Page 68 of The Getaway List
He pulls me in again and I understand that this isn’t just a hug but a goodbye. I feel those old words creeping up in me the same way they did so many times as a kid: What if we’re totally different when you come back?
Only this time it’s not a matter of what if. We’re already different; we’ll always have this just the same.
We don’t kiss. We don’t do our handshake. For a moment it almost feels like Tom said—not an ending or a beginning, just something that’s happening for now. But then he pulls me in a little tighter, tells me he’ll text me when he gets in, and the moment he’s out of my reach I can feel my heart taking a reluctant snapshot of this moment. The split and excruciating second between before and after; the last moment I have to say his name or let him go.
The door closes behind him, a strange bracket closing the summer with the two of us on opposite sides of this wall. I stand there, entirely unsure of what to do with myself for a few long minutes, only to realize there’s only one thing I can do. I pull out my phone and call my mom.
“Tom’s leaving New York,” I blurt.
Inexplicably, impossibly, my mom says, “I know.”
I don’t ask how on earth that could be true, because in this moment it almost doesn’t matter what she says. I just need to hear her voice, and know she can hear mine. “Also I’m in love with him.”
Her voice is softer. “I know.”
And then finally, with an unbearable crush of disappointment and relief, I start to cry.
Chapter Twenty-Three
I spend the next day outrunning the absence of Tom, and at first it’s easy. I have to meet up with Eddie and Dai to help move a used couch into our new place while Jesse’s working a shift at his new gig at a guitar shop. I have to pack up the last of my things strewn around the apartment. I have a final job interview as a barista at a charming little hole-in-the-wall spot in the East Village where Mariella’s been going since she was a kid.
I should be nervous for the interview, but being in the shop is the most settled I’ve felt all day. It’s not just that it’s cozy and homelike, with the maroon walls and worn-out lounge chairs and warm yellow fairy lights on the wall. It’s that everyone here knows each other—what they do for work, how they take their tea, what the names of all their pets are. There’s a back wall so littered with flyers you can’t even see the wallpaper behind it, advertising upcoming shows from indie bands, creative workshops, odd jobs in the community. The longer I’m in New York the more I get the impression that it isn’t the shiny new universe I expected it to be—it’s just the home of a hundred thousand little universes like this one that all exist rubbing up against each other, sometimes never touching, sometimes spilling to make something new.
I look at that wall of flyers and it feels like a manifestation of all the Rileys I could be here, that I’m going to get a chance to try on. I walk into the interview with a bright, settled smile. I show off all the tricks I’ve learned from being my mom’s shadow at the coffee shop back home. I walk out not just with a job offer, but the sincere question, “How soon can you start?”
I open my mouth to say tomorrow, but instead I say, “Would it be okay if I start next week?”
A few ideas seize me in that moment. I’ll take a road trip on my own; eight and a half items out of nine is still better than eight. I’ll take the train upstate to where we were going to camp and walk around the small town outside of the camping grounds. I’ll book a bus ticket to one of the Tides of Time shooting locations I always wondered about seeing outside the city. I’ll take my blank notebook somewhere to try to drum up ideas for the short-story contest that’s kept me awake every night this week, still trying to decide whether or not I want to go for it in the first place. I’ll take a subway, a train, a bus, just for a little while, just to get out of my own head, but that doesn’t stop my head from doing exactly what it did last night. It takes me right back around in a circle.
I have to go home.
This probably should have been clear during the brief, mostly one-sided conversation I had with my mom last night. She stayed on the line with me as long as she could, but she was the closing manager on duty so mostly what I did was blurt it all out: that I’d been determined not to fall for Tom, but I fell for him anyway. That she was wrong about him being the one to push things, because he was the one keeping an eye out on everyone all summer. That I was scared for his sake because all these years nobody was keeping an eye on him, and now he was gone.
My mom didn’t try to fight me on any of it—she wasn’t even upset. She just said a lot of “I know” in that comforting way moms do when you’re not sure if they really do or not, but it doesn’t matter because they know you.
She tried to stay on the line longer but I told her to go when I heard people calling for her from the front. I promised I’d catch up with her tomorrow. But now that I’ve talked to her, the ache of missing her is too deep to ignore. Like hearing one “I know” from her let me finally pull in a breath deep enough to feel how far it went down.
I need to talk to her face-to-face. Not just about everything I told her last night, but about everything I’ve avoided talking to her about all summer, and long before that. Everyone around me has already been brave this summer, following their passions and having hard conversations and starting fresh from them. I’ve been cheering them on through it all, but I’ve been a hypocrite. It’s time for me to take their cues and be brave, too.
My bag is already packed, so it’s really a matter of figuring out which bus from Port Authority will get me back to Virginia the earliest. My nose is buried in the transit schedule when I open the door to leave Tom’s apartment, only to find my mom on the other side of it.
For a moment we’re too stunned to react, like we’re both recovering from the uncanny sensation of almost running into a mirror. Then it really is like running into a mirror, because both of our expressions wobble at the same time, our arms stretching out so fast that they’re tangled before I can even croak out the word “Mom.”
She hugs me fiercely, smelling like coffee and lavender shampoo and home. We stand there in the open doorway for so long that we might have just been reunited from a millennium apart, from separate edges of the world. It feels like enough of me has changed that we might have been, but also like there are some things, comfortingly, that could never change if I tried. This feeling between us we’ve always had, one that I recognized the shape of before I had the words for it—the two of us are a team. Maybe we’ve wanted different things these past few years, but we are still the same in our cores. We still want the world for each other, because for so long we’ve been each other’s worlds.
She pulls away from me but keeps her hands on my arms, looking me up and down as if to account for me. Only then does she see the backpack on my shoulders, her eyebrows lifting in question.
I look her up and down, too. At her familiar bright red floral top and her faded jeans and her hair every bit as wavy and recently sun-kissed as mine, the same way we get every summer.
“I missed you,” I say. “It’s a good thing you showed up when you did or we’d be passing each other on I-95.”
My mom pulls me in for another hug then, one that eases the backpack off my shoulders and has us headed back into the living room. She hasn’t been here before but that somehow doesn’t stop her from seamlessly figuring out that the hidden door in Vanessa’s kitchen is in fact the fridge, and pulling out two seltzers. She hands one to me as we stand at the ceiling-high window, staring out at the lush green of Central Park, at the expanse of downtown Manhattan beyond it, at the whirring traffic of the street down below.
“Wow,” says my mom. “It feels like being on top of the world.”
I want to smile but there’s something in the way her eyes are skimming the view, hushed and reverent, that weighs on me. The understanding that I was right. That for all my mom’s “do as I say, not as I do,” we’re still the same—I can recognize everything I feel about this place reflected back in the lights in her eyes.
Neither of us moves to sit. We just stare out at it.
