Page 113 of If Not for My Baby
“Conor said he’d never seen Halloran like this.” Molly doesn’t pick up on my continent-sized rescrambling of everything I thought I knew. All those weeks, assuming Cara had been Tom’s devastating heartbreak…I’d never even asked.
My mom was right about everything.
I’d been so frightened of falling in love with Tom, I’d told myself an entire story that wasn’t even remotely true. How many other walls had I put up to avoid what she went through…to do the abandoning before anyone could do it to me? Because I was so sure I’d suffer my mom’s same fate. So sure that all love ended in heartbreak, I’d done the job myself.
It dawns on me right there in the bleary-eyed hours in my kitchen that I’d not accomplished any brave thing back in Los Angeles telling Tom that I loved him. I’d still been beatingthe pain before it could beat me, just as Mike had said. Waving my white flag before anyone had even attacked.
Loving someone doesn’t mean saying it out loud one time on a tour bus and then running for the hills. Loving someone means choosing them every day regardless of all the things that might stand in your way. Or, for some of us, the things we put there ourselves. That’s how I level these walls and stomp right over them.
Molly riffles through her bag and pulls out a blank envelope. “Here.”
I slide my finger under the seam and open it up, finding a piece of paper with something printed on it. When I unfold it, my mouth hangs open.
“We all pitched in,” Molly says. “It was Indy’s idea, but I bullied all the guys into helping out, so…”
In my hand is a one-way ticket for a flight from Austin to Kerry Airport that leaves in five hours.
“Molly you didn’t have to—”
“Please,” she cuts me off. “Don’t get all mushy. We all hate Jen. It was mostly because of that.”
When I finally look up she’s got her rare smile on. She can blame Jen’s overlordship all she wants—but Molly is a fierce protector of the people she loves. And I am stupidly grateful to be one of those people.
“I tried to tell you yesterday—”
“I know,” I say, still a bit in awe.
“According to Lionel, there’s a place in Austin that does same-day passports. Usually they’re like thousands of dollarsbut he knows a guy who knows a guy or something. He said they’d help you out.”
When I round the counter to wrap my arms around her, she doesn’t even flinch.
“Thank you,” I tell her.
“It’s not business class or anything.” I don’t release her despite the squirming. “And the only seats left were in the back. You’re gonna need a neck pillow.”
“Understood,” I say into her hair.
When the hug—which is mostly just me—ends, she looks me dead in the eye. “Take the trip, Clementine. You guys deserve to be happy.”
“Oh, hello.” My mom sounds chipper for the hour, and I am smacked over the head once more with how fine she was always going to be without me.
“Mom, Molly. Molly, Mom.” I’m already up and scrambling for my closet. I have a plane to catch.
Thirty-Seven
Hustling to the airport andboarding a last-minute flight to tell the man you love how badly you messed everything up is not as romantic as Nora Ephron led us to believe. I guess you can take the girl out of her cynicism, but you can’t take the cynic out of the girl?
In reality, there is less sprinting to epic, violin-heavy scores and more shuffling at a snail’s pace through security, eating a Lunchables that has likely been in this airport since the mid–two thousands, and conserving phone battery like army rations.
The flights—plural,Austin to Dallas, Dallas to Dublin, Dublin to Kerry—are no better, and certainly no more romantic. It doesn’t help that flying home from Los Angeles two weeks ago was my first time on a plane, where I learned mighty quick how much I dislike both takeoff and landing. Also, that having a middle seat is not dissimilar to being thrown in a trash compactor. Yet, here I am again, sandwiched for the entire duration across the Atlantic.
When we finally land in County Kerry, and I make it blessedly outside of the airport, I take a much-needed deep breath. The air has a different quality here—sweeter, cleaner, older somehow. Like it’s been blowing around these parts much longer than any of us. The sun slinks closer to the pretty mountains as I find a taxi and climb inside. I’m an hour from Tom’s house, and significantly worse for wear. Skin: parched. Hair: flat and greasy as a griddle cake. Breath: lethal. I need a toothbrush and a hazmat suit.
Worst of all, morale is low. The multiple flights have given me twenty-five hours with virtually no sleep to think about all the ways this can go sideways. Every ounce of my pre-airport optimism has been smooshed under the shoe of self-doubt and neck cramps. A vision of Tom opening the door and a throng of beautiful groupies peeling out flashes in my mind. Another, in which I bare my soul and he tells me his feelings have changed and I’ve come all this way for nothing.
There’s one more scenario, this one the rawest and most real, in which Tom sits me down and allows me to cry in his arms. He cries, too, and we come to the same conclusion we did in Los Angeles: that his life and my life don’t make sense together, and I fly home alone. The thought makes me so nauseous I have to roll my window down and inhale some fresh air.
It’s not lost on me that my spark of excitement aboutWest Side Storyand New York—the tiny flame I’m hunched over and stoking inside my heart—only makes all of this more complicated. Ironically, we had a better shot at a future when I’d broken us up on that tour bus. At least that version of mehad nothing of her own to build on. “What life?”my own mother had said. My rueful snort has my taxi driver turning in his seat.
