Chapter 14
“brOOKLYN BITCH”
It took two flights to get back to New York City, back through Montreal and then another flight to JFK airport.
The strangest part of getting off the plane was how little culture shock I felt.
When I walked through the airport that my friend Jasmine had nicknamed the world’s most overpriced mall, I half-expected to feel overwhelmed by all the people and the noise and the traffic.
But instead I immediately relaxed. Everything felt like it was moving at the appropriate speed.
Hearing and seeing people from all over the world, with every accent, felt right.
Even the brusque taxi driver who tossed my bags into his trunk felt right.
He was efficient but not warm. He didn’t want to make friends.
He drove me back to my apartment in Brooklyn in silence, except for some casual swearing at a double-parked truck.
My doorman Nash was at his desk, and he greeted me as I came in.
“Hey, welcome back!” he said, and made a feeble motion toward getting up to help me with my bags, which he knew I would I wave off.
“Thanks, Nash, I got it.” I hauled my suitcases along the handicapped ramp that covered half the lobby staircase and then rumbled them along to my elevator.
My building had one of those old-fashioned elevators with a small round window like a porthole, and stepping onto it gave me a warm, familiar claustrophobia.
I was home. My heart was breaking, maybe, but I was about to see Laura. I was about to see my favorite kid. My sister and Hannah would already be waiting for me in my apartment.
I still had my keys, and I fumbled awkwardly through my bags to find them.
Then I walked up to my own door and opened the deadbolt with a familiar clunk.
I could hear Laura talking in my kitchen on the phone, and she quickly stepped into the living room and waved a greeting at me and then kept talking.
“Yeah, I know. I can definitely come in then,” she was saying. “Brant,” she whispered to me, pointing to her cell phone, and then kept listening; Brant was a co-worker at her old job.
“Got it,” I whispered.
I put down my bags and walked deeper into the living room to where Hannah lay watching TV on my sofa, looking half-asleep and sunburned.
“Tabby,” she said and made a half-move toward me before her gaze returned to the screen. “We’re staying at your place.”
“That’s just where I want you to be,” I said, climbing onto the sofa beside her. She looked extraordinarily tired.
“We were traveling all day.”
“Me, too.”
“That’s my sixth time on a plane!”
“That’s very impressive for seven years old.”
“I’m almost eight.”
“I know,” I said.
She looked at me for a long moment as if she was still deciding whether she wanted to hug me, and it hurt my heart to see it. She must have felt like I had left her, rather than the other way around.
Then she flashed a smile at me and crawled into my lap and put one of her soft little arms against my collarbone.
“I missed you,” she said as her eyes returned to the television. She was watching an animated show filled with overeager animals debating the nuances of life in a submarine.
“I missed you, too,” I said.
I leaned back to watch cartoons with her, trying to tell myself that everything was right again in the world. I was back where I belonged, back in the land of Broadway and bodegas, back with my family all in one place. The hole in my chest would fill soon enough.
After a few minutes, Laura walked into the room and sat next to me.
“I may be able to get my old job back,” she said. “Brant is pulling some strings for me.”
“That’s great,” I said.
“And then we’ll find a different place and be out of your hair.”
“No rush.”
A moment later, she said, “I put all the booze in your bedroom.” I remembered that Laura was in recovery, and I had forgotten how weird it might be for her to be around my fancy cocktail cart.
“Sorry. I forgot it was out.”
“You had the full set.”
She wasn’t wrong; she would have found whiskey, vodka, rum, tequila, and gin on the credenza.
“Well, you don’t come over much.” It was true.
I almost always went to Laura’s house. I would pick up Hannah at school and then we’d go to Laura’s and stay there until she got home from work.
Laura never went to my place. My life was supposed to revolve around hers, and now she was annoyed that my apartment wasn’t set up the way she wanted it.
She shrugged and said nothing.
It bothered me a little that she was implying something about my lifestyle, about how much I was like our mother, but I didn’t say anything. She was tired. We were both really tired.
Once Hannah was tucked into my pull-out sofa bed in the living room, Laura and I headed into my bedroom to have a real discussion.
“So Nick,” she said at last, perching herself on the end of my bed.
Of course that’s what we were going to talk about. Nick.
“I know you want me to say you were right about him,” she began.
“I don’t want you to say that.” It was true. The one thing I didn’t feel, right now, was any sense of gloating. “I know it was reasonable to try again with him.”
“The thing is, we may work it out. I just need my own life.”
“That’s fine, Laur.”
There was tension between us, but I wasn’t sure why. I hadn’t said anything, hadn’t teased her, hadn’t done anything I could think of to make her feel unwelcome.
“I don’t want you to think I’m going to live on your sofa bed forever.”
“I don’t. It’s fine. I’m not upset. I told you that you could have the bedroom if you want it. Both of you.”
“I didn’t want your bedroom.” I wondered if Laura’s pride was wounded.
She was the older sister, but she was crashing on my sofa for the first time.
It hit me that she and I both hated acting needy.
She was insisting everything was fine, and I wasn’t even bringing up that I’d just left behind a man I was totally in love with.
We were fine. We were good. This was how we got through everything.
I wasn’t sure what to do with that knowledge. It seemed impossible to do anything but what we were used to.
“You should go to sleep,” I said.
“You look tired,” Laura said.
“Everyone is tired,” I said.
“Are you okay?”
“Yeah,” I said quietly. “I’m okay. I’m not an alcoholic, Laur.”
“I know that. I’m sorry. I’m just annoyed that I still have to do that. And I had to explain what I was doing to Hannah, you know?”
“Yeah.” I hadn’t thought about it from that angle. I wondered how much Hannah knew about her mother’s relationship to alcohol.
“I’m glad you’re back from your trip,” she said as she rose from my bed. “I missed you.”
“Missed you, too,” I replied.
Was I home? I wasn’t sure anymore. Why was I annoyed that she assumed everything in Newfoundland had just been a casual lark?
‘A trip.’ That’s what Kedar had called it. A detour. And now it was over.
Kedar had told me not to go to the office on Monday because he was fighting to allow us to work from home and it would undermine his efforts if I went in anyway, so I spent the day with Hannah while Laura ran around trying to get their life back in order and get Hannah enrolled back in a New York City school.
Hannah was not excited that she’d already been in school for over a week, and none of it ‘counted,’ but Laura had explained that she needed to start back again in New York with the other kids.
“It’s not fair,” she wailed.
“Well, you’ll have at least a few days with me before you go back,” I said. “Let’s do something fun before I have to go back to getting work done.”
We walked to a playground together, but Hannah only spent a couple of minutes running around before she came to sit with me on a bench.
“You remember this playground?” I asked.
“Of course I remember it,” she said, like I was being silly. “It’s not my favorite anymore.”
“You like the one in Central Park with the big rock.”
“There’s a sprinkler playground in Atlanta,” she said. “That one is my favorite now.”
“I’m glad you had fun.”
“I want to move back to Georgia,” Hannah said. “I didn’t realize I had to start school over again. It’s not fair.”
“I know, sweetie.”
Hannah turned to watch the other kids on the playground with a wary expression.
I realized that Hannah looked different.
She had gotten new clothes and a new haircut, and I could glimpse the tween that she was going to become.
Eight years old was going to be different than seven.
I wondered if nine would see her sipping martinis and complaining about her third ex-husband. My time with her was slipping away.
“How was it,” I asked her, “down there in Georgia? Was it nice to see your dad?”
“Daddy and Mommy would have all these discussions.”
“Discussions?”
“Yes,” she said wearily. “You should have come. You could have told them to stop.” Then she wrapped an arm around me and hugged me.
“Push me on the swing!” she cried.
“What am I? Your servant?”
“Yes! Come, servant! Obey my commands!”
It was an old gag we had together, and she snapped her fingers for me to catch up.
Something in my heart hurt as I stood up.
I wondered again whether the time for me to have kids had passed forever.
For the last few years, I had been telling myself that I probably couldn’t even have kids anymore, like my uterus had closed up shop.
Better that than to think my negativity would doom me to spinsterhood.
I used to joke to Laura that I was going to pull a Miss Havisham on Hannah and raise her to punish the world of men.
“Push me higher!”
“Okay, okay.”