For once, Tibby was right smack in the middle, and she could see a lot better from here.
Her mother was at work and Krista was asleep and the Morgans were at the beach and Bee was in Alabama and Lena was at the store and Tibby was in Virginia and Carmen was sitting in her closet.
Her closet was so full of crap it was a walk-in in name only. Carmen loved shopping, but she hated throwing anything away. She loved beginnings, but she hated endings. She loved order, but she hated cleaning.
Most of all, she loved dolls. She had a collection that could only belong to a solitary female child of guilt-ridden parents.
She loved dolls, but she wasn’t good at taking care of them, she decided as she pulled out the three cardboard boxes of them that lived under her hanging clothes. Throughout her childhood they had been dear to her. She had played with them long after normal girls had stopped. But her efforts at washing and grooming and dressing and improving them, her many eager makeovers, had left them looking like veterans of a long and grueling war.
Angelica, with the brown hair and the mole, had a crew cut from the time Carmen had tried to crimp her plastic hair with a curling iron. Rosemarie, the redhead, had two black eyes from the time Carmen had applied eye makeup with a Sharpie. Rogette, her favorite doll of color, wore a hideous half-stitched rag from the time Carmen had taken up sewing in imitation of her aunt Rosa. Yes, Carmen had loved them, but they couldn’t have looked worse if she had set out to mangle them.
“Carmen?”
Carmen jumped. She dropped Rogette. She squinted in the darkness of her room.
“Sorry to surprise you.”
She picked up Rogette and stood. “Oh, my God. Paul. Hi.”
“Hi.” He had one of those large, outdoorsy backpacks over his shoulders.
“How did you get in?” she asked.
“Krista.”
Carmen winced. She chewed on her thumb. “She’s awake? Is she all right? Is she mad at me?”
“She’s eating Frosted Flakes.”
That seemed to answer all three questions. Carmen was still holding Rogette. She held her up. “Meet Rogette,” she said.
“Okay.”
“I was cleaning out my closet.”
He nodded.
“I’m pretty much a social whirlwind. You know, things to do, people to see.”
It took him a long time to register that she was kidding.
“Did you tell your mom?” Carmen asked.
“She knew,” Paul said.
“Everything’s all right? You think Krista is okay?”
He nodded. He didn’t look worried.
“So … how’s school?” she asked.
“Good.”
She’d imagined college would make Paul more relaxed and less polite, but from the way he stood in the door of her room, she doubted it had. She pictured him as the sole sober pledge of Delta Kappa Epsilon.
“Summer school fun? Soccer? Good?”
He nodded. Paul was to chitchat what Carmen was to self-restraint. Silence descended.
“You?” he asked.
Carmen sighed and took in a lot of air to start her answer. “Oh, it’s kind of a mess.” She waved her hands around. “I ruined my mother’s life.”
Paul looked at Carmen the way he often looked at Carmen. As if she were the star of a Discovery Channel special.
Krista appeared at the door behind Paul. She was holding Carmen’s copy of CosmoGIRL! She flapped it a few times. She didn’t seem in the least annoyed that Paul was there. “I’m going out to get us milk shakes.”
“Okay.” Carmen waved. “You need money?”
“No. I got.”
Paul looked amused. Krista was teaching herself to talk like Carmen too.
Carmen pointed to her bed. “Sit.” She pulled herself up onto her desk, sitting and swinging her feet in the air.
Paul did as he was told. Awkwardly he moved a pile of clothes out of the way. He didn’t take to sitting on a girl’s bed as easily as some guys did. He sat there, feet on the ground, shoulders square. She felt proud of how handsome he was, tall and strong, with his sweetly long, dark eyelashes fringing his navy-blue eyes. He never acted like he was handsome.
She wasn’t going to wait for Paul to restart the conversation. She’d be waiting till next week. “Paul, remember the guy David I e-mailed you about? The guy who liked my mom?”
He nodded.
“Well, he really liked her. Like, loved her. And she was falling for him, too.” She looked up at him. “Unbelievable, right?”
Paul shrugged.
“Okay, well.” Carmen pulled her heels up onto the desk with her and hugged her knees. “This is the part of the story where Carmen is bad.”
Paul looked patient. He knew of several such stories.
“I just got crazy. I can’t explain. My mom was out all the time. She was dressing like a fourteen-year-old. She even borrowed the … Never mind. Anyway, I felt like she had all this happiness … and I had nothing.”
Paul nodded more.
“And I just … I yelled at her. I told her I hated her. I said all these mean things. I ruined it for her. She broke it off.”
Paul’s face was earnest. His eyes were squinched up in concentration, like he was trying his hardest to understand the inscrutable Carmen.
How good it was having a guy like Paul. He had witnessed her at her absolute worst last summer, and still he hung in with her. Granted, he didn’t say much, but over the past year he had become her true, devoted friend. He never ignored an e-mail, never forgot to call her back. He had real things to worry about. His father was such a severe alcoholic he had been in and out of rehab since Paul was eight years old. Before Carmen’s father had married Paul’s mother last summer, Paul had taken care of his mother and sister as though he were the head of the household. And yet, no matter what nonsense Carmen rattled on about, he always listened like it mattered. He never groaned or looked horrified or told her to shut up.
“You were jealous,” he said finally.
“I was. I was jealous. And selfish and small.”
Big tears were suddenly shivering in Carmen’s eyes. They warped the face of poor Rogette, discarded on the floor. Carmen was bad at loving. She loved too hard.
“I didn’t want her to be happy without me.” Carmen’s voice came out wobbly.
Making very little noise, Paul appeared beside her, sitting next to her on the desk. “She would never be happy without you.”
Carmen had meant to say that she didn’t want her mom to be happy without Carmen getting to be happy too. But as Paul’s words bumped around in her brain, she wondered if maybe he’d understood something she hadn’t.
Had she been jealous of her mother? Or had she been jealous of David?
Paul linked his arm with hers. Carmen cried. It wasn’t much, maybe, but it felt like everything.
Kostos did come for her, but not when she expected. Lena wished for and wanted him through breakfast, lunch, and dinner, but he didn’t come until she was already in bed. She heard the acorn against her window.
Her heart rising up nearly out of her chest, she went to the window and saw him there. She waved and rushed down the stairs and out the back door as fast as she could. She practically threw herself at him. He pretended to fall backward. He staggered a few giant steps and pulled her down with him.
“Shhhh,” he told her as she was laughing.
They found the most private place they could find in her yard. It was at the side of the house under the thick-leaved magnolia tree. If her parents found out, not even the dazzling Kostos could save her.
She was in her nightgown. He was more properly dressed.
“I’ve dreamed about you all day,” she told him.
“I’ve dreamed about you for a year,” he told her.
They started out slow, kissing. That was all they needed for a long, long time, until she put her hands inside his shirt. He let her explore his chest and his arms and his back, but at las
t he pulled away. “I have to go,” he said miserably.
“Why?”
He kissed her. “Because I’m a gentleman. I can’t trust myself to be one too much longer.”
“Maybe I don’t want you to trust yourself,” she said boldly, letting her hormones do the talking.
“Oh, Lena.” He sounded as though he were partly underwater. He wasn’t looking at her as though he wanted to go anywhere.
He kissed her more and then broke away. “There are a few things I want to do with you very badly.”
She nodded.
“You haven’t done … these things before, have you?” he asked.
She shook her head. Suddenly she was worried he thought she was inept.
“All the more reason,” he said. “We have to be slow. Make it count.”
She was touched by his honor. She knew he was right. “I want to do those things too. Sometime.”
He held her and squeezed her so hard she had to stifle a shout. “We have time. We’ll do all of those things millions of times, and I will be the happiest person in the world.”
They kissed and kissed more until finally she had to let him go. She wanted to gobble up her whole future in this one night.
“I have to leave tomorrow morning,” he told her.
Her eyes instantly filled with tears.
“I’ll come back, though. Don’t worry. How could I stay away? I’ll come back next weekend. Would that be all right?”
“I don’t know if I can wait,” she said, her throat aching.
He smiled and held her for one last minute. “Any place at any time. If you are thinking of me, you can be sure that I am thinking of you.”
Billy practically accosted Bridget on her way to the hardware store, where she was going to buy parts to fix Greta’s refrigerator door. She was now paying her seventy-five dollars a week to Greta and was busy vanquishing every disobedient thing on the property—the weeds in the lawn, the wobbly coffee table, the peeling paint at the back of the house. Bridget was in her running clothes, her hair was stuffed into a scarf, and her mood was giddy because she’d been thinking about Lena.
“You didn’t come to practice on Thursday,” he said.
Bridget just stared at him. “And?”
“Usually you come.”
“I do have one or two other things to think about,” she said.
Billy looked offended. “Like what?”
She prepared to look offended right back, but then he laughed. His laugh was just as choky and full as it had been when he was seven. She loved the sound of it. She laughed too.
“Hey, can I buy you a milk shake or something?” he asked her.
He wasn’t flirting, but he was genuinely friendly. “Okay.”
They crossed the street and sat down at an outside table in the shade. He ordered a mint-chip shake and she got a lemonade.
“You know what?”
“What?” she asked.
“You look familiar.”
“Oh, yeah?”
“Yeah. Where are you from?”
“Washington, D.C.,” she answered.
“Why’d you come all the way down here?”
“I used to come here when I was a little kid,” she explained, wanting him to ask more.
But he didn’t ask more. He didn’t even listen to the last part of what she said, because at that moment, two girls stopped by on their way down the sidewalk. One was a busty brunette and the other a small blonde wearing very small, very low pants. Bridget recognized the girls from the soccer field. They smiled and flirted with Billy while Bridget retied her shoes.
“Sorry about that,” Billy said when they were gone. “I had a crush on that girl for a year.”
Bridget felt sad. She remembered when she herself had been the girl boys had crushes on, not the one they talked to about them. “Which one?” she asked.
“Lisa, the blonde,” he said. “I’m a sucker for blondes,” he added.
Instinctively she touched her skunky hair packed in its bandana. The drinks came.
“So how do you know so much about soccer?” he asked.
“I used to play,” she said. She held the straw between her teeth.
“Were you any good?” he asked.
“I was all right,” she said around the straw.
He nodded. “You’ll be at the game Saturday, right?”
She shrugged, just to punish him.
“You gotta be there!” He looked worried. “The whole team will freak if you’re not there!”
She smiled, enjoying herself. He didn’t have a crush on her, but this wasn’t so bad. “Oh, all right.”
“Krista’s taking her mom to brunch at Roxie’s,” Carmen explained to her mother over toaster waffles. Both Al and Lydia had arrived the evening before to make peace with Krista and take her home.
Christina smiled. It was a ghost of a smile, really, but downright mirthful compared to her expression of the last few weeks. Roxie’s, notable for its clientele of drag queens, stood at the edge of Adams Morgan. Krista had heard about it from Tibby with wide, fascinated eyes. Carmen was actually pretty pleased with her protégée. Krista was going down, but not without a fight.
“Al too?”
“No, it’s a mother-daughter day. Krista’s going home with them tomorrow.”
Her mother nodded thoughtfully. “I like Krista.”
“She’s sweet. She’s all right.” Carmen tore off half a waffle and stuffed it in her mouth. “Are you coming tonight?” she asked after she’d chewed and swallowed.
Her mother’s face settled back into its look of distant forbearance. “I guess I am.”
As every couple had an identity in marriage, they also had one in divorce. Carmen’s parents practiced “amicable divorce.” This meant that when Al and Lydia arranged to have dinner at a restaurant with Carmen, Al was bound to invite Christina to come along to meet his newer-model wife, and Christina was bound to accept.
“You okay about meeting Lydia?”
Christina considered this, sucking on her empty fork. “Yes.”
“Yes?” Her mother was stoic. Her mother was brave. Carmen was maybe adopted.
Christina looked like she was about to say more, but she stopped herself. “Yes.”
These weeks, they stayed on the surface together. Carmen wanted a million things from her mother, but she was afraid to press. She deserved nothing.
She had certainly eaten and slept, although she couldn’t remember exactly what or when.
Tibby had lost track of time and space and even going to the bathroom. There was a lot of video to go through, especially after she had called Mrs. Graffman and asked for a few tapes from their collection. She needed to be absolutely scrupulous about saving all her original material, and every stage of her edit took deep concentration.
In the course of her work, she’d discovered pretty quickly that the stuff she’d shot for her actual documentary last summer was worthless. The beautiful things were hanging around the edges. They were the outtakes and the overhangs—Bailey setting up shots or breaking them down, Bailey’s careful tinkering with the boom.
Tibby also loved the parts when Bailey’s eye was behind the camera. Bailey had a remarkably patient style. Unlike Tibby, she wasn’t in a hurry to muscle everything into the shape of a story. She didn’t goad her subjects into saying what she wanted them to say.
The one part that Tibby had purposely filmed that was any good was her interview with Bailey. Bailey sat in the chair by the window, as luminous as an angel, the Traveling Pants bagging at her feet. There was even a shot of lumpy, sleeping Mimi in the mix. Tibby was mesmerized by Bailey’s brave, straight-on face, her peeking-out soul, no matter how many times she watched.
Today she was working on the soundtrack. It was easy, really, because she was just going to play Beethoven straight through. But as she listened, the music wasn’t having exactly the effect she wanted.
She put her head back. She was dizzy. She’d been u
p for a lot of hours. The end-of-summer festival was less than four days away.
The quality she loved about the music involved Brian whistling to it. Somehow, in her sleep-deprived mania, this struck her as art. It wasn’t Kafka and explosions at Pizza Hut. It was the rise and fall of Brian’s whistle.
He made the world to be a grassy road Before her wandering feet.
—W. B. Yeats
It had been a summer of awkward meals. Carmen sat between Lydia and Krista. Christina sat between Al and Paul.
Carmen so dreaded the long, miserable silences they were sure to endure, she’d actually prepared a few topics for discussion:
Summer movies
Sequels-a good idea or inherently problematic?
Popcorn-what exactly is that buttery mess? (Make room for Christina to cite stunning calorie facts.)
Sunscreen (Throw a bone to the mothers.)
SPF-what’s it all really mean?
Worst sunburn ever? (Appear to leave up for grabs. Let Al win with oft-told story of sailing in the Bahamas.)
Ozone. (Allow all to be in agreement over liking it. Not liking holes in it.)
Air travel-has it gotten worse? (Allow adults to go on and on as needed.)
(If situation grows desperate.) Israel/Palestine.
But strangely, the paper stayed in her pocket. She listened quietly as the conversation made its own brave start: Lydia described Roxie’s and surprised Carmen by being able to laugh about it. Lydia laughing made Christina laugh too. It was a small and rosy miracle.
Then Krista told about getting lost for three hours and twenty-two minutes on the D.C. subway. That immediately launched Al into a long, educational summary of the various colors and lines and junctions of the Washington, D.C., mass transit system. He even whipped out his map for illustration.
Then somehow or other, that led to the story of how Al and Christina got lost the night they brought brand-new baby Carmen home from the hospital. Carmen knew the story well, and she usually hated hearing it because the punch lines were always Carmen crying or Carmen spitting up. But tonight she listened raptly as her parents traded back and forth narrating the different parts of the story, being funny and amicable. Lydia laughed and winced appreciatively. Al held Lydia’s hand on top of the table, to let her know it was okay, he loved her better now.