Sisterhood Everlasting (33 page)

“Yes.”

“Yes.”

“This whole thing?”

“Tibby fell in love with it in the pictures.”

“Wow.” It wasn’t that it was so fancy. Bridget knew it hadn’t cost millions of dollars or anything, but still.

“And since I got the programming finished, we won’t have to sell it.” His face looked a little bit lighter than it had.

“Good news,” she said. She had the sense that Brian was trying to thank her, and she felt thanked.

She’d always known he was exceedingly smart with computers. She’d heard a couple of rumors that his company was getting off the ground, but she hadn’t paid attention to them. “What kind of program is it?” She didn’t know why she hadn’t thought to ask before.

“A game. A simulation game.” Brian dug in his pocket and handed her some keys. “I haven’t been inside the icehouse yet. I’ve only seen pictures. You want to tell me what you think?”

She left Bailey and ventured across the grass. The icehouse was the last of the structures, sitting at the edge of the woods about twenty yards from the main house. As she got close, she discovered there was a little stream running along the far side of it.

It was a miniature house, white clapboard like the farmhouse, and sort of vertical. She got ready with the keys, but she found the door unlocked, so she pushed it open.

She stood in the doorway, astonished and slightly puzzled. She felt like she’d seen it before, or maybe dreamed it. The ground floor
was two simple square rooms, one big and one small. The big one had an open kitchen on one side of it, and the small room glowed with the light of a clerestory. The upstairs was a loft reached by a ladder. Standing below, she could see it was high and white and open, with sloping walls and a skylight. You could see through it to green branches and pieces of sky overhead.

She climbed up the ladder and then back down. She wandered into the smaller room on the first floor and discovered another door. She opened it and gazed through. There was a tiny rustic screen porch sticking into the woods and cantilevered over the stream. She stepped onto it in a state of near-disbelief. She’d never imagined that any enclosed space could be so appealing. There was an old iron daybed against one wall. If you went to the edge and looked down, the water was rushing right under your feet. She couldn’t quite get over it, the smell of the woods, the sound of the stream, the quality of the light. It was almost painfully perfect.

Feeling slightly dazed, she walked back to the kitchen of the farmhouse and handed Brian the keys. He didn’t take them.

“How is it?” he asked.

“It is perfect,” she said, a little breathlessly.

“That’s what Tibby thought you would say.”

When the train stopped in Toccoa, just past the Georgia state line, they lost Coach Attendant Kevin and got Coach Attendant Lee. Coach Attendant Lee had a paramilitary flavor about him, Carmen decided; he immediately started asking everybody for their IDs.

Carmen produced her driver’s license, which was in fact still valid. Lee stared at it and her ticket for a long time. He turned his eyes on her as though she had something to hide.
I’ll let you go this time
, his eyes seemed to be saying as he moved across the aisle.

Carmen listened only vaguely at first as the father of the family across the aisle tried to follow the words of the fast-talking Lee. He went into his wallet and found his driver’s license. He went into his suitcase to retrieve his passport. Carmen could see that it wasn’t a U.S. passport, but she wasn’t sure what it was.

Lee started to get crabby as the father had to search for the tickets,
at last finding them in Pablo’s coloring book. Coach Attendant Lee was not charmed by the decorations Pablo had added to the tickets. His voice kept getting louder.

“What you don’t seem to understand Mr. …” Lee brought the license up to his face. “Mr.
Moyo
, is that I need to see the papers for these children.”

Carmen sat up. Lee was talking so loudly now, the entire car could hear.

The father, understandably, was looking flustered. He presented the tickets again. “See … for the … boy,” he said. He didn’t have a proper ticket for Clara, but had some sort of baby voucher. “The baby … small.”

“I
see
the tickets. I don’t
need
to see the tickets again!”

The father looked at him in bewilderment.

“Do you understand a word I am saying to you? Mr. Moyo? I need to see the papers for the children. Are these your children?”

Lee was talking so fast and so loudly, Carmen could see and understand that the father’s shaky hold on English was failing him. She felt her heart and her head beginning to throb. She was thankful that both children were sleeping.

“Excuse me?” the father said tentatively.

“Are these your
children
?”

The father’s face was frozen for a moment. “Yes. My children,” he said finally.

“Thank you,” Lee said with a sneer. “Now, what you need to do is prove to me that these are your children and that you are traveling with them legally. And if you can’t do that, I am going to need you to get off this train.”

The father shook his head. “I am sorry?”

“I am going to need you to
get off this train.
”

Carmen couldn’t take it anymore. She got to her feet. “Excuse me,” she said. “Mr. uh … Lee.” She wanted to call him motherfucker, but she resisted. “It seems to me that you don’t speak Spanish very well, and Mr. Moyo’s English is not quite up to your hounding, so maybe I can help,” she went on in a quiet, smooth, and friendly voice. “Why don’t you tell me exactly what you need from Mr. Moyo.”

Coach Attendant Lee glared at her. He couldn’t seem to decide to what extent she was insulting him. “I am doing my
job
, miss,” he spat. “And I need to see ID for the kids.”

The father was turning from one to the other of them.

Carmen gave the father a look that did not include Lee, and tried to offer a comforting smile. “This man is an asshole,” she said to him in quick Spanish, “but he will not leave you alone until you show him some kind of identification for the children. Do you have something? Passports? Birth certificates?” she asked sympathetically.

The father looked at her in surprise. “Oh, is that what he wants?” he replied in Spanish. “Of course. I’m sorry. I should have understood. I have the birth certificates in my suitcase.”

Carmen helped him hold things from the suitcase so he could get to them quickly. He produced two birth certificates for Coach Attendant Lee, who looked at them grudgingly. “If you’re gonna be in this country, you ought to speak English,” he muttered as he passed into the next car.

Carmen stood there shaking her head. The father let out his breath. He put out his hand to Carmen. “Roberto,” he said.

“Carmen,” she replied as she shook it.

She went back and sat in her seat and looked out the window. When she glanced across the aisle, she saw that Roberto was looking at her. “Thank you, Carmen,” he said to her, serious in his tone.

“You’re very welcome,” she said, serious in return.

When she closed her eyes she kept seeing the way he looked at her. There was something in it that stirred her, not uncomfortably, but in a way she needed to grasp. What was it? Something that reached down to a deep, almost forgotten part of her, and she needed to figure out what it was.

She watched the trees dashing by mile after mile, and suddenly a wide lake opening up in front of her eyes and then closing again. And at last she figured it out. Or at least she figured out some aspect of it: Roberto looked at her like she was an adult. For a moment he’d brought her across the chasm to stand with him on the other side. He looked at her with respect.

That was what it was. And the effect of it on her was incalculable.

Lena’s adrenaline wasn’t quite as helpful in mapping out step two of her plan. Here she’d overcome a lifetime of reticence and arrived in London with lion cuff links, armed with a bolt of thunder, and now she had nowhere to fling it.

Might Kostos be at work? Could she possibly find him there? She pictured herself arriving at his fortress of finance and the moment of their reunion taking place in the hallway in front of five secretaries. My, that would be awkward.

It was six in the evening on a Monday night. It was possible. She knew the name of his firm because he’d once sent her a letter in an envelope from his office. So she got the number through an automated operator and called it.

“May I speak with Kostos Dounas, please?” she asked after she’d been transferred from the main reception desk.

It must have been his secretary. “I’m sorry. He’s not here.”

Lena felt her thunderbolt weaken a little. “Will he be in tomorrow?”

The silence felt uncomfortable. “No, I don’t believe so. I believe he’s traveling outside of the country.”

“Do you know when he’ll be back?”

“No, I’m afraid I don’t.”

“Well, can I ask if—”

“I’m afraid I can’t give out any further information.”

Could he be in Greece? That was her next possibility. She still had the phone number of his house there, so she called it.

After a vast number of rings, one less hopeful than the last, the phone was answered by a woman’s gruff voice. She knew the voice.

“Is this … Aleta?” Lena asked in Greek.

“Yes, who is this?”

“It’s Lena Kaligaris. A friend of Kostos’s. Is he there?”

“No, he’s not here. I talked to him two days ago. He said he was traveling somewhere. He didn’t know when he was coming back.”

“Oh. He didn’t say where he was going?”

“No, he didn’t say.”

        And you cannot go on

                               indefinitely being

                          just an ordinary,

                    decent egg.

We must be hatched or go bad.

         —C. S. Lewis

Carmen gave Clara her afternoon bottle and, at Pablo’s extreme
urging, let her try some bits of apple and cheese. Clara wanted to grab them more than eat them, and spit half of them out, but Pablo was undeterred.

“Good, huh?” he said to his sister in English. It was funny how he seemed to have faith in Clara’s ability to appreciate what he appreciated. It occurred to Carmen that Pablo had been where Clara was rather recently, so he took her more seriously and didn’t doubt, as the rest of them probably did, that she was an actual person.

She tried to teach Pablo go fish while Roberto carried Clara up and down the aisles of the train cars. Then they played war, which was somewhat more successful. Pablo got it wrong half the time, but he was viciously competitive. She had to keep herself from laughing at the snarly face he made every time he thought he’d won her card.

Roberto brought them back wraps and sandwiches and sodas for dinner, and Carmen gobbled hers down. She realized that it was the first time in years she hadn’t calculated the calories of something before she stuck it in her mouth. She hadn’t drunk a soda that wasn’t diet since she was about ten.

The idea that she had an audition seemed hundreds of miles away, and in fact it was. She didn’t want the train to go any faster than it was going.

She discovered that Roberto was originally from Chile, but had crept progressively northward throughout his life. He’d lived in Colombia and Costa Rica, briefly, gone to university in Mexico and stayed there until he’d met his wife four years ago, and moved to Texas to be with her.

Carmen chewed her Caesar salad wrap and wondered about his wife. What must she be like? It seemed to Carmen like an extremely exalted position, to be Roberto’s wife and the mother of these children. Carmen pictured a Supreme Court justice with the body of Salma Hayek.

She hadn’t seen Roberto with a phone. He must have one. Had his wife called him? Had he called her? Maybe when he was walking around the train. Or maybe they weren’t the kind of couple who talked all the time. Not like her and Jones.

Carmen wondered how many times Jones had tried to call and text her in the last two days. What must he be thinking? She should find a way to call him, she thought. And yet, when she pictured Jones, he seemed a thousand miles away. As in fact he was. Planes just seemed to skip you around without really taking you anywhere different. The distances felt real when you were on a train.

She watched the sun go down with Clara on her lap. She kissed Clara’s head a few dozen times, and hoped Clara’s mother wouldn’t mind. She chanted and sang every rhyme and song she could remember her mother singing to her. Most were in Spanish, and when Carmen forgot stretches of words she’d fill in nonsense words. She got busted by Mr. Law-and-Order Pablo a couple of times, who couldn’t tell her the right words though he knew she’d gone far off the script.