Sisterhood Everlasting (7 page)

There were pink roses on the dining room table and white ones on the coffee table and in the small kitchen. A large bowl on the counter was piled with fruits and vegetables.

“She went shopping,” Carmen said. There were two loaves of bread atop the short fridge, and milk, cheese, butter, eggs, and bottles of water inside of it. She peered into a white bakery box and found a fancy cake.

Carmen felt her tired eyes welling at all the little offerings. The hand of Tibby so close and yet not here.

“I bet she’ll be back any minute,” she heard Lena saying as she headed up the stairs.

In the bedrooms Carmen found more pink and white roses in teacups and jam jars. They’d already decided it would be Bridget and Tibby in one room and Lena and Carmen in the other and no one in Valia and Bapi’s old room, because that would be creepy. Tibby knew Lena loved the front room with the views of the Caldera, and so she had left her two bags in the back bedroom. Also out of deference to Lena, Tibby had left her stuff pretty tidy, though she was a known slob.

Carmen heard Lena calling Tibby’s cellphone from the house line downstairs. “She’s not picking up. I’m just getting her message,” Lena called out in a general way. “I wonder if her phone works here.”

Carmen wandered in a circle around the little room. Seeing Tibby’s familiar things made her presence so acute, she half expected her to jump out from under the bed. The angle of Tibby’s discarded shoes instantly bridged two lost years. You could build a whole Tibby from that alone. Nothing had changed, really.

The rest of them had big feet, from Lena’s nine and a halfs to Carmen’s eight and a halfs to Bridget’s somewhere in between. Three of them could always share shoes in a pinch. But Tibby’s sixes looked like child shoes in comparison. They could never share shoes with Tibby. She wore these chunky, grommety, attitudinal shoes all the time, but they were too small to really make the point.

The particular scent of Tibby brought more tears to her eyes. Neither a sweet, perfumy smell nor a bad foot odor–ish smell, just a smell that conveyed Tibby about as uniquely as anything could. With the tears came a rushing feeling of missing her, the helpless sadness of not seeing her. Carmen hadn’t realized she’d been forcibly holding the sadness in. Now she let it overcome her.

Lena always described how she dreaded and mourned things before they even happened. Carmen was beginning to suspect that she was permitting herself to mourn this long separation only now that it was over.

Fate is not an eagle, it creeps like a rat.

        —Elizabeth Bowen

Bridget pictured them as the three ants trapped in an amber
bead of a necklace Tibby’s great-grandma Felicia had worn. It was odd the things that stuck with you. Bridget couldn’t remember most of her birthdays, her mother’s last day, her father’s current address, her college graduation, but how frequently she thought of those three damned insects stuck in a necklace belonging to Tibby’s ancient ancestor who happened to have been bananas.

It was dark. It was dinnertime and Tibby still hadn’t turned up. They didn’t want to eat anything or do anything or even say anything until Tibby got there. The three of them sat paralyzed in the living room. Bridget had the eerie sensation that their state of suspension was the culmination of nearly two years spent like that.

There were four of them. There were always four of them. It seemed, as it had always seemed, disloyal to allow any aspect of their friendship to progress without all of them present. No way could they start their magical week before Tibby appeared.

Lena was looking agitated. “Could she have gotten lost? The roads are really treacherous. I hope she wasn’t driving.”

“Lenny, she’s twenty-nine years old. She can handle herself. She’s the second-best driver of us, and even if she did get into some mishap it couldn’t be serious.”

Lena was nodding.

“She’s dependable with the seat belt, and you can barely go ten miles an hour on these roads.”

Lena, still nodding, wandered back to the kitchen to check again that there was a dial tone on the phone. It was a quirk of her father’s that he left the phone on in an empty house. Indeed, there was a dial tone, just as there had been a dial tone half an hour before. “She might not have this number,” Lena murmured.

“Probably not,” Carmen said from her stiff perch on the couch. Bridget could read Carmen’s anxiety by the way her collarbones stuck out.

Bridget cocked an ear. “Len, do not call her again. When she sees the number of times you called, she’s going to think you are psychotic.”

“I’m not. I mean I wasn’t,” Lena said, floating back to the living room. “I was just checking.”

Carmen picked at her fingernails. “Judging from the stuff in the kitchen, it seems like she made plans for dinner. Whatever happened, she’s going to figure out a way to get back here in time for dinner, right?”

By nine o’clock the wind had come up, and the mystery was turning rancid.

“They eat dinner really late here,” Carmen noted.

“Maybe she ran off with a handsome Greek.” Bridget was trying to be funny, but not even she found herself to be.

Between nine and ten, they barely moved. Bridget got up twice, once to look out the window into darkness and once to open the door. She looked up and down the windy, empty street, hoping this would be the moment that Tibby would come around the bend.

“I wish there was someone we could call,” Lena said.

“Do you think her parents might know anything?” Carmen asked.

Lena shook her head. “Anyway, it’s around four in the morning there.”

“What about Brian?” Bridget asked.

Carmen looked up. “Do you have a number for him?”

Bridget shook her head, as did Lena. They only had Tibby’s cellphone number, no landline in Australia where they might find him. “I wonder where he is?”

“Australia, I assume. He’s not here.”

Lena looked thoughtful. “What do we even know about them anymore? Do we know they’re together? I know they moved to Australia together, but do we know for sure what’s happened since? She hasn’t mentioned him in a long time.”

Bridget shrugged. Her legs were aching from holding them in one position for too long. “Tibby would have told us if they broke up.”

“She hasn’t mentioned much of anything in a long time.”

Bridget nodded. This was a conversation they’d had many versions of before. “I wish I knew why all the mystery.” In the light of the present, unsettling mystery, it seemed especially strange—unacceptable, really—not to know these things. How could they have gone around knowing so little? How could they have let that stand?

“This doesn’t happen by accident. There’s got to be some reason for her being out of touch,” Lena said.

Carmen crossed and uncrossed her legs. “She sent out emails. We’ve all gotten a few. What do you expect when she lives halfway around the world? Anyway, she obviously wants to be together now.”

Bridget shook her head, annoyed at herself for letting this go, for not spending enough time badgering Tibby. For not just getting on a plane and going to Australia if that was what it took. “When she turns up here, we’re going to sit the poor girl down and get some answers before we let her out of our sight.”

Carmen’s arms were crossed and her bones stuck out. “She’s just been busy, like all of us. Brian has been utterly, totally in love with Tibby since she was fifteen, and she’s the same way about him. There’s no way they broke up. Who besides us would she talk to about it? There’s no way she could go through something that big without us knowing.”

“Something is wrong,” Bridget said. They’d waited implicitly until midnight to say so. They’d waited for Bee to be the one to say it.

Lena’s hands were on her neck. “What should we do? Call the police? The consulate?” She’d been thinking of it since the sky turned dark. Her mind flashed back to the hundreds of signs they’d made when they were looking for their lost pants ten years before, and she felt like she was choking.

This island was a fucking sinkhole. It had lost most of itself under the ocean, for God’s sake. It was a terrible place for losing things.

Bridget got up and started to pace. “I feel like going out and looking for her,” she said.

“I think call the consulate first,” Carmen said to Lena.

Lena found the number in one of her grandparents’ ancient directories but couldn’t get a live voice on the phone.

Carmen’s face was serious. “The police?”

Lena found the number of the local precinct number and called it. Her heart was mashing around and her head was grasping for the way to say anything in Greek. The phone rang many times before a man picked it up.

“English?” was the first thing she asked him, disappointingly.

“A little. No. You want to call back?” he asked her in Greek.

“No. I need to talk to someone now,” she said, also in Greek. She didn’t realize she wasn’t speaking English until she’d spoken. She explained, in Greek apparently, about Tibby. She talked and listened for several minutes, noticing Bee’s and Carmen’s surprised eyes on her face. They hovered as she hung up the phone.

“How did you do that?” Carmen asked her breathlessly.

“I’ve been practicing.”

“What did they say?” Bridget asked.

“He said to call back if she’s missing for twenty-four hours. She’s not technically missing until then. But he took down all the information. He has her name and age and description and our number and address and everything.” She pressed her lips together. She felt suddenly tired, though nowhere near sleep. “I don’t know what else to do.”

“We’ll wait,” Bee said.

Nobody tried to suggest eating or sleeping. Talking was the only comfort they had.

By the time dawn made its way through the slats of the shutters, they couldn’t think of any more stories to tell themselves about what could have happened. It had been two nights now without sleep, and the whole world had taken on an alien aspect. Carmen had long since searched the back bedroom for any note or clue as to where Tibby might have gone, though it felt wrong to open Tibby’s duffel bag.

“There is some logical explanation,” Carmen told them. “There always is.”

The knock at the door came around two hours past dawn.

Though they had sat seemingly inert, two on the couch, Lena in the chair, for the last hour, they were all three on their feet and at the door almost instantly.

It wasn’t Tibby. It was the opposite of her. It was two men in uniform, one young and one middle-aged. The older one took a step forward. “Lena Kaligaris?” he said.

Lena raised her hand like an elementary school student. “Me,” she said.

“You called the precinct last night,” he said to her in Greek.

“Do you speak English?” Whatever he had to say she didn’t want to hear alone.

“Yes. Okay.” He looked at his partner. Lena was searching for some reassuring casualness in their manner, but she didn’t see it. “You called about your friend. Tibby.” The way he said it sounded like “Teeeby.” “She did not come home?” Lena felt Bee’s hand wrap around hers.

“No. Not yet. Is everything okay?” Her words made a faint whisper in a howl of a windstorm in her head. People like this didn’t come to your house if everything was okay.

He glanced again at his partner. “Early this morning a fishing boat passing Finikia … they called the guard. Well. They found a body. A girl. A swimmer. A bather, you say? She must have drowned
many hours before. We regret to say we think this could be your friend.”

There was a sound that came from somewhere. Maybe Carmen. Maybe her. Lena shook her head hard. There were these thoughts, these ideas, climbing, scraping, shouting to be let in, but she wouldn’t let them. She felt Bee’s arm shaking at the end of her hand. “I don’t think so. No. I don’t think she would go swimming. I think that must be somebody else.” Her voice didn’t sound like hers, it sounded strangely like Valia’s, impermeable, stubborn, and sure. No, that drowned swimmer must belong to somebody else’s tragedy. It didn’t feel like theirs.

“Are you, any of you, her family? What you call next of kin? If someone could come to”—the police officer took out his handkerchief and wiped his face—“to identify the body, if it is your …”

“The body fits the description you gave on the phone,” the younger partner offered solemnly in Greek. “If this is a mistake we are very, very sorry.”

And if it wasn’t? Lena couldn’t help choking on the thought. What was he then?

But it was a mistake. “She wouldn’t be swimming. It’s late October. Nobody goes swimming now,” Valia’s voice insisted, coming out of Lena’s mouth.

The older one shook his head. “The beaches are full with bathers all day. This month is very warm. The water is still not so cold but the currents are dangerous.” The perspiration dripping down his temples seemed to make the point.

There was that scratching wriggling somewhere under Lena’s skull, like mice that couldn’t escape, and how long could she continue to ignore them?