Too Good to Be True by Carola Lovering

Author:Carola Lovering
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: St. Martin's Publishing Group

Chapter Thirty

Burke

OCTOBER 2019—ONE DAY WITHOUT SKYE

I don’t wait until the morning to leave West Eleventh Street. The idea of sleeping in the bed without Skye is too depressing, and besides, she wants me out.

It doesn’t take me long to pack up the few items in the apartment that are mine—clothes, toiletries, computer, a few books. Mostly everything was Skye’s to begin with, and the place hardly looks any different by the time I zip my duffel.

A stack of Post-it notes sits on Skye’s desk, and I peel one from the top. I want to leave her with a few words—I can’t not leave her with something. I try not to think about the ramifications of what’s happening as I leave the apartment.

I take the subway to Grand Central, where I catch the train to New Haven. It’s surprisingly full, and I wonder why anyone else might be journeying from Manhattan to New Haven on Monday afternoon. A lot of crazy people are in this world, but I wonder if anyone is carrying as outrageous a secret as I am.

I check my texts with the frequency of a teenage girl, and for the first time I understand why Maggie is constantly glued to her phone. But Skye doesn’t text or call. No one does.

I imagine Skye arriving home and finding my note. I imagine her lighting it on fire.

The weather has turned, and it’s raining by the time my train rolls into the station around a quarter of six. I can’t bear the thought of asking Heather for a pickup; instead I spring for a cab with the little cash I have left. Rain smacks and streaks the windows of the taxi as it heads to the east side of town, toward the white-shingled split-level where I raised my children.

It’s a complicated feeling, being back here. So much has changed inside me since I left. Nothing changed for twenty-five years, and now everything is different because I am. I wonder if this is how Garrett and Hope and Maggie feel when they come home after months of being away at school or in their new adult lives, after all that time evolving and being shaped by the complexities of the world. It’s a strange, sad thing, after all that, to come back home and see the physical sameness of it. The steady constant of the place you left.

I didn’t have that with Langs Valley. When Heather and I moved to New York, neither of us looked back.

On the front stoop I pause, listening to the rain drum against the roof of the portico. I shift from one foot to the other. I imagine Skye back on West Eleventh Street. I picture her sitting on one end of the couch with her knees tucked. I imagine the apple smell of her hair. I miss her so badly I feel split open with a kind of homesickness, and maybe this is what I do, maybe this is what I have always done. I make my home in the women that I love and remain lost inside my own self.

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