Sisterhood Everlasting (13 page)

She held the glass and balanced a plate on her knees. “Thank you,” she choked out.

He lifted his glass. “To friendship,” he said.

She nodded and lifted her glass in return. She worked on a smile. Even that would help.

They chewed and sipped in silence for a few minutes.

“You know what I’d like to do?” he said.

She shook her head.

“I’d like to write you a letter about Tibby. I’d like to write something that could help, I really would.” He looked almost tearful. “But I don’t know what it would say.”

She was moved by the sympathy in his face. It took her a while to pick her words. “I don’t know what it would say either.”

He nodded. His face expressed something like defeat, and she hated for him to feel that way. He’d spoken to three local bureaucrats on her behalf. He’d fixed her eggs and tea, bread and wine. He’d repaired the kitchen faucet and the back door, and had even cleaned out the cabinets when she wasn’t looking. He’d lain with her for hours on the couch. He’d held her feet.

Who knew why? Who knew what—other than guilt and a sense of responsibility toward Valia—made him do it? But strange as it was, Kostos, her customary causer of sadness, had given her enormous comfort.

She swallowed the bread she was chewing and cleared her throat. “Your being here is kind of like the letter,” she said.

Lena could hear the wind outside late that night. It sounded like the beginnings of a storm. She could almost feel the anticipation of it on her skin.

It was well after midnight, and she had expected that at some point Kostos would go back to his alleged vacation house, which she knew had to offer accommodations more comfortable than her grandparents’ old couch. But he didn’t. He lay with her, or mostly with her feet, sipping wine, occasionally talking, and eventually dozing.

Tonight we make strange bedfellows
, she thought. Her loss, his guilt. Her insecurity, his good manners. Usually these things kept them apart, but tonight they brought them together.

Was there an attraction anymore? There had been, fiercely, before. But she was too distant from herself, too sad and empty and confused to know anymore. What, besides sympathy, did he feel for
her now? He was large and dashing and glamorous, moving through time with ease, where she felt stunted and small and stuck, a stick figure of pity with large feet.

She could imagine how it seemed to him. If you couldn’t bring yourself to marry the sad granddaughter, you could at least take pity on her.

He didn’t touch her in any romantic way. The set of his body—even crimped with hers on this couch—was not suggestive or in any way demanding.

And if it had been otherwise?

Then it would have been all wrong. It might have momentarily flattered or reassured her, but at such a moment in her life, it would have felt desperate and sad. She wouldn’t have been lifted up by an expression of his attraction right now, she would have been diminished by it. Over time, she would have resented him for it.

So why be disappointed by wishes you would not want to come true? That was the road to unhappiness if ever there was one, and she had traveled it extensively.

Whether or not he had ever wanted to marry her, he seemed to know the right way to care for her at a deeply fragile time, and that in itself was something like love. The love of a near-relative, the love of an old friend. Whatever it was, she was too depleted not to take what was offered.

She’d been certain she wouldn’t and couldn’t fall asleep in such a configuration of limbs—his limbs, of all limbs!—and yet she opened her eyes and there was light poking in at the bottom of the shutters. She had slept, really slept, for the first time in days.

Kostos was opposite her, still sleeping peacefully with his arms crossed around her ankles. She wanted to imprint this on her brain, to scratch it in deep so she could have it for later, when she could feel things again.

God often gives nuts to toothless people.

             —Matt Groening

The following morning Bridget’s hand was still pounding and
swollen. She wondered if she’d just bruised it or broken a bone. She ripped one of her old T-shirts into strips and tied it up. It didn’t help anything, but it made her feel a little more protected.

She ducked into Pancho Villa for a late-morning burrito and was happy to see the familiar ladies in their hairnets smiling at her. She wished she could speak Spanish. She wished she were like Eric, who dreamed in Spanish. In fact, she wished she thought and dreamed in a language she couldn’t understand.

She wasn’t hungry, exactly, but she needed to eat. She ate two-thirds of the burrito and drank a Mexican lime soda before she felt sick and dumped the rest in the garbage. She hated to waste it. She would have eaten it if she could have.

As she unlocked her bike, she had an idea. She pedaled up Guerrero until she came to a gas station. She spent a portion of the little cash she had on a foldout map of California. She was getting good at riding with her pack on her back. So she set out eastward into the Great Central Valley with a hat on her head and her aching hand and three bottles of water.

Davis was seventy miles away, a lot of it hot and relentlessly dry. Even on the smaller roads there were hours without shade.
You want sun?
the sky seemed to be taunting her.
I’ll give you sun
.

It was nearly five o’clock when she arrived at the little gray bungalow.
She locked her bike up on the porch. She knocked and peered in the windows, but nobody was home. She could probably find her way into the house if she wanted to, but she decided against it. She didn’t want to be overwhelming right away.

She sat in a wicker chair on the front porch, grateful for the shade. She must have fallen asleep. She opened her eyes and saw Perry coming up the walk. She stood and hugged him. She pulled back and could see he was genuinely happy to see her and also awkward about what to say.

“I heard about—I’m so sorry about Tibby—”

“I know,” she said quickly. She didn’t know how to finish his sentence either.

“Are you all right?”

“Yeah,” she said, too quickly to convince anybody. She pulled her pack up onto her shoulder. “Do you mind if I stay with you and Violet for a couple of days?”

“No. You can stay as long as you want. Where’s Eric?”

“Home.” She said it in a way that didn’t welcome more questions.

“What did you do to your hand?”

She hesitated and then shrugged. “I hit it on something. It’s fine.”

Her brother was relatively easy to put off, and she was grateful for it. He turned to put his key in the door. His hair was blond again from living in California. He was much stronger and sturdier than he had been when he’d lived back East. Even though she’d seen him every few months since he’d moved here, she still somehow expected to see the old Perry every time.

“How’s school?” she asked.

“Good. Almost done. I start my residency in July.”

“Amazing. Do I get to call you Doctor?”

Perry laughed. “All you want. But I can’t offer you much medical care.”

“Unless I were a bird,” she said, following him into the cool house.

“Yes. Or a dog or a horse or a swordfish.”

“A swordfish?”

“Okay, maybe not a swordfish. A dolphin. Then I could help you.”

“Are you still doing the oily bird network?”

He smiled. “Oiled wildlife. Yes.”

Perry spent what seemed to her a million hours a week in school and doing schoolwork, and in his nonexistent free time he was part of a rescue network for injured animals. She knew that was the most important thing to him.

By the time Perry had made lemonade and changed his shoes, Violet had come home. She was surprised to see Bridget, but not unwelcoming. She gave Bridget a hug. “I’m sorry for what you’ve been through,” she said.

Violet had a pointy chin, black eyes, freckles, and serious-girl glasses. She worked in a lab at the vet school, doing research on infectious animal diseases. She and Perry had gotten married on the beach at Monterey among the elephant seals two years before. Violet was thirty-three. She told Bridget they were going to try to get pregnant as soon as Perry got his DVM.

Perry made pasta with pesto sauce and Violet made a salad. Bridget ate voraciously and then fell asleep on the couch without even brushing her teeth. She woke a while later, to the sound of them cleaning the kitchen. They must have thought she was asleep.

“Do you think she’s okay?” she heard Violet asking in a quiet voice.

Perry’s response was muffled.

“Do you think Eric knows she’s here? Should we call him?”

Bridget couldn’t fall back asleep, but she couldn’t get up off the couch either. What a reversal had taken place over the last decade. It used to be she who was the functional one. She had the best friends, went to a good college, played on a team, while Perry stayed in his room, so lost in his obscure role-playing games on the computer that he barely ate. It was Perry people whispered about, Perry they worried about. Not her.

Now Perry had a wife, a house, friends, a purpose, a graduate degree coming in May. And what did she have? The college didn’t matter, the team didn’t even really matter. But the friends. The
friendship. Without it, she didn’t know who she was. Without them, without the idea of them, she had nothing.

Kostos made Lena coffee in the morning and hustled her to the ferry dock. She was relieved to be taking a boat before the plane. She felt tremulous at the thought of leaving the surface of the earth just yet. She didn’t trust anything to stay where she wanted it.

He carried her heavy bag and Tibby’s duffel. He pulled her by the hand when it looked like she was in danger of missing her boat. He promised to close up the house, to make sure everything was left in order. He said it with such a sense of purpose she half expected he’d spackle the walls and refinish the floors before he considered himself done.

It was a rushed goodbye that would have to last for a long while, she guessed. Maybe forever. She hugged him zealously, her body able to express more than her brain. She pressed her face into his chest. He must have had the same feeling. He hugged her in return like she was someone he might not see again.

He kissed her hard, not on the face but above her ear. She wondered about the nature of this kiss.

They let go of each other. How to leave it?
I’ll call you? Don’t forget to write? See you next time!
None of that seemed to fit.

Because why say these words? When was next time going to be? Bapi was gone. Valia was gone. The house would soon be gone. They were two people who had never come together of their own volition. They’d come their weary way always by circumstances, usually bad ones. These few days had been like a cozy foxhole dug out of time—a big, prosperous life in his case, a tragedy in hers. It was time to go back to those things.

“Thank you,” she said tearfully. Those were the parting words that fit.

She lugged the two bags the last few yards onto the boat. She weaved through the other passengers and parked at the first empty stretch of rail. Quickly she turned again to catch his face. She felt a sense of desperation as the engines began to churn and pull her
away from the dock. She wanted to keep him in her mind as he was now. She didn’t want to lose him.

What if this was her life? What if his was the face she was coming home to rather than leaving? What if she had arrived here on Independence Day all those summers ago? She pictured Kostos standing just where he was now, but the engines churning in the opposite direction, bringing her to him maybe forever. Was that the brave life through which she would have earned the right to keep Tibby?

He didn’t move from his spot on the dock. The crowd drifted and dissipated and he stood there as the distance between them grew. And yet the wind was so oddly calm and the water so glassy she could imagine it was he who was drawing away and she who was staying still.

She hadn’t chosen the brave life. She’d chosen the small, fearful one. She hadn’t gotten to keep Tibby.

Finally she stopped waving, dropped her hands to her sides, and just looked at him as he got small. It gave her the feeling that her memory was already closing in on him. The distance between them stretched and finally broke. She never got to keep anything.

She turned to face the horizon, the blurring line of water and sky, the great vacuum, the place where things went when they left her.

But this morning it wasn’t empty. This time she could barely open her eyes enough to see it because there was something large and fierce right in the middle of it and it was the sun.

                   She was not one

who expected to get away

                         with much in life.

              —Larry McMurtry

Carmen lay on her mother’s bed after the burial and let her
mother rub her back, the way she’d done through all the many tragedies of Carmen’s childhood. Carmen found herself longing for those tragedies, when a back rub and a long cry on her mother’s pillow would do the trick, instead of this one, when nothing seemed to help.

At least the burial was over and she didn’t have to dread it anymore. It had been small and grim, just a handful of shattered people standing in the gray November air: Tibby’s family, Carmen and her mother, Lena and her parents. Vaguely Carmen wondered about Brian, what he knew and where he was. She wondered many things, but she didn’t pursue the information. She was terrified by what little she knew; she didn’t want to find out any more. That was wrong of her, maybe, but she didn’t have the energy to make it right.