“My sweet girls!” Mom cries, and I bend to sweep a kiss across her cheek on my way to the fridge. I make it all the way there before the chill sets in. The feeling of wrongness.
I turn and look at her, my beautiful mother. She’s gone back to reading, but when she catches me staring, she breaks into a puzzled smile. “What?”
I feel tears in my eyes. That should be the first sign that I’m dreaming—I never cry in real life—but I never notice this incongruity.
She looks the same, not a day older. Like springtime incarnate, the kind of warmth your skin gulps down after a long winter.
She doesn’t seem surprised to see us, only amused, and then concerned. “Nora?”
I go toward her, wrap my arms around her, and hold tight. She circles me in hers too, her lemon-lavender scent settling over me like a blanket. Her glossy strawberry waves fall across my shoulders as she runs a hand over the back of my head.
“Hey, sweet girl,” she says. “What’s wrong? Let it out.”
She doesn’t remember that she’s gone.
I’m the only one who knows she doesn’t belong. We walked in the door, and she was there, and it felt so right, so natural, that none of us noticed it right away.
“I’ll make tea,” Mom says, wiping my tears away. She stands and walks past me, and I know before I turn that when I do, she won’t be there anymore.
I let her out of my sight, and now she’s gone. I can never stop myself from looking. From turning to the quiet, still room, feeling that painful emptiness in my chest like she’s been carved out of me.
And that’s when I wake up. Like if she can’t be there, there’s no point in dreaming at all.
I check the alarm clock on the bedside table. It’s not quite six, and I didn’t fall asleep until after three. Even with my sister’s snores shivering through the bed, the house was too quiet. Crickets chirped and cicadas sang in a steady rhythm, but I missed the one-off honk of an annoyed cabdriver, or the sirens of a fire truck rushing past. Even the drunk guys shouting from opposite sides of the street as they headed home after a night of barhopping.
Eventually, I downloaded an app that plays cityscape sounds and set it in the windowsill, turning it up slowly so it wouldn’t jar Libby awake. Only once I’d reached full volume did I drift off.
But I’m wide awake now.
My pang of homesickness for my mother rapidly shape-shifts into longing for my Peloton.
I am a parody of myself.
I pull on a sports bra and leggings and trip downstairs, then tug on my sneakers and step out into the cool darkness of morning.
Mist hovers across the meadow, and in the distance, through the trees, the first sprays of purply pinks stretch along the horizon. As I cross the dewy grass toward the footbridge, I lift my arms over my head, stretching to each side before picking up my pace.
On the far side of the footbridge, the path winds into the woods, and I break into an easy jog, the air’s moisture pooling in all my creases. Gradually, the post-dream ache starts to ease.
Sometimes, it feels like no matter how many years pass, when I first wake up, I’m newly orphaned.
Technically, I guess we’re not orphans. When Libby got pregnant the first time, she and Brendan hired a private investigator to find our father. When he did, Libby mailed dear old Dad a baby shower invitation. She never heard back, of course. I don’t know what she expected from a man who couldn’t be bothered to show up to his own kid’s birth.
He left Mom when she was pregnant with Libby, without so much as a note.
Sure, he also left a ten-thousand-dollar check, but to hear Mom tell it, he came from so much money that that was his idea of petty change.
They’d been high school sweethearts. She was a sheltered, homeschooled girl with no money and dreams of moving to New York to become an actress; he was the wealthy prep school boy who impregnated her at seventeen. His parents wanted Mom to terminate the pregnancy; hers wanted them to get married. They compromised by doing neither. When they moved in together, both sets of parents cut them off, but his turned over his inheritance as a parting gift, a sliver of which he’d bequeathed to us on his way out the door.
She used the nest egg to move us from Philly to New York and never looked back.
I push the thoughts away and lose myself in the delicious burn of my muscles, the thudding of my feet against pine-needle-dusted earth. The only two ways I’ve ever managed to get out of my head are through reading and rigorous exercise. With either, I can slip out of my mind and drift in this bodiless dark.
The trail curves down a forested hillside, then turns to follow a split-rail fence, beyond which a pasture stretches out, glowing in the first spears of light, the horses dotting the field backlit, their tails swishing at the gnats and flies that float and glimmer in the air like gold dust.
There’s a man out there too. When he sees me, he lifts a hand in greeting.
I squint against the fierce light, my stomach rising as I place him as the coffee shop Adonis. The small-town leading man.
Do I slow down?
Is he going to come over here?
Should I call out and introduce myself?
Instead I choose a fourth option: I trip over a root and go sprawling in the mud, my hand landing squarely in something that appears to be poop. A lot of it. Like, maybe a whole family of deer has specifically marked this spot as their shit palace.
I clamber onto my feet, gaze snapping toward Romance Novel Hero to find that he’s missed my dramatic performance. He’s looking at (talking to?) one of the horses.
For a second, I contemplate calling out to him. I play the fantasy out to its logical conclusion, this gloriously handsome man reaching to shake my hand, only to find my palm thoroughly smeared with deer pellets.
I shudder and turn down the path, picking up my jog.
If, eventually, I meet the exceptionally handsome horse whisperer, then great, maybe I can make progress on the list and check off number five. If not . . . well, at least I have my dignity.
I brush a strand of hair out of my face, only to realize I’ve used the scat-hand.
Scratch that part about dignity.
* * *
“I forgot how peaceful it is grocery shopping without a four-year-old, like, lying on the ground and licking the tile,” Libby sighs, moseying down the toiletries aisle like an aristocrat taking a turn about the garden in Regency-era England.
“And all the space—the space,” I say, far more enthusiastically than I feel. I’ve been able to forestall Libby seeing the droopy city center of Sunshine Falls by insisting on having Hardy drive us to the Publix a few towns over, but I’m still in preemptive damage-control mode, as evidenced by the fifteen minutes I spent pointing out various trees on the ride over.
Libby stops in front of the boxed dyes, a brilliant smile overtaking her face. “Hey, we should choose each other’s makeover looks! Like hair color and cut, I mean.”
“I’m not cutting my hair,” I say.
“Of course you’re not,” she says. “I am.”
“Actually, you’re not.”
She frowns. “It’s on the list, Sissy,” she says. “How else are we supposed to transform via montage into our new selves? It’ll be fine. I cut the girls’ hair all the time.”
“That explains Tala’s Dorothy Hamill phase.”
Libby smacks me in the boob, which is completely unfair, because you can’t hit a pregnant lady’s boob, even if she’s your little sister.
“Do you really have the emotional resilience to leave a checklist unchecked?” she says.
Something in me twitches.
I really do fucking love a checklist.
She pokes me in the ribs. “Come on! Live a little! This will be fun! It’s why we’re here.”