Sisterhood Everlasting (21 page)

The address matched a bungalow not unlike Perry and Violet’s, but the inverse, other-side-of-the-world version. Where Perry’s was purply gray, this one was butter yellow. Where Perry’s was held close by a matching house on either side, this one was surrounded by its own little meadow. Perry’s tiny backyard was bordered by a line of old dark-leaved eucalyptus trees. Spreading behind this one were young woods, topped by a cloud of green so green it seemed to pulse. The pink late-day light slanted differently here, the shadows spread differently under her feet.

Had Tibby lived here? Vacationed here? For a short time? A long time? Was this the place she’d lived most recently or had she left it long before?

It was opposite world, turned upside down. The toilets flushed the other way, the guy on the train had told her, and you just had to see Bowral’s famous spring tulips—in September. Fall was spring, winter was summer, gray was yellow, night was morning. Maybe death was life. Maybe Tibby was here.

Bridget floated along the concrete walk. She was tired and disoriented. There was nothing that could surprise her, nothing she wouldn’t let happen.

She noticed a car parked in the driveway behind the house. She walked up a few steps to the shaded porch. The screen was closed, but the door was open. She knocked on the wooden trim. She heard a voice talking from the back of the house. She opened the screen door a couple of feet.

“Hello?” she called. She felt yet another old version of the world ending, a new one opening up.

She saw him walking toward her down the hallway. The sun was setting behind the house, making a silhouette of him against the back windows, so she could make out his shape but not his features at first. The gait was both familiar and strange. It took until his face was within a couple of yards for her to know it was him.

“Bee,” he said.

He came out onto the porch, barefoot and also disoriented. She put her arms around him, and he felt thinner and more brittle than she’d expected him to.

“Tibby said you would find us,” Brian said as they came apart. “But I didn’t think you’d come all the way down here.”

Before Bridget could formulate a question, another shape emerged from the back of the house, a very small one. Bridget was mesmerized by it as it came into focus.

The tiny shape reached to pull open the screen door and let it slap behind her. The shape turned into a tiny girl, who came up beside Brian and wrapped her arm around Brian’s knee.

Bridget stared at the girl in astonishment—the large hazel eyes, the pointy face, the serious mouth. This was a person she knew. Death was life and the present was the past. She’d gone back to her earliest childhood to find her friend again.

Brian took the little girl’s hand and led her forward. “Bee, this is Bailey. This is Tibby’s and my daughter.”

Lena was back in Providence, back in her tiny, dark studio apartment, back to long, quiet, mostly empty days, but one important thing was different: she had a project.

When you had a project it was much easier to pretend to be someone else. You could pretend to be Nancy Drew, for instance, or Maria from
The Sound of Music
, or the sensible wisecracking housekeeper on
The Brady Bunch
.

In her Nancy Drew persona, Lena looked up the phone number of Kostos’s so-called vacation house in Santorini and called it. She couldn’t hold on to the persona long enough to leave a message on voice mail, but she called three times over the course of the week,
and the third time the phone was answered by a live person, a woman who greeted her in Greek. Lena asked in timid Greek if Kostos was home.

“No, he’s not here. He doesn’t come back until the middle of February.” The voice was rough and deep, that of an older woman, probably large in stature.

“I’m Lena Kaligaris, an old friend.”

“You have an American accent.”

“Yes. I’m American. My family is Greek.”

“I am Aleta. I take care of the house. You should call him in London.”

“Okay.” Would Nancy Drew ask for the number?

“Lena, right? If I talk to him should I tell him you called?”

“No, no, that’s okay,” she answered quickly and fearfully, one hundred percent Lena and zero percent Nancy Drew.

When she hung up, her heart was pounding. Her heart wasn’t buying the persona yet.

Now what? She couldn’t wait that long to leave for Greece. She couldn’t go all the way across the Atlantic and not deliver Tibby’s letter. She woke up her computer and checked the cheap travel sites. There were about as many flights to Santorini stopping in London as any other way. It was less expensive than trying to fly nonstop to Athens, and it broke the trip up a little.

From the back of her underwear drawer she retrieved the letter of condolence Kostos had sent about Valia. The return address was London. She confirmed it on the Internet, but the phone number wasn’t listed.

It would be better to call first, before she went ahead and bought the ticket through London. When she pictured herself picking up the phone and calling him, though, she was frankly relieved that neither she nor any of her new personas had his number.

She had his address. She’d get his number in some way or other, even if she had to call Aleta again. Being a plucky risk-taker in her Maria–from–
The Sound of Music
persona, she bought her ticket on the strength of that.

Bridget watched in pure wonder as Brian fed Bailey the last of her dinner. She watched as he cleaned her up.

Bailey sat on the edge of the kitchen sink, her feet in the basin and her hands stuck under the flowing faucet. She shouted when the water felt hot and laughed when it felt too cold. When the water was right, Brian plugged the drain.

Bailey stood on the counter and Brian pulled her dress over her head and took off her diaper. She was tiny enough to fit in the sink. Brian turned off the water and pushed the faucet aside so she wouldn’t hit her head.

Occasionally Bailey turned her curious, somewhat suspicious eyes on Bridget. Bridget stared back without a gesture or a word.

Brian told Bridget she should go ahead and put her pack in the guest room. He showed her the closet where the extra sheets and towels were. When he invited Bridget to join them for Bailey’s pajamas and bedtime story, she followed them up the stairs mutely. She lay on the floor of Bailey’s room, her mind a whirl of incoherence, listening to
Goodnight Moon
twice.

Bridget didn’t try to talk to Bailey or touch her. When Brian kissed Bailey goodnight, Bridget stood shyly in the doorway. She could hardly say anything. It wasn’t Bailey’s baby diffidence that was the problem; it was her own.

Bridget went to the kitchen and mindlessly tidied up from Bailey’s dinner. She couldn’t find her voice. She couldn’t shake the feeling that she’d passed through a time portal and found Tibby in the midst of their joint childhood. She couldn’t help feeling that this tiny former Tibby was her peer.

She was on the underside of the world and she couldn’t remember where she was in the time line of her own life. She felt like she could close her eyes and open them and be in any part of it.

She drifted out to the front porch and sat on the steps. She watched the dark. They had lightning bugs here too. No matter where you went in time or space you could find them.

Brian came out and joined her. She thought of when he had entered the story, an oddball character in Tibby’s “suckumentary” the summer they turned sixteen.
You don’t come into the story just yet
, she felt like telling him.
We are still small
.

They sat in silence as Bridget tried to remember how the story went, how to put all the parts back in the right order.

“How old is she?” she finally asked.

“Twenty months.” His face showed strain and exhaustion. She could see the web of blue-purple veins under his eyes and at his temples.

“You’re her father. I can’t believe you’re a father.”

“I can’t remember not being one.”

“Tibby is her mother.” Bridget looked quickly at Brian and he looked away. “Was her mother.”

Brian’s face stayed turned away. She could see the wariness in his posture.

“She looks so much like Tibby it scares me.”

Brian nodded, but still didn’t look at her. He didn’t want to talk about that, she understood. She could see by the way his head tipped how much he didn’t.

For the first time since Greece, Bridget couldn’t force away the presence of Carmen and Lena in her mind. They didn’t know about this. They needed to know.

“Would you mind if—Could I tell Carmen and Lena about her?”

“About Bailey?” He looked uncomfortable. “Tibby didn’t say anything?”

“No, she—”

“Then I’d rather wait till we get back to the States next month. Tibby wanted to make the introductions in person.”

“She did?” Bridget swallowed painfully. How could you make any sense of what Tibby wanted?

“That’s why we’re moving back,” he said.

“Oh.” There was an opening here and she was too unsettled to know what to do with it.

“Next month. The truck comes on the twenty-first of March.”

“Where will you go?”

“We bought a place in Pennsylvania. A farm. Tibby picked it.”

She waited for him to say more, but he was quiet.

“How did you find us here?” he asked after a while.

“I found the address on the Internet.” She was somewhat ashamed to admit it. But she hadn’t known what she’d be finding.
She’d imagined the address would only be the first step of a long, roundabout search for Tibby’s lost years. She hadn’t expected to hit it right off.

“I was figuring you would wait and find us at the new place,” Brian said.

“Why?”

“Because Tibby said she was sending you an invitation to come there.”

The word “invitation” rang in her ears. “She probably did. I didn’t open the letter yet.” As Bridget said it, she realized how typically impulsive it sounded and how badly she had misfired yet again. “I’m sorry for just showing up like this,” she said.

Brian shook his head. “It’s okay that you’re here. I was just surprised.”

He pulled apart a fraying bit of his shoelace, and she watched the side of his face. She wondered what dark thing had happened to him and Tibby. Had their relationship become a source of misery? Had the baby been an unwelcome trial?

Brian was the only source of information she had, and with his stiff body and his face turned away, she didn’t know if he even realized the worst of it, or how to ask him. “I just want to know what happened,” she began gracelessly. “Can you tell me about her life here? Because I just wish I knew—”

Brian got to his feet. He looked at her and then looked away again. “Bridget, I don’t think I can handle this right now.”

“But can you just …” Bridget stood too. “Did the two of you fight? Was she sorry about moving all the way out here?” Even as she said these things she knew they were the wrong questions.

Helplessly she watched Brian step into the house and let the screen door bang behind him. She felt injured and oversized and she couldn’t follow him. What could she do?

Maybe he blamed her. Maybe he thought she was blaming him. Maybe he didn’t want to compare notes on their failures.

Maybe he didn’t know what had really happened. Maybe, like Alice, he thought it was simply a terrible accident. Or maybe he knew the truth and was as blindsided, confused, and miserable as
Bridget was. Maybe Tibby’s death had shattered his idea of the world as it had hers.

She waited until the house was quiet before she walked silently to the guest room and collected her things. She was halfway down the front walk when he caught up with her.

“Bridget, don’t leave,” he said.

She could see that he’d been crying and she felt sorry. She’d come here expecting him to be a role player in her tragedy, to give her that missing piece that would make her life bearable. But he had his own tragedy to get through, and a kid besides. Was he supposed to relive his torment for her benefit?

“I should go,” she said.

“No, you shouldn’t. Tibby would never forgive me if I sent you away.” Some small part of his face had opened toward her.

“I know you want to be left alone.” She felt genuinely terrible for him. Over the last three months she’d taken the opportunity to fall apart, but he hadn’t been able to do that, had he? He looked like he wasn’t far from it, like a skeleton with slippery joints. She couldn’t push him for answers. It was wrong of her to think she could find what she needed here.

“Listen.” He was at least talking to her now, and not to the side of the porch. “I have a project for work hanging over my head. It was due a couple of months ago, but I—well—Anyway, it’s a big software job I have to do and I need to hold myself together and finish it before we move. It’s not that I don’t want to talk about Tibby, but I wasn’t prepared for this. I can’t do it now.”

There was something about Brian. The sincerity of his eyebrows and the way his eyes hardly blinked. She couldn’t help but feel sympathy for him and shame at her selfishness. And strangely she felt a little bit afraid of him, for the unhappiness he had allowed to grow under his roof.