Sisterhood Everlasting (29 page)

And because she was not completely without shame or self-awareness, Bridget thought of the thing in her uterus, not a thing but a person, a soul, and she felt chastened. Just look what she was willing to do. Had been willing to do.

The tears rolled on and Bailey rose and fell on her chest. Bridget cried for the leavers and the left. For the people, like herself, grimly forsaking what few precious gifts they would ever get. She cried for Bailey, for Tibby, for the resolute clump of cells making headway in her uterus, and for Marly, her poor, sad mother, who’d missed everything.

Lena half expected that the day known as Wednesday, March 15, would not occur. It would somehow get swallowed by the calendar. The earth would give a little heave in its orbit, and Tuesday would turn into Thursday. People across the globe would miss dentist appointments and soccer matches, but they would reschedule them and life would go on.

The time to open Tibby’s portentious letter would be gone without ever having arrived, and life in the post-disappointment era would go on unchallenged.

Lena’s life had come down to a very few things, and on the evening of March 14, even those were beyond her. She couldn’t take in the words on the pages of her book. She couldn’t hear the words of the songs she played. She couldn’t taste her dinner. She couldn’t fall asleep. She didn’t want to cede what slight hold she had on the world in case the appointed day might just tiptoe past without her notice. But wouldn’t that be easier, in a way?

At midnight she crept out of bed and woke her computer. Her computer wouldn’t lie to her. If it skipped the day, it would at least let her know.

At 12:00 a.m. it recorded Wednesday, March 15. Was it being honest with her or just conventional?

She thought of Julius Caesar on this day.
So it has come
, she thought.
It has come, but it has not gone
.

Should she open it now? She thought of Kostos. What time was
it where he was? Later. He hadn’t already read it, had he? No, not that much later. He was probably asleep in his bed. She didn’t want to picture his bed in the likely event he wasn’t alone in it.

She picked up the letter. She could open it—it was the proper day. But somehow her desperate-in-the-middle-of-the-night-in-her-bare-feet status would seem to follow the letter of Tibby’s law rather than the spirit. The spirit was what she was going for here.

She brought the letter into her bed and clutched it until morning.

At six o’clock in the morning she tried to be casual. She ate a bagel casually. She went out to the newspaper stand two blocks away and bought
The New York Times. Wednesday, March 15
, it said along the top. It was probably midday in London.

As soon as she got back to her apartment, she walked directly to the letter still lying in her bed and opened it. In the envelope were two things. First was a one-page letter, folded, and second was yet another small sealed envelope with her name on the front. On the back the envelope said
Please open on March 30
.

How long would this go on? She put the sealed envelope beside her on the bed, and unfolded the page to which she was now entitled. It was printed sort of like an invitation.

Someday is now. (Or it is never.)

Please come to the following address on the Second of April

at 4 o’clock p.m. Eastern Standard Time
.

If you choose to come, bring yourself, all of yourself, and no one else
.

Consider it a journey that could last the rest of your life
.

If you choose not to come, that’s a different ending, but it’s a beginning too
.

Bridget waited until three nights before the move, while she was helping Brian pack up the books in the living room, to ask another question.

“Did Tibby want to have a baby?” As payment went, this was a more expensive question, and she knew it.

He didn’t answer at first. His book-boxing movements became robotic. “Yes. Of course.”

“Did you?”

“Of course.”

She stopped and looked at him with some impatience. Tibby was gone. It didn’t seem so “of course” to her.

He walked out of the room, up the stairs, and into his bedroom, and she thought they were back to her first day in this house.

She waited for a door to bang shut, but a few seconds later she heard him walking down the stairs again. He was carrying something and he thrust it at her from several feet away. His face had changed to a completely different shape.

She took it from him and looked at it. She drew in a breath and felt her whole body shifting in response to it.

It was a photograph in a glass frame. It was black-and-white and must have been taken within a few days of Bailey’s birth, because her tiny face was puffy and crumpled.

In the picture Tibby’s hand cupped the baby’s head and her cheek lay against her baby’s cheek. Tibby’s eyes were closed, her freckles were like dark snowflakes on her white skin, and her lovely pixie face showed something too ancient to name. It was her familiar Tibby, but also it was Tibby gone to a serious place where Bridget couldn’t follow.

From the picture Bridget understood. She felt an uprising of tears, neither tranquil nor philosophical. The picture answered her question expensively.

She handed it back to Brian and saw he was crying too. He sat down in a chair, his jaw in his hands and his shoulders shaking. She went to the other chair and curled up like a fetus.

They stayed like that for a long time in their separate chairs. They didn’t exchange a word, but unlike the first time she’d pushed too hard, she realized that the air felt strangely companionable.

She decided not to ask him any more questions for a while.

Lena thought of canceling her weekly coffee with Eudoxia, but for what? So she could sit on her bed and stare at the wall and ruminate. Was that really something she needed more of?

“My dear, what is it?” That was the first thing Eudoxia said. “Something is very wrong.”

Lena looked at her coffee and looked at Eudoxia and looked back at her coffee. It seemed insane, on the face of it, to tell Eudoxia what was going on.

But why?

Because it wasn’t the kind of thing she did.

But why?

Because she was raw and uncertain, and she liked to keep all the messy parts of herself to herself.

Lena realized she was kneading her hands in the manner of Valia if Valia had taken amphetamines. As much as Lena liked to hide the mess and display the finished product, by this point she was all mess and no product. She couldn’t hide from everyone for the rest of her life.… Well, she could. That was the direction things were going. But she knew from long-ago experience that when you were uncertain and if you were courageous enough to let her in, a real friend could do a world of good.

“Tibby left a letter for me and one for Kostos. She gave a date and a time and meeting place, some place in Pennsylvania I’ve never heard of, and invited us both to show up.”

Eudoxia looked purely puzzled. “To show up for what?”

It was so outlandish, Lena found it hard to answer. “I guess it’s the chance to be together. To get together and stay together.”

A dawning look was coming into Eudoxia’s eyes. “And if you don’t?”

“Then just give up and move on.”

“Tibby wants you to make a choice, not just wait around for him to come.”

“I’m not waiting around for him to come.”

“Lena.”

“That supposes that I want to be with him. Maybe I don’t.”

“I see your face when you say his name.”

“What does that mean?”

Eudoxia cocked her head to one side. “Let me put it this way: do you want to be without him?”

Lena remembered the feeling of saying goodbye to Kostos at the ferry the last time. “But that doesn’t mean I want to be with him.” Why was everyone always trying to turn the world into binary choices, black or white, A or B, this or that?

Eudoxia looked unimpressed.

“We’ve caused each other more misery than anything else,” Lena said hotly. “It’s true. It’s all suffering with the two of us. If you were to ask Kostos: Has Lena caused you more pleasure or pain? If he was honest, he’d answer the same way I would about him.”

Eudoxia sat there shaking her head. “That’s just silly.”

Lena felt like Eudoxia had slapped her. “That’s
silly
? Thanks a lot.”

Eudoxia looked unrepentant. “You’ve been unhappy because you haven’t been together. If you were together, you’d be happy.”

Lena’s mind raced over their long, tragic history, all wrenching goodbyes and longing letters. Kostos being with people besides her.

It couldn’t possibly be that simple, could it? There was no possible way. Their torments were real and important, fateful and psychologically complex.

Weren’t they?

Then the strangest thing happened. It was as though Lena’s consciousness shifted from her body into Eudoxia’s. Suddenly Lena’s mind existed at the top of Eudoxia’s big, generous body and looked out of her canny eyes.

From that perch Lena saw the whole thing differently, and it did seem silly. And dumb. It was another dumb thing Lena had been holding on to. Another part of her dreadful mythology that made her think even simple things were overwhelmingly complicated and worthy of dread.

Feeling dumb, Lena crept back wretchedly to her own body. If she’d been aiming to keep her personal mess off the table, this might have been a good time to pay the bill and go home, but she realized she couldn’t anymore. She was all in.

Lena stared at Eudoxia’s knowing face, and though she did feel
silly, she did not feel appeased. There were other problems too. “In all the fourteen or something years we’ve known each other, we haven’t done much more than kiss a few times. How can we make some big blind commitment when we don’t even know how we are together?”

Eudoxia cast that off with a flick of her wrist. “Anatole and I had barely kissed. Most couples in the history of the world had barely kissed. It’s when the world changed and people started doing everything else, that’s when everybody got divorced.”

“You think.” Lena half intended to sound sassy and sarcastic, but it didn’t come out like that.

“Of course. It’s better this way. You have more to look forward to.”

Lena was floundering in messy doubt and Eudoxia was sitting there like the queen of certainty.

“Oh, and another thing. I think he’s getting married.” Lena laid down the heavy card.

Eudoxia shrugged philosophically. “Then he probably won’t come.”

Lena shot up in her seat in protest. “He probably won’t come! And that seems okay to you? You think I should go and yet you think he won’t show up?”

“I don’t think he won’t show up.”

“But you think it’s possible.”

“Of course it’s possible.”

“How can I go if he doesn’t go? How terrible would it be to just wait there pathetically alone for him never to show up?”

Eudoxia’s expression grew more serious. “That’s what you’re doing anyway, my dear.”

Probably because she had no pride left, Lena called Eudoxia three hours after they’d said goodbye at the coffee shop.

“Do you think he’ll come?”

“I don’t know, dear one.”

“You act so confident, like you know what’s going to happen.”

“I don’t. I know what I want to happen.”

“But what do you think
will
happen?” Lena recognized that she sounded like she was five.

“I think you need to make this decision on your own. I think you need to know what you want and try to get it. That’s the only thing you can do. The other part is not in your control.”

“Okay, okay, I know that.”

“You get older and you learn there is one sentence, just four words long, and if you can say it to yourself it offers more comfort than almost any other. It goes like this.… Ready?”

“Ready.”

“ ‘At least I tried.’ ”

Lena sighed. “Okay. I get it. I do.” She was too pathetic for words. “But will he come? I just want to know what you think the odds are. Tell me what you really think.”

“I think Tibby was a wise girl. I think she loved you.”

       When we argue for our limitations,

we get to keep them.

                —Evelyn Waugh

The afternoon she was getting on a plane to go to New Orleans
, Carmen stopped in the Apple store downtown to switch her service from her old phone to the new one that Tibby had left for her.

She had to wait in line, and then wait endlessly for the so-called genius salesperson to transfer all her contacts, so that by the time she got out of there she was running really late.