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.
34
THE GIRLS ARE tucked into the air mattress in the upstairs bedroom (I’ve been relocated to the foldout couch), but Brendan, Libby, and I stay up late, picking over the leftovers of Bea’s blackberry pie.
Someone knocks on the door, and Brendan kisses Libby’s forehead on his way to answer it. “Nora?” he calls. “For you.”
Charlie’s standing in the doorway, his hair damp and his clothes perfectly wrinkle-free. He looks like a million bucks. Actually, more like six hundred, but six hundred very well-appointed dollars.
“Up for a walk?” he asks.
Libby shoves me out of my chair. “She sure is!”
Outside, we wander across the meadow, our hands catching and holding. It’s been years since I’ve held anyone’s hand other than Libby’s or Bea’s or Tala’s. It makes me feel young, but not in a bad way. Less like I’m powerless in an uncaring world and more like . . . like everything is new, shiny, undiscovered. The way Mom saw New York—that’s how I see Charlie.