Chapter 24 - Jamie
Jamie
"We're going on an airplane!" Rosie told Sam for the third time. "Have you ever been on an airplane?"
Rosie had been on a loop about the airplane since Sam walked in with takeout. I'd explained the trip three times at preschool pickup and twice more in the kitchen. Two weeks in New York. Packing up the old apartment. Saying goodbye to a life I wasn't coming back to.
Sam smiled. "A couple times."
"Is it scary?"
"A little. But mostly it's fun. You get to see the clouds from above."
Rosie's eyes went wide. "From above?"
"Yep. You fly right through them."
Rosie went quiet. "Do you think we could see Mommy and Daddy? At work in the clouds?"
The table went still.
My breath caught. Across from me, Sam's whole face changed.
I reached over and brushed Rosie's hair back from her forehead.
"Maybe, sweetheart. They're very busy keeping the sun shining and the rain falling. But I bet if you look really hard, they'll wave at you."
Rosie nodded. "I'll look really hard."
"Good."
She went back to her chicken nuggets. Already moved on the way children do.
Sam's eyes met mine across the table. He didn't have to say anything. The weight of it sat between us—Jack's absence, the life we were building in his shadow, this little girl who carried her parents in the clouds.
I reached over and squeezed his hand.
He squeezed back.
Sam drove us to the airport the next morning.
He parked instead of dropping us at the curb. Rolled the suitcase in for us. At the doors, he crouched down and pulled Rosie into a hug.
"Take care of Auntie Jamie for me, okay? I'm gonna miss you."
Rosie nodded against his shoulder, serious as a promise.
Then he stood and pulled me into a kiss.
"Call me when you land," he said when he pulled away.
"I will."
I took Rosie's hand and walked through the doors.
I hadn't been back to New York since Jack died.
I'd been telling myself for weeks that it was just logistics—pack the apartment, clear the desk, say the goodbyes I hadn't said on the phone.
But the closer the flight got, the more it felt like I was about to walk back into a life I'd already left.
A life that was still waiting there, with my clothes in the closet and my name on the lease, like nothing had changed.
I looked back once. He was still there with his hands in his pockets, watching us go. I knew without turning again that he'd stay there until we were out of sight.
New York was loud in a way I didn't remember.
We stepped out of the terminal into the horns, the crowds, and the pace of people who all had somewhere to be five minutes ago. Rosie pressed against my side with Biscuit clutched under her arm, her eyes wide, and whispered that the city was so big. I shifted the suitcase and waved down a cab.
It used to feel like freedom. Like the place I'd escaped to when Havensworth became too small. Now it just felt loud.
At the apartment Rosie walked around slowly, taking in the bookshelves, the windows, the framed photos I'd hung on the walls years ago.
"This is where you lived?"
"Yeah," I said. "This is where I lived."
I didn't notice I'd said it that way until later.
The office took just one morning. I'd thought it would take longer.
I'd thought there would be more to say to the people I'd worked beside for eight years.
But most of what needed saying had already been said on the phone weeks ago, and what was left was the kind of thing you handled with a box and a few hours of quiet.
My boss pulled me into her office while Rosie colored on the floor with the crayons someone had dug out of a supply closet.
She told me what I already knew—that the door was open, that I was one of the best writers she'd had, that I should call her if I ever wanted to come back.
Then she told me something I hadn't expected.
That whatever I was putting together in Havensworth, she wanted to see it when it was ready.
That it sounded like the kind of story they should be running.
I nodded and thanked her. I didn't trust my voice to say more.
Rosie held up a drawing of the two of us on an airplane. Clouds everywhere. Two stick figures waving from above. My boss looked at it for a long moment. Then she looked at me and told me to go be with my family.
Lunch was at a place a few blocks away—we used to go there on Fridays, back when I had Fridays that looked the same every week.
The whole team came. They ordered too much food and made me sit at the head of the table and told stories I half-remembered.
Rosie sat beside me with a kids' menu and a small pencil, working her way through a maze on the back.
Someone made a toast I couldn't remember now.
I laughed at the right moments. I said thank you more times than I could count.
When the plates were cleared and we stood to leave, one of the older editors hugged me and told me I was going to be fine, and I held on for a beat longer than I meant to.
I walked back to the apartment after. Took the long way.
Rosie held my hand for the first few blocks, looking up at everything.
Past the coffee shop where I'd written half my first piece for the paper.
Past the bookstore I used to duck into on bad days.
A few blocks later she tugged on my sleeve and asked to be carried, and I shifted her onto my hip, and she wrapped her arms around my neck and rested her head against my shoulder.
I kept walking. Past the corner where I'd stood in the rain one night a few years in, twenty-two years old and certain I'd figured something out.
The city didn't look different. It was me who'd changed.
I'd built a woman on these blocks—careful, private, sharp-edged, good at her work—and I'd loved her.
I was going to miss her. But she'd been built alone, and I wasn't alone anymore, and the weight of the girl against my shoulder was the answer to a question I hadn't known I was asking.
Rosie fell asleep on my shoulder in the elevator.
Inside the apartment I set her on the couch with Biscuit tucked against her chest. I stood in the middle of the living room for a long time without turning on the lights.
The city hummed outside the window the way it always had. I was the one who had gone quiet.
The movers came on Thursday.
I'd booked them the week I landed, the same afternoon I'd started looking at what I actually owned and what I was willing to let go of.
In the end I sent almost all of it to Havensworth.
The fire had taken everything—our clothes, our photos, Jack's records, the kitchen we'd cooked in, the rooms my parents had lived in.
Rosie and I were sleeping on donated sheets.
I wasn't going to put eight years of my life into a storage unit in Queens when there was a new apartment in Havensworth with bare walls and nothing in the cabinets.
The lease was up at the end of the month.
I'd given notice before I flew up, and the super was scheduled to do the walk-through on my last morning.
The apartment had come furnished, which meant what I had to move was smaller than I'd feared—clothes, books, records, kitchen equipment, the framed photos I'd pulled off the walls the first night and wrapped in a towel.
By Friday afternoon everything I owned was on a truck headed south.
In between the logistics, there were days I didn't know what to do with. Too many hours. Too much of the city I hadn't shown Rosie yet. So we went.
The carousel in Central Park on a cold Tuesday morning with almost no one else there.
Rosie on a painted horse, gripping the pole with both hands, and me walking alongside with my hand on her back because she wouldn't let me stand at the railing.
Every time we came around she looked up at me like she needed to check I was still there.
Pizza at a place I used to go to when I lived four blocks north. The Central Park Zoo. The Natural History Museum for the dinosaurs. The Staten Island Ferry one afternoon just to see the harbor, Rosie pressed against the railing with her hair blowing sideways while I held the back of her coat.
She was going to forget most of it. Four-year-olds don't keep that kind of memory.
But she'd have the pictures, and I'd have told her about it for the rest of her life, and that was enough.
I wanted her to have it. I wanted her to know that I had walked this city before I was her mother, and that I had come back to it with her once before we went home.
Sam had been texting me.
He hadn't been calling, and I understood why.
The probies had started that week, and Cap had put him on point, and what he'd described in his messages sounded like every hour of his shift and most of the hours that weren't. He texted when he could.
Missing you. Hope Rosie's not driving you crazy.
The phone would buzz and I'd read whatever he'd sent and smile and put it back in my pocket and keep going.
I missed his voice. I hadn't realized how much I'd come to need it at the end of a day until I didn't have it.
The phone rang that last afternoon.
Rosie was on the couch with Biscuit tucked under her chin, the apartment nearly empty around her. When she heard Sam's voice through the phone she lit up and reached for it with both hands.
"Uncle Sam! Guess what? I saw Mommy and Daddy on the plane!"
I froze.
His voice came through the speaker, confused. "You did?"
"Uh-huh. In the clouds. I saw angel wings! They were waving at us. Just like Auntie Jamie said they would."
My eyes filled.
She chattered on—about the clouds, about how high we were, about how she'd pressed her face to the window the whole way and watched. Then she handed the phone back to me. "He wants to talk to you."
I took it. Couldn't speak for a moment.
"Jamie?" His voice was thick.
"I'm here."