Alice laughed. “We did not take turns,” she said.
“Maybe it was just a coincidence,” Tibby said, knowing it wasn’t.
She remembered the four Septembers as little girls, playing for hours every Wednesday afternoon at the crummy playground on Broadbranch Road next to the public court while their mothers whacked the ball around. It had about two pieces of climbing equipment, as Tibby recalled. The Good Humor man had always stopped his truck there, and their mothers had almost always let them get ice cream bars.
“I wonder if she still plays?” Alice said more to the air than to Tibby. “Anyway.” She took the envelope out of her purse. “Here’s what I wanted to show you.” She passed Tibby a three-by-five color photograph.
“Ohhhh.” Tibby held it and studied it, letting the pleasure warm her all the way down to her dark red toenails. “I love this,” she said. “Can I please, please have it?”
There was a serious, actually fatal, infection called endocarditis, which was an inflammation of the heart. Lena’s great-grandmother had died of it as a young woman, and Lena was pretty sure she had it.
Lena lay in bed deep into the morning, monitoring the ache and the swell.
Sometime around lunch, her mother tiptoed into the room, took off her heels, and crawled into bed with Lena. She was still wearing her navy silk suit. Lena’s resistance evaporated. She felt herself slip back to being a three-year-old as her mother put her arms around her and pulled her protectively to her chest. Lena smelled her unique, powerful, mother smell, and she melted away. She cried and she shook and her nose ran disgustingly as her mother stroked her hair and wiped her face. Lena might have even fallen asleep for a while, strangely enough. She left off being a conscious creature altogether.
Her mother was as patient as the earth. She didn’t say one thing until the light had changed in the room and the pink of late day crept in the window. When her mother sat up a little more in the bed, Lena noticed she’d gotten snot on her mother’s best outfit.
“Would it be okay with you if I told you a little bit about Eugene?” her mother asked very softly.
Lena sat up a little too, and nodded. She’d cared so much about Eugene early in the summer, and now she could hardly remember why.
Ari fiddled with her rings for a while before she started talking—her wedding ring, her diamond engagement ring, her fifteen-year-anniversary emerald. “I met him in church in Athens when I was seventeen, and I fell madly in love.”
Lena nodded again.
“He went to America to go to college—to American University. Right near home.”
Lena nodded.
“I stayed in Athens. For four years I ached every day and every night we were apart. I felt like I only lived those few weeks of the year when we were together.”
Lena nodded again. She understood this.
“When I was twenty-one, after university in Athens, I moved to America to be with him. My mother forbade me, and she was furious when I went. I waited tables and I waited for Eugene. He was busy with his life and finishing up school. I was willing to take any part of him that he would give me.”
Her mother looked upward and thought about that for a-while.
“He asked me to marry him, and of course I said yes. He gave me a ring with a tiny pearl, and I cherished it like it was a religious icon. We lived together like we were already married. If my mother had known that, she would have died. Three months later, Eugene left suddenly and went back to Greece.”
“Mmmm,” Lena hummed in sympathy.
“His father had cut off the money and told Eugene he’d better come home and put his expensive education to some kind of use. I didn’t actually know that at the time.”
Lena nodded.
“For a year I longed for him miserably. He kept saying he would come back next month and next month and next. I lived in an ugly one-room apartment over a pet store on Wisconsin Avenue. I was as poor and lonely as could be. And, God, the place really stank. So many times I wanted to go home. But I thought Eugene would come back to me, that we would be married like he’d promised. And of course I didn’t want to prove my mother right.”
Lena nodded yet again. She could understand how that might be.
“I enrolled in graduate school at Catholic University that autumn. The first day of classes, I got a call from my sister. She told me the thing that everybody else knew and had known for weeks. Eugene had met another girl. He had no plans to come back to me.”
Lena’s chin quivered in overwhelming empathy. “Poor you,” she murmured.
“I dropped out of school the very first day. I took to my bed.”
Lena nodded solemnly. That sounded very practical to her. “Then what?”
“I had a truly good-hearted advisor at graduate school. She called me at home. She made me come back.”
“And then?” Lena had a feeling they were about to get to the part of the story she knew.
“On Thanksgiving I met your father. We were the two confused, countryless Greeks eating alone at Howard Johnson’s.”
Lena smiled. She knew this part. The often-told story of her parents’ first meeting, as it arose in this context, felt as dear to her as an old sweater. “And you got married four months later.”
“We did.”
And yet, Lena’s parents’ famous whirlwind meeting and marriage had a different, darker shading now that Lena knew all the facts.
“But unfortunately it wasn’t the end of Eugene.”
“Oh.” Lena sensed that this was where it got tricky.
Her mother seemed to consider her strategy for a minute or two. Finally she said, “Lena, I will explain this to you as a nearly seventeen-year-old young woman and not as a daughter. That is, if you want me to.”
Lena wanted that infinitely, but she also didn’t. The wanting prevailed. She nodded.
Ari let out a breath. “I thought about Eugene often in the early years of my marriage. I loved your father, but I distrusted that love.” She rubbed her finger over the top of her lip, gazing into hazy middle distance. “I felt ashamed of the hasty rebound, I guess. I believed our union was connected to Eugene and tainted by him. I was afraid I had transferred my feelings from Eugene to your father out of emotional necessity.”
Lena’s head felt heavy as she nodded. Her mother was trained in psychology, and sometimes it showed.
“When you were almost one, Eugene called me from New York. It was the first time I had heard his voice in four years. It sent me into a tailspin.”
Lena was starting to get nervous about where this was going.
“He wanted me to go up and see him.”
Lena ground her back teeth. She felt sorry for her one-year-old self.
“I agonized for three days. And then I went. I made an excuse to your father, left you with Tina and Carmen, and got on the train.”
“Oh, no,” Lena muttered.
“Your father still doesn’t know about it, and I’d strongly prefer that you not tell him.”
Lena nodded, feeling both the intoxication of knowing something about your mother that your father didn’t even know and also the deep revulsion of it.
“I remember walking toward him in Central Park, touching that awful pearl ring I’d brought in my coat pocket. Honestly, in that moment, I did not know how the rest of my life was going to go.”
Lena closed her eyes.
“The three hours we spent walking in the park were possibly the most valuable three hours I have ever spent.”
Lena didn’t want to hear this.
“Because I left there and I came home to you and Daddy, and I knew from then on that I loved your father for being your father and I no longer loved Eugene.”
Lena felt her heart begin to lift. “So nothing … happened.”
“I did kiss him. That was it.”
“Oh,” said Lena, almost disbelieving she was having this conversation with her mother.
“I was so happy to be home that evening. I’l
l never forget the feeling.” Her mother’s voice took on an amused and almost conspiratorial tone. “I believe Daddy and I made Effie that very night.”
Lena was starting to need to go back to being the daughter again.
“And you more or less know the rest.”
This struck Lena all of a sudden. It made a kind of cosmic sense that her conception and babyhood had been spent in an atmosphere of worry and distrust, and Effie had cruised in on a wave of perfect happiness. It made a sick kind of sense.
“So that was the end of Eugene,” Lena said.
“It wasn’t quite as easy as that. He called me a half-dozen times over the next few years. He was usually drunk. Your father really loathes that man.” Ari rolled her eyes at the memory. “That’s why Tina and Alice and—” Lena knew her mother had been about to say Marly, but she’d stopped herself. “That’s why my close friends knew about Eugene. I would dread those calls and the fights they provoked with your father. I still don’t mention his name around Daddy. That’s partly why I reacted the way I did when you brought him up.”
Lena nodded. “But Daddy shouldn’t worry, should he?”
“Oh, no.” Ari shook her head emphatically. “Your father is a magnificent man and a fine father. Eugene is a fool. I look back at that heartbreak, and I feel like it was the best thing that could have happened.”
Ari looked significantly at her daughter. “And that, my love, is what I want you to remember.”
Tibberon: Talked to Lenny late. Awful, unbelievable shit. Have you talked to her yet?
Carmabelle: Just talked to her. Cannot even think. Poor, poor Lenny. What can we do? Stay there. I’m coming over.
Bridget knew it was time to get home. Now that she knew what was going on with Lena, she needed to be with her. On her last day in Burgess she lay with Greta on the back porch. They munched on ice cubes and talked about future home-improvement projects instead of saying good-bye.
And yet three o’clock still rolled around, and it was still time for Bridget to go.
Greta was being careful. She didn’t want to start the crying.
Bridget was never careful, so she said what she was thinking. “You know what, Grandma, if I didn’t have three friends I loved, I would stay here with you. This feels like home now.”
Greta started tearing up right on schedule. Bridget did too.
“I’ll miss you, honey. I really will.”
Bridget nodded. She hugged Greta maybe too hard.
“And you’ll bring your brother when you come at Christmas, you promise me?”
“I promise you,” Bridget said faithfully.
“Remember,” Grandma said in her ear when at last she let her go, “I’ll always be here loving you.”
After she gathered her things, Bridget turned around on the sidewalk to look at the house one last time. It had seemed so plain when she’d arrived, but it looked beautiful to her now. She could make out the shape of Greta standing inside the darkened front window. Her grandmother was crying hard, and she didn’t want Bridget to see.
She loved this house. She loved Greta. She loved Greta for her bingo on Monday and her TV on Friday and her lunch at twelve o’clock every single day.
Maybe Bridget didn’t have much of a home with her dad and Perry. But she had made herself a home here.
Lenny,
You’re still in Greece, so I know you won’t get this letter for a while, but I need to do something. I need to feel like I’m with you in some way.
I’m so sorry about Bapi. I cried for you this morning when I heard. You’ve always been steady, Len, and so good to messed-up me. I wish I could take care of you, for once.
All my love,
Bee
Two important things happened on Lena’s fourth and last day in Greece. The first thing was that Grandma gave Lena Bapi’s hideous white tasseled shoes, and amazingly, they fit Lena’s giant feet. Grandma looked aghast, like she hadn’t actually meant for Lena to put them on, but Lena was very pleased.
“I vas going to put them in the casket, but I thought you might like them, lamb.”
“I do, Grandma. Thank you. I love them.”
The second thing was that as night fell, Lena sat on the little wall outside her grandma’s house and made a painting for Bapi. She had the idea she would bury it with him.
It was the full moon hanging over the smooth Caldera that inspired her. She set out her paints and her panel and started uniting various blobs of paint into swirly night colors. She’d never made a painting in the dark before, and she probably never would again, because it was basically impossible.
But she managed to capture two glowing moons, the one in the sky and its twin in the water. They looked the same, and in her painting, they were the same.
As she was shoving around the mess of oils on her palette, she saw that Kostos had come to stand behind her and watch her work.
He watched very patiently for a man who had just ruined both their lives.
“Moony night,” he said to no one in particular, after he’d studied it for a long time.
It was funny, because that was just what she’d thought to call it, but fear of hubris had made her back down. She couldn’t connect anything of hers to Van Gogh, especially not to the painting of his she loved best of all. She thought about her mother and Eugene and wondered whether she would ever be able to think Kostos was a fool. She kind of doubted it.
“Bapi will love it,” he said.
Okay, she doubted it even more.
She willed herself not to cry again, and even more, willed her nose not to start flowing. She knew this was the last time she would see him maybe ever. She turned around and stood up to get a long, thirsty look at his face, to soak it in.
The night before, she had felt stifled and hostile and numb, but now, for whatever reason, she didn’t.
“Good-bye,” she said.
She realized he was drinking in the look of her just as thirstily. Her eyes, her hair, her mouth, her neck, her breasts, her paint-spattered pants, Bapi’s white shoes. It would have been entirely inappropriate if this had been hello and not good-bye. Maybe it was inappropriate even so.
“The things you said to me last night,” she began.
He nodded.
She cleared her throat. “Same here.”
She had to hand it to herself. She couldn’t have found a less poetic way of putting it.
He nodded again.
“I’ll never forget you.” She thought about that. “Well, hopefully, I’ll forget you a little.” She scuffed the toe of Bapi’s shoe. “Otherwise it will be awfully hard going.”
His eyes were full now. The corners of his mouth quivered downward.
She put her palette and her brush down on the wall. She rose up onto her very tiptoes, put her hands on his shoulders for balance, and kissed him on the cheek. No matter the placement, she kissed him like a lover and not like a friend. But maybe it could pass. He held her in his arms, harder and closer than he should have. He didn’t want to let her go.
A while after Kostos left, Effie appeared. She had her Walkman on, and she looked suspiciously disheveled.
“You sure cry a lot more than you used to,” Effie pointed out.
Lena could almost have laughed. “And you found the waiter, didn’t you?”
Effie shrugged coyly. Of course Effie could take up last summer’s love interest as though no time had passed. Effie could revel in a robust make-out session and when it was time to leave, she could bid her crush good-bye, no worse for wear.
Lena studied her sister in amazement. Effie was bobbing her head around to some dumb song coming through her earphones.
Different people were good at different things, Lena mused. Lena was good at writing thank-you notes, for instance, and Effie was good at being happy.
We are born not once, but again and again.
—William Charles
Bridget had wanted to carry her bags the quarter mile to the bus station, but when B
illy suddenly appeared next to her on the sidewalk and took the two heavy ones, she wasn’t mad.
“I wish you weren’t going,” he said.
“They need me at home,” she said. “We’ll see each other around, though.”
She looked at Billy standing there in the bus station, holding her bags, wishing she weren’t going. He liked her, she felt sure. She watched him for signs of physical yearning. She wanted that, didn’t she? She liked herself enough again to feel like she deserved it.
But she wondered. Did she really want that? Hadn’t she had enough boys look at her that way? Would she partly hate him if he changed the way he liked her because she was pretty and blond?
Anyway, he wasn’t looking at her like that. He was looking at her like she was Bee, who he’d known since he was six. He was looking at her the way he looked at her when she screamed at him on the soccer field. Wasn’t he?
He touched the soft underpart of her wrist.
Or was he?
She’d thought the Bee she’d been when she was six and the Bee she was now were a world apart, separated by her tragedies. She’d thought the Bee who was his friend and the Bee who was his potential crush were different and opposite girls. Now she wasn’t sure what she thought.
But when he kissed her full on her lips, he sent a tingle from her hair to her toenails, and she knew she liked it.
In a flash of wonderment she saw firm, continuous ground under her feet, stretching from back then to right now and on and on as far as her eyes could take her.
It was a pretty weird idea, actually. But Carmen had always liked things that went around and came around. Her mother was out with David being happily ever after. Carmen had done her penance, spending her days worrying about Lena and watching her mother be joyful. She’d had a lot of time to devote to it too, since the Morgans were spending these last two weeks of the summer at the beach.
Porter had left a couple of messages the week before inviting her to some jock party in Chevy Chase. So Carmen figured maybe now that she’d gotten herself straightened out about her mom, she could start to like him for real.