The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants (17 page)

“I have to go,” Tibby whispered. Her heart was going to explode, and she was going to die herself, and she didn't want to do it in the hospital.

O
n a morning in early August, Lena shared her customary silent breakfast with Bapi, then packed up and scaled the cliff to the flatland. She was going back to her olive grove. No. His olive grove.

When she reached her spot, she saw that the colors had changed since June. There was more yellow in the grass, different wildflowers. The olives on the trees were grown fatter—they were teenagers now. The breeze was stronger. The
meltimi,
her grandmother called it.

She might have come hoping to see him here; she wasn't sure. But painting stole her thoughts from any other thing. For hours, in deep concentration, she mixed and painted and squinted and painted. If the sun was hot, she stopped knowing it. If her limbs were tired, she stopped feeling them.

When the shadows grew too long, she came back to regular life. Now she looked at her painting through critical, earthbound eyes. If she hadn't been herself she would have smiled, but as it was, she just felt the smile.

Now she knew what the work had been for. She would give this, her best painting, to Kostos.

She despaired of ever having the courage to tell him how she felt. She hoped this painting would say to him in Lena-language that she recognized that it was his special place, and that she was sorry.

Tibby called in sick to Wallman's. She had a cramp in her foot. She had a twitch in her eye. Her nose ring was getting infected. She just wanted to go to sleep.

She didn't want to be at work and have Bailey be in the hospital. She didn't want to forget even for a moment and have to remember again when Bailey didn't come at four. The forgetting and having to remember again was the very worst part.

She looked longingly into Mimi's glass box. Mimi was sleepier than ever. She hadn't even touched her food. Mimi lived so slowly, and yet her life cycle was progressing much faster than Tibby's. Why was that? Tibby expected her to keep pace.

Tibby went over and tapped the glass wall. She felt an unexpected surge of frustration that Mimi could just snooze through all this distress. She reached into her box and nudged Mimi's soft stomach with her index finger.

Something was wrong. Mimi wasn't right. She wasn't warm. She was room temperature. With a jolt of panic, Tibby grabbed her too roughly. Mimi flopped between Tibby's hands. She didn't stir. “Mimi, come on,” Tibby urged her tearfully, like Mimi was playing a stupid guinea pig joke. “Wake up.”

Tibby held her up high, in one hand. Mimi hated that. She usually scrambled her sharp little nails against Tibby's wrist.

Dawning on her both slowly and panic-fast was the knowledge that this wasn't Mimi anymore. This was leftover Mimi.

Somewhere in her brain a wall formed, a wall that kept out further consideration about what was happening here. Tibby's thoughts were confined to the small area of her brain that was left. They felt more like commands from a control tower than actual thoughts.

Put Mimi back in her cage. No, don't. She might start to smell. Take her to the backyard.

No way.
Tibby bristled at the control tower. She was not doing that.

Should she call her mom at work? Should she call the vet? No, she knew what they would say.

She had a different idea. She marched downstairs. For once in her life her house was quiet. Without thinking any more than was strictly necessary, she put Mimi in a brown lunch bag, crumpled down the top so she was snug, and stuck her in the freezer.

Suddenly Tibby flashed on the horrible image of Loretta defrosting Mimi and dumping her into a roasting pan. Tibby threw open the freezer door again and hid Mimi behind the frozen remains of Katherine's baptismal cake, which no one would ever eat or throw away.

There. Fine. Mimi wasn't . . . whatever. She was just on ice. There was technology for this kind of thing. There was a whole science, Tibby was pretty sure. It might take a decade to perfect the science, but Tibby wasn't going to be impatient about it. There was time.

Upstairs she collapsed on her bed. She took a pen and notepad from her nightstand to write a letter to Carmen or Bee or Lena, but then she realized she had nothing to say.

Carmen,

Every day I've been in Greece I've eaten breakfast with my grandfather, and we've never had a single conversation. Is that weird? Does he think I'm a freak? Tomorrow, I swear, I'm going to memorize at least three sentences in Greek and say them. I'll feel like a failure if the summer ends and we still haven't said a word to each other.

When we get back, do you think you could give me a few pointers on how to be a normal person? I don't seem to get it.

Love,
Lena

Raw and open, Carmen collapsed on her mother's bed and let her mother rub her back.

“My baby,” Christina murmured.

“I am mad at Dad,” Carmen announced, half into the quilt.

“Of course you are.”

Carmen flipped over onto her back. “Why is that so hard for me to say? I have no trouble being mad at you.”

“I've noticed that.”

Carmen's mom was silent for a while, but Carmen could tell she had something to say.

“Do you think it's easier to be mad at people you trust?” her mom asked very softly.

I trust Dad,
Carmen was about to say without thinking. Then she tried thinking. “Why is that?”

“Because you trust that they'll love you anyway.”

“Dad loves me,” she said quickly.

“He does,” her mother agreed. She waited some more, but with a look of purpose in her eyes. She lay down beside Carmen on her bed. She took a long breath before she started in again.

“It was very hard on you when he moved away.”

“It was, wasn't it?” Carmen remembered her seven-year-old self, aping the words her father told her when anyone asked. “He has to go for his job. But we're going to see each other as much as ever. It's the best thing for all of us.” Did she really believe those words? Why did she say them?

“You once woke up in the middle of the night and asked me if Daddy knew you were sad.”

Carmen rolled onto her side and propped her cheek on her palm. “Do you think he knew?”

Christina paused. “I think he told himself you were okay.” She was quiet again. “Sometimes you tell yourself the things you need to hear.”

“Tibby, dinner!” It was her dad's voice. He was home.

It was freezing. Tibby shivered in her flannel shirt and pajama bottoms. Her dad must have turned the a/c up again. Ever since her parents had central air-conditioning installed in the house, they had kept the place hermetically sealed four to five months of the year.

“Tibby?”

Dully she realized that she would have to answer him eventually.

“Tibby!”

She opened her door a crack. “I ate already,” she yelled through it.

“Why don't you join us anyway,” he called. He phrased it like a suggestion, so she figured she could ignore it. She closed her door. She knew that in a few seconds, Nicky would start flinging peas and Katherine would emit one of her arcing vomits—she had baby reflux—and her parents would forget about Tibby, the sullen teenager.

She touched her hair. It wasn't just greasy at the scalp. It was greasy all the way to the ends. She would be leaving a slick on the pillowcase.

“Tibby, honey?” It was her dad still. He wasn't giving up so easily.

“I'll come down for dessert!” she bellowed. Her chances were good he would forget by then.

It was seven. She could watch game shows until the WB shows started. Then those could take her right through ten o'clock. Unlike those emergency room shows, she knew, the WB shows would have no relationship to your actual life. Then there were hours of pompous rockumentaries on VH1 of bands that had died of drug overdoses before she was born. Those were good for putting her to sleep.

The phone rang. The first time Tibby's mom got pregnant, Tibby got her own phone line. The second time, Tibby got her own TV. When the phone rang in here, she knew it was for her. She crawled deeper under her covers.

The times you were in the kitchen and wanted Carmen to call you back, the answering machine picked up after three seconds. When you were screening calls less than two feet from the phone, it rang for hours unanswered. At last the machine clicked on.

“Hi, Tibby? This is Bailey.”

Tibby froze. She shrank from the phone.

“My number here is 555-4648. Call me, okay?”

Tibby shivered under the covers. She focused on the commercial about erectile dysfunction. She wanted to go to sleep.

She thought of Mimi downstairs freezing in her little box and her up here freezing in her big one.

Bridget took a long time getting dressed for the big game. Other girls had decorated their shirts with pictures of taco fixings. It was the kind of thing Bridget would have loved if she hadn't run out of steam.

Both teams had strung paper streamers along their goals. There was a table piled with watermelons at the side of the field.

Her cleats felt too loose. Bridget knew she'd lost some weight. Her metabolism required constant feeding. But could you lose weight in your feet?

“Bridget, where've you been?” Molly asked. Bridget knew there'd been some kind of unofficial kick-around this morning.

“Resting up for the big game,” Bridget said.

Molly wasn't sensitive enough to detect anything else, and Bridget didn't want her to.

“All right, Tacos,” Molly said. “We've got a tough game here. Los Cocos are on a roll. As you all saw yesterday, they are clicking. We are going to have to max it out to win this.”

Bridget made a mental note never to say “max it out.”

Molly turned to her, her face full of giving. “You ready, Bee? You do your thing. You go all out today.”

The rest of the team cheered at that. Bridget just stood there. She'd been stuck on defense. Stuck in the goal. Screamed at when she dribbled the ball more than two yards. “I don't know if I remember how,” she said.

From the first moment, Bridget was slow. She was tentative. She didn't go after the ball. When it came to her she kicked it away. It made her team confused and listless. They were used to building on her intensity. Los Cocos scored twice in the first five minutes.

Molly signaled to the ref for time. She looked at Bridget like she was a stranger. “Come on, Bridget. Play! What's the matter with you?”

Bridget really hated Molly right then. She'd never been great with authority. “You wasted me when I was good. Right now I'm not. Sorry.”

Molly was furious. “Are you punishing me?”

“Were you punishing me?”

“I'm the coach, goddammit! I'm trying to turn you from a showoff into a real player.”

“I am a real player,” Bridget said, and she walked off the field.

F
irst Tibby brought up the box of Entenmann's crumb donuts, but then the crumbs reminded her of rodent pellets, so she ran back to the kitchen and shoved them into the back of the cabinet.

Then she thought of ice cream, but she didn't want to go where the ice cream was. Instead she grabbed a box of dinosaur fruit snacks—Nicky's favorite—and brought them upstairs. Her eyes fixed on Ricki Lake, she systematically chewed through eight packages of garish gummy dinosaurs, tossing eight silvery wrappers on the floor.

For
Jerry Springer
she drank two liters of ginger ale. After that she threw up in fizzy Technicolor. After that she watched the shopping network for a while.

Three-quarters of the way through
Oprah,
her phone rang. Tibby turned the volume way up. She hated to miss even one word. Oprah was very sympathetic.

Try as she did to avoid it, Tibby could still hear the voice on her answering machine. “Uh, Tibby. This is Robin Graffman, Bailey's mom.” Long pause. “Do you think you could call or come by? The number is 555-4648. Room 448. Fourth floor, make a left when you get off the elevators. Bailey would really like to see you.”

Tibby felt the pain invading her chest again. Her heart was not right. Pain exploded in her temple. She was having a heart attack and a brain aneurysm at the same time.

She looked at Mimi's box. She wanted to curl up in those soft wood shavings and breathe in Mimi's salty rodent smell and sleep until she died. It didn't look hard.

Carmen dialed the numbers. She half expected to hang up when she heard a woman's voice pick up, but she didn't. “Lydia, this is Carmen. May I speak to my father?”

“Of course,” Lydia said hastily. Did Carmen seriously think that Lydia would bring up anything unpleasant?

Her father's voice came quickly. “Hello?” She heard both relief and fear in his voice.

“Dad, it's Carmen.”

“I know. I'm glad you called.” He sounded mostly like he really was glad. “I got the package. I appreciate your thought.”

“Oh . . . good,” Carmen said. She felt herself being tugged into the comfort zone. She could apologize. He would be overly understanding. In under two minutes, all would be shiny again. Life would go on.

She had to fight on. “Dad, I need to tell you something.”

She felt his silent pressure not to do it. Or was it her own pressure? “Okay.”

Go go go,
she commanded herself.
Don't look back.
“I'm mad at you,” she said a little brokenly. She was glad he stayed quiet.

She took a breath and dug into the skin around her thumbnail. “I'm . . . disappointed, you know. I thought we'd be spending the summer together, me and you. I really, really wish you'd warned me about moving in with Lydia's family.” Her voice was shaky and raw.

“Carmen, I'm . . . sorry. I wish I'd warned you. That was my mistake. I really am sorry.”

He finished with a note of finality. He was closing it off again. Cauterizing the wound before there could be any more bleeding.

She wasn't cooperating. “I'm not finished,” she declared. He was silent.

She gave herself a few moments to steady her voice. “You've found yourself a new family, and I don't really fit into it.” Her voice came out squeaky and bare. “You got yourself this new family with these new kids. . . . B-But what about me?” Now she was completely off the road and driving fast. Emotions she hadn't even realized she felt were flying past. “What was the matter with me and Mom?” Her voice cracked painfully. Tears were falling now. She didn't even care if he was listening anymore; she had to keep talking.

“Why wasn't your old family good enough? Why did you move away? Why did you promise me . . . we'd be closer than ever?” She broke off so she could try to catch her breath. “W-Why did you keep saying we were, even though it wasn't true?” She was flat-out sobbing now. Her words rose and fell on waves of crying. She wondered if he could even understand what she was saying.

“Why does Paul visit his drunk father every month, and you visit me two or three times a year? I didn't do anything wrong, did I?”

She stopped using words at all and just cried, maybe for a long time; she wasn't sure. At last she got quieter. Was he even there?

When she pressed the receiver to her ear and listened, she heard a muffled sound. Breaths. Not dry, wet.

“Carmen, I'm sorry,” he said. “I'm so sorry.”

She figured she might believe him, because she realized that for the first time in her life he was crying too.

Tibby was sinking into sleep the next afternoon when a knock came at the door. “Go away!” she barked.

Who could it be? Her parents were both at work, and Tibby had scared Loretta sufficiently to keep her away forever.

“Tibby?”

“Go away,” she said again.

The door opened partway. Carmen's head appeared. As she took in Tibby's horrific appearance and the mounds of crap on the floor and bed, Carmen's face grew pointy with concern. “Tibby, what's going on?” she asked in a soft voice. “Are you okay?”

“I'm fine,” Tibby snapped, sinking back under her covers. “Please go away.” She turned up the volume. Oprah was coming back after a short commercial break.

“
What
are you watching?” Carmen asked.

With the shades pulled down, there wasn't much to look at besides the TV and the hulking piles of mess.

“Oprah. She's very sympathetic, you know,” Tibby snapped.

Carmen waded through the piles and sat on Tibby's bed. It was testament to her concern, because Carmen hated any mess she herself hadn't made. “Tibby, please tell me what's going on. You're scaring me.”

“I don't want to talk,” Tibby said stonily. “I want you to go away.”

The phone started ringing again. Tibby glared at it as though it were a rattlesnake. “Don't touch it,” she ordered.

Beeeep,
went the answering machine. Suddenly Tibby dove for it, furiously searching for the volume dial. She dropped the whole thing on the carpet.

Still the voice on the machine came through loud and clear. “Tibby. It's Bailey's mother again. I want you to know what's happening here. Bailey's not doing so well. She has an infection and . . .” Tibby could hear the woman sucking in air. Her lungs sounded like they were full of water. “We—we'd just really like you to come. It would mean a lot to Bailey.” She sobbed a little and then hung up.

Tibby couldn't look at Carmen. She didn't want to see anything. She could feel Carmen's eyes digging little tunnels into her brain. She felt Carmen's arm come around her shoulders. Tibby looked away. An infinite number of tears hovered behind her eyelids.

“Please just go.” Tibby's voice wobbled.

Carmen, being Carmen, kissed the side of Tibby's head and got up to leave.

“Thanks,” Tibby whispered after her.

Unfortunately, Carmen, still being Carmen, arrived back in Tibby's room about an hour later without being invited. This time she didn't even knock. She just appeared.

“Tibby, you have to go see her,” Carmen said softly, floating in Tibby's half dream at the side of her bed.

“Go away,” Tibby ordered groggily. “I can't move.”

Carmen let out a long breath. “You can so. I brought you the Pants.” She laid them down over Tibby's feet. It was the only place in the room where they wouldn't be swallowed by ravenous mess. “Put them on and go.”

“No,” Tibby rasped.

Carmen disappeared out the door.

Tibby chattered and shivered. Didn't Carmen understand that her heart wasn't working and her brain had an aneurysm and her nose ring was getting infected?

She fell into comatose sleep for hours and awoke to see the Pants glowing at her in the bluish light of
The Tonight Show with Jay Leno
. The Pants were telling her that she was an awful person, and they were right. She sank back down, feeling the weight of them on her feet and ankles. They seemed to weigh about fifty pounds. Who could walk in such heavy pants? “Surprise yourself,” Jay Leno told her. She stared at him. He had not just said that.

She leaped out of bed, scared, her arrhythmic heart racing. What if there was no time left? What if it was already gone?

She pulled off her pajamas and pulled on the Pants. She stuck her feet in a pair of wool clogs. Her hair was so dirty it had gone around the bend. It looked clean again.

She realized once she was out on the sidewalk that it was almost midnight and she was still wearing her pajama top. Who at the hospital would let her in to see Bailey at midnight? Didn't visiting hours end by eight?

She backtracked and got her bike from the open garage. She didn't have very much time. Bailey was afraid of time.

She raced through the streets. The traffic lights on Wisconsin Avenue were flashing yellow.

The regular entrance to the hospital was mostly dark, but the emergency entrance was alight. Tibby walked in and past the assortment of miserable people in plastic chairs. Even emergencies grew boring after people waited for a few hours in this place.

Luckily the woman in the reception box had her head tilted down. Tibby walked right by. She struck out for an elevator.

“Can I help you?” a passing nurse asked her.

“I'm, uh, finding my, uh, mom.” Tibby lied badly. She kept walking. The nurse didn't come after her. She took fire stairs up to the main floor, hovered in the stairwell until the coast was completely clear, then sped to the elevator.

There was a tired-looking doctor in the elevator. Tibby rummaged around her brain for excuses, until she realized he really didn't care what she was doing. Obviously he had better things to think about than hospital security.

She got off at the fourth floor and immediately ducked into a doorway. The floor was very quiet. The reception area was to the left, but a sign indicated that room 448 was to the right. There was a nurses' station farther down the hall to the right. She barely breathed as she moved along the wall like a spider. Thank goodness, room 448 was close. The door was partially open. She slipped inside.

She stalled in the little vestibule. From there she could see Jay Leno up on the ceiling-mounted TV doing his shtick in silence. She could see no parents in the chairs by the windows. She had to make herself go in.

She was afraid she would see a different Bailey, a leftover Bailey. But the girl sleeping in the bed was the same as the girl she knew. Only she had tubes sticking out of her wrist and a tube in her nose. Tibby heard a high-pitched little gasp escape her own throat. There was more emotion bubbling around in there than she could hold back.

Bailey was so tiny under the covers. Tibby saw the flutter of pulse at her neck. Gently Tibby reached for Bailey's hand. It was made of bird bones. “Hi, Bailey, it's me,” she whispered. “The girl from Wallman's.”

Bailey was so small there was enough extra room for Tibby to sit on the bed next to her. Bailey's eyes stayed shut. Tibby brought Bailey's hand to her chest and held it there. When her own eyelids started to droop, she lay back gingerly, resting her head on the pillow next to Bailey's. She felt the soft tickle of Bailey's hair against her cheek. Tears slipped out of her eyes and went sideways into her ears and onto Bailey's hair. She hoped that was okay.

She would just stay here holding Bailey's hand for all time, so Bailey wouldn't be afraid that there wasn't enough of it.

That night was the celebration of
Koimisis tis Theotokou
, the Assumption of the Virgin. It was the biggest Greek Orthodox holiday after Easter. Both Lena and Effie joined their grandparents in the small, plain, lovely church for the liturgy. Afterward there was a small parade, and then the whole town got busy eating and drinking.

Grandma was on the dessert committee, so she and Effie made dozens of trays of
baklava
with every conceivable kind of nut in the filling for the delicate pastries. Grandma had intensified Effie's training now that the summer was almost at an end.

Lena had one glass of strong, rough-tasting red wine, and it made her feel tired and sad. She went up to her room and sat by her window in the dark, where she could watch the festivities from a bit of a distance. This was the way she liked to enjoy a party.

Down on the sidewalk and in the little plaza a few yards down from Kostos's house, the celebration became more boisterous after sunset. The men drank loads of
ouzo
and got very expansive once the music began. Even Bapi wore a big, silly smile.

Effie drank a few glasses of wine herself. There was no official drinking age in Greece. In fact, even their grandparents pushed wine on Effie and Lena on special occasions, which probably made Effie much less interested in drinking than she would have been otherwise. Tonight, though, Effie was flushed and exuberant. Lena watched her sister dance to a few songs with Andreas the waiter and then sneak off into an alleyway with him. Lena wasn't worried. Effie was carbonated, but under that she was possibly the most sensible person Lena knew. Effie adored boys, but even at fourteen, she didn't abandon herself for them.