Sisterhood Everlasting

by Ann Brashares

  Lena felt like a child. Worse than a child and less valuable. She felt like a mouse. No, smaller than a mouse and less alive. Her life seemed so small and crumpled you could shoot it through a straw like a spitball.

  Kostos stopped near the bottom of the stairs as it slowly dawned on him who was there. He was surprised, undoubtedly. She didn’t know what else he was, because she couldn’t look any longer. She looked away.

  She held out Tibby’s letter with a shaking hand, and the woman took it. “I am so sorry for disturbing you,” she said earnestly. She turned and walked down the three stairs and away from that house as fast as her numb legs would take her.

  As soon as Brian had shut the door to his study at the rear of the house, Bridget embarked on her journey back through time.

  It began with Bridget and Bailey staring at each other over cereal.

  “Bee,” Bailey said to her. “Beebee. Beeeee. Bee.”

  “Right,” Bridget said with a note of pride. “That’s me.” She hadn’t realized she had a name that fit perfectly into the mouth of a toddler.

  Bailey tipped her bowl over and sent milk and Rice Krispies all over the table. She laughed.

  Bridget thought of Brian’s advice. But here was another way Bailey was different from her—Bridget wouldn’t have done that.

  Bridget cleaned up the mess and felt the day stretching out for a thousand years in front of her. She tried to think back. What had she liked to do?

  “Let’s go outside,” she said. She lifted Bailey from her high chair and put her on the ground. She took her hand and led her out to the backyard.

  The grass seemed to glow. The little forest buzzed. The world felt early and young out here, a place where none of the serious things could have happened yet.

  “Oh, my gosh. You have a creek!” Bridget exclaimed.

  “Creek,” Bailey repeated.

  Bridget led her under the canopy of leaves to the edge of the water. It was a perfect creek, just like the one that ran through the little woods at the end of Tibby’s old street. Time passed so slowly at that place Bee couldn’t begin to calculate the number of hours they’d spent there.

  “Look, you can step over it. You can walk on the stones.” She swung Bailey from one rock to another, as Bailey slipped and slid.

  Bridget liked how Bailey was careful, but her balance wasn’t very good. Bridget hoped she would not pull Bailey’s small arm right out of its socket. Bailey’s eyes were large and uncertain as she looked down at the water going past her feet. Bridget wondered if she was scared.

  “Again,” Bailey said as soon as they got to the other side.

  “Okay,” Bridget said. They went across again, slipping and sliding. Bridget couldn’t tell from Bailey’s face whether she liked it or hated it.

  “Again,” Bailey said again, and so they did.

  They went back and forth and back and forth with complete solemnity until a foot went wrong and landed in the shallow flow. Bailey looked up at Bridget to see how they felt about it. Bridget smiled. “Ha! Cold!” she said.

  Bailey’s serious face transformed into an expression of pure glee. “Ha!” she said. “Ha ha!”

  Bridget felt her face mirroring Bailey’s. “Ha ha!”

  Once they made friends with the water, they started looking for things to catch. At first it was just a stringy bug that Bridget picked up from the surface. She held it out on her palm as it wriggled. Bailey touched it in fascination. Bridget couldn’t think of a specific name for it. “Bug,” she said.

  “Bug,” Bailey repeated, digging into the “g” sound, looking at Bridget as though she were a genius. It was nice to be around someone so easily impressed.

  Bridget put the bug back gently. As much as she felt like a child, she realized that as a child she would have just as easily crushed it in her hand or smashed it against a rock. She never thought of the bug fitting into a larger perspective back then.

  They perched on neighboring rocks, Bridget holding Bailey’s hand, and dangled their free hands in the water to sieve for crayfish. Bridget caught one and triumphantly held it up, all its little legs going.

  “Big bug,” Bailey intoned carefully. There was so much motion she was timid about touching it.

  “It doesn’t bite.” Bridget put Bailey’s finger on it so she could enjoy its sliminess.

  “Bite,” Bailey said. She got a slightly vicious look on her face and snapped her jaws together.

  “No, it doesn’t bite us. And we don’t bite it.”

  Bailey thought this was funny. Or seemed to think it should be funny. She opened her mouth in a wide and somewhat fake laugh. Bridget saw she only had about eight teeth, all crowded to the front, and big spaces where the molars would go.

  “Here. You can throw it back,” Bridget said. She carefully put it in Bailey’s palm. “Gentle,” Bridget said as Bailey’s fingers closed around it with a crunching sound.

  “Okay, say goodbye.”

  Bailey flung the disfigured, mostly dead crayfish. “Bye! Bye-bye!” she shouted gaily.

  Why did you want this for me, Tib? Why did you make me do it?

  Lena walked for blocks and blocks. So much for her carefully labeled map of London. She didn’t have any direction in mind and she barely looked up.

  Maybe it was so Lena could finally see what was obviously true to everyone else: Kostos had moved on. He was far out of her league.

  Tibby wouldn’t think of it that way, exactly, because she had always overvalued Lena. But she would want Lena to understand that it was time for her to move on too.

  Lena passed unthinkingly through one neighborhood and then another.

  At last she was too cold and tired to go on. She didn’t want to sit at a restaurant or drink at a bar by herself. She ducked into a supermarket that was open late.

  Sightlessly she walked up and down the aisles, and eventually stood by the front window. It was dark on the street and brightly lit in the store, so she couldn’t see the outside; she saw only her forlorn reflection. She wanted to distract herself with the life on the sidewalk, but instead she saw her red dress and felt embarrassed.

  There had been a fantasy. She hadn’t wanted to acknowledge it, but there absolutely had been. She would wear her red dress, and Kostos would see her anew. He would see her here in London and realize he loved her again, maybe had loved her all along. He would grasp not just the letter but her. He would take her in his arms and overwhelm all of her fears and misgivings. In some way she longed to turn herself over to him, to let him take over the running of her, because she didn’t know how to do it anymore.

  She’d been trying to look glamorous and magnetic, but in the context of Kostos’s home and his wife (or girlfriend or maybe fiancée), her efforts seemed pathetic. Red dress or brown, she looked like what she was: a timid cipher. She was usually good at keeping her hopes down, but even that small gift had failed her this time.

  It was the time they’d spent together in Santorini that had done it to her. She’d felt so close to him; closer than she’d even known. She’d told herself she wanted nothing more from him, but it wasn’t true.

  As angry as she was at herself, she realized she had some anger left over for Kostos too.

  “Can I help you?” a young woman behind a register asked her.

  Lena turned her head to stare at her and remembered where she was.

  “No. Thank you. Sorry,” she said with her head down. She went back outside to the cold and resumed her walking.

  She thought maybe if she walked long enough she might eventually pass into Brixton, but now she had the sad feeling that there was no way to get there from here.

  She remembered back almost ten years ago to her moonlit walk up the hill in Oia to meet him in their special olive grove.

  “Someday,” he’d said to her in Greek. She hadn’t been able to speak Greek at all then, and it had taken her great effort to figure out what the word meant.

  The word had seemed like a precious gift at the t
ime, a keepsake or an inheritance. She’d tucked it away and treasured it accordingly, waiting for the right time to cash it in.

  Waiting and waiting. That was her thing. The word gave her an excuse to wait and do little else. The word wasn’t so much a gift as a terminal virus with a long period of latency.

  In her heart she thought he had meant it, but of course he hadn’t. She remembered other parts of that long-ago conversation word for word. He’d asked her if she loved somebody else and she’d said, “I don’t know if I can.” And in return he’d said, “I know I can’t.”

  She had been pretending she’d more or less forgotten the whole episode, but she hadn’t. She had still been a teenager at the time, he not much older, and that gave everybody an automatic out, didn’t it?

  No, it didn’t. Not in her lockbox of a heart. I know I can’t. She’d held on to that declaration as if it were a signed affidavit.

  And yet it was total crap. She thought of the beautiful, scornful woman in the black dress. Oh, yes, you can, Lena thought.

  People said things they didn’t mean all the time. Everybody else in the world seemed able to factor it in. But not Lena. Why did she believe the things people said? Why did she cling to them so literally? Why did she think she knew people when she clearly didn’t? Why did she imagine that the world didn’t change, when it did?

  Maybe because she didn’t change. She believed what people said and she stayed the same.

  I was ador’d once too.

  —William Shakespeare

  Naturally it started raining. Around ten o’clock that night, freezing and wet in a place called Houndsditch, Lena finally stopped. She stood under a bus shelter and took stock. Her flight did not leave for Greece until ten past ten in the morning.

  She had consciously planned a lot of things, but not where she would stay the night. Why not? Perhaps that was where the unconscious planning had come in. Somewhere buried under a few layers in her mind had been the idea that the moment she saw Kostos, everything else would fall into place. It was to be the happily-ever-after part in the story that took place after the velvety red curtains closed and was never strictly specified.

  Now that she was taking stock in Houndsditch, she decided to confront that too. What had she really thought? He would see her and take her in his arms? Was that really it? He would carry her to his bed and they would make love all night?

  She blushed at the thought, more from shame than desire. Maybe she hadn’t quite thought that. Not even her subconscious fantasies were quite that brave.

  A group of men in suits cast her long looks as they went by. One of them said something she couldn’t quite hear and the group of them laughed. In her red dress and bare legs, and with what was left of her makeup running down her face, she probably looked like a streetwalker.

  She didn’t want to find a hotel at this hour, nor did she have the cash on hand to pay for it. Out of principal, she carried a debit card instead of a credit card, and her checking account didn’t have much of a balance. She hadn’t thought she’d need it. Her dad had prepaid for most aspects of this trip, including airfare and the special service for her cellphone so it would work over here. She’d brought a couple hundred dollars in traveler’s checks, but she didn’t want to blow it all on her first night.

  What could she do? She took the train schedule from her bag and unfolded it. Two trains left Houndsditch that night, and she had to hurry if she was going to catch the last one.

  The map of the Underground showed the way to Aldgate, a Tube stop a short distance away. She had to push herself out of the dry shelter of her bus stop and into the post-disappointment stage of this adventure.

  Bridget got hungry for lunch before Bailey did, which made her question Brian’s advice once again. She wasn’t sure what they should eat. “What do you like to eat for lunch?” she asked Bailey.

  Bailey stared back at her impassively.

  “Do you like yogurt?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you like apples?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you like crackers?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you like spinach?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you like poisonous mushrooms?”

  “Yes.”

  “Okay. Never mind.” Bridget put out crackers and sliced up an apple. She found some hard cheese in the refrigerator and sliced that up too.

  Bailey had stuffed several things in her mouth before Bridget realized she was eating as much dirt as anything else. She took Bailey back out of her high chair and carried her to the sink under her arm like a football. She put her hand under the faucet to test the temperature. “We should probably wash these,” she said, gathering Bailey’s fingers in the water.

  When she sat Bailey back down, Bailey’s cheeks were still full. “Are you chewing any of that?” she asked. She remembered the lack of molars.

  She ended up excavating Bailey’s packed mouth, throwing out the contents, cutting everything on the plates up finer, and starting again.

  They both ate the little bits of things hungrily. We are about the same, but I have quite a few more teeth, Bridget thought.

  They shared a cup of strawberry yogurt. Bridget got them each a spoon. Bridget ate hers and Bailey flung most of hers on the table and on the floor. Bridget considered the options. I can see doing that.

  After lunch Bailey was desperate to go back to the creek. This time she was the one to grab Bridget’s hand and lead the way. When they got to the squelchy mud at the edge they dug their toes into it. Bridget squished her toes down deeper and Bailey copied her. Bridget had a brainstorm. They both sat down in the mud. Why not? They were already dirty and the air was warm.

  It was perfect, because she and Tibby used to love to make mud pies. Bridget dug in and pulled up a heaping handful. She brought her hands together and shaped it. “It’s a pie. Yum,” she said, bringing it to her mouth.

  Bailey took to this idea right away. She got her own clump of mud and brought it directly to her mouth. When she looked up at Bridget there was already a mud mustache under her nose.

  Bridget laughed. “No, you don’t actually eat it. You just pretend.”

  Bailey liked that equally well. They pretended to eat several pounds of mud and then Bridget made a mud turtle and a mud starfish. After Bailey got the idea that these were not to be pretend eaten, but played with, she made her own versions, which weren’t very good.

  Bridget’s fingernails were as stuffed with mud as they had ever been, and her hair as snarled. Feeling the creep of the wet earth through her pants and the sun on her head, Bridget closed her eyes and believed she was small again, sitting with her friend Tibby by the creek. And opening her eyes did nothing to undermine her image. This little person next to her had the same intensity, the same quickness to be won over, the same pixie face and flyaway hair that never seemed to grow past a certain point.

  Bridget had marched through her portal to a simple time, and she was back with Tibby doing the things she and Tibby liked to do. Her mind seemed to vibrate more and more slowly into something like silence, and that was all she could ask for right now.

  Lena arrived at her gate exactly eleven hours before her plane was scheduled to depart. In the annals of travel she didn’t think anybody had ever gotten to a gate earlier than her father, but now she had. She brushed her teeth and washed off the makeup at a row of fourteen sinks (she counted) in the women’s bathroom.

  Back at the gate, she sat on the ground by the big window where you could watch the planes taxi away, but there wasn’t much going on at this hour. She wanted to stay awake. It seemed important to stay awake, because otherwise, what might happen to her? She put her arms around her bag, just in case.

  She may or may not have been dozing, she wasn’t sure, when her bag started buzzing. It took her a moment to realize it was her phone. She’d forgotten that anyone could call her here. She grabbed it and answered without looking at the number. It was either her mo
m or her dad. Who else called her anymore?

  “Lena?”

  “Yes?”

  Her mind was spinning. It wasn’t her dad and it definitely wasn’t her mom.

  “Where are you?”

  She was groggy and confused. “Who is this?” she asked.

  “It’s Kostos.”

  Her mind spun faster and in a different direction. How did he get her number? “How did you get my number?”

  “I called your mother.”

  Oh, shit. Well, she knew who would be calling next.

  “Why are you in London?” he asked.

  To see him. To deliver a letter. To fall into his arms and then have the lights go dark and the red curtain fall. There was no part of the truth she could tell him. “I’m just on a layover.”

  “Going where?”

  She couldn’t tell him the truth about that either. Between London and Santorini it would seem like she was stalking him. She closed her eyes and searched for a lie. “To Italy. To look at art.” She sounded like she was reading from a script. She hated lying.

  “How long are you here?” he asked.

  “I fly out tomorrow morning.”

  “Lena, you came all the way to my house. Why did you run away like that?”

  Because you live in a mansion with a beautiful and scary wife. Because you crushed my hopes and hurt my feelings. Because you promised me Someday, and you didn’t even mean it. “I just wanted to deliver the letter. I felt like I was disturbing you and your …”

  “My?”

  “Your …” Lena didn’t know what she was. She didn’t want to be forced to ask.

  “Do you mean Harriet?”

  “I mean the woman who opened the door. We didn’t introduce ourselves.”

  “Yes, that’s Harriet.” He sounded uncomfortable.

  “Are you married? Do you live together?” Lena wasn’t so much amazed by her masochism as by her boldness. Anyway, she knew the answer. There was something about the flowers in the front hall that made her know at least part of it.