“You don’t have to do that, Tibby.”
“But I want to. I will.”
“Let’s see how it goes.”
“Okay,” she said, unnerved by his reserve, his reasonableness.
She realized he was right when he said that they couldn’t go back. For better or worse, it would be different now. Innocence was not one of the things you could get back.
“Maybe we can trade off,” he said.
Eric had probably hoped for a dinner alone in a restaurant where they could laugh and kiss and play romantic under-the-table foot games to their hearts’ content. Instead, he got underheated pesto, a distractedly made salad, and a lot of awkward silence from Bridget’s two poorly socialized family members.
He might have thought he’d get to sleep in a bed in a nice suburban house, but he got a scratchy couch in a falling-down house occupied mostly by ghosts.
He tolerated all of it bravely, and his reward did come when she tiptoed downstairs and led him by the hand into her room and shut the door quietly behind her. She knew her brother and father were happily ensconced in their headphones, and this one time it made her glad.
She sat him down on her bed and he groaned with delight as she hitched up her nightgown and sat on his lap, wrapping her tan legs around him. She kissed him long and deep, tangling him up in her web of limbs and fingers and soft hair.
“Why did you come back early?”
“For this,” he whispered.
“No, really.”
“Really.”
“Really?”
“I missed you.”
“Did you?”
“A lot.”
She hugged him harder.
“I thought of you everywhere all the time. On the beach. On the soccer field. In the water. Lying in bed I really thought of you.”
His expression was so shameless she laughed. “I mean it, Bee. Every girl I saw I wished was you.”
She looked at him with wonder. He was so much better at this than she was! She felt suddenly sad for herself and happy for him. Or rather, the opposite: She felt happy for herself, getting someone as wonderful as him, and sad for him, getting someone as wretched as her.
“Did you miss me?” he asked.
She looked at him thoughtfully. She didn’t want to lie. She had some complicated things to tell him and she wasn’t yet sure how. “When you told me you were going to Mexico, I wasn’t sure what it meant,” she said slowly. “I wasn’t sure if it meant you wanted to…go our own ways for a while.”
Each one of his features seemed to grow solemn in turn. “Did you really think that?”
“I wasn’t sure what to think.”
“Do you think that now?”
“No.” She knew her answer right away.
He put his hands on either side of her face. “I never thought of going separate ways. I never wanted that. The way I looked at it was, when you’re meant to be, what’s a summer?”
She felt the ache in her throat. He didn’t question his love. Why had she?
“So does that mean you didn’t miss me?” he asked.
“I didn’t realize how much until the end,” she said.
“And the beginning and the middle?”
She rubbed her cheek thoughtfully. “I think I was missing the idea of missing,” she said. “But I think I might have figured it out now.”
He let her pull his T-shirt over his head. He let her kiss him. He obliged when she pulled at the waist of his boxers, and he seemed eager to get her out of her nightgown. He was going to trust her and she was going to be worthy of it.
It was maybe strange to want to make love to your boyfriend in your old bedroom after such a summer. But it was undoubtedly what she wanted.
Maybe it was her need to connect old and new. Maybe it was her desire to put a happy memory, an act of love, into this house that had seen so few of them.
Carmen wore Perdita’s flowers in her hair and she kept quiet. She spoke when she was onstage and otherwise she floated around in the state of a dream. For three days, she didn’t look at her script.
The hardest part was the few hours in the middle of the night spent in her room. It was hard to be impervious to Julia’s overtures. It was perhaps harder to be impervious to Julia’s silent rage.
You don’t want me to be happy, she said to herself to ward off Julia’s poisonous spirit.
She wore her costume. She mused on the warmth of her skin and the sensation of new textures against it. She listened to Leontes. She listened to Polixenes and Autolycus and Paulina. She bathed her brain in luxurious language and mostly forgot about thinking.
She said her lines, but she did not look at Andrew and he said nothing to her. We’re trusting me to figure this out, she knew.
In the morning Eric had to leave, he said. Maybe he just wanted to leave. But he promised Bridget he’d meet her in Providence in a few days. That was a relief. She wanted to practice being better at missing him, but not quite yet.
Before she left home she had a number of things to take care of. The last was retrieving the boxes of stuff she had shoved into the basement in her apoplexy of cleaning the day before.
She sensed that her dad and Perry were happy with some of her alterations, but she didn’t want to go overboard. If Perry needed to keep his Lord of the Rings calendar from 2003, then so be it.
She walked down to the basement and hauled up the boxes one at a time. Going down for the last load, she finally thought to turn on the light to make sure she wasn’t forgetting anything.
Her eyes caught on a shelf holding a series of neatly placed boxes. She didn’t remember them—neither the shelves nor the boxes. How long had it been since she’d looked around down here? She walked over to study them more carefully.
Each of the boxes was labeled with a name and a year or, in a few cases, a span of years. The writing was all capitals, but she recognized it as her father’s.
In a state of breathlessness she took down Bridget from 1993. Was it kindergarten? Maybe first grade? Inside, carefully stacked and piled, were artworks, clay pieces, efforts at writing and tracing. There were pictures, some with notes on the back in her mother’s handwriting. There was a card from Greta. A necklace she remembered beading. There was a photograph of her with Tibby and Lena and Carmen. There was a crayon drawing she’d made of Perry with a tiny head, holding a newt.
She took down the box that said Marly, 1985–1990. There were pictures from her parents’ wedding, her mother’s journals, pictures her mother had drawn, the beginning of a baby book for her twins. Bridget never knew that her mother had drawn pictures.
She took down another of her boxes, Bridget 1994. Here were many more photographs of the Septembers. Here was the first of her soccer trophies. Bridget picked up a tiny cardboard box, the kind you got when you bought a piece of jewelry. She shook it, and she knew without looking what it was. She remembered the celebration of little teeth tucked under her pillow, expecting money and usually getting it.
She put it back without opening it. She put the boxes back in place on their shelves and sat down on the dusty floor.
She thought about the vast amount of work her father had put into saving these things, the care with which he had preserved every single object. Out of sight, but still here. Her mother was here too. They didn’t live big, maybe. But they lived.
She put her arms around her knees and hugged herself and let herself cry.
Lena extended her time in Bethesda by a few days because she sensed she might be needed there. Effie was leaving for a ten-day trip to Europe the following week, but until then, Lena sensed her sister might need some girly distraction. Lena was mentally preparing herself for round-the-clock manicures, pedicures, and home facials. One nice thing about Effie: There were few reversals in her life that a manicure couldn’t fix.
Lena had the idea of calling Leo and telling him where she was and why. But when she actually got him on the phone she decided not to. He was happy to hear f
rom her and eager to tell her about a new painting he had started, but he didn’t need to know where she was or when she’d see him. That wasn’t the way it would go between them. She knew that and she wasn’t sorry.
Was she? Honesty required that she ask that question of herself a second time. No, she wasn’t, she decided, trailing her hand over her bedspread, still looking at the phone. She would be happy to see him again. She admired him, she was attracted to him. But she wasn’t sorry to let it go. The interlude in Leo’s bed had been exciting and it had been clarifying for her, but even as it had unfolded she had sensed it was more like the end of the story than the beginning.
Lena went by Tibby’s and Bee’s houses that afternoon to say good-bye. Not long after she returned, she heard a knock at the door and Brian’s voice downstairs and understood that he and Effie had gone for a walk.
She closed her door and sat on her bed and waited patiently for the noise to start. Within forty-five minutes it did. First Lena heard the front door slam. Then she heard the pounding on the steps and the slam of Effie’s bedroom door.
She knew better than to relax. Minutes after Effie’s door slammed the first time it slammed again, and then Lena’s own door flew open.
“I cannot believe her!” Effie’s face was red and her eyes were smeared with black. It had to have been an ambush of sorts, because Effie had an almost unerring instinct for when to wear waterproof mascara.
Lena deliberated with herself as to how much knowledge to convey. She decided to be quiet. When it came to Effie, quiet usually worked best.
“Why did she tell me it was over? I gave her the chance! Why did she lie?” Effie’s gestures were big with indignation.
Lena tucked her hands under her.
“Brian is an idiot! Why would he go back to her? After what she did? She doesn’t care about him! She doesn’t love him!”
Lena opened her mouth even though she shouldn’t have. “How do you know that, Ef?” Instantly she regretted the mistake.
“What?” Effie came in closer, bearing down. “Are you saying she does?”
Lena kept her voice low and uncommitted. “Don’t you think it’s possible?”
“No! It’s not! Do you know how she treated him?” She shook her hands emphatically. “You don’t treat someone like that if you love them!”
Lena felt her own face warming. Oh, but sometimes you do.
“Lena? Lena!”
Lena looked up.
“You are siding with her, aren’t you? I knew this would happen! You are taking Tibby’s side, even after what she did!”
“Effie, no—”
“You are! Just admit it. Tibby lied to me, she treated Brian like crap, she betrayed me even after I went to New York to get her permission, and you are still siding with her against your own sister!”
“No, Effie—” This had taken a wrong turn. The path to manicures had been forsaken.
“It’s true!” Effie was really crying now, and Lena’s heart felt frail. These were not histrionic tears, but sad, uncontrollable ones.
And Lena knew they had gotten to a deeper, harder thing, even harder than losing the boy you thought you loved.
“You always do that! You do! You always have. You know that?”
Lena felt the dull ache in her throat. “Effie—”
“You do. You do, Lena. I am your only sister, but you always choose them over me.”
“Effie.” Lena stood up to try to comfort her or touch her or even block her way, but it was too late. Sobbing, Effie fled.
Lena wished for a hearty door slam, but that wasn’t what she got. Her door swayed quietly so that she could still hear her sister’s tears. She minded them more than all the shouts and slams put together.
She tried to go to Effie’s room a while later, but Effie wouldn’t answer. The next day, Effie wouldn’t open her door at all.
Lena left for a few hours in the late afternoon, and when she came back, Effie’s door was still shut. She still would not answer.
Lena spent most of the evening hours quietly in her room, wondering whether she’d done the wrong thing. Had she really chosen Tibby over Effie? It didn’t feel that simple. In a way that was almost more troubling, she felt like she’d chosen one way of being over another. She’d chosen Tibby’s agony over Effie’s joy. In a weird way, she’d chosen herself.
Before Bridget left home she went to the pet store and came home with a rabbit and a hutch.
“It’s for you,” she said to Perry, presenting it to him in the backyard.
He was startled and he didn’t want to accept it at first, but as he held the little creature she could see his mind changing.
He began to get excited as they set up the hutch under the dogwood tree. He held the rabbit in his arms and fed it a stalk of wilted celery.
“I’ll have to get a water bottle,” he noted to himself and to her. “And carrots and lettuce and stuff.”
“You can borrow my bike if you want,” she said.
He nodded. How nice he looked with a little sun on his face.
She would come back home again in the next few weeks. She promised herself she would. And in the meantime Perry would have the company of this warm-blooded and furry thing. A reason to get out of his room and out of the house. Something to take care of, something that needed him. Something to nuzzle his neck and crawl down his shirt, to get him back into the practice of loving another soul.
She suspected that what he really needed were antidepressants, but until she could rally herself for that effort, a baby bunny rabbit was the next best thing.
He named it Barnacle. She had no idea why.
“She’s got to come out eventually, right?” Lena said to her mother the next morning in the kitchen.
“Effie?” her mom said.
“Yeah. Have you seen her?”
“She left early this morning. Daddy drove her to the airport.”
“What? You are kidding me! Where did she go?”
“She went to Greece.”
Lena was stunned. “She went already?”
“She called Grandma last night and asked if she could stay in Oia for the week. Grandma was delighted. She wants Effie to help her paint her house. Your father changed the ticket on the computer.”
How had she missed all of this? “She left this morning?”
“Yes.”
Lena scratched violently at a bug bite on her wrist. She needed to think for a minute. “Did she seem okay?”
Her mother gave the first sign of knowledge. “Depends on what you mean by okay.”
“Will she talk to me if I call her?”
“Maybe you should give her a few days.”
Lena felt stricken. “That bad, huh?” She kept her eyes down.
“Lena, honey, she feels betrayed,” her mother said, perching on a tall kitchen stool. Ari rarely gave in to a true sit.
Lena put her arms on the counter. “Brian didn’t love her, Mom. She was going to have to notice that eventually.”
“I think you’re right. And I think Brian basically told her that as gently as he could,” Ari said.
“You do?”
“I do. But I don’t think it’s Brian’s love she’s missing.”
Lena had thought she’d be needed here at home. Now she wasn’t. She couldn’t reach Effie on the phone to make anything right, and she was too guilty and fitful to hang around sidestepping conversations with her father about her plans for the future.
So she came up with an even crazier idea.
She fooled with the phone in her father’s office until she managed to get Tibby and Bee on at the same time. Within two minutes she’d presented her crazy idea and they’d both agreed to it.
Once she secured the borrowing of her mother’s car, she went upstairs to pack her bag.
“Hey, Mom?”
“Yeah?”
“Have you seen the Traveling Pants?” Lena went down to the kitchen to ask the question rather than just shout it.
> “No. I don’t think so.”
“I thought they were in my room.” She began to feel a touch of nervousness. “Was anybody in here cleaning or doing laundry yesterday?” She trusted her mother and the regular housekeeper, Joan, not to do anything insane, but once in a while there was a substitute.
“No. Joan was here on Friday. That’s it. Are you sure you had them? That you brought them from school?”
“Yeah. I’ll go back and look more,” Lena said, darting back up the steps to her room. She checked everywhere, even hopeless places like her bottom drawers and a trunk she hadn’t opened in months.
She knew she had brought them home for Tibby to wear to the party. Tibby had worn them and then given them back. She had given them back, right?
Lena thought she had, but there was enough doubt to provide modest comfort for the moment.
Opening night arrived, and Carmen’s stomach somehow climbed into her neck. She might have thrown it up, but luckily, it stayed attached.
There were photographers, critics, hundreds of people. Andrew was trying to protect her. She could feel that. He held her hand and walked her around backstage.
Jonathan kissed her and pulled her hair.
“Lovely.” Ian nodded at her decked out in her flowers. He kissed her head and she thought she might cry.
Could she do this? Did she know how? She tried to swallow her stomach back down to her stomach again.
From where she sat backstage, she listened to the first act and let the trance begin. She heard the words more clearly than she ever had before. She heard more in each word, more in each combination of words, and exponentially more in each line of words.
These were real performers. Her heart swelled to know them. They had given so much in five weeks of rehearsals, she would have thought they’d given everything. But now she knew that they had saved something for this.
During intermission she peeked out at the theater, watching it refill. When it was almost full and the lights blinked on and off, she saw three people file in through the center door and her breath caught. Time lapsed as they walked down the center aisle: three teenage girls all in a row.