Sisterhood Everlasting (34 page)

Eventually the train turned dark and peaceful. Carmen wasn’t sure how she would live without the sound of the clonking and rushing under her feet. It was as though she’d developed an external circulatory system with a protective heartbeat of its own.

Roberto put the baby to sleep in her car seat on the floor in front of their row. He lay Pablo out over the two seats and tucked him in with a blanket.

Carmen watched him in admiration. Roberto was really adept at
this stuff. Most fathers she observed did these things a little awkwardly and almost for show, as though waiting for the mom to take over before they messed it up too badly. Her stepfather, David, was a bit like that. But Roberto looked as though he’d done every one of these maneuvers hundreds of times. Maybe he was just naturally graceful that way.

He stood in the aisle for a moment, once they were settled, then turned to Carmen. “Could I sit with you for a while?” he asked.

“Of course,” she said. She shoved her purse out of the way. She thought of her horror in the first hour of the trip that someone might sit next to her. Now she couldn’t imagine wanting anything more.

“Wait,” he said, before he sat down. “I’ll be right back.”

When he returned he was carrying two bottles of Heineken and a brownie. He settled in and she put down her tray to hold the bottles. He split the brownie and she sipped her beer and enjoyed the coziness of it all.

“So tell me about you,” he started in Spanish. “Where are you from and why do you speak Spanish like a native?”

She felt happy to talk. She told him about her mom moving from Puerto Rico when she was a teenager and her mom’s family. She told him about growing up outside D.C., in Bethesda.

She told him about the Septembers, but she told him with partial amnesia. She couldn’t make any sort of picture without them, so she stuck to the happy parts for now. Not entirely happy parts. She told him about her parents’ divorce, her dad moving away. Usually when she told that story, she told it like it had happened to somebody else, but this time she knew it had happened to her. Maybe because it had moved down a notch in the hierarchy of her tragedies. She’d take that one if it meant she could hold off the bigger ones.

She told him about her later childhood, her awkward phases, the first summer of the Traveling Pants, and finally the last. She surprised herself by how open she was. The rock through the window, her dad’s wedding, the first summer of David, her mom’s wedding. High school graduation, the birth of Ryan, the first year at Williams, the first fateful trip to Greece. She decided to stop there.

Roberto listened intently. If he thought any of it was less than consequential he made no sign of it. He had a natural sympathy about him. His face seemed to react to each turn in the plot.

When she stopped talking she saw that her bottle was empty and so was his. The brownie was long gone. She squeezed by him to go to the dinette and buy the next round. When she came back his face was still thoughtful.

She squeezed by him again and handed him his beer. “Now you,” she said. “Will you tell me about you?”

He obliged. He told her about his early memories of the tiny town in the mountains where he’d been born. He was the youngest of four, the only boy.

Carmen cut in briefly to say that she too was a youngest child, and immediately realized that in every factual sense she was lying. But Roberto didn’t hold her to it.

He explained that his parents had been hippies. They’d both been raised by educated families in Santiago, but soon after they got married decided that his father should be a farmer and his mother should be a poet, and they should live off the fruit of the land and their good minds. After a few very lean years, they finally accepted the fact that they were city folk. His father didn’t know how to be a farmer and his mother didn’t especially know how to be a poet. They went back to Santiago and eventually his father got a job in manufacturing in Bogotá. They didn’t starve after that, but nobody was terribly happy either, he told her.

He took up his parents’ discarded dreams, as children will do, he said. He wanted to be a poet. He got involved in politics, somewhat disastrously. He spent two weeks in jail and then dropped out of the whole scene. He moved to Costa Rica and learned how to surf. He got good at it, he said, which she took to mean he probably became world champion. He taught surfing to rich tourists at a fancy resort and discovered he was growing stupid. He moved to Mexico City and enrolled at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma. He studied economics and literature, got a degree, and then an advanced degree. That was where he met his wife, Teresa.

At this point his face changed. His story ended somewhat abruptly, as maybe hers had done. He looked out the window at the
nearly full moon, and she looked at the side of his face, wondering. She felt she would have known if he wanted her to ask him a question, and he didn’t.

She drew her feet up under her. She heard the conductor announce a station stop in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. She thought of Bee and her grandmother Greta, who lived not so far from here. She wondered where Bee was, and she missed her as she hadn’t let herself do since the day in Greece when their world had ended.

After a long silence, Roberto started up his story again in a slightly different-sounding voice. She found herself wanting to touch him. Not in any sexual or inappropriate way. She wanted to make contact with him, offer him her support for she didn’t know what. For the tense of a verb.

Teresa was Mexican American from Texas. She was a literature student and a ceramicist.

Was
, Carmen heard,
was
.

They got married in El Paso. He looked for a job. They lived with her parents. They had Pablo. Roberto told these parts with strangely little affect. He had wanted to move back to Mexico, where he could teach at the university, but she had thought he should become a citizen first, which he did. He had managed a carpet store. They’d had Clara.

He stopped again. She put her hand on his. There was something coming and she was scared of it. “You don’t need to tell me any more,” she said. She felt the ache in her throat, the tears rising, and she didn’t even know for what. They had moved past the happy parts. She knew where it was going.

What kind of night was this, where they needed to say everything? They’d be in New Orleans in the morning, and it felt like the last night on earth. The miles were grinding away. It felt like they needed to say it all to each other before they said goodbye. Their paths crossed for this one stretch of hours and then fate would send them hurtling apart again. It was only this chance to say it all, to win a stranger’s empathy, to earn a stranger’s absolution.

“When Clara was six weeks old, we went to Mexico City so she could meet her grandparents. Teresa went out to dinner with friends.” He stopped. She could hear his breathing, no longer
smooth. “She came home late. She was struck by a car on the Paseo de la Reforma.”

Carmen was squeezing his hand with both of hers, probably too hard. If he was brave enough to say it, then God, she would be brave enough to listen. She found it hard to look at his face. She knew the ending.

Why would a man travel thousands of miles on a train with two small children if he had a wife? He wouldn’t. His wife didn’t call him on his cellphone because she wasn’t there. Roberto made the gestures of parenthood like he’d done them thousands of times because he
had
done them thousands of times. There was no faking, no show, no stalling for the mom to swoop in, no mom.

He put his chin to his chest. She held his hand. He got up and walked out of the train car. She watched his back, the shape of his shoulders, the particular rhythm of his walk.

How truly strange it was that after twenty-four hours she knew him better than she knew three and a half years’ worth of Jones. She not only knew more about Roberto; she knew him. He’d shown her his seams, as Jones had never done. Maybe Jones didn’t have any.

When Roberto returned a few minutes later, it was with two more beers and a face he’d put back close to normal. He sat down next to her. He handed her a bottle and then lifted his to clink against hers.
To what?
she thought.
To saying everything
.

It was the stab of a lion cuff link in her thigh as she folded her knees onto the uncomfortable chair in the British Airways terminal that made Lena think of it. Who knew why? She didn’t let herself wait. She found the much-neglected name on her contact list and called it.

For once there was an answer. “Hello?”

“Ef?”

“Lena?”

“Yes, it’s me.”

“Hey,” Effie said. She sounded subdued and uncharacteristically guarded, but what did Lena expect?

“I’m sorry, Effie. I really am. I treated you badly. I’m sorry it’s taken me so long to say that.”

Effie didn’t say anything at first. Lena could hear her breathing. “Not everything was your fault.” Effie’s voice was shaky when she finally spoke. “You weren’t wrong about everything. I made mistakes too.”

“My mistakes were much worse, Ef. You came to help me. You brought all that stuff. You were really trying and I wasn’t. I wasn’t even giving you a chance.”

“No, you weren’t.”

“I wasn’t.”

Effie paused and Lena heard her sister blowing her nose. “That’s why I kept the extra two hundred bucks Mom and Dad gave me and bought a sweet pair of cowboy boots with it.”

“You didn’t.” Lena laughed and Effie blew her nose again.

“I’ll share them with you.”

“You know they won’t fit.”

“I bought them big. I thought of that.”

“Aw, really? That’s nice, Ef.”

“Hey, Len.”

“Uh-huh.”

“I’m sorry about the Traveling Pants. I really am.”

“I know. It’s okay.” For the first time Lena meant it when she said it. She knew that what had happened to Tibby wasn’t the pants’ fault. In fact, she realized she was grateful that their pants were out in the blue, keeping Tibby company.

They said a tearful goodbye, and Lena looked out over the hated terminal with an unexpected feeling of well-being. One thing you could say about Effie, you never felt alone when she was at the other end of your phone. She’d claimed she didn’t matter enough to help Lena, but she certainly had.

After the third beer, it was Carmen’s turn again. She had more to tell, and Roberto seemed to know it. He waited for her.

She started with the first couple of years after college, moving to New York. She led him through her succession of painful jobs: hostess, coat-check girl, waitress, telemarketer, food stylist. She told him the longest it had taken her to get fired (seven months) and the
shortest (an hour and a half). She recounted the happiest times, the almost two years she’d roomed with Tibby and Bee in the hilariously crappy walk-up on Avenue C and East Eleventh Street, when Lena had slept on their floor four nights out of seven.

She felt the need to try to represent that old time, that old self. “You see, I used to be sort of … bigger.”

“You mean fatter?” he asked, like that wasn’t so hard to believe.

“No. Well, probably. But I mean I was just … more
there.
”

She told him about her first bit parts: saying one word in the
Sex and the City
movie that got edited out, saying seven words in an episode of
CSI
before she got whacked, getting a commercial for a prescription medicine for female hair loss that paid her rent for two years. She told him about everyone moving apart. She told him about meeting Jones and, soon after, landing her role on
Criminal Court
.

She paused and looked out the window. She wondered what time it was. She doubted this was the kind of night when you ever went to bed.

She told him about Lydia getting sick and then seeming to get better and getting sick again. And then she came to the part where Tibby disappeared. The part where Tibby moved again, just like always, but this time somewhere much farther away. It wasn’t Australia that was the problem, it was that she fell out of touch in a different way and it just went on and on. There was some confusion among them. Who had talked to Tibby last? Somebody must be talking to her. There were three emails in a year and they didn’t even sound like Tibby.

“We told ourselves it was okay. I don’t know why, but we thought she would get home and be our regular Tibby again. I don’t think we could process the truth of it, that she had really pulled away from us. We just waited for her to come back.” Carmen put a hand to her cheek.

And then came the tickets to Greece. The elation. Getting to the airport on the island. The three of them together, jumping out of their skins to see Tibby again. So much excitement, so much joy. A new life was starting. She could just feel it. And then. And then.

Carmen put her arms around her knees. She rested her cheek on top of her knee.

And then the call. And then the police. And then the denial, and the confusion, and finally the calls to Tibby’s parents. Nobody knew how to reach Brian anymore. And then the silence. And the discovery of the things she’d left for them. The terrible knowledge, the incomplete but also inescapable knowledge that it wasn’t all an accident. And then. And then. And then. It was a new life indeed.

She finally lifted her head to look at him. She saw that her sadness had gotten all over his face. She saw it more clearly than if she’d looked in a mirror. He put his large hands on either side of her head and pulled her into his chest. He held her tightly and it all came loose.

She passed through Hattiesburg, Mississippi, and over the Louisiana state line with her face in his chest and his arms around her. It was a mysterious thing. She clung to him as though she hadn’t first seen him two nights before, but had known him and needed him and depended on him the whole time, from the very beginning.

It was the great peculiarity of her life. The people she loved, really loved, had been with her from the start. She hadn’t added a person, not one single person, to that group since the day she was born. There was in fact the legendary picture taken a few hours after her birth, she a tiny hunched-over grub held by her mother and father and surrounded by newborn Bridget with Marly, newborn Tibby with Alice, newborn Lena with Ari. Compared to Carmen, a strapping Lena at three weeks old had looked as if she were ready to go to law school. “We had all just been hanging around, waiting for you to be born!” her mother told her the first time she remembered looking at that picture.