Sisterhood Everlasting (37 page)

Home. That was tricky. Where was home? Where was she going?

And then she knew where she needed to go—to Pennsylvania, on April 2—and she felt not scared but hopeful.

London was the place you got stranded, Lena decided. Heathrow airport was the place where you slept by the window and brushed your teeth in the restroom and felt like a complete asshole.

She couldn’t just go back after all this, could she? It was now Thursday, and April 2, the appointed day, was Sunday. Did that mean Kostos was going to Pennsylvania? He wouldn’t have left so early, though. He was traveling somewhere else, entirely unrelated. Maybe that was it.

By Friday morning she felt lost and sad. It was tiring, carrying
a thunderbolt around this long. Sometime between the time she cried in the magazine shop and the time she threw up her lunch in the restroom, her cellphone rang.

“Hello?”

“Is this Lena?”

“Yes.” All the blood in her body seemed to drain to her feet. “Who is this?”

“It’s Kostos. I’m standing outside your apartment building. I’ve been ringing your bell for hours. Where are you?”

She closed her eyes and put the phone down for a moment while her whole body shook, trying to stave off spasms of laughing and tears.

“I’m in London, looking for you.”

He was stunned to silence. “Why? Why London? Why aren’t you here? We’re supposed to meet in the States!”

It was a raw sound she made. Maybe like laughing. He spoke of their meeting as if there had never been a question of his intent.

“Because I couldn’t wait,” she said. “I wanted to come more than halfway.”

Kostos was quiet for a second. His voice was full when he spoke again. “Oh, Lena. I couldn’t wait either.” He laughed. “I wanted to go all the way.”

She was still shaking. “I want to too.” Her face was burning hot. She was laughing and shaking too much to talk.

“I want to see you so badly. I can’t wait anymore.”

She let out a little sobbish noise, much more like crying. She couldn’t make up her mind. She couldn’t say a single word.

“Lena, do you want to stay still and I’ll get on the next plane and come to you? Or do you want to come to me?”

Lena sucked back tears, and though her voice was a mess she answered with confidence. “You stay. I’ll come to you.”

Bridget used Brian’s phone to call Eric just after midnight, nine o’clock his time. She felt semi-delirious when he answered.

“It’s Bee,” she said sheepishly, eagerly.

“Where are you?”

She was so glad to hear his voice. “I’m in Pennsylvania. Bucks
County, south of a town in New Jersey called Belvidere,” she said. “I have so much to tell you.” A sob escaped her chest unexpectedly.

“Are you okay?”

“I’m okay. Do you think you could come here?”

“To Pennsylvania?”

“If you fly to New York, it’s only an hour and twenty minutes by car.”

“When?”

She realized she was being absurdly presumptuous. She had no business asking him for anything. He was the one who’d been left, and her misery didn’t make it any nicer for him.

She tried to calm herself down and step into his shoes. “I know you have work. You can’t get carried away. When do you think you can come?”

“I can get carried away,” he said. “When do you want me to come?”

“Now? Tomorrow?”

“Are you sure you’re okay?”

“Yes. I have something important to tell you.”

Eric was quiet. She couldn’t blame him. This wasn’t the same as her coming back. She’d never made it easy on him, not from the very beginning. “Bridget, is this something I’m going to like?”

She closed her eyes. “I really hope so.”

Eric called from the rental car to say he was an hour away, and Bridget couldn’t stand waiting. For the entire hour, she stood in the middle of the road, watching for a car she would not even recognize. She hated waiting.

Her heart surged when she finally saw his face through the windshield. When he slowed way down to turn she screamed moronically and jumped on the hood of the car. He laughed and drove the last twenty-five feet with her sitting on the hood. It was a testament to his love that he always let her happiness sweep him along and make him happy.

The moment he got out of the car she mowed him down. She clobbered him on the grass and rolled him around. This was perhaps the downside of a tall girlfriend. He laughed as she kissed him
all over the face. She stuck her hands under his shirt. His joy was unstinting, even after all this.

At last she let him sit up. Eventually she even let him stand and look around. “This place is beautiful. Where are we?”

“This is the farm Brian and Tibby bought before she died.” She shook her head, letting some of the sadness in, keeping most of it out for now. “I have so much to tell you.”

“Please tell me.”

She led him toward the icehouse. She would have wanted to introduce him to Bailey first, but Bailey was napping, so she led him directly through the tiny house to her porch. This was where she thought such a talk should take place.

They sat down on the creaky daybed. “I will tell you everything, and it will take a while. But first I have to tell you one thing that won’t.”

“Okay.” He looked a little nervous and unbelievably dear to her. She’d thought she knew how much she missed him starting after she’d hung up the phone last night, but looking at him now, she realized she’d missed him even more than that.

“Okay.” She was nervous too. “Okay, the thing is …”

He looked terrified. She prayed he wouldn’t look more terrified after she finally got the news out. She touched the ends of her hair, wishing it weren’t in disastrous condition. She squeezed her eyes shut. She swallowed down a vast amount of saliva. “I am, we are, having a baby.”

“What?” For a moment his face was unreadable, and then it all started to open up.
“What?”

“I’m pregnant. Around twenty weeks, I think. More, even. It must have happened the night before I went to Greece.” She was talking quickly.

He seemed to be following her lips as though he were hard of hearing and not quite getting all of it. “You are pregnant?”

“If I stand, you can sort of see it.” She demonstrated and put his hand to her belly.

He seemed to regard her belly and his hand as though they were both deeply unfamiliar.

“That ring I had on my cervix must have worn out and I forgot to get a new one. That’s what the nurse thought happened.”

“The nurse?”

“At Planned Parenthood. In Sacramento. That’s where I found out.”

Eric nodded slowly. He was staring not at her stomach, but at her face.

“I’m sorry I didn’t tell you before this. I really am. I should have, but I couldn’t. I was scared and I didn’t know what to do.” She felt teary and suddenly unsure of him. “Even now it’s not too late to … not do it,” she said quickly. No, that wasn’t true. It was far too late for her not to do it. “Or I guess I should say, I won’t put any pressure on you to be part of it if you don’t feel—I mean, I would understand if you aren’t ready for something like this—”

The way he watched her face, he knew her. He knew this hadn’t been easy. She realized he was being careful. So careful he barely swallowed, barely moved. He was easier with his feelings, but he was like any other person in not wanting to see them get destroyed. “How do you feel about it?” he asked soberly.

“I feel like we are its parents.”

“And is this something you are sure you want?”

Tears had been building up and she let them fall. “Yes. It really is.” She couldn’t remember not wanting it. The person who hadn’t wanted it was a stranger. “I’ve had a while to think about this, and I admit I didn’t take to it right away. But I know,
I know
it’s what I want.” She wiped her eyes and gathered her hair in a bunch. “The question is, is this something you want?”

He moved toward her on the creaky daybed. He put his arms around her waist and pulled her onto his lap. He pressed her hard against his chest. He put his face in her neck.

“This is something I want,” he said, and she could hear the emotion in his voice. “This is something I’ve always wanted.”

When Lena stepped off the plane from London in JFK airport in New York City, the first face she saw was his. He’d somehow managed
to talk, bribe, or wrestle his way all the way up to the gate to wait for her.

She saw Kostos walking toward her in long slow-motion strides, his gray tweed coat flapping open. His eyes were steady on her face. He wasn’t smiling, but he didn’t look sorry. He looked serious, like a serious man would look doing a serious thing.

Here we go
. She walked toward him and he toward her, as far as he could come, into the throng of the departing passengers and past the gate attendant, who seemed to be annoyed with him and calling out to him. But he didn’t say anything back or even turn his head. He kept his eyes on her and she didn’t look away. She didn’t feel self-conscious or nervous. She didn’t need to smile or ask silently for reassurance. She was sure.

She didn’t see any of the people around her as she went. She saw the determination in his face and she felt it too. She found herself thinking,
Well, this is it
, and knew she was walking into the rest of her life without another pause or question or even a glance to either side.
I choose you
, she thought.
Come what may, you are what I choose
.

She didn’t stop until he was right in front of her. They just stood there staring at each other for a moment. She wasn’t sure what happened after that. He put his arms around her, she put hers around him, she was up off her feet and he was squeezing her against him as hard as he could have without knocking the wind out of her.

People streamed around them and the gate attendant continued carping at them and he put her back on her feet and they kissed like they had been waiting to do that and only that for a dozen years.

At some time after the people were gone and the gate attendant had given up and moved to straightening the desk, they broke apart and looked at each other again.

He took her hand and they started walking toward the baggage claim. They didn’t say anything to each other. They swung their held hands like little kids, like they believed anything could happen, like they might take off soaring into the air. All the things you wanted to happen could happen. Why not?

She looked over at him and he was smiling. How she loved the British Airways terminal.

“Hey,” he said. “It’s someday.” He said the last word in Greek.

Country roads,

           take me home.

—John Denver

Carmen crept along the bewildering roads in a rented Ford
Focus certain she was lost. She’d flown from New Orleans to New York the night before last and stayed long enough to meet Jones at their loft and tell him she didn’t want to get married. “Not now, or not ever?” he’d asked.

“Not ever,” she’d said as gently as she could manage. She wasn’t sure if he was more disappointed by that or by the earlier revelation that she’d come home from New Orleans four days prematurely and without a contract.

He wasn’t so bitter, really, except when he told her he was keeping the loft. He seemed to think she was going to fight him over it, but she said fine. She hadn’t wanted to stay in it anyway. She had never loved it the way he had, and even the third of the rent she paid was honestly more than she could afford.

He sat on the bed for the first hour and watched her pack. He told her she was making a big mistake, and she nodded even though she knew she wasn’t. He told her single girls over thirty in New York City never found husbands, even if they were beautiful, and she nodded, though she found it frankly insulting. He told her magnanimously that he wouldn’t let this tarnish any working relationship they might have, and she nodded even though she didn’t believe him.

She packed one big suitcase to last a couple of weeks and
arranged to have the rest of her stuff boxed up and sent to her mom and David’s house. There was nothing keeping her in New York until August, when her show resumed, and that was assuming she got picked up again.

She spent the night in a comfortably untrendy hotel in Midtown and rented the car in the morning. It was a strange feeling, driving out of town with her suitcase in the back. She had no apartment, no fiancé, and no idea where she was going. Really no idea. She’d veered off the map, which was supposed to take her to an unknown place in rural Pennsylvania.

Tibby’s note had said she wanted Carmen to meet someone. What was that about? Who could Tibby want her to meet at this point? She hoped it wasn’t some kind of blind-date situation. That would be seriously uncomfortable. Granted, Tibby hadn’t liked Jones any better than Lena or Bee had liked him, but still.

Damn. She pulled over and studied the map. Why was she trying to get to Belvidere, Pennsylvania? Why was being on the right road to get there any less lost than being on the wrong road to get there?

But she turned herself around and persevered anyway. The evidence gave her no reason to believe she even knew who Tibby had been during the last two years, but she still trusted her. She couldn’t help it. And if nothing else, the landscape was quite beautiful, with forests and farms and valleys glowing with the yellow-green of early spring.

A little past noon she turned into a driveway. She saw the street number on the white fence post. She eased up the lane very slowly, taking in the pretty clapboard farmhouse, the shaded yard, and the handful of buildings surrounding it, including a classic red barn.

She stopped the car and peered over the wheel. She was debating whether to walk up to the farmhouse and knock on the door, when the very door swung open and a tall, thin man with a baby in his arms walked out of it. Her brain was trying to process the identity of these people, when she turned her head and a figure came running out of the barn and suddenly became Bridget. In a dreamlike way, Carmen turned her head again and watched the man with the baby become Brian. She was too surprised to get out of the car until Bridget flung open her door and pulled her out.