“Oh, Nora.” Libby squeezes me to her as we come to a crosswalk, and I bask in the closeness. No matter how hectic life and work sometimes get, it’s always felt like there were some internal metronomes keeping us in sync. I’d pick up my phone to call her, and it would already be ringing, or she’d text me about grabbing lunch and we’d realize we were already in the same part of the city. The last few months, though, we’ve been ships passing in the night. Actually, more like a submarine and a paddleboat in entirely separate lakes.
I miss her calls while I’m in meetings, and she’s already asleep by the time I call back. She finally invites me to dinner on a night I’ve promised to take a client out. Worse than that is the faint, uncanny off feeling when we’re actually together. Like she’s only halfway here. Like those metronomes have fallen into different rhythms, and even when we’re right next to each other, they never manage to match up.
At first I’d chalked it up to stress about the new baby, but as time has worn on, my sister’s seemed more distant rather than closer. We’re fundamentally out of sync in a way I can’t seem to name, and not even my dream mattress and a cloud of diffused lavender oil are enough to keep me from lying awake, turning over our last few conversations like I’m looking for faint cracks.
The sign has changed to WALK, but a slew of drivers rushes through the newly red light. When a guy in a nice suit strides into the street, Libby pulls me along after him.
It’s a truth universally acknowledged that cabdrivers won’t clip people who look like this guy. His outfit says, I am a man with a lawyer. Or possibly just I am a lawyer.
“I thought you and Andrew were good together,” Libby says, seamlessly reentering the conversation. As long as you’re willing to overlook that my ex’s name was Aaron, not Andrew. “I don’t understand what went wrong. Was it work stuff?”
Her eyes flicker toward me on the words work stuff, and it triggers another memory: me slipping back into the apartment during Bea’s fourth birthday party and Libby giving me a look like an injured Pixar puppy as she guessed, Work call?
When I apologized, she brushed it off, but now I find myself wondering if that was the moment I’d started to lose her, the exact second when our diverging paths pulled just a little too far from each other and the seams started splitting.
“What went wrong,” I say, recovering my place in the conversation, “is that, in a past life, I betrayed a very powerful witch, and she’s put a curse on my love life. He’s moving to Prince Edward Island.”
We pause at the next cross street, waiting for traffic to slow. It’s a Saturday in mid-July and absolutely everyone is out, wearing as few clothes as legally possible, eating dripping ice cream cones from Big Gay or artisanal ice pops filled with things that have no business being anywhere near a dessert.
“Do you know what’s on Prince Edward Island?” I ask.
“Anne of Green Gables?” Libby says.
“Anne of Green Gables would be dead by now,” I say.
“Wow,” she says. “Spoiler.”
“How does a person go from living here to moving to a place where the hottest destination is the Canadian Potato Museum? I would immediately die of boredom.”
Libby sighs. “I don’t know. I’d take a little boredom right about now.”
I glance sidelong at her, and my heart trips over its next beat. Her hair is still perfect and her skin is prettily flushed, but now new details jump out at me, signs I missed at first.
The drawn corners of her mouth. The subtle thinning of her cheeks. She looks tired, older than usual.
“Sorry,” she says, almost to herself. “I don’t mean to be Sad, Droopy Mom—I just . . . I really need some sleep.”
My mind is already spinning, searching for places I could pick up the slack. Brendan and Libby’s evergreen concern is money, but they’ve refused help in that department for years, so I’ve had to find creative ways of supporting them.
Actually, the phone call she may or may not be peeved about was a Birthday Present Trojan Horse. A “client” “canceled” “a trip” and “the room at the St. Regis” was “nonrefundable” so “it only made sense” to have a midweek slumber party with the girls there.
“You’re not Sad, Droopy Mom,” I say now, squeezing her arm again. “You’re Supermom. You’re the regulation hottie in the jumpsuit at the Brooklyn Flea, carrying her five hundred beautiful children, a giant bouquet of wildflowers, and a basket full of lumpy tomatoes. It’s okay to get tired, Lib.”
She squints at me. “When was the last time you counted my kids, Sissy? Because there are two.”
“Not to make you feel like a terrible parent,” I say, poking her belly, “but I’m eighty percent sure there’s another one in there.”
“Fine, two and a half.” Her eyes dart toward mine, cautious. “So how are you, really? About the breakup, I mean.”
“We were only together four months. It wasn’t serious.”
“Serious is the nature of how you date,” she says. “If someone makes it to a third dinner with you, then he’s already met four hundred and fifty separate criteria. It’s not casual dating if you know the other person’s blood type.”
“I do not know my dates’ blood types,” I say. “All I need from them is a full credit report, a psych eval, and a blood oath.”
Libby throws her head back, cackling. As ever, making my sister laugh is a shot of serotonin straight into my heart. Or brain? Probably brain. Serotonin in your heart is probably not a good a thing. The point is, Libby’s laugh makes me feel like the world is under my thumb, like I’m in complete control of The Situation.
Maybe that makes me a narcissist, or maybe it just makes me a thirty-two-year-old woman who remembers full weeks when she couldn’t coax her grieving sister out of bed.
“Hey,” Libby says, slowing as she realizes where we are, what we’ve been subconsciously moving toward. “Look.”
If we got blindfolded and air-dropped into the city, we’d probably still end up here: gazing wistfully at Freeman Books, the West Village shop we used to live over. The tiny apartment where Mom spun us through the kitchen, all three of us singing the Supremes’ “Baby Love” into kitchen utensils. The place where we spent countless nights curled up on a pink-and-cream floral couch watching Katharine Hepburn movies with a smorgasbord of junk food spread across the coffee table she’d found on the street, its busted leg replaced by a stack of hardcovers.
In books and movies, characters like me always live in cement-floored lofts with bleak modern art and four-foot vases filled with, like, scraggly black twigs, for some inexplicable reason.
But in real life, I chose my current apartment because it looks so much like this one: old wooden floors and soft wallpaper, a hissing radiator in one corner and built-in bookshelves stuffed to the brim with secondhand paperbacks. Its crown molding has been painted over so many times it’s lost its crisp edges, and time has warped its high, narrow windows.
This little bookstore and its upstairs apartment are my favorite places on earth.
Even if it’s also where our lives were torn in half twelve years ago, I love this place.
“Oh my gosh!” Libby grips my forearm, waving at the display in the bookstore’s window: a pyramid of Dusty Fielding’s runaway hit, Once in a Lifetime, with its new movie tie-in cover.
She pulls out her phone. “We have to take a picture!”
There is no one who loves Dusty’s book as much as my sister. And that’s saying something, since, in six months, it’s sold a million copies already. People are calling it the book of the year. A Man Called Ove meets A Little Life.
Take that, Charlie Lastra, I think, as I do every so often when I remember that fateful lunch. Or whenever I pass his shut-tight office door (all the sweeter since he moved to work at the publishing house that put out Once, where he’s now surrounded by constant reminders of my success).
Fine, I think Take that, Charlie Lastra a lot. One never really forgets the first time a colleague drove her to extreme unprofessionalism.
“I’m going to see this movie five hundred times,” Libby tells me. “Consecutively.”
“Wear a diaper,” I advise.
“Not necessary,” she says. “I’ll be crying too much. There won’t be any pee in my body.”
“I had no idea you had such a . . . comprehensive understanding of science,” I say.
“The last time I read it, I cried so hard I pulled a muscle in my back.”