Traffic moved along at a snail’s pace but I found I didn’t mind. I loved New York in the fall and, thanks to my trip abroad, therapy, and texts with Marley, I felt my time here was coming to a close. I no longer felt the fear that had been clinging to me. Or rather, the fear I’d been clinging to with both hands for years. I didn’t feel as tentative or stuck. There was an openness inside me that was palpable, and that I couldn’t remember ever feeling before. It was freeing. Comforting. And it made me curious.
“Hey,” I said, leaning forward, and then proceeded to give the driver directions that would take me past Lior’s house on the way to mine.
Perhaps it was a bad idea. But I tried to think of it in a different light, as Novi had been teaching me to do.
“See how a situation can serve you,” she’d said one day after I’d come back from a couple days visiting The Hague. “Don’t count it all as bad. Count it as learning something about yourself.”
“And if it makes me feel like shit?”
“Then don’t do it again,” she’d said with an uncharacteristic wink.
It had been weeks since I’d seen Lior and, while I didn’t plan to stop, I just wanted to drive by. I wanted to see how it would feel. Was she home? Were the lights on? Would it look as though she had company? How would I feel if she did? How would I react? Would I be angry? Sad? Resigned?
My pulse sped up as we rounded the corner onto her street and I mentally braced myself for what I would see – and then physically braced myself as the driver swerved around a garbage bin that had fallen over into the street.
“It’s been windy while you were gone,” he said. “You’re lucky you were out of town. Me and the missus lost power a couple of times this past week. You’ll probably have blinking clocks all over your house when you get in.”
I nodded, barely listening, because Lior’s house was four away… three… two…
All the lights were off, aside from the porch light. And then I saw it.
“What the fuck is that?” I said.
“What’s what?” the driver asked, hitting the brakes.
“Don’t stop!” I said, moving away from the window in case she was home and somehow saw me in a small cab window through the rain. But then I leaned forward again, my eyes glued to the sign posted on the column at the bottom of the stairs leading to her front door.
A ‘For Sale’ sign.
Lior was moving.
All the air expelled from my lungs. I leaned back against the seat and closed my eyes. I had no idea where she was going. Seattle? Somewhere else? Europe? But I wasn’t privy to that information because I’d let her go. And she… she was moving on.
I paid the driver and dragged my suitcase up the front steps to my house. The stormy weather had knocked two of the three potted plants onto one another, and there was a small pile of wet newspapers shoved into the corner – the newspaper boy’s attempt at keeping them out of the elements. I’d deal with them later.
For the next week I wandered my house feeling more than ever like I didn’t belong in it. With Brontë gone and Lior not around to soften the bright white and hard edges with her warmth and laughter, everything felt off kilter. Even more now than when I’d first lost them.
“You look terrible,” Marley said. We were doing a video call so she could show me the clothes she’d picked out for a job interview. She didn’t need to work, our dad and her mom were able to provide for anything she might need, but she’d never had a job and thought it might be fun to earn a paycheck. Mostly, I was pretty sure, because some of her roommates had jobs and she said the responsibility of it made them seem more mature.
“Don’t be in a rush to grow up,” I’d told her. “Take advantage of this time to just learn.”
But Marley had gotten it in her head that a job equaled fun. Who was I to burst that bubble?
“Are you sick?” she asked.
“No,” I said.
“Are you sad because of Lior?” I’d finally told her we were no longer speaking. She’d said she’d suspected as much, but didn’t say why. I wondered if the two of them still talked, but I never asked.
“No. And yes. But… Look, I’m just sad, okay? It’s been a rough few weeks and I’ve had a lot on my mind.”
“I thought you said the vacation was cathartic.”
“It was. And then I came home and nothing here has changed. Brontë is still gone and?—”
“And?”
I knew she was fishing for me to talk about Lior, but I would not satisfy her need.
