The Second Summer of the Sisterhood

by Ann Brashares

  “I didn’t know about it. Or I would’ve.”

  He nodded again. She was leaving open a lot of questions, she knew, but people didn’t press you when your mother was dead.

  “I thought about you a lot,” he said. She knew by his eyes that he meant it. “I felt sorry a lot. About your mom, I mean.”

  “I know,” she said quickly.

  He touched her hand lightly as they walked. They had only ever talked about soccer before this, and yet he was able to be serious with her now, to absorb who and what she was.

  “I wanted to come here and see this place again,” she explained after some silence. “I wanted to see Greta and find out about my mom, but I . . . I didn’t want any . . . commitments. I guess.”

  He seemed to find this rational, although she couldn’t be sure.

  “I don’t feel that way anymore,” she added.

  She liked how carefully he looked at her, but she was ready to change gears now.

  “So how’d y’all fare against Decatur?” she asked. Now that she was herself again, it was funny to hear her voice relaxing into the old accent.

  “We lost.”

  “Oh. Too bad. I figured you got rained out Saturday.”

  “We played Sunday,” he said. “Lost three-one. The guys say it’s because you weren’t there.”

  Bridget smiled. She liked that idea.

  “I told them I’d ask you to be our coach, officially.”

  “How about I’ll do it unofficially?”

  He settled for that. “No more missing games, Coach,” he said. “And you’ve got to come to practice, too. We’ve got the final tournament next weekend.”

  “I promise,” she said.

  At the end of the path, they aimed themselves in their different directions. Billy grabbed her hand as she was walking away. He squeezed it once, not hard, and let it go.

  “Glad you’re back, Bee.”

  Tibby had to leave the dorm. It had been three days since she’d seen the sunlight, and she’d eaten every flake and grain from every miniature cereal box she’d pilfered from the cafeteria—dry, after she’d run out of milk. She didn’t need to shower, necessarily, or do her laundry, or comb her hair, but she did need to eat.

  She was wandering through the lobby of her dorm, arguing with herself about a couple of her edits, when she plowed straight into Brian.

  “Brian!” she shouted when she realized it was indeed him and not her tricky imagination.

  He smiled. He got close enough to hug her and then lost his nerve, so she reached out and hugged him.

  “I’m so, so glad to see you,” she said.

  “I got your messages,” he said.

  She winced slightly.

  “All of them,” he added.

  “Sorry about that.”

  “No problem.”

  Happily she studied his face. “Hey. Where are your glasses?” And as the question left her lips, she realized that Carmen had a point. If Tibby forced herself to be objective, she could see that Brian looked perfectly presentable. She had a terrible thought. “You didn’t get contacts, did you?” What if Brian, of all people, had suddenly turned vain? What would that mean for the world?

  Brian looked at her as if she were crazy. “No. They broke.” He shrugged. “I can’t see.”

  Tibby laughed. She was so relieved that he was her friend again.

  “Can you come to the cafeteria with me? I’ll sneak you in?”

  “Sure,” he said.

  At the entrance to the building, Tibby saw Maura. Some cowardly part of herself wanted to hide, to pretend she hadn’t actually seen her. They hadn’t spoken in over a week. Tibby felt certain Alex had told her all about Tibby’s harangue.

  Maura was decked out in a leather skirt. Tibby was still wearing her plaid pajama bottoms. Her tank top was splotched with ink. Brian glanced at Tibby cautiously. Maura looked down, obviously preferring the charade where they acted as though they hadn’t seen each other.

  Tibby spat in the face of her cowardly self. “Hey, Maura,” she said. “I didn’t properly introduce you to my friend Brian. Maura, this is Brian. Did I mention that he’s my friend?”

  Maura looked cornered. She glanced around at the people streaming through the lobby. She didn’t want to be seen talking to the girl wearing pajamas. Tibby found herself wishing, perversely, that Brian looked as much like a doofus as she did, rather than perfectly presentable.

  Maura acknowledged them with a tight, unpleasant smile and sidestepped Tibby to get to the elevators.

  Later, in the cafeteria, Tibby wanted to introduce Brian to everyone she knew, but unfortunately, that came down to Vanessa. Vanessa agreed to sit at their table and promised to show Brian her animals when they got back to the dorm.

  “He’s cute,” Vanessa whispered to Tibby as Brian went to get them orange juice.

  The first letter took eight days to come, and Lena knew by the feel of it in her hands that it wasn’t going to make her happy. It was light and thin, and Kostos’s normally expansive handwriting looked oddly compressed.

  Dearest Lena,

  It is hard for me to write you with this message. I am in a situation here that is troubling me. I want to wait to explain it to you until I know how it will be resolved. I’m sorry for the suspense. I know it isn’t easy on you.

  Please bear with me for a bit longer.

  Kostos

  Under his cold sign-off he’d written something else at a different time, she guessed, because the ink had dried a slightly different color, and the writing was much looser, almost drunken.

  I love you, Lena, he had scrawled at the bottom. I couldn’t stop if I tried.

  She studied it, feeling a strange sense of detachment. What could it be? She’d spent so many hours trying to calculate and guess, and she hadn’t come up with one hypothesis that made any sense.

  He said he loved her. Though she generally did a poor job of holding and trusting that notion, she did believe him. But why did he say he couldn’t stop if he tried? It sounded like he was trying. Why was he trying? What could possibly have come up that made him want to stop loving her?

  Was his bapi sick again? That would be devastating, but it wouldn’t have to split them apart. If he needed to stay in Oia, then fine. She would find a way to be there next summer. Maybe even for the Christmas holidays.

  Lena felt like a pebble falling down a well. She dropped through the air with nothing to hold her. She knew the ending, when it came, would be painful. But even suspense became monotonous after too long.

  She was waiting, waiting. Falling.

  The next letter was worse.

  Dear Lena,

  I cannot continue to feel committed to you. Nor do I want you to feel committed to me any longer. I am sorry. Someday, I will explain it all to you and I hope you’ll forgive me.

  Kostos

  The bottom had arrived. She crashed against it, but it brought no sense of closure or understanding. She just lay there at the bottom looking up. She knew there must be a very tiny circle of light up there somewhere, but just now she couldn’t see it.

  “Hello, is this David?”

  “Yes. Can I ask who this is?”

  “It’s Carmen Lowell. You know, Christina’s daughter?”

  He paused. “Hi, Carmen. What can I do for you?” He sounded guarded—all business. He knew that Carmen hadn’t exactly played Cupid between him and Christina.

  “I’d like to ask you a big favor.”

  “Okay . . .”

  His “okay” had the ring of “in your dreams.”

  “I’d like you to pick my mother up tonight at seven and take her to Toscana. The reservation is under Christina.”

  “Are you her social secretary?” he asked. He was allowed to be a little bitter. Besides, she frankly appreciated that he wasn’t talking down to her.

  “No,” Carmen snapped back. “But I did my share of messing things up between the two of you. I feel it’s my responsibility to fix i
t if I can.”

  He paused again. “Seriously?” He was afraid to believe her.

  “Seriously.”

  “Does your mom want to see me?” His voice reached up high and plaintive on the last word. He wasn’t all business anymore.

  “Are you insane? Of course she does.” Carmen hadn’t actually checked that fact with her mother yet. “Do you want to see her?”

  David breathed out. “Yeah, I do.”

  “She’s missed you.” Carmen couldn’t believe what was coming out of her mouth, but fostering love was turning out to be a lot more fun than ruining it.

  “I miss her.”

  “Good. Well, you two have fun.”

  “Good.”

  “And David?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Sorry.”

  “Okay, Carmen.”

  Tibberon: Have you talked to Lena? I’m worried about her.

  Carmabelle: I’ve been calling and e-mailing for two days. I’m worried too.

  Lena was sitting by herself in the back of the store under a rack of hanging blouses. She knew she needed to look industrious, but she couldn’t do it today. She hugged her knees. She was losing her mind in stages. The first stage was doing weird things, and the second was not caring anymore.

  Today she had spoken to Tibby and Carmen twice each. She found herself feeling angry with them for not being able to say things that could make her feel better. But she was beginning to realize there weren’t any things that could make her feel better.

  She felt the stubble on her calves. She picked the thick nail on her baby toe until it almost came off. The pain was the only thing in this place that fit her.

  A woman walked through with a bunch of clothes flopped over her arm. Lena saw her from the back as she chose a fitting room. You shop. I’ll just be here.

  She listened to the lady fumble and thump around in the tiny torture chamber with the curtain that didn’t fully close. It was as good as anything else to listen to. Lena closed her eyes and bowed her head.

  She heard a throat clear. “Excuse me?” The voice was timid. “Do you think this looks all right?”

  Lena looked up. She had lost track of the lady, but now here she was, standing in the middle of the carpet. Her feet were bare and flat. She wore a gray washed-silk dress that sagged and swayed over her small, bony frame. The woman’s face was shadowed, and her skin looked as thin as cellophane. Only the blue veins in her neck and hands seemed vivid. But the color of the dress matched almost identically the shade of her large, lovely eyes. It didn’t look good, but it probably looked better than anything else in the shop would have.

  Lena stopped looking at the lady’s dress and looked at her face. Until now, Lena hadn’t been able to put her finger on the particular look of so many women who shopped here. Truthfully, she hadn’t tried very hard to put her finger on it. But now she saw it so clearly. It was need. It was hope. It was a plea for some small signal that they were worthwhile.

  This woman’s need was raw. Suddenly Lena knew who she was. She was Mrs. Graffman. She was Bailey’s mother. Mrs. Graffman didn’t know Lena, but Lena knew about her. She had lost her daughter, her only child. She didn’t have anyone to be a mother to anymore. Lena knew nothing about loss compared to her.

  Lena looked at Mrs. Graffman’s face. She saw what it needed and she didn’t look away. Lena rose to her feet. “That dress . . . I think it makes you look . . . beautiful.” The words came out as light as the air, truer than any lie Lena had ever told.

  When Bridget got home from running one afternoon, there was a package waiting for her. She ripped it open instantly, standing at the kitchen table.

  The Pants! They’d come back to her. With a clanging in her chest, she tore up the stairs, stripped off her running clothes, and jumped into the shower. You weren’t allowed to wash the Pants. She wasn’t crazy enough to try them on just after she’d run ten miles on an August day in Alabama.

  She dried herself, put on underwear, and took up the Pants. Please fit, she begged them. She pulled them up and closed them in one fluid motion. Ahhhhh. They felt so good. She did a victory lap around the attic. She ran downstairs and outside and did a victory lap around the house. “Yay!” she shouted to the sky, because it felt so good to feel good again.

  She put her hands on her thighs, soaking in the connection to Carmen and Lena and Tibby, and loving them so much. “It’s okay!” she wanted to shout loudly enough for them to hear. “I’m going to be all right now!”

  Greta cast her a bemused look as Bridget shot past her, back up to the third floor.

  The contents of the last box were still piled in the corner. Bridget was ready to put it all away and be done with it now. She grabbed the box to repack it, but as she did, she stalled. There was a yellowed square left in the bottom that she hadn’t noticed before. Her euphoria dimmed as she reached in after the paper. It was the back of a photograph, she realized as she put her fingers on it. She promised herself she would be okay, whatever it was.

  The picture showed a girl, about sixteen, sitting on the steps of Burgess High. She was beautiful to behold with her giant smile and her yellow curtain of hair. Bridget’s first thought was that it was her mother. She just assumed it. But as she looked closer, she wondered. The picture looked too old to be of her mother. And besides, the character of the face was different. . . .

  Bridget thundered back downstairs.

  “Grandma! Hey!” she shouted.

  “Out here,” Grandma called from the yard. She was hosing down the little garden that hugged the back of the house.

  Bridget thrust the picture in her face. “Who’s this?”

  Greta looked at it. “Me,” she said.

  “That’s you?”

  “Sure.”

  Bridget studied it again. “You were beautiful, Grandma.”

  “Is that so surprising?” Greta asked, trying to look offended but not seeming to care very much.

  “No. Well. A little.”

  Grandma hosed Bridget’s foot. Bridget hopped around laughing.

  When Bridget settled down she came back to the picture. “You had the hair.”

  Grandma cocked her head. “Where do you think you got it from, missy?” she asked playfully.

  Bridget’s answer was serious. “I always thought I got it from Marly. I always thought it meant I was like her.”

  Greta transitioned easily into Bridget’s new mood. “You are like her in some ways—in some wonderful ways.”

  “Like how?”

  “You’re intense like she was. You’re brave. You have her beauty, no doubt about that.”

  “You think so?” Bridget longed for reassurance on this point more than she ever had before.

  “Of course you do. Whatever color you want to make your hair.”

  Bridget liked that for an answer.

  Greta turned off the hose and tossed it into the flower bed. “You’re very different from her too.”

  “Like how?” Bridget asked again.

  Greta thought. “I’ll tell you an example. The way you came into this house and remade that attic. You pulled it apart and worked day after day to put it back together. It made my heart grow to see your patience and your hard work, Bee. Your mother, God bless her in heaven, couldn’t pay attention to any one thing for longer than an hour or two.”

  Bridget remembered that about her mother, how quickly she had become impatient. With a book, with a radio station, with her children. “She gave up too easily. Didn’t she?” Bridget asked.

  Greta looked at Bee like she was going to cry. “She did, honey. But you won’t.”

  “Grandma, can I keep this picture?” she asked. Of all the thousands of things she had sifted through in the attic, this one looked like hope. This was the one she wanted to keep.

  Carmabelle: Len. Please answer me? Please? I’m coming over.

  Lennyk162: Not right now. I’ll call you later, okay?

  Distantly, from the bottom of the well, Lena he
ard the knock on the door. It came twice more before it occurred to her that it was her door and she was supposed to answer it.

  She coughed up her voice. “Who is it?”

  “Lenny, it’s me. May I come in?”

  Carmen’s voice was so lovely and familiar, and yet it belonged to the world above.

  “Not . . . right . . . now,” she managed to say.

  “Lenny, please? I really need to talk to you.”

  Lena closed her eyes. “Maybe later.”

  The door opened anyway. Carmen walked straight over to the bed where Lena was huddled.

  “Oh, Lenny.”

  Lena made herself sit up, though her bones seemed to slump and cave. She began to cover her eyes with her hands, but then Carmen was right there. There was no hiding. Carmen put her arms around Lena and held her.

  Lena let her heavy head fall into Carmen’s neck, giving way to the inexpressible mercy of her friend’s warm skin.

  “Lenny.” Carmen hummed and held, and Lena cried.

  Lena cried and shook. She cried, and Carmen cried for her.

  After a while Lena realized she wasn’t at the bottom of the well, but here, with Carmen.

  “Mark him! Rusty, go!” Bridget screamed from the sidelines. She paced the length of the field in the Traveling Pants, barking orders and ranting encouragement like any good coach. Her hair was free and incandescent, but her players didn’t care. They wanted her for her mind. Or her strategy, more specifically. At the half, eleven guys crowded around her, wide-eyed and attentive, as if she were an oracle.

  Greta sat a few yards behind her in a beach chair, smiling and shaking her head, alternately studying the game and her crossword puzzle.

  “Jesus, Corey, stop mooning around the goal. Rusty, don’t get so far ahead of Billy. You’re useless when you’re offsides; I don’t care if you are fast. And also, their right midfielder is dead on his feet and has no viable sub. That’s where you work ’em.” She rearranged her lineup a little and sent them back onto the field.