Keep Me Posted (23 page)

We’d been on the plane for four or five hours by the time Lulu and River were both asleep. Before Sid also decided to nap, I shifted in my seat and gave her arm a gentle squeeze.

“Hey, did everything go all right with Adrian last night?”

She let out a sigh and said, “I guess that depends on your definition of ‘all right.’”

I laughed nervously. “Well, my bar is pretty low these days.”

“We sketched out a plan for him to see Lulu every month, and I promised to come to Singapore later this year.”

“So you’re definitely splitting up?”

“Yep.”

I squeezed her arm again, and we both sat in silence for a
moment. Remembering how I’d felt the night before, I was ashamed. I just wanted to take all of her pain away. I wished I could go back in time and make Adrian a better husband and me a better—or at least a wiser—human being.

With that familiar feeling of dread, I launched into the speech I’d been preparing in my head since I sat down in seat 14C. “Sid, listen, there is something else we need to talk about.”

Startled, she replied, “Oh my gosh. That’s right.” She rotated her body to face me. “Sorry, Cass. This is all so surreal. I’ve completely lost track of things. It seems like a million years ago River told me you were there at my house. Why did you come all this way? Are you okay?” Her eyes were searching mine.

“Yeah. But you know the letters?”

Sid started laughing. “Um, yes, I know the letters, Cassie.”

I heard someone take a sharp inhale and then a head popped up over the seats in front of us. “Ohmigod, I’m sorry, but I have to ask. Are you the Slow News Sisters?”

An American woman—in her late twenties, if I’d had to guess—was studying our faces. She had kinky dark brown hair and a voice like a Valley girl with a sinus infection. I immediately felt a physical disdain toward her.

“What? The what? No,” I spat, furious that this idiot was about to ruin everything.

“Oh, sorry. I just heard the names Sid and Cassie and you mentioned letters, and I had to ask. I’m obsessed with them.
Obsessed
,” she said, her eyes bugging out. “You know what I’m talking about, right?”

“Uh-uh,” I said, shaking my head “no” while shooting death rays with my eyes.

“But wait—this is so crazy! You have the same names as they do. You did say Cassie and Sid, right? And you’re sisters, right? You’ve got to be. You look so much alike.” I could see her wheels turning.

“Okay, thanks. We’ll have to check that out,” I said with finality, reaching for the in-flight magazine.

“Just Google ‘Slow News Sisters.’ The blog is down right now because one of the sisters is suing the other one, but hopefully it will be back up soon. Wait. Tell me the truth. Are you them?”

I wanted to roll up that magazine and thwack her like a fly. “Please. I don’t mean to be rude, but could you leave us alone? This is starting to get weird,” I said.

She gave me a mean look and popped back down without another word.

Sid looked at me, bewildered.
What the fuck?
she mouthed.

Even under the harsh little spotlight that shone from above her seat, Sid looked beautiful, and I’m not embarrassed to admit that I took a moment to revel in the fact that the horrible woman said that we looked alike. But I had to get down to business. I was determined to come clean to Sid before we got back to New York, even if I had to pull her into the bathroom to do it. Then I had a better idea. I fished my notebook and pen out of my bag and wrote,
I’m sorry,
then nudged her elbow and pointed to the notebook.

Sid looked at me quizzically, awaiting my next move.

I got the
Us Weekly
out of my bag and showed it to her.

She stared at it for several minutes, expressionless.

She looked at me and pointed to the magazine and then gestured to the two of us, a confused look on her face.

I nodded.

She pointed to the seat in front of us.

I nodded again.

She held the magazine close to her face and reread the paragraph and then laughed a deep and strangely Santa-esque “Ho-ho-ho-ho-ho,” as if blending “No” with laughter and shaking her head. Not smiling, but really not frowning, either.

Shooting a dramatic look toward the seat in front of us, I thrust the pen at her.

No words . . .
she wrote.

I grabbed the pen back and wrote,
I wanted to save the letters forever, so I scanned them and then started a
private, protected
blog that no one was supposed to ever see, but a freak computer glitch made it go viral for a few weeks. It’s
private
again now.

Before I passed the pen back to Sid, I made a frowny face, but she made no move to take it. She closed her eyes and rested her head on her chair. My heart pounded as I waited for a sign.

She grabbed the pen and wrote,
All of our letters?

Yes.

On the Internet?

Yes. But not anymore.

She looked out the window for a long time. I watched her, but she didn’t look back. After a few minutes, I nudged her and gave her my most pathetic “sorry” face. Sid took off her seat belt, stood up, and looked down at the woman in front of us. Satisfied that she was engrossed in her movie, she whispered to me, “I don’t know what you want me to say.”

Ouch. Those felt like angry words, although her tone was gentle. “I just want you to know how sorry I am for violating your privacy. I didn’t mean to.” I could feel tears threatening, and Sid laid her hand on my arm and sighed.

“It’s not the end of the world, Cass. It’s not like I’m never going to talk to you again. It’s just a lot to take in.”

Lulu woke up and needed a diaper change, so Sid took her to the bathroom and then spent the next forty minutes or so following her as she toddled up and down the aisle. I just sat there, feeling helpless. The small amount of relief that came from having told Sid was countered by the frustrating inability to talk it through and the discomfort of being physically trapped on this plane with a few hundred strangers.

We managed to squeeze in a few more mini conversations over the rest of the trip, but we weren’t really talking. I couldn’t even tell if Sid wanted
to.

R
eaching JFK after the decency of the Singapore airport was about the worst thing that could happen after twenty-four hours of flying with a heavy cloud of unfinished business hanging between Sid and me.

Tired, grimy, and restless, we were funneled into an airless and low corridor with no signs. A uniformed man with a thick New York accent appeared and started yelling, “US citizens on the left; foreign passport holders on the right.” But his arms were waving to our left when he said right and our right when he said left, and everyone was packed in so tightly that trying to rearrange ourselves while jockeying for position with roller bags and strollers and oversized backpacks that never should have been allowed in the overhead bins to begin with was an exercise in futility.

Poor Lulu could almost taste her freedom and was head butting my thigh and whining and falling down and doing whatever she
could to exorcise the demons of being on an airplane for an impossibly long time. Sid rubbed River’s arm as we stood there, but he looked straight ahead, ignoring her. He was probably still mad that she’d made him leave Singapore so abruptly. Finally, the line started moving, and all I could think was what a cold welcome to our country this was. I wanted to apologize to the tourists and tell them that it wasn’t going to be like this everywhere, maybe slip them some restaurant recommendations to make up for this degrading scene.

We arrived home at noon and received a much warmer welcome from Mom and the boys. Homemade signs festooned the slightly ajar front door, and the sounds of home drifted into the hallway: “Yet’s ’ten I am Batman and you are a bad guy . . .”

I had never really been away from the boys before, and hearing those sweet voices brought tears to my eyes. I hugged them tightly, inhaling their delicious scents, and listened with all my being to their stories about the adventures they’d had with Grandma.

Mom had bagels and coffee and juice waiting for us, and we all sat around on the floor and ate and talked. Sid and I barely made eye contact, but we were too busy with the kids for it to be awkward. Plus, Mom was grilling Sid about her banishment from Singapore. After we ate, we all walked over to the small playground on Leroy Street.

If you ask me, Leroy Street in the fall is the most magical place in the city. The trees have all turned the same spectacular yellow, and with half of the leaves on the ground and half still on the trees, walking down Leroy—especially in late afternoon, when the sun is low—is like passing through a golden tunnel. I recalled Sid’s letter about missing the seasons changing, and silently thanked Mother Nature for making my sister’s homecoming so special.

Mom and River chased after the boys and Lulu. Sid linked her arm through mine, and a swell of relief rushed over me.

“Cass. It’s so beautiful,” she said.

“Isn’t it?”

We walked, arms linked, for a few sidewalk squares, enveloped in the shimmering canopy. I felt proud of my city and relieved that it had redeemed itself after that horrid airport experience.

“I am so sorry,” I said.

“You know, I don’t think I’m mad at you. I’m not really sure how I feel.”

“I was in shock for a while, too.”

“You took the blog down, right?”

“Right.”

“So we’re, like, famous?”

“I don’t know. I guess we were for a few days or weeks, but I think our fifteen minutes is coming to an end.”

“But nobody knows what we look like, right?” Sid said.

“Right. Well, except that lady on the plane, I guess.”

Sid let out a little chuckle. “Right,” she said. We walked arm in arm, slowly, taking in the trees and the colors and our happy children running and playing. I wished that moment could last forever. I was accepted, forgiven, loved. Already my trip had been worthwhile.

Lulu fell fast asleep while Sid pushed her on the swing at the park, so I walked them back home while Mom and River and the boys strolled over to look at the boats on the river.

Once I cleared the dinosaurs off of Quinn’s bed and closed the
room-darkening curtains, Sid laid Lulu down and whispered to me, “What did Leo say?”

“Not much,” I whispered back, feeling a catch in my throat.

We made it back out to the living room, and she peered into my eyes. “Cass? Are you okay?”

“I don’t know,” I said, and started to cry.

I had been pretty successful at pushing my anxiety about Leo to the back of my mind since boarding the plane in Singapore, but now, with my mission to come clean to Sid accomplished, the release of her forgiveness only reminded me that Leo’s reaction had been far less placid.

“He’s not speaking to me, but I don’t even know what I’d say to him if he were.”

By this point I was blubbering. “I mean, if you were him, what would you be most mad about? That I kissed Jake? That I aired our dirty laundry on the Internet? That I
trusted
the Internet?”

“Oh, Cass.” She pulled me into an embrace and then walked me to the couch, guiding my head onto her shoulder. I felt so stupid. In the past thirty-six hours, she’d been thrown out of a country, left her cheating husband, said goodbye to a dozen friends she might never see again, had her trust betrayed by her sister, survived twenty-four hours on an airplane with a toddler, withstood a tiresome line of questioning from Mom and suggestions that she go to the embassy or the police to report her unfair treatment in Singapore, and not cracked once. Yet here I was, literally crying on
her
shoulder. I got up and grabbed a roll of toilet paper from the bathroom, sitting back down on the couch to dry my eyes and blow my nose, stuffing the damp little wads into the cardboard hole in the middle.

Sid tried to comfort me, but when I revealed that I’d told him everything only about twenty minutes before I’d left for the airport, squeezing him in like an afterthought, even she had to admit that it didn’t look good for a loving reunion with him that day. “But he’ll come around. Don’t you think?” she asked.

We had to wait only a few hours to find out. We were all there, discussing whether to order Chinese food or walk up to have Mexican on Fourteenth Street,
when Leo came home from work. He gave Sid and the kids all big hugs, but not me. My heart pounded in my ears and I self-consciously wondered who else had noticed the snub.

To keep the tears at bay, I busied myself with minutiae—wiping the countertop, separating the mail, putting shoes away—while he chatted with Sid and River. He was keenly interested in Sid’s dramatic expulsion from Singapore (which meant he’d at least
read
the messages I’d sent).

When River asked him to weigh in on the Mexican-versus-Chinese-food debate, Leo said he wouldn’t be joining us for dinner, that he was going to stay at his brother’s place in Jersey for a few days. He worked the practical angle, but I knew what was really going on. Until then I hadn’t really allowed myself to seriously imagine him leaving me, but hearing those words made my mouth go dry.

Mom spoke up first. “Oh, Leo. No, no, no, no. We think alike! I moved my flight to this evening. So you can stay!”

She put her hand on his shoulder and looked at me. “This poor guy has been sleeping on the couch. I’m sure he’s ready to have his bed back.”

“No—it’s fine. I’ve already talked to Stevie.” He nodded to Sid and me. “I’ll let these guys have the run of the place. You know how they are together. I’d only be in the way.”

“Oh, Leo. You really don’t need to. We could get a hotel,” said Sid.

“Don’t be crazy,” Leo said, giving Sid a sideways squeeze.

“Well, we’ll be renting a car and driving back to Ohio in the next few days, so you’ll have your home back soon.”

I decided I should probably speak. “Are you sure, hon?” I said, wondering if anyone noticed that my voice was shaking.

Without looking at me, Leo crouched down and talked to Joey and Quinn.

“I get to have a sleepover tonight with my big brother Stevie while you guys have a sleepover with your cousins. How cool is that?”

“Cool!” Joey agreed.

“Mmmm. But, Daddy. That means you won’t be here, at your home,” Quinn said.

This was more than I could take. I made a beeline to the bathroom and splashed some water on my face while trying to stop imagining more conversations about Mommy and Daddy sleeping apart. I looked like I had aged ten years. A red and itchy spot—possibly a hive—had appeared on my cheek, and I rifled through my Kiehl’s samples for something with “soothing” on the label. I could overhear River helping with the boys, asking if he could sleep in their room and talking about how much fun they’d have. God, he was a great kid. He probably knew why Leo was leaving; he’d read the letters, after all. I felt bad for him and mad at myself, because I knew he adored Leo and had surely been hoping to spend time with him.
Is he thinking that I should be the one leaving?
The thought added to my anxiety, and I had to sit down on the toilet and take a few deep breaths.

When I came out of the bathroom, Leo was nowhere to be seen. I made my way through the crowd in my living room and found him in the bedroom getting his things together. I wanted to break
down and beg and sob when I saw the size of the bag he’d packed. Instead, I silently handed him the letter I’d written that first night in Singapore.

But after he left I found the envelope, unopened, on the bed.

By eight thirty that evening, Mom was safely on her way to the airport and River had fallen asleep in Quinn’s bed while reading him a dinosaur book. Sid and I took photos of them with our phones; they looked so cute and comfortable that we decided to leave River there. (Also because his other option was the living room couch.) Lulu had slept all afternoon, so she was awake but looking at books and babbling contentedly to herself—something I’ve never seen either of my sons do. Is independent, quiet play something I could teach them, or was it too late? I sighed and mentally added it to my list of failures. Even though I was exhausted, going to bed didn’t appeal. Plus, I wanted to be around in case Sid felt like talking. She was organizing her luggage, which was piled high in the entryway, moving clothes around so she, Lulu, and River all had things in a single bag, saving them from the game of Jenga required each time they needed something from their luggage. I fixed us each a vodka and orange juice, concluding that it was the perfect drink when your body didn’t know whether it was morning or evening. She leaned back and looked in at the
clink-clink
of ice cubes in the glasses.

“Nightcap?” I said.

“No, thanks. Do you have any tea?”

“Only peppermint.”

“My favorite kind.”

I turned the kettle on, feeling disappointed that she wasn’t joining me for a drink.

When her tea was ready, I set it on the square edge of my couch on top of a book.

“How are
you
?” I said, leaning in the doorway and hovering over her.

She looked over her shoulder at me. “I was just going to ask you the same thing. But thanks. I’m okay.”

“Are
we
okay?”

“Always,” she said.