“You’ve known for a long time?”
Another nod.
“The whole time?” Bridget asked.
“Not the first day,” Greta answered, protecting Bee from feeling sad that her scheme had failed entirely.
Bridget nodded.
“You’re my honey Bee. How could I not know?”
Bridget considered that. It made sense. “Even with my hair different?”
“You are you, however your hair is.”
“But you didn’t say anything.”
Greta lifted her shoulders and dropped them. “I figured I’d take your lead.”
Bridget nodded again. It was remarkable and true. Greta sensed what Bridget needed. She had always done that.
Crawling back in bed, with her raw skin and her smooth hair, Bridget had a feeling of comfort spreading through her insides. She’d let in the memories of a mother who couldn’t seem to love her, but in the same flood had rushed in memories of the mother who could.
Through the middle of August, Lena got up in the morning and went to bed at night. Sometimes she went to work in between. She ate once in a while too. She saw Carmen, and she listened to Carmen talk. She had a few stiff conversations with Tibby. The time Bee called she hadn’t been home. Lena was the kind of person who liked to share good news. Bad news she kept for herself.
Kostos had gone back to Greece. He hadn’t explained why. When she had asked if she’d done anything wrong, he’d gotten upset. For the first time in days his voice had lost its flatness.
“No, Lena. Of course not. Whatever happens, you didn’t do anything wrong.” His voice had been thick with emotion. “You are the best thing that ever happened in my life. Never think you did anything wrong.”
Somehow, she wasn’t reassured by that.
He had promised he would write all the time and call when he could. She knew he wouldn’t be calling much. It cost a fortune and would put a burden on his grandparents. Their house in Oia wasn’t even set up for e-mail.
It was back to the letters. The delay of gratification seemed like torture beyond anything even Kafka could have dreamed up.
I don’t know if I can do this, she thought on many occasions. But what was the alternative? Fall out of love with him? Impossible. Stop caring? Stop wishing she could be with him? She’d tried that once. She was too far gone to try it again.
“Lena, are you all right?” her mother asked her one morning at breakfast.
No! I’m not! “I’m fine,” she said.
“You look so thin. I wish you would tell me what’s going on with you.”
Lena also wished it. But it wasn’t going to happen. For a long time, especially since the Eugene debacle, they’d orbited each other at a wide distance. It wasn’t like her mother could suddenly hug her and make everything better.
Carmabelle: Tib. Saw Brian riding bike today. Almost ran over him. Looks amazing. Is handsome. Not kidding.
Tibberon: Are kidding. Or mistaken.
Carmabelle: Am not.
Tibberon: Are too.
Bridget needed a run. A long, fast one. For days she’d been hanging close to the house, padding around in Greta’s slippers and letting Grandma make her lemonade and rub her back. She’d gone a long time without a mother.
Usually when she slept twelve hours at night it meant she was falling apart, but these nights, with her quiet dreams, she felt as if she were remaking herself, putting herself together.
She washed her hair vigorously, four times in a row, watching the last of the faint brown dye go down the drain. Then she put on her running shoes.
The air was a little cooler than usual, and her breath settled into an easy rhythm right away. Her body felt light and wonderful, as if she’d cast off a very heavy, very dark blanket.
The river was still extra full from the day and night of storms. Her feet slipped a little on the muddy parts of the path, but she slowed down without breaking her stride. She could have run a million miles today, but she decided to turn back once she was five miles out. The trees were so lush and thick they drooped heavily over the river’s edge. Big-leafed magnolias towered to the sky. A thick coat of moss seemed to cover every boulder and rock.
“Hey!”
“Hey!” the voice shouted out a second time before she realized it was directed at her.
She slowed down and made a half turn.
It was Billy. He was waving to her from farther up the grassy bank. It made sense. She could see his house from here if she stood on her tiptoes.
He came toward her. He looked confused by her appearance.
She touched her head, remembering she hadn’t covered it. What was the point anymore?
“You look … different,” he said, eyeing her carefully. “Did you dye your hair?”
“No, I … kind of … undyed it.”
He looked surprised.
“I mean, this is how it usually is.”
There was something stirring in his eyes. He was grasping for something.
“You do know me, Billy,” she said.
“I do, don’t I?”
“My name isn’t Gilda.”
“No.”
“No.”
He was racking his brain, she could tell he was.
“It’s not Mia Hamm, either.”
He laughed. He studied her a little longer. “You’re Bee,” he said finally.
“I am,” she said.
He smiled, amazed, happy, bewildered. “Thank God there aren’t two girls in Burgess who can kick my ass all over the soccer field.”
“Just one,” she said.
He pointed to his forehead. “I knew I knew you.”
“I knew I knew you.”
“Yeah, well, I wasn’t going under an alias, was I?”
“No. Besides, you look exactly the same.”
“You look …” He considered her. “The same too,” he decided.
“Funny how that is,” she said, feeling giddy.
They started walking together along the river.
He was grabbing looks at her as they went. “Why were you using the fake name?” he asked finally.
It was a reasonable question. She wasn’t sure what the answer was anymore. “My mom died, did you know that?” So it wasn’t an answer, but it was information she wanted him to have.
He nodded. “We had a memorial service for her here. I remember thinking maybe you would come.”
“I didn’t know about it. Or I would’ve.”
He nodded again. She was leaving open a lot of questions, she knew, but people didn’t press you when your mother was dead.
“I thought about you a lot,” he said. She knew by his eyes that he meant it. “I felt sorry a lot. About your mom, I mean.”
“I know,” she said quickly.
He touched her hand lightly as they walked. They had only ever talked about soccer before this, and yet he was able to be serious with her now, to absorb who and what she was.
“I wanted to come here and see this place again,” she explained after some silence. “I wanted to see Greta and find out about my mom, but I … I didn’t want any … commitments. I guess.”
He seemed to find this rational, although she couldn’t be sure.
“I don’t feel that way anymore,” she added.
She liked how carefully he looked at her, but she was ready to change gears now.
“So how’d y’all fare against Decatur?” she asked. Now that she was herself again, it was funny to hear her voice relaxing into the old accent.
“We lost.”
“Oh. Too bad. I figured you got rained out Saturday.”
“We played Sunday,” he said. “Lost three-one. The guys say it’s because you weren’t there.”
Bridget smiled. She liked that idea.
“I told them I’d ask you to be our coach, officially.”
“How about I’ll do it unofficially?”
He settled for that. “No more missing games, Coach,” he said. “And you
’ve got to come to practice, too. We’ve got the final tournament next weekend.”
“I promise,” she said.
At the end of the path, they aimed themselves in their different directions. Billy grabbed her hand as she was walking away. He squeezed it once, not hard, and let it go.
“Glad you’re back, Bee.”
Tibby had to leave the dorm. It had been three days since she’d seen the sunlight, and she’d eaten every flake and grain from every miniature cereal box she’d pilfered from the cafeteria—dry, after she’d run out of milk. She didn’t need to shower, necessarily, or do her laundry, or comb her hair, but she did need to eat.
She was wandering through the lobby of her dorm, arguing with herself about a couple of her edits, when she plowed straight into Brian.
“Brian!” she shouted when she realized it was indeed him and not her tricky imagination.
He smiled. He got close enough to hug her and then lost his nerve, so she reached out and hugged him.
“I’m so, so glad to see you,” she said.
“I got your messages,” he said.
She winced slightly.
“All of them,” he added.
“Sorry about that.”
“No problem.”
Happily she studied his face. “Hey. Where are your glasses?” And as the question left her lips, she realized that Carmen had a point. If Tibby forced herself to be objective, she could see that Brian looked perfectly presentable. She had a terrible thought. “You didn’t get contacts, did you?” What if Brian, of all people, had suddenly turned vain? What would that mean for the world?
Brian looked at her as if she were crazy. “No. They broke.” He shrugged. “I can’t see.”
Tibby laughed. She was so relieved that he was her friend again.
“Can you come to the cafeteria with me? I’ll sneak you in?”
“Sure,” he said.
At the entrance to the building, Tibby saw Maura. Some cowardly part of herself wanted to hide, to pretend she hadn’t actually seen her. They hadn’t spoken in over a week. Tibby felt certain Alex had told her all about Tibby’s harangue.
Maura was decked out in a leather skirt. Tibby was still wearing her plaid pajama bottoms. Her tank top was splotched with ink. Brian glanced at Tibby cautiously. Maura looked down, obviously preferring the charade where they acted as though they hadn’t seen each other.
Tibby spat in the face of her cowardly self. “Hey, Maura,” she said. “I didn’t properly introduce you to my friend Brian. Maura, this is Brian. Did I mention that he’s my friend?”
Maura looked cornered. She glanced around at the people streaming through the lobby. She didn’t want to be seen talking to the girl wearing pajamas. Tibby found herself wishing, perversely, that Brian looked as much like a doofus as she did, rather than perfectly presentable.
Maura acknowledged them with a tight, unpleasant smile and sidestepped Tibby to get to the elevators.
Later, in the cafeteria, Tibby wanted to introduce Brian to everyone she knew, but unfortunately, that came down to Vanessa. Vanessa agreed to sit at their table and promised to show Brian her animals when they got back to the dorm.
“He’s cute,” Vanessa whispered to Tibby as Brian went to get them orange juice.
The first letter took eight days to come, and Lena knew by the feel of it in her hands that it wasn’t going to make her happy. It was light and thin, and Kostos’s normally expansive handwriting looked oddly compressed.
Dearest Lena,
It is hard for me to write you with this message. I am in a situation here that is troubling me. I want to wait to explain it to you until I know how it will be resolved. I’m sorry for the suspense. I know it isn’t easy on you.
Please bear with me for a bit longer.
Kostos
Under his cold sign-off he’d written something else at a different time, she guessed, because the ink had dried a slightly different color, and the writing was much looser, almost drunken.
I love you, Lena, he had scrawled at the bottom. I couldn’t stop if I tried.
She studied it, feeling a strange sense of detachment. What could it be? She’d spent so many hours trying to calculate and guess, and she hadn’t come up with one hypothesis that made any sense.
He said he loved her. Though she generally did a poor job of holding and trusting that notion, she did believe him. But why did he say he couldn’t stop if he tried? It sounded like he was trying. Why was he trying? What could possibly have come up that made him want to stop loving her?
Was his bapi sick again? That would be devastating, but it wouldn’t have to split them apart. If he needed to stay in Oia, then fine. She would find a way to be there next summer. Maybe even for the Christmas holidays.
Lena felt like a pebble falling down a well. She dropped through the air with nothing to hold her. She knew the ending, when it came, would be painful. But even suspense became monotonous after too long.
She was waiting, waiting. Falling.
The next letter was worse.
Dear Lena,
I cannot continue to feel committed to you. Nor do I want you to feel committed to me any longer. I am sorry. Someday, I will explain it all to you and I hope you’ll forgive me.
Kostos
The bottom had arrived. She crashed against it, but it brought no sense of closure or understanding. She just lay there at the bottom looking up. She knew there must be a very tiny circle of light up there somewhere, but just now she couldn’t see it.
Pools of sorrow, waves of joy
—John Lennon and Paul McCartney
“Hello, is this David?”
“Yes. Can I ask who this is?”
“It’s Carmen Lowell. You know, Christina’s daughter?”
He paused. “Hi, Carmen. What can I do for you?” He sounded guarded—all business. He knew that Carmen hadn’t exactly played Cupid between him and Christina.
“I’d like to ask you a big favor.”
“Okay …”
His “okay” had the ring of “in your dreams.”
“I’d like you to pick my mother up tonight at seven and take her to Toscana. The reservation is under Christina.”
“Are you her social secretary?” he asked. He was allowed to be a little bitter. Besides, she frankly appreciated that he wasn’t talking down to her.
“No,” Carmen snapped back. “But I did my share of messing things up between the two of you. I feel it’s my responsibility to fix it if I can.”
He paused again. “Seriously?” He was afraid to believe her.
“Seriously.”
“Does your mom want to see me?” His voice reached up high and plaintive on the last word. He wasn’t all business anymore.
“Are you insane? Of course she does.” Carmen hadn’t actually checked that fact with her mother yet. “Do you want to see her?”
David breathed out. “Yeah, I do.”
“She’s missed you.” Carmen couldn’t believe what was coming out of her mouth, but fostering love was turning out to be a lot more fun than ruining it.
“I miss her.”
“Good. Well, you two have fun.”
“Good.”
“And David?”
“Yeah?”
“Sorry.”
“Okay, Carmen.”
Tibberon: Have you talked to Lena? I’m worried about her.
Carmabelle: I’ve been calling and e-mailing for two days. I’m worried too.
Lena was sitting by herself in the back of the store under a rack of hanging blouses. She knew she needed to look industrious, but she couldn’t do it today. She hugged her knees. She was losing her mind in stages. The first stage was doing weird things, and the second was not caring anymore.
Today she had spoken to Tibby and Carmen twice each. She found herself feeling angry with them for not being able to say things that could make her feel better. But she was beginning to realize there weren’t any things that could make her
feel better.
She felt the stubble on her calves. She picked the thick nail on her baby toe until it almost came off. The pain was the only thing in this place that fit her.
A woman walked through with a bunch of clothes flopped over her arm. Lena saw her from the back as she chose a fitting room. You shop. I’ll just be here.
She listened to the lady fumble and thump around in the tiny torture chamber with the curtain that didn’t fully close. It was as good as anything else to listen to. Lena closed her eyes and bowed her head.
She heard a throat clear. “Excuse me?” The voice was timid. “Do you think this looks all right?”
Lena looked up. She had lost track of the lady, but now here she was, standing in the middle of the carpet. Her feet were bare and flat. She wore a gray washed-silk dress that sagged and swayed over her small, bony frame. The woman’s face was shadowed, and her skin looked as thin as cellophane. Only the blue veins in her neck and hands seemed vivid. But the color of the dress matched almost identically the shade of her large, lovely eyes. It didn’t look good, but it probably looked better than anything else in the shop would have.
Lena stopped looking at the lady’s dress and looked at her face. Until now, Lena hadn’t been able to put her finger on the particular look of so many women who shopped here. Truthfully, she hadn’t tried very hard to put her finger on it. But now she saw it so clearly. It was need. It was hope. It was a plea for some small signal that they were worthwhile.
This woman’s need was raw. Suddenly Lena knew who she was. She was Mrs. Graffman. She was Bailey’s mother. Mrs. Graffman didn’t know Lena, but Lena knew about her. She had lost her daughter, her only child. She didn’t have anyone to be a mother to anymore. Lena knew nothing about loss compared to her.
Lena looked at Mrs. Graffman’s face. She saw what it needed and she didn’t look away. Lena rose to her feet. “That dress … I think it makes you look … beautiful.” The words came out as light as the air, truer than any lie Lena had ever told.
When Bridget got home from running one afternoon, there was a package waiting for her. She ripped it open instantly, standing at the kitchen table.