I thought about Hannah, and I stood up and walked to the check-in area. It was time to go home.
14
“BROOKLYN BITCH”
It tooktwo 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 Amazon 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 andthen 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.”
