Sisterhood Everlasting (30 page)

She saw as she raced back to the loft that the black town car was already waiting to take her to the airport. She finished packing in a hurry. She went down to the car and then raced up to the loft again when she realized she’d forgotten her makeup bag. By the time the car pulled onto the FDR Drive she was half an hour later than she should have been.

It ought to be fine
, Carmen told herself. Travel departments always loaded on extra time. She immediately thought to pass the time checking her email and making calls, but the new phone was not booting up properly. She turned it off. Maybe AT&T needed a little time to switch the service. Her fingers itched.

She grabbed a copy of
People
magazine from the seat pocket. She remembered how much she used to love these gossipy magazines. At Williams, between Dostoyevsky and Marx, she’d be gobbling up
Us Weekly
and
OK!
She’d believed they were faithfully recording
the magical world of celebrity. But the more she knew the business, the less she enjoyed the magazines. Every page she turned, she saw the manipulations, the gears showing. She saw how much of the coverage was bartered and bought. She used to look at the red carpet pictures and be dazzled, but now she saw Botox and fake teeth, starvation and double-sided tape.

Maybe they lost their thrill the day she had seen herself in one of the pictures. It was a red carpet photo of her at the Golden Globes, and it probably looked as glamorous as the next one to the outside eye. But when she saw it all she could think of was the sweat that had been dripping down her back, the gross taste in her mouth from not eating for three days, the tape holding up her dress, her confusion at photographers barking her name, the smile pasted on her face. There had been nothing magical about it.

“What time is your flight?” the driver asked her.

Carmen looked up. “Uh. Five forty-five, I think?” She looked at her dead phone. The flight time was on the phone. The airline and terminal information was on the phone. She wondered what time it was. Damn, that was on the phone too. The phone company might as well have switched off her brain while they were at it.

“That might be tough,” he said.

“What?” Now that he mentioned it, it did seem as though the car hadn’t moved in a while. She looked out the window. She scooted up to look through the front windshield. “What’s going on?”

“There must be an accident. Nobody’s moving.”

She could see the Triboro Bridge in the distance, but there were about a million other cars between them and it. She heard sirens behind them, trying to get through. The lanes of the FDR were so packed, no cars could get over to make way for them. A blast of honking began.

At last she spotted an old-fashioned clock on the dashboard. It was almost five. “Can you get off this?” she asked.

The driver looked over his shoulder at her. He couldn’t get anywhere. It was too stupid a question to answer.

She tried to turn her phone on again, but it turned itself off. Was it the battery? Where could she charge it?

Another twenty minutes passed, and no one moved except two
police cars and an ambulance that finally broke the sclerosis. “Shit,” Carmen said, as she did every couple of minutes. She stared at the phone in rising panic. What could she do? She couldn’t call the airline, she couldn’t call her manager, she couldn’t call the travel contact. What had anybody ever done before they had iPhones?

She read every page of
People
, including the weird ads in the back. At five forty-five she paused and raised her head to acknowledge officially missing her flight.

“What do you want to do?” the driver asked.

“I guess go to the airport,” she said. She felt like half a person without a phone to wield. “I’ll have to catch a later flight.”

The only saving grace was the fact that the official meeting wasn’t until Tuesday. She’d simply have to absorb the local culture at a slightly faster rate.

She read
The New York Times
and even the
Financial Times
, God help her. She didn’t get out of the car and into the airport until seven twenty. She went to the Delta counter and put herself at their mercy.

“Please just get me on the next flight to New Orleans,” she said.

The Delta woman seemed to push every button on her keyboard at least a hundred times. “The next flight I can get you on is Tuesday afternoon.”

“What?”

“I’m afraid so.” She pushed a few more buttons.

“It’s only Saturday. How can that be?”

She shrugged. “Can’t say.”

“Are you sure?”

She looked down at her screen again. Her name was Daisy and she had a very cheap dye job. Carmen could not afford to start hating her yet. “Sorry. Most of these are overbooked.”

“Can you check another airline for me?”

“Well, I can’t really.…”

“Please?” Carmen felt like she might vault over the desk and hijack the computer herself. She ached for some digital interaction.

“All right, let me look,” Daisy said. She looked, shook her head, looked, shook her head. Carmen hated the sound of her fingernails clacking on the keys. Why did somebody who typed on a keyboard for a living grow such farcically long nails?

“What?” Carmen finally exploded bossily.

Daisy picked up her phone. She mumbled a few things and nodded a few more times. Finally she looked at Carmen. “There’s some big music festival in New Orleans this weekend into next week. That seems to be what’s going on. Nobody’s got any seats until Tuesday.”

“Nobody?”

“Nobody.”

“What should I do?” Carmen wished she had somebody better than Daisy to throw her lot to.

Daisy seemed to wish she had somebody better than Carmen to assist. “Wait till Tuesday?”

“I can’t wait until Tuesday!” Carmen exploded. “I have a meeting on Tuesday! It is the biggest meeting of my entire career.”

Even Daisy was a human being. “You could drive.”

“I don’t have a car.”

“You could rent one.”

“I can’t drive for a million hours by myself!” She wasn’t even so sure she had a valid license. She drove about twice a year, when she went home to see her mom and David and Ryan.

Daisy gave her a look of maternal sympathy. Carmen realized you could turn almost anyone into a mother if you acted like enough of a baby. “Could you get a train?” Daisy asked.

“Is there a train to New Orleans?” Carmen had effectively forgotten the existence of trains. She used to like trains. She once took the sleeping train to see her father in South Carolina, and she’d found it pretty thrilling.

“Sure. There must be. It would take a while.”

“Can you look for me?”

“Can I?”

“Sure. On your computer.”

“You’d probably do better to call Amtrak.”

Would it help or hurt if Carmen started crying? “I don’t have a phone. It’s not working.”

Daisy looked around to see if there was danger of someone catching her engaging in a non-plane-related travel search. Carmen suddenly loved Daisy.

Daisy opened up the Internet browser on her computer and tapped a few things in. She raised her eyebrows. “Well, believe it or not, there’s a train leaving Penn Station at nine fifty-nine tonight that gets you into New Orleans at … five fifteen in the morning.”

“Tomorrow morning?”

“Monday morning.”

“You’ve got to be kidding me.”

“No.” Daisy made an understanding face. “You’d make your meeting.”

Carmen considered. She’d do her local absorption at warp speed. What choice did she have?

“It’s almost eight now. You probably ought to get going,” Daisy counseled.

“Okay. You’re right. Well, thanks.”

“Good luck to you,” Daisy said sincerely.

Carmen looked over her shoulder several times as she left the terminal. She found it strangely difficult to say goodbye to Daisy, and she wondered if maybe this meant she was lonely.

Lena walked along the river. Over the last few days, she’d taken many walks along the river. It was freezing, but she didn’t feel it. It might have been hailing. The river might have leapt out of its banks and taken her under and she might not have noticed it.

What would she do? What would he do? No, no, no. What would she do? (What would he do?)

Stop! That wasn’t what she got to decide. She only got to decide what she did. This was a version of the prisoner’s dilemma: a lover’s dilemma. She had to do what she was going to do regardless of what he was going to do. She had to do the right thing.

She thought back to something Effie had told her once long ago when it came to taking a risk on Kostos.
You have to have some faith
, Effie had said.

But Effie hadn’t meant faith in Kostos, Lena realized. Not faith that Kostos would be there to meet her and throw his arms around her and want her more than anyone else. Effie meant faith in herself.
Faith that even if he didn’t come, she would be all right. She had to have faith not just in trying, but in failing. Was she strong enough to fail? Was she strong enough not to?

“I’ll give you a hundred bucks if you can make this phone work in the next ten minutes,” Carmen thundered at the pimply young man in the phone store two blocks from Penn Station.

“We close in five minutes, ma’am,” the pimply young man answered.

Carmen glared at him. Where was the ambition? Where was the greed? This country was going down the tubes if this kid was any indication. “I’ll give you a hundred bucks if you can make it work in the next
five
minutes,” she said slowly.

He looked scared of her. He was no Daisy. His Adam’s apple bobbed. “I could try.”

“Please try.” Was she going to have to tell him about being on TV? She didn’t want to, but that sometimes worked on guys like him.

He turned her phone on. He pushed a couple of buttons and then the home key. “I don’t see anything wrong with it,” he said.

“Are you serious?”

He pointed it at her. She snatched it from him.

“You don’t have to pay me the hundred bucks,” he said magnanimously.

“Thanks,” she snapped, walking out the door.

She managed to buy her train ticket on her credit card without incident. There were no roomettes available, she discovered, but there was a car called the dinette where she could eat.

She passed by the newsstand and looked at the fashion magazines. She didn’t need them. Her phone was working, she’d be fine. She could read the script, she could make calls. She could write emails and plan her wedding. She could play that game where you landed the airplanes. With a functioning phone in her hand she felt her confidence slowly returning.

She got on the train with time to spare. She put her head back and closed her eyes. It was hard to believe she’d had all these reversals without telling Jones about any of them. He was always the one
she complained to first. He understood her bumbling and faltering. He seemed to expect it.

Carmen felt happy to have two seats to herself on the dark train. She was happy that there was no one in the seats directly across from her or behind her. If she could keep her phone charged then maybe this wouldn’t be so bad.

She dozed a little until Newark, when the train stopped and more people got on. She put her big purse on the seat next to her. She watched a trickle of people come down the aisle, most of them, thankfully, passing her by. Finally a small group straggled up next to her. It was a man with a small boy and a baby. He was eyeing the seats directly across the aisle from her.
Please don’t sit there
, she thought. She overheard the man talking in Spanish to his son.

Her heart sank as they settled in. She listened to the boy chirp excitedly to his father. Oh, God. How long before the baby woke up and started screaming? She wondered if she could get her seat reassigned. This was really the last thing she needed.

Eight days remained before the fateful meeting was meant to take place, five days before Lena was meant to open Tibby’s last letter, and there was something Lena was doing, hour after hour, day after day, and it didn’t feel right. She’d done it in her studio apartment and she’d done it alone and with far too much ease. It was the grueling habit she meant to overturn, and yet she had no choice but to do more of it: it was waiting.

But what else could she do? She felt unusually fitful, jumpy, and impulsive, yet she was stuck in a holding pattern and didn’t know what to do other than fret and fret and fret and wait.

Many times she thought of reading back over the twenty precious letters Kostos had written, but something stopped her.
I don’t want to turn those into memories, like everything else with him
. She didn’t want them enshrined as further exhibits in the Lena and Kostos memorial museum. Maybe they would end up there, but she wanted them to stay real for at least a while longer.

She stared at Tibby’s sealed envelope and had the strangest idea. What if she opened it right now? What if she didn’t wait?

Could I just do that?

She felt a weird gonging in her head. She ripped the envelope open so fast she almost shredded the letter inside.

My dearest Lena
,

I know I’ve made a blunt and probably unwelcome maneuver to wrest control of your life from you. And I know that you’ll know that, misguided as it may be, it’s out of love
.

You don’t have time, Len. That is the most bitter and the most beautiful piece of advice I can offer. If you don’t have what you want now, you don’t have what you want
.

I know you’ve always hated an either-or decision. You always want to choose Option C, as you call it, the third way, which too often, my sweet Lenny, means no way at all. And here I am demanding A or B
.

I’ll be honest and tell you I want you to choose A. I feel like I understand Kostos. I don’t think he’s forgotten you. I think he’s waiting too. He’s holding back, because he knows if he comes to you he’ll scare you off. And if he comes to you, there will always be doubt. You have to come half the way. I didn’t think anybody could comprehend you and love you as well as we Septembers do, Lenny, but Kostos impresses me
.