Sisterhood Everlasting (26 page)

Bailey watched the air with suspicion and interest. Bridget could see her trying the words out in her mouth before she said them aloud. Even at this tiny age she was like her mother in not wanting to get out in front of something before she had a feel for it.

“Let’s get a jar and we’ll catch one,” Bridget said excitedly. She ran into the kitchen with Bailey following. She found a glass jar on a high shelf. Bailey watched in wonder as she jammed a few holes in the lid with the point of a sharp knife. Bridget vaguely wondered how many decent knives she’d ruined over the years in this enterprise.

Bailey followed her back out to the yard. Standing on the grass in the falling dark, Bailey looked tentative. Bridget wondered if she’d been outside at night much.

“Let’s pick a few blades of grass and put them in the jar to make it a nice home for when we catch one,” she said ambitiously. “Here, like this.” She plucked a blade of grass, unscrewed the lid, and put it in the jar.

This Bailey could do. She leaned down and plucked the blades one at a time and carefully put each one in the jar. It was hard to get her to stop.

“I see one,” Bridget said. “Look.” She pointed there and there and there. Bailey stood frozen in her white pajamas and bare feet in the middle of the grass. Her eyes were large and attentive.

“Watch this,” Bridget said, putting the jar down. She chased a bug and grabbed it out of the air with cupped hands. She brought it back to Bailey, kneeled down, and opened her hands slowly. Bailey was eager to see but didn’t want to get too close. “See it?” Bridget said when the bug’s posterior lit up.

“See it,” Bailey said, awed.

Bridget let it go and Bailey followed it with her eyes. Then Bailey started jumping around. “Catch! Catch!” she yelled.

Bridget ran around the lawn. Bailey ran around too, but in aimless excitement. “Got it!” Bridget cried when she caught another one.

Bailey rushed over. This time she peered down very close and made a little scream when it flashed.

“We could let it go or put it in the jar.” She pointed to the jar lying on the grass.

Bailey made an excited mangle of sounds ending with “jar.”

Bridget wasn’t sure Bailey knew what it meant. Kneeling down so Bailey could see, she trapped the bug in one closed hand and opened the jar with the other hand while holding it between her knees. She opened her closed hand onto the top of the jar and held it flat until the bug flew in. She could hear Bailey breathing. “Now, quick, you put the lid back on so the bug doesn’t fly out.”

Once the lid was screwed shut Bridget handed the jar to Bailey. Bailey held it with two hands and gasped and dropped it as soon as the bug lit up. Bridget laughed and picked it up off the grass. She put it back in Bailey’s eager hands.

“Pretty cool, huh?”

Bailey stared into the jar and then looked up at Bridget. “Again?”

“You want me to catch another one?” Bailey nodded.

“Okay. You can try to catch one too.”

Bailey was loath to let the jar go for the sake of catching, but finally relented. They both ran around the grass. Bailey flailed at the sky with cupped hands in rough imitation of Bridget.

As soon as Bridget caught and captured another one in the jar, Bailey looked at her greedily. “Again?”

“Another one?”

“Other one!”

They kept at it until there were nine lightning bugs in the jar. Bridget found it so thrilling that it was hard to stop, and Bailey was relentless.

“It’ll get too crowded,” Bridget finally said, laughing.

“Other one!” Bailey shouted.

“Too many in there. They might get in a fight.”

Bailey paused and looked interested in that.

“They might bite each other.”

Bailey looked concerned.

“No, I’m just kidding. They don’t bite.”

“No bite,” Bailey proclaimed, snapping her jaws together.

“No bite.”

Brian came out onto the back steps. “What are you doing out there?” he called.

Bailey went rushing for the steps, nearly hyperventilating in her eagerness to show her dad the bugs and the jar.

Bridget smiled and stood around, a little awkward about her own zeal, but proud at having caused the excitement and pleasure.

Bailey’s words collapsed into such an eager muddle you couldn’t understand one thing she was saying, but the blinking jar spoke for itself.

“Wow,” Brian kept saying, carrying her into the house as she held the jar, still sputtering with her story. “Wow. Wow.”

Bridget cleaned up the kitchen with a feeling of satisfaction, listening to Brian calming Bailey down and putting her to bed.

Yawning on her own way to bed an hour or two later, Bridget stopped at Bailey’s bedroom and opened the door very quietly. She walked a few steps into the room and smiled to herself at the sight of Bailey in her crib, still clutching the lightning-bug jar, and the bugs still flashing faintly between her arms.

Bridget hoped for another long innocent night of sleep, but it didn’t come. The longer she lay in the little twin bed in the extra room of this house that had been Tibby’s house, the more agitated she felt. There were so many obvious sources for this feeling, she didn’t feel any desire to dig. But her mind didn’t go to the obvious things like Tibby or Eric or Nurse Tabitha or Carmen or Lena, it went further back, to her mother. The memories opened not in any logical order but in flashes, some sweetly nostalgic and others devastating.

And then, without warning, her mind skipped all the way back to the present. It flashed on the glass jar in Bailey’s arms and then flashed ahead to the very near future, the morning right in front of them. The thought of it made her so restless she sat up in bed and put her feet on the floor. She imagined Bailey waking up and finding the bugs dead or dying among the bits of grass in the jar.

Bridget had killed enough lightning bugs in her life to know how
it went. Whatever light they might muster in the context of the morning sun looked tawdry and pitiful, so you couldn’t believe there had been any grandeur to it at all.

She couldn’t tolerate the idea of Bailey’s discovering them in that state. What would Bailey’s delicate heart say about that? What would she think of Bridget’s magic then?

How could Bridget have ever thought the lightning bugs were a good idea? What business had she to try to capture life and light? Why was she incapable of thinking anything through? She belonged in the lower orders with the termites and cockroaches. She belonged in a jar, small and powerless, where she couldn’t do harm.

Bridget crept out of her room and into Bailey’s. She carefully pried the jar from between Bailey’s arms and crept back to the hallway. She went through the back door out onto the dampening grass. She unscrewed the lid and showed the poor bugs the sky, imagining they would fly to freedom. But they didn’t. They were apparently so stunned by their twisting fate, the only way to get them out was to dump them on the grass. She watched them trying to reorient.

When Jones woke to a car alarm in the middle of the night, he looked at Carmen staring wide-eyed at the ceiling.

“What’s the matter?” he asked.

“Tibby wants me to go to someplace in Pennsylvania on April second. If I go to New Orleans, I won’t be able to get back in time.”

“
If
you go to New Orleans?” He didn’t even question the notion of how Tibby could ask her to go someplace.

“Yeah, if I go.”

“You have to go.”

“I don’t
have
to go.”

Jones lifted his head and propped it on his hand, looking at her in disbelief. “It would be career suicide not to. I mean, think of it. How would your reps feel? Do you think you’ll be getting any more calls like this again?”

Carmen clamped her molars together. She could have these childish run-ins with Jones all she liked, but she could hear herself on the phone with her mother in the morning. Her mother would be saying,
“You don’t
have
to go,” and Carmen would be saying, “It would be career suicide, Mom. What would my reps think?”

“Work’s not the only thing in life,” Carmen said petulantly.

“Of course it’s not. But this is a once-in-a-career opportunity, and what would you be missing it for? What do you think you are going to find in Pennsylvania? You’re not going to find Tibby, if that’s what you’re hoping for.”

Carmen turned on her pillow to face away from him. She stuffed her arms under her pillow. She didn’t want to admit to herself that she was even more afraid of Pennsylvania than she was of New Orleans. She didn’t want him to see her cry anymore.

“You can go to Pennsylvania after you get back,” he added in a softer voice. “After the wedding. Tibby wouldn’t expect you to miss a casting meeting with one of the top directors in the world. She wouldn’t want to get in the way of your wedding.” He touched Carmen’s shoulder blade. “These are important things. She would understand.”

Tibby would understand what was important. Carmen agreed with that part. Tibby always understood. But as she struggled to see Tibby’s face in her mind, Carmen also knew what was important, and it wasn’t either of the things he said.

I’ll let you be in my dreams

                        if I can be in yours.

      —Bob Dylan

Bridget woke the next morning to the sound of crying. She
realized that there were tears on her face and there was panic in her chest but that the sobs didn’t belong to her. She couldn’t remember where she was. She gaped at the ceiling, trying to remember. Her mind spun through a series of beds in Mission apartments, at Perry and Violet’s place, at the Sea Star Inn. She had to sit up and look around before her mind finally and fully joined her body in Australia. The sobs were Bailey’s, coming from downstairs. She could hear Brian’s soothing voice, trying to comfort her.

Bridget dressed quickly. When she arrived in the kitchen, Bailey was still clutching the glass jar where the lightning bugs had been and sobbing. Brian cast Bridget a drowning look.

Bailey sat in her high chair, holding up the jar so Bridget could see it, but she was incapable of forming any words. After Bridget had released the bugs the night before, she’d put some grass back into the jar and returned it to Bailey’s crib.

Bridget pulled a chair close. “The bugs went away?” she said.

Bailey nodded. The look on her face rent Bridget’s heart and she began questioning everything she had done. She tried to identify the moment when she’d done the worst wrong. It often happened without clear warning. Was it the moment of abandon when she’d begun grabbing living things from the sky? Was the worst wrong opening the jar and letting them go? Had she sided with bugs
against a child? Was the worst wrong returning the empty jar to Bailey’s arms?

“We don’t know how they escaped, but they did,” Brian said. “They flew away.” Bridget couldn’t tell if there was a note of accusation in his voice.

Bailey nodded.

“I told her they’re happy in the sky,” Brian continued, “but she’s still feeling sad.”

Bailey was listening carefully. The sobs had stopped, but her face was still stricken, wet with tears and her runny nose.

“I’m sorry they went away,” Bridget said. She understood Bailey wasn’t looking for an explanation. Bailey didn’t need Bridget to tell her they hadn’t gotten out by themselves, and that if she’d left them in there they would have died. She put her hands out and lifted Bailey from her chair.

She wordlessly took the jar from Bailey’s hands and put it on the counter. She folded Bailey into her side, held her firmly with one arm and stroked her head with the other as she walked back and forth across the kitchen. After two or three laps, Bailey gave the weight of her head to Bridget’s shoulder.

Brian sent her a grateful look and tiptoed back to his office. Bridget didn’t stop walking. She moved from stroking Bailey’s head to stroking her back. She made the laps bigger.

Bailey wiped off her nose on Bridget’s shirt, and Bridget felt strangely grateful for it. Bridget felt the violent hitch in Bailey’s breathing begin to smooth out. After some time Bailey put her thumb in her mouth and got heavier.

When the loop grew to include the entire ground floor of the house and the front porch, Bridget began to understand the deeper thing Bailey was crying for. She wondered about the words Brian might have used. They probably involved going away and maybe even being in the sky, and Bridget was sure they were bewildering to Bailey and signaled nothing more than pure loss.

Bridget went out to the porch and lowered onto a wicker chair in the soft shade. She continued to rub Bailey’s back as she felt Bailey’s body settle deeply into hers.

She’d thought Bailey had fallen asleep until Bailey sat up on her
lap. She took her thumb out of her mouth and formulated a question.

“Catch a-a-a-again?”

Bridget sighed. She was greatly tempted to tell Bailey they would catch more tonight. They could easily catch a dozen in their jar. They could catch them every night if they wanted to.

But Bridget thought again about the moment of worst wrong, such an unassuming juncture that she often swanned right past it. There was no way she was putting them through that again.

“They are always in the sky. In the summertime you can see them,” Bridget said quietly. “Everywhere you go.”

Bailey lay back down on her again, and Bridget resumed stroking her back.

Bridget had imagined it was better if the thing you loved just disappeared. But maybe Bailey would have been better off if she could have seen and known what happened. Either way, she and Bailey were the same. They were both broken in the same place.

I know how you feel
, Bridget thought. And it wasn’t just Tibby. She had lost her mother too.

The day Lena returned from Greece to nothing and no one, there was a letter waiting for her. She knew instantly who it was from by the way her name looked in the particular way he wrote it. It had been forwarded from her parents’ address.