“Sorry, baby.”
“It’s okay.” Hannah looked unfazed and took off at a run, but I felt shocked. My frustration had come out of nowhere. I didn’t want to take it out on her.
When we got back to the house, I turned on the television for Hannah and fussed with my articles for the rest of the afternoon, finishing a piece on farm subsidies. I tried for humor, pulling out references to movies likeField of Dreamsand the Zach SnyderSupermanfilms, but it read more like a freshman in college banging out their first submission to a humor magazine. Laura got home at five from her meetings about possibly returning to work. She had brought Indian take-out with her, our sisterly equivalent of a dozen roses to smooth over any fight, but I told her that I needed to run an errand.
What I really needed was to get out of the house. I walked the streets of Brooklyn by myself for over an hour, all the way from Carroll Gardens to the Brooklyn Museum, through Prospect Park, past some of my favorite restaurants and vintage clothing stores.
The city was beautiful. It was closing in on September, and the tips of some trees were beginning to be touched with gold. The skies were an endless blue shading into violet, and the whole population of the city seemed to be outside, biking and skateboarding or sitting on stoops listening to rap music.
I took a cell phone photo of the park with the last strains of light in the sky, just when everything was turning purple. I texted it to Paul and Lisette with the words,back inBrooklyn. miss you both.
Lisette responded immediately with a long series of exclamation marks.They have trees in NYC? No one tells me these things!
Paul didn’t respond for half an hour, and when he did, he just “loved” the image. I stared at the heart for a long moment.
On my way home, I walked past an open tea shop and browsed their teas. Shops like this in St. John’s would have shut down by six p.m., but in New York, the places that sold caffeine stayed open later, keeping the city going well into the night. I bought a little teacup to send to Mrs. Mahoney with some fancy tea. The teacup looked old and delicate but had ‘Brooklyn Bitch’ painted in gold leaf. I didn’t know if she would love it or hate it, but I figured at least it would make her smile or make her glad she was rid of me. I also bought a coffee press for Lisette because she didn’t have one yet in her basement apartment. I knew she worked at a coffee shop, but this one would be something of her own.
In spite of my best efforts, the anger that had been brewing inside me wasn’t fully gone by the time I got home. I had a little half-balcony off my bedroom, barely big enough for two chairs, and I invited Laura to sit outside with me and enjoy the breezy night while Hannah finished one last television show before bed. I felt tense and wary.
“You know I’m sorry,” she said, out of nowhere, opening a can of seltzer.
“For what?”
“For getting mad at you when you didn’t want to move down to Atlanta. I didn’t assume you would come babysit, by the way. I really didn’t. I just thought you might want to.”
“That’s okay,” I said. “It was just a big ask, and I felt like you didn’t really ask. You didn’t say I was important to you, and you hoped I’d come. You acted like you were doing me a favor by asking me.”
“Well, I meant to ask nicely.”
I sighed, nodding.
She paused and went on. “I just freaked out a little. I didn’t mean to force you to move to Newfoundland just to make a point.”
“Except I did want to move to Newfoundland.”
Laura gave me a skeptical look. “Abby.”
“Yes, I mean, it’s pretty, and there are nice people there…It wasn’t just a panic reaction. I wanted to go.”
“To Newfoundland. Not Toronto, not Maine, but this island in the middle of the ocean? That doesn’t in any way strike you as being an overreaction?” Laura raised her eyebrows at me, and I felt a rush of all the fights we’d had in the past, every little conflict that I’d let slide.
“Fuck you, Laura.” She froze, and I pressed on. “Sure, I mean, at first, I just wanted to go somewhere with cooler weather because I hate the heat, but I liked it. A lot. I mean, it’s not some backwater, it’s a decent-sized city and it’s a lot cheaper than other places in Canada. Toronto real estate is as expensive as New York.”
“And then you’d what, just never see us again?” There was hurt in her voice, and I wondered if she was being condescending to hide that she was feeling abandoned.
“I could take Hannah for the summers, so you don’t have to pay for summer camp,” I said. “Camp Abby.”
Laura’s face was a portrait of incredulity, like I had announced I was joining the circus as soon as I mastered juggling knives.
“I probably can’t move there permanently, so I don’t even know why we’re debating this. I don’t know if my application for a visa will be accepted.”
“You applied for a visa?” Laura genuinely looked shocked.
“I’ll hear in a few months. Maybe in December. But yes. If I got permission, I would move back.”
It was the first time I had said it aloud, in such a definite way, and I watched Laura’s face. She was waiting for me to say I was joking, trying to come to terms with the idea that she didn’t understand me as well as she thought she did.
“You should probably stay there for a whole winter before you decide anything.”
