The tiny shape reached to pull open the screen door and let it slap behind her. The shape turned into a tiny girl, who came up beside Brian and wrapped her arm around Brian’s knee.
Bridget stared at the girl in astonishment—the large hazel eyes, the pointy face, the serious mouth. This was a person she knew. Death was life and the present was the past. She’d gone back to her earliest childhood to find her friend again.
Brian took the little girl’s hand and led her forward. “Bee, this is Bailey. This is Tibby’s and my daughter.”
Lena was back in Providence, back in her tiny, dark studio apartment, back to long, quiet, mostly empty days, but one important thing was different: she had a project.
When you had a project it was much easier to pretend to be someone else. You could pretend to be Nancy Drew, for instance, or Maria from The Sound of Music, or the sensible wisecracking housekeeper on The Brady Bunch.
In her Nancy Drew persona, Lena looked up the phone number of Kostos’s so-called vacation house in Santorini and called it. She couldn’t hold on to the persona long enough to leave a message on voice mail, but she called three times over the course of the week, and the third time the phone was answered by a live person, a woman who greeted her in Greek. Lena asked in timid Greek if Kostos was home.
“No, he’s not here. He doesn’t come back until the middle of February.” The voice was rough and deep, that of an older woman, probably large in stature.
“I’m Lena Kaligaris, an old friend.”
“You have an American accent.”
“Yes. I’m American. My family is Greek.”
“I am Aleta. I take care of the house. You should call him in London.”
“Okay.” Would Nancy Drew ask for the number?
“Lena, right? If I talk to him should I tell him you called?”
“No, no, that’s okay,” she answered quickly and fearfully, one hundred percent Lena and zero percent Nancy Drew.
When she hung up, her heart was pounding. Her heart wasn’t buying the persona yet.
Now what? She couldn’t wait that long to leave for Greece. She couldn’t go all the way across the Atlantic and not deliver Tibby’s letter. She woke up her computer and checked the cheap travel sites. There were about as many flights to Santorini stopping in London as any other way. It was less expensive than trying to fly nonstop to Athens, and it broke the trip up a little.
From the back of her underwear drawer she retrieved the letter of condolence Kostos had sent about Valia. The return address was London. She confirmed it on the Internet, but the phone number wasn’t listed.
It would be better to call first, before she went ahead and bought the ticket through London. When she pictured herself picking up the phone and calling him, though, she was frankly relieved that neither she nor any of her new personas had his number.
She had his address. She’d get his number in some way or other, even if she had to call Aleta again. Being a plucky risk-taker in her Maria–from–The Sound of Music persona, she bought her ticket on the strength of that.
Bridget watched in pure wonder as Brian fed Bailey the last of her dinner. She watched as he cleaned her up.
Bailey sat on the edge of the kitchen sink, her feet in the basin and her hands stuck under the flowing faucet. She shouted when the water felt hot and laughed when it felt too cold. When the water was right, Brian plugged the drain.
Bailey stood on the counter and Brian pulled her dress over her head and took off her diaper. She was tiny enough to fit in the sink. Brian turned off the water and pushed the faucet aside so she wouldn’t hit her head.
Occasionally Bailey turned her curious, somewhat suspicious eyes on Bridget. Bridget stared back without a gesture or a word.
Brian told Bridget she should go ahead and put her pack in the guest room. He showed her the closet where the extra sheets and towels were. When he invited Bridget to join them for Bailey’s pajamas and bedtime story, she followed them up the stairs mutely. She lay on the floor of Bailey’s room, her mind a whirl of incoherence, listening to Goodnight Moon twice.
Bridget didn’t try to talk to Bailey or touch her. When Brian kissed Bailey goodnight, Bridget stood shyly in the doorway. She could hardly say anything. It wasn’t Bailey’s baby diffidence that was the problem; it was her own.
Bridget went to the kitchen and mindlessly tidied up from Bailey’s dinner. She couldn’t find her voice. She couldn’t shake the feeling that she’d passed through a time portal and found Tibby in the midst of their joint childhood. She couldn’t help feeling that this tiny former Tibby was her peer.
She was on the underside of the world and she couldn’t remember where she was in the time line of her own life. She felt like she could close her eyes and open them and be in any part of it.
She drifted out to the front porch and sat on the steps. She watched the dark. They had lightning bugs here too. No matter where you went in time or space you could find them.
Brian came out and joined her. She thought of when he had entered the story, an oddball character in Tibby’s “suckumentary” the summer they turned sixteen. You don’t come into the story just yet, she felt like telling him. We are still small.
They sat in silence as Bridget tried to remember how the story went, how to put all the parts back in the right order.
“How old is she?” she finally asked.
“Twenty months.” His face showed strain and exhaustion. She could see the web of blue-purple veins under his eyes and at his temples.
“You’re her father. I can’t believe you’re a father.”
“I can’t remember not being one.”
“Tibby is her mother.” Bridget looked quickly at Brian and he looked away. “Was her mother.”
Brian’s face stayed turned away. She could see the wariness in his posture.
“She looks so much like Tibby it scares me.”
Brian nodded, but still didn’t look at her. He didn’t want to talk about that, she understood. She could see by the way his head tipped how much he didn’t.
For the first time since Greece, Bridget couldn’t force away the presence of Carmen and Lena in her mind. They didn’t know about this. They needed to know.
“Would you mind if—Could I tell Carmen and Lena about her?”
“About Bailey?” He looked uncomfortable. “Tibby didn’t say anything?”
“No, she—”
“Then I’d rather wait till we get back to the States next month. Tibby wanted to make the introductions in person.”
“She did?” Bridget swallowed painfully. How could you make any sense of what Tibby wanted?
“That’s why we’re moving back,” he said.
“Oh.” There was an opening here and she was too unsettled to know what to do with it.
“Next month. The truck comes on the twenty-first of March.”
“Where will you go?”
“We bought a place in Pennsylvania. A farm. Tibby picked it.”
She waited for him to say more, but he was quiet.
“How did you find us here?” he asked after a while.
“I found the address on the Internet.” She was somewhat ashamed to admit it. But she hadn’t known what she’d be finding. She’d imagined the address would only be the first step of a long, roundabout search for Tibby’s lost years. She hadn’t expected to hit it right off.
“I was figuring you would wait and find us at the new place,” Brian said.
“Why?”
“Because Tibby said she was sending you an invitation to come there.”
The word “invitation” rang in her ears. “She probably did. I didn’t open the letter yet.” As Bridget said it, she realized how typically impulsive it sounded and how badly she had misfired yet again. “I’m sorry for just showing up like this,” she said.
Brian shook his head. “It’s okay that you’re here. I was just surprised.”
He pulled apart a fraying bit of his shoelace, and she w
atched the side of his face. She wondered what dark thing had happened to him and Tibby. Had their relationship become a source of misery? Had the baby been an unwelcome trial?
Brian was the only source of information she had, and with his stiff body and his face turned away, she didn’t know if he even realized the worst of it, or how to ask him. “I just want to know what happened,” she began gracelessly. “Can you tell me about her life here? Because I just wish I knew—”
Brian got to his feet. He looked at her and then looked away again. “Bridget, I don’t think I can handle this right now.”
“But can you just …” Bridget stood too. “Did the two of you fight? Was she sorry about moving all the way out here?” Even as she said these things she knew they were the wrong questions.
Helplessly she watched Brian step into the house and let the screen door bang behind him. She felt injured and oversized and she couldn’t follow him. What could she do?
Maybe he blamed her. Maybe he thought she was blaming him. Maybe he didn’t want to compare notes on their failures.
Maybe he didn’t know what had really happened. Maybe, like Alice, he thought it was simply a terrible accident. Or maybe he knew the truth and was as blindsided, confused, and miserable as Bridget was. Maybe Tibby’s death had shattered his idea of the world as it had hers.
She waited until the house was quiet before she walked silently to the guest room and collected her things. She was halfway down the front walk when he caught up with her.
“Bridget, don’t leave,” he said.
She could see that he’d been crying and she felt sorry. She’d come here expecting him to be a role player in her tragedy, to give her that missing piece that would make her life bearable. But he had his own tragedy to get through, and a kid besides. Was he supposed to relive his torment for her benefit?
“I should go,” she said.
“No, you shouldn’t. Tibby would never forgive me if I sent you away.” Some small part of his face had opened toward her.
“I know you want to be left alone.” She felt genuinely terrible for him. Over the last three months she’d taken the opportunity to fall apart, but he hadn’t been able to do that, had he? He looked like he wasn’t far from it, like a skeleton with slippery joints. She couldn’t push him for answers. It was wrong of her to think she could find what she needed here.
“Listen.” He was at least talking to her now, and not to the side of the porch. “I have a project for work hanging over my head. It was due a couple of months ago, but I—well—Anyway, it’s a big software job I have to do and I need to hold myself together and finish it before we move. It’s not that I don’t want to talk about Tibby, but I wasn’t prepared for this. I can’t do it now.”
There was something about Brian. The sincerity of his eyebrows and the way his eyes hardly blinked. She couldn’t help but feel sympathy for him and shame at her selfishness. And strangely she felt a little bit afraid of him, for the unhappiness he had allowed to grow under his roof.
She looked up at the sky. If she was going to reconstruct the steps that had led Tibby to the bottom of the world, she was going to do it without his help.
Bridget forgot until she got into bed in Brian’s guest room that night the thing that was going on in her uterus. She didn’t remember it in a panicky way. She remembered it as an abstraction. And even as an abstraction, it didn’t suit her at all.
She pictured the sure way Brian bathed Bailey and read to her and knew when to put on a new diaper and what she was supposed to eat and wear to bed. She couldn’t imagine knowing or doing any of that. If felt as foreign to her as standing up in front of a college classroom and lecturing on chemistry. She had nothing to say about it.
She wondered if her own mother had felt that way. She could remember how her mother’s face looked when confronted with lacing Bridget’s skates or getting gum out of her hair. It was just too taxing, too foreign, too much. She wondered if that was the way Tibby had felt.
Look up … and see them.
The teaching stars,
beyond worship
and commonplace tongues.
—Dorothy Dunnett
It was strange for Lena to attempt to dress herself and do her makeup in an attractive way without calling Effie or Carmen for help, but attempt it Lena did. She piled all her clothes up on her bed and tried on every defensible outfit she could come up with.
In between the navy blue shirtdress and the black and white patterned skirt with the white blouse, she stood still in her underwear. She turned to the mirror and studied her image carefully and honestly, in a way she hadn’t done in a long time. She’d spent a lot of years dressing down, being every quiet and serious thing other than pretty.
“God, your looks are wasted on you,” Effie used to say.
But was that true anymore? Was she even pretty anymore? Was there any point in spending energy pushing away something she didn’t even have?
She stepped closer to the mirror, so close her two eyes became one stretched cyclops eye, and then she stepped back again. She couldn’t tell, honestly. Her hair was still thick and shiny, but was long and shapeless from not having been cut in a couple of years. Her eyes were still that odd pale celery color. If anything, they were getting lighter as she got older. It was hard to say they were pretty, exactly.
She was thinner than she used to be. She was thin by her own standards, by normal people standards, but certainly not by Kate Moss standards. Not even by the new Carmen Lowell standards. She squinted and felt insecure. She wanted Kostos to think she was pretty. That was about all the use she had for pretty.
This year she’d be thirty. Maybe when she was forty or fifty she’d look back and think, Why didn’t I enjoy it when I had it? Why did I spend my pretty years in dark clothes looking down at the sidewalk? Why didn’t I wear red or fuchsia and submit to the makeup Effie was always trying to put on me?
Lena trudged back to her closet to look for something red. She had one thing, and she didn’t know if she could bring herself to put her hands on it. It was a red silk dress—or maybe rayon—simple but fitted and kind of short. Tibby and Carmen had bought it for her to wear to her first gallery opening, a group show at Larker, but Lena had chickened out at the last minute and worn brown.
Effie would have had ten things to lend Lena on the spot, and she would have given them generously. They would be big on Lena, but Effie would belt them or pin them in her magical way, and they would transform her. Lena would look ten times prettier and also uncomfortable.
The thought of making peace with Effie felt about like embarking on an Ironman triathlon: absurdly grueling, but Lena knew the steps it would take to accomplish it, even badly. The thought of trying to be close to Carmen again felt more like trying to design a time machine using only the things in her kitchen. She had no idea how to go about it and no faith that such a thing could be done.
Some nights when she lay in bed, she imagined her way through Carmen’s day. Other nights, she went through Bee’s. She could picture them doing the regular things. She could picture Bee pedaling up hills on her bike, buying falafel from a truck parked at the edge of Dolores Park or eating a burrito from Pancho Villa the size of a newborn baby. She pictured Carmen in her trailer parked on the Bowery or Seventh Avenue, in the makeup chair with a cup of coffee in one hand, her script in the other, her iPhone on her lap. She pictured Carmen sweeping into crowded restaurants alongside Jones and his pretentious glasses.
But when she tried to see into their minds, to think their thoughts, she couldn’t. When she tried to imagine how they were making sense of things, what they might know that she didn’t, how they fit the brutal facts into their lives, what memories they were carrying around, she couldn’t. That exercise had been effortless for most of her life, and now it wasn’t. They seemed almost like strangers to her; she could only see them from the outside.
Bridget was the one she worried about, even from the outside. Bridget was the one with
the deepest fault lines. She was the one least able to diagnose or treat her own condition.
As the days passed, there was some robotically maternal part of Lena that couldn’t quite let Bee go. Every few days Lena left a message for Bridget or wrote an email, certain as she did that it was going straight into the digital abyss. But she didn’t know what else to do.
She’d even called Bee’s dad once and left a message. She hadn’t said anything important and wasn’t so surprised he hadn’t called back, but still. Lena thought it was tough having parents who tried too zealously to fix your troubles, but how would it be to have a parent who didn’t even notice them?
When the phone rang on Lena’s desk amid all her packing, she was so surprised that she answered it. She was down to one regular caller, her mother, and Ari had taken to leaving messages on her cellphone, because the mailbox—unlike the one on her home phone—wasn’t full.
“Lena?”
“Yes.”
“Why is it you can’t meet for the next two weeks?” The voice was loud and speaking Greek.
“Eudoxia. Hi.”
“Are you going somewhere?”
“Yes.”
“Why didn’t you tell me? Where?” Usually they confirmed and occasionally canceled their Wednesday-afternoon coffee by email. They hadn’t spoken on the phone in years.
Lena took a breath. She tried to summon Ann B. Davis playing the sensible Brady Bunch maid. In Greek. “To Santorini.”
“You are going back? Why?”
She remembered with some longing the comfort of Eudoxia as a disembodied Greek-speaking voice on the phone and then Eudoxia as a large, kind, pastry-eating stranger. But Eudoxia was long past being a stranger now. It was frustrating how when people loved you they took an interest in you and sometimes worried about you and personally cared what you did with yourself. Lena wished that love were something you could flip on and off. You could turn it on when you felt good about yourself and worthy of it and generous enough to return it. You could flip it off when you needed to hide or self-destruct and had nothing at all to give.
Sisterhood Everlasting Page 16
