And we’ve stopped it several times so she can learn the handshake. Honestly, I’m lucky she’s still at an age where watching movies with her dad isn’t deeply uncool yet. Not sure how much of that I have left.
The visual sounds so cozy, and I’m fairly certain it’s not just the movie they’re watching. It scares me a little, how appealing it is.
Weather girl?
Yeah?
I can’t wait to see you again.
Those seven words do something to my heart.
Torrance comes back with two cups of coffee, her hair pulled into a ponytail. “Figured this would help me finish sobering up,” she says, passing me a cup.
It’s ridiculous to be this touched by a cup of coffee. The maternity ward must be making me overly emotional.
Torrance and I spend the next twenty minutes on a crossword puzzle in a parenting magazine, until Seth reappears with not one but seven balloons.
“I, uh, couldn’t decide,” he says, a flush touching his cheeks. “Though I’m partial to this one.” And he hands her the one that says PROUD GRANDPARENTS.
* * *
? ? ?
WE PASS THE time with more crossword puzzles, work emails, and questionable sandwiches from the hospital’s cafeteria. After a couple hours go by, I stop asking Torrance whether she wants me to go home. Even when she and Seth are getting along, it’s clear she likes having me here as some kind of buffer. Or maybe it’s to make up for not being there in the past. Whatever it is, I’m glad to stay.
It’s just past eleven o’clock when Patrick rushes back in wearing scrubs, a wild grin on his face. “We have a baby girl,” he says. “Penelope Rose. Penny. They’re both doing fantastic.”
Torrance and Seth leap to their feet, crushing him into a hug.
“We have a granddaughter,” Torrance says, tears in her eyes. “I’m a grandma.”
“The hottest grandma I’ve ever seen,” Seth says before he releases Patrick to pull her into an embrace.
It happens so quickly, it takes me a few extra moments to process: Torrance flinging her arms around his shoulders and Seth’s hands settling against her lower back, her lips landing on his with all the longing of five years spent apart.
And . . . I can’t believe it.
Honestly, I might start crying, too.
“Congratulations,” I tell Patrick before I excuse myself to give them all some privacy.
“You sure you don’t want to come see her?” Torrance asks, still wrapped up in Seth. He’s toying with the end of her ponytail.
“No, no,” I say. “I’ve intruded enough. Go. Enjoy.”
Gently, she extricates herself from him to give me a wine-and-coffee-scented hug, and of all the surreal things that have happened tonight, that might be the strangest.
I grab my purse and head for the elevator, hitting the down button. Maybe I’m too sensitive. There’s so much going on in this place—not just the Hales, but all the families going in and out all night. I hate that it makes me wistful about my own family, wishing the bad moments had been better, and that the good moments had lasted longer.
My memory snags on what Torrance said about Seth being a good father. He was a great dad. Is a great dad, she corrected. Because it doesn’t end when your kid hits eighteen and moves out. It doesn’t end when they take a job on the other side of the state or when they get engaged or when that engagement falls apart.
Maybe it’s Torrance acting so motherly that makes me realize it, or maybe it’s been tapping away inside my brain, waiting for the right moment to make me aware. But I miss my mother. With all her flaws and all our painful history, I miss her. I missed her before she went to the hospital, even if I wouldn’t admit it to myself.
When I get down to the lobby, I head right outside without requesting an Uber yet, letting the crisp, low-forties air nip at my exposed skin. It’s been a week without rain, and while typically I’d lament that, today the clear sky seems right.
Before I can give it a second thought, I call my mother.
“Ari?” she says when she picks up on the second ring. “Everything okay? It’s almost midnight.”
Oh. Whoops.
I am but a simple millennial: phone calls are terrifying and for emergencies only. Calling someone out of the blue and so late at night is supremely out of character for me.
“Fine, Mom.” I swallow, trying to keep the emotion out of my voice. “I just . . . wanted to say hi.” I don’t want to admit to her everything that made me emotional, don’t want to expose that soft part of myself. Not right now.
“Hi,” she repeats, sounding puzzled. And I don’t blame her—I can’t remember the last time I called her. “Did you see the eclipse last weekend?”
My heart swells at that. “Of course I did. It was incredible.”
“It really was,” she says. “It looked like someone had taken a bite right out of the sun.”
If anything could confirm that weather isn’t small talk, it’s this. Weather connects us. A shared experience, even when we aren’t in the same place.
We talk about the eclipse for a while, with me probably giving many more details than she’d like, but still, she listens. I ask her how work is going, and she tells me about the new paper shredder her boss got that plays the sound of someone shredding on the guitar when you feed paper through it. And I don’t have to force myself to laugh—it comes naturally.
I want to ask about therapy. I want to make sure she’s taking her medication.
But if there’s anything I’ve learned about depression, it’s that it is an intensely personal journey, one that never really ends.
“Do you think I could come over sometime soon?” I ask when the conversation starts winding down, the static warping the sound of my mother’s yawn.
“Ari.” There’s an odd tone to her voice, and I worry for a moment that I’ve ruined the conversation. “You don’t have to ask.”
22
FORECAST:
A new front promises severe weather and severe anxiety
TORRANCE AND SETH aren’t exactly back together—not yet, she tells me at lunch on Monday.
“It’s still complicated,” she says between spoonfuls of green curry at a Thai restaurant a block from the station. “We’re taking it slowly, and we have a lot to talk about. Isn’t that completely bizarre, though? I’m dating my ex-husband.”
I don’t miss the new expression on her face when she talks about him, calm with a hint of a smirk. Or an old expression, rediscovered. The station has become considerably more peaceful, too, to the point where my coworkers have started asking me if I know what’s going on with Torrance.
“I can’t believe he changed his mind about that,” Avery Mitchell said to me this morning, when Seth aired Torrance’s crab story.
“Did I just see Torrance and Seth holding hands on their way in to work?” Hannah Stern said last week.
And I just shrugged, biting back a smile. Trying not to smile—that’s a new one.
I’m not sure what to expect when Torrance calls a spontaneous meeting the next afternoon, and even people who don’t directly report to her are curious enough to show up.
“I have something exciting to announce,” she says, standing at the head of the small conference room table. She’s in one of her power dresses, a form-fitting deep red with three-quarter sleeves paired with knee-high black boots.