Sisterhood Everlasting (27 page)

Dear Lena
, it began in his beloved handwriting.
You said not to call, so I decided to write
.

The momentary ecstasy at seeing her name in his writing again was quickly replaced by a pang of dread.

With a girded heart she scanned the letter for the explanations and mollification regarding Harriet. On the phone he’d said they weren’t married, but that was kind of a cop-out. He and Harriet lived together in an extravagant house and Harriet wore a big fat sapphire on her marriage finger. You didn’t do that if you weren’t planning to get married. At least, a girl like Harriet didn’t; Lena felt pretty sure of that.

Lena looked through the neat lines for the apologetic language,
the stilted sorrow for the ending of her hopes, such as they were, and the exhortation for friendship in the future. He’d say that they were like family, that he really cared for her and blah, blah, blah. This was exactly the conversation she didn’t want to have and the one he was surely eager for. But when she paused her brain and actually read the words, she saw that they were nothing like that.

As I walked along the river on my way home from work yesterday, I had a memory of Tibby, and I wanted to tell it to you
.

Do you remember that August, almost ten years ago, when you and your friends came to Santorini to look for your lost pants? Bridget saw me first on a street in the village and recognized me, I think. But it was Tibby who chased me down. I don’t know if they even told you about it
.

Tibby said, “Lena is here, did you know that?” and I told her that I didn’t. I was startled to hear it and startled to see her. She introduced herself, but I already knew who she was. “Do you want to see her?” Tibby asked
.

She had so much intensity and sweetness in her demeanor. I was a coward at first. “Does she want to see me?” I asked
.

And Tibby fixed me with quite a look. She was weighing my character at that moment, and I would have believed her judgment over anyone else’s. “Do you want to see her?” she said again
.

I remember standing in the middle of the street, and there was Tibby right up in my face and Bee standing in puzzlement with her hands on her hips a few yards away. I could see the conflict with Bee. She didn’t know if she would be betraying you by coming closer or by staying away
.

Seeing those girls, I knew you better. I understood you in a new way. After all that had happened earlier that summer, I guess I wondered about you: do you
even want to be loved? And when I saw them, I knew you did
.

So there was Tibby, a stranger who didn’t feel like a stranger, putting it to me. I wanted to hide from her, but I couldn’t. I looked at her and said, “Of course I do. More than anything else.”

And so Tibby considered me and then nodded. She said, “You should come to the house this afternoon.” And I did
.

In the morning and evenings here in London I like to walk to and from work alone, in part because I’m never actually alone. I always seem to walk with someone, either living or gone
.

Often I walk with my father, though I have almost no true memory of him. He’s my adviser, fixed and principled, the man who tells me to do the right thing and knows I know what it is, regardless of any seeming complication. Occasionally it’s my mother. My memory of her is no better, so I fabricate. I project her, as an analyst might say. She looks or sounds different at different times, changing according to my needs, I suppose. She is my empathizer
.

On lesser days, when I’m surface bound, it’s one of my colleagues or my secretary. Often it’s a friend, Yusuf or Daniel from the old flat. Today, yesterday, the day before, maybe tomorrow, I walk with Tibby
.

Lena didn’t stare at the letter for hours at a time in her customary way. She didn’t think, obsess, wonder, or tremble. Well, she did all of those things, but she was suddenly invested with some larger power. She sat down and wrote him back.

Having grown up perched over the Caldera, do you ever think of the lost city that supposedly slid into the sea?

I seem to think of it and dream of it all the time these days. I know it’s infantile, but I imagine that Tibby was
swimming out there, searching for our lost pants, and found the trick way in, and she’s there, and it’s beautiful and everything is slow and still and quiet, as I always wish the world to be
.

That’s my projection, as your analyst would say, I guess, and it keeps me company. Our pants do happen to be there too, and Tibby found them, so according to our old myth, she has us with her
.

Tibby occasionally looks up, I think, and sees the sun the way it might come down to reach her, glowing gold and refracted. Now she knows the secrets they have down there that we don’t understand
.

I think there are other things of mine down there in the ancient city, and they all happen to have a common quality: that I lost them and wish for them. Under there is a life I could have had, but don’t, and it’s going on without me in it
.

In reality I guess you would say it’s me who goes on without Tibby, but I can’t quite seem to do that. It feels more like she’s gone somewhere without me
.

Not only did Lena write the letter quickly, she didn’t overconsider the introduction, conclusion, or sign-off. She copied his closing:
Your old friend, Lena
. And not only that, she stuck it in an envelope as soon as she’d finished it, sealed it, put two stamps on it, and delivered it to the mailbox around the corner before she could fail to do so.

It was a blessing and also a curse of handwritten letters that, unlike email, you couldn’t obsessively reread what you’d written after you’d sent it. You couldn’t attempt to unsend it. Once you’d sent it, it was gone. It was an object that no longer belonged to you, but belonged to your recipient to do with what he would. You tended to remember the feeling of what you’d said more than the words. You gave the object away, and left yourself with the memory. That was what it was to give.

After the lightning-bug incident, Bailey could not be detached from Bridget. She sat on Bridget’s lap through dinner. She wanted Bridget to read her bedtime story. She wanted Bridget’s kisses right after Brian’s.

Bridget went to bed early as usual. She lay in bed and listened to the rain start up. She felt sad but serene. Her limbs were heavy and quiet. Far from agitated, she imagined it would take a crane through the roof to get her out of bed.

She thought about Eric and the way he had looked when she’d walked away from him down Pine Street. She thought of Carmen and Lena on the last terrible day in Greece when they couldn’t let their eyes meet and said things to one another that were supposed to pass for a long goodbye.

She tried to picture them in their lives. Carmen in her glitzy loft with her cappuccino machine that cost more than all of Bridget’s possessions put together. Was the cappuccino machine offering Carmen any comfort? Maybe it was. Maybe Carmen understood something Bridget had simply missed.

She pictured Lena in her dark, quiet little room. So dark you couldn’t grow a plant, the only window thick with chicken wire. She pictured Lena drawing her feet until the drawing was so real there were four feet and you couldn’t tell the difference. And here Bridget could barely muster a scribble. Maybe Lena understood something too.

For the first time Bridget felt a vague longing to talk to them, a hope that they were doing better than she was. It was a strange tingling she had that made her think of phantom limb syndrome, but the tingling was rooted much deeper. She felt like parts of her soul were missing, had left her body long ago. It had happened not in Greece three months ago, but long before that. It was in Greece that she’d realized those parts had left her and were not coming back.

Her mind turned to Eric again, when she heard a flutter of feet down the hallway. She sat up, feeling an unexpected surge of adrenaline. Had Bailey climbed out of her crib? Was she okay?

So maybe it wouldn’t take a crane, Bridget recognized ruefully with her feet planted on the floor, as her door pushed open and a small figure crossed her room with the grace of an insect. Bailey appeared
at the side of her bed, too short to climb up on her own. She raised her arms to be lifted, and Bridget obliged her.

Bailey crawled under the covers and molded her body against Bridget’s. In some wonder Bridget heard the crinkle of Bailey’s diaper, smelled her zincy ointment, and felt the moistness of her toes, which only came down to the top of Bridget’s thigh. Bailey put her thumb in her mouth and closed her eyes.

Afraid of breaking this spell, Bridget barely breathed. She put her arm around Bailey, wanting to hold her, but afraid to burden her with any weight.

The rain pounded on the roof and trickled down the window. Bailey snorted and twitched and drooled and finally passed into such a deep stage of sleep, Bridget supposed she could dangle her by the ankles without waking her.

It wasn’t a spell, Bridget realized, gathering Bailey closer. She needed a mother.
Like all of us
, Bridget thought. And like most of us, Bailey wanted to sleep in proximity to another warm body.

Bridget lay awake, but she wasn’t restless. There weren’t as many places to go as there were thoughts to think.

Sometime in the early-morning hours, Bridget felt Tibby’s presence again. Not in the form of this look-alike old playmate, but separate from her. In Bridget’s half-dream, Tibby seemed to lie in a symmetrical curve on the other side of Bailey, so that their knees practically touched under Bailey’s feet. This time she took the form of a mother.

Honey,

            you cannot wrestle a dove.

                  —The Shins

Nearly every aspect of the wedding planning had been a cheerful
and much-needed distraction for Carmen until now. Now she sat at the kitchen table in her loft, bouncing her leg, staring at the pile of invitations, unable to pick up her pen.

Until now she’d been pleased with the invitations. They were expensively engraved, just the right shade of ecru, and one hundred percent tasteful. With the help of these invitations, she’d managed to waste at least four evenings, addressing them during the time when she otherwise might have had to spare a thought for how her life was going to feel the day after her meticulously planned honeymoon came to an end.

But when it came to the last two invitations, her pen dried up and her energy left her. She’d invited Lena’s parents. She’d even invited Effie. Now she had to invite Lena. She’d invited Bee’s dad and her brother and Violet, even though she felt pretty sure they wouldn’t come. Now she had to invite Bee.

She knocked her pen against the metal table. The plan had been to call them first, resume contact before the invitations arrived, but she hadn’t done that. The plan then became to write a little note in each of their invitations acknowledging, at least, how strange and difficult this was, but she hadn’t managed that either.

What was she so scared of? She couldn’t even frame it. She didn’t want to have to talk about what happened. She didn’t want to have
to acknowledge the impenetrably dark thing that they three—maybe only they three—knew and could not say.
It isn’t just that she drowned
.

Carmen didn’t want to have to digest it any further. She couldn’t.

The third plan was just to write out their addresses and stick the damned things in the mail, but even that proved too hard. She pictured their reactions when they got them.
You are seriously going ahead with this?
What would they think of her? They would think she’d had a lobotomy. That would be their kindest reaction.

What if she didn’t invite them? That would be insane.

She tried to imagine the feeling of walking down the aisle, seeing their faces in the crowd as she and Jones took their vows, just two more random spectators. If only she could think of them that way. But she couldn’t. She couldn’t imagine them and not imagine their honesty along with them. They knew her better than anyone.

She tried to imagine the feeling of walking down the aisle without seeing their faces at all, and she simply couldn’t do it.

Without them, her life was a farce. With them her life was a farce. Carmen sighed and put her head down on the cold table. Her life was a farce.

Kostos’s return letter came in an extraordinarily brisk three days. It had many parts, all of them funny or sad, none of them having anything to do with his girlfriend/fiancée named Harriet.