warm in her freezing fingers.) He pulled her to her feet, then let go. He still wasn’t smiling, so she didn’t smile either. She knew she was crying, but tried to ignore it.

“You’re here,” he said without moving his lips.

Georgie nodded.

Neal moved quickly, taking her face in his hands—one on her cold cheek, one under her jaw—and pulling it into is.

She felt relief blow through her like a ghost.

Neal.

Neal, Neal, Neal.

Georgie touched his shoulders, then the back of his hair—still sharp—then the tops of his ears, rubbing them between her fingers and thumbs.

She couldn’t remember the last time they’d kissed like this. Maybe they’d never kissed like this. (Because neither of them had ever almost fallen off a cliff.)

“You’re here,” he said again.

And Georgie nodded, stepping forward just in case he was thinking of pulling away.

She was here.

And it didn’t fix anything. It didn’t change anything.

She still had her job. And the meeting maybe. She still had Seth to sort out—or not. Georgie hadn’t made any real decisions. . . .

But for once she’d made the right choice.

She was here.

With Neal. Whatever that meant from now on.

He kissed her like he knew exactly who she was. He kissed her like he’d been waiting for her for fifteen years.

Alice and Noomi jumped on their parents’ feet and hugged their legs.

There was a dog in there somewhere, and Neal’s mom talking about setting an extra place at the table.

“You’re here,” Neal said, and Georgie held him by the ears so he couldn’t pull away.

She nodded.