Sisterhood Everlasting

  He didn’t touch her in any romantic way. The set of his body—even crimped with hers on this couch—was not suggestive or in any way demanding.

  And if it had been otherwise?

  Then it would have been all wrong. It might have momentarily flattered or reassured her, but at such a moment in her life, it would have felt desperate and sad. She wouldn’t have been lifted up by an expression of his attraction right now, she would have been diminished by it. Over time, she would have resented him for it.

  So why be disappointed by wishes you would not want to come true? That was the road to unhappiness if ever there was one, and she had traveled it extensively.

  Whether or not he had ever wanted to marry her, he seemed to know the right way to care for her at a deeply fragile time, and that in itself was something like love. The love of a near-relative, the love of an old friend. Whatever it was, she was too depleted not to take what was offered.

  She’d been certain she wouldn’t and couldn’t fall asleep in such a configuration of limbs—his limbs, of all limbs!—and yet she opened her eyes and there was light poking in at the bottom of the shutters. She had slept, really slept, for the first time in days.

  Kostos was opposite her, still sleeping peacefully with his arms crossed around her ankles. She wanted to imprint this on her brain, to scratch it in deep so she could have it for later, when she could feel things again.

  God often gives nuts to toothless people.

  —Matt Groening

  The following morning Bridget’s hand was still pounding and swollen. She wondered if she’d just bruised it or broken a bone. She ripped one of her old T-shirts into strips and tied it up. It didn’t help anything, but it made her feel a little more protected.

  She ducked into Pancho Villa for a late-morning burrito and was happy to see the familiar ladies in their hairnets smiling at her. She wished she could speak Spanish. She wished she were like Eric, who dreamed in Spanish. In fact, she wished she thought and dreamed in a language she couldn’t understand.

  She wasn’t hungry, exactly, but she needed to eat. She ate two-thirds of the burrito and drank a Mexican lime soda before she felt sick and dumped the rest in the garbage. She hated to waste it. She would have eaten it if she could have.

  As she unlocked her bike, she had an idea. She pedaled up Guerrero until she came to a gas station. She spent a portion of the little cash she had on a foldout map of California. She was getting good at riding with her pack on her back. So she set out eastward into the Great Central Valley with a hat on her head and her aching hand and three bottles of water.

  Davis was seventy miles away, a lot of it hot and relentlessly dry. Even on the smaller roads there were hours without shade. You want sun? the sky seemed to be taunting her. I’ll give you sun.

  It was nearly five o’clock when she arrived at the little gray bungalow. She locked her bike up on the porch. She knocked and peered in the windows, but nobody was home. She could probably find her way into the house if she wanted to, but she decided against it. She didn’t want to be overwhelming right away.

  She sat in a wicker chair on the front porch, grateful for the shade. She must have fallen asleep. She opened her eyes and saw Perry coming up the walk. She stood and hugged him. She pulled back and could see he was genuinely happy to see her and also awkward about what to say.

  “I heard about—I’m so sorry about Tibby—”

  “I know,” she said quickly. She didn’t know how to finish his sentence either.

  “Are you all right?”

  “Yeah,” she said, too quickly to convince anybody. She pulled her pack up onto her shoulder. “Do you mind if I stay with you and Violet for a couple of days?”

  “No. You can stay as long as you want. Where’s Eric?”

  “Home.” She said it in a way that didn’t welcome more questions.

  “What did you do to your hand?”

  She hesitated and then shrugged. “I hit it on something. It’s fine.”

  Her brother was relatively easy to put off, and she was grateful for it. He turned to put his key in the door. His hair was blond again from living in California. He was much stronger and sturdier than he had been when he’d lived back East. Even though she’d seen him every few months since he’d moved here, she still somehow expected to see the old Perry every time.

  “How’s school?” she asked.

  “Good. Almost done. I start my residency in July.”

  “Amazing. Do I get to call you Doctor?”

  Perry laughed. “All you want. But I can’t offer you much medical care.”

  “Unless I were a bird,” she said, following him into the cool house.

  “Yes. Or a dog or a horse or a swordfish.”

  “A swordfish?”

  “Okay, maybe not a swordfish. A dolphin. Then I could help you.”

  “Are you still doing the oily bird network?”

  He smiled. “Oiled wildlife. Yes.”

  Perry spent what seemed to her a million hours a week in school and doing schoolwork, and in his nonexistent free time he was part of a rescue network for injured animals. She knew that was the most important thing to him.

  By the time Perry had made lemonade and changed his shoes, Violet had come home. She was surprised to see Bridget, but not unwelcoming. She gave Bridget a hug. “I’m sorry for what you’ve been through,” she said.

  Violet had a pointy chin, black eyes, freckles, and serious-girl glasses. She worked in a lab at the vet school, doing research on infectious animal diseases. She and Perry had gotten married on the beach at Monterey among the elephant seals two years before. Violet was thirty-three. She told Bridget they were going to try to get pregnant as soon as Perry got his DVM.

  Perry made pasta with pesto sauce and Violet made a salad. Bridget ate voraciously and then fell asleep on the couch without even brushing her teeth. She woke a while later, to the sound of them cleaning the kitchen. They must have thought she was asleep.

  “Do you think she’s okay?” she heard Violet asking in a quiet voice.

  Perry’s response was muffled.

  “Do you think Eric knows she’s here? Should we call him?”

  Bridget couldn’t fall back asleep, but she couldn’t get up off the couch either. What a reversal had taken place over the last decade. It used to be she who was the functional one. She had the best friends, went to a good college, played on a team, while Perry stayed in his room, so lost in his obscure role-playing games on the computer that he barely ate. It was Perry people whispered about, Perry they worried about. Not her.

  Now Perry had a wife, a house, friends, a purpose, a graduate degree coming in May. And what did she have? The college didn’t matter, the team didn’t even really matter. But the friends. The friendship. Without it, she didn’t know who she was. Without them, without the idea of them, she had nothing.

  Kostos made Lena coffee in the morning and hustled her to the ferry dock. She was relieved to be taking a boat before the plane. She felt tremulous at the thought of leaving the surface of the earth just yet. She didn’t trust anything to stay where she wanted it.

  He carried her heavy bag and Tibby’s duffel. He pulled her by the hand when it looked like she was in danger of missing her boat. He promised to close up the house, to make sure everything was left in order. He said it with such a sense of purpose she half expected he’d spackle the walls and refinish the floors before he considered himself done.

  It was a rushed goodbye that would have to last for a long while, she guessed. Maybe forever. She hugged him zealously, her body able to express more than her brain. She pressed her face into his chest. He must have had the same feeling. He hugged her in return like she was someone he might not see again.

  He kissed her hard, not on the face but above her ear. She wondered about the nature of this kiss.

  They let go of each other. How to leave it? I’ll call you? Don’t forget to write? See you next time! None of that seemed to fit.

>   Because why say these words? When was next time going to be? Bapi was gone. Valia was gone. The house would soon be gone. They were two people who had never come together of their own volition. They’d come their weary way always by circumstances, usually bad ones. These few days had been like a cozy foxhole dug out of time—a big, prosperous life in his case, a tragedy in hers. It was time to go back to those things.

  “Thank you,” she said tearfully. Those were the parting words that fit.

  She lugged the two bags the last few yards onto the boat. She weaved through the other passengers and parked at the first empty stretch of rail. Quickly she turned again to catch his face. She felt a sense of desperation as the engines began to churn and pull her away from the dock. She wanted to keep him in her mind as he was now. She didn’t want to lose him.

  What if this was her life? What if his was the face she was coming home to rather than leaving? What if she had arrived here on Independence Day all those summers ago? She pictured Kostos standing just where he was now, but the engines churning in the opposite direction, bringing her to him maybe forever. Was that the brave life through which she would have earned the right to keep Tibby?

  He didn’t move from his spot on the dock. The crowd drifted and dissipated and he stood there as the distance between them grew. And yet the wind was so oddly calm and the water so glassy she could imagine it was he who was drawing away and she who was staying still.

  She hadn’t chosen the brave life. She’d chosen the small, fearful one. She hadn’t gotten to keep Tibby.

  Finally she stopped waving, dropped her hands to her sides, and just looked at him as he got small. It gave her the feeling that her memory was already closing in on him. The distance between them stretched and finally broke. She never got to keep anything.

  She turned to face the horizon, the blurring line of water and sky, the great vacuum, the place where things went when they left her.

  But this morning it wasn’t empty. This time she could barely open her eyes enough to see it because there was something large and fierce right in the middle of it and it was the sun.

  She was not one

  who expected to get away

  with much in life.

  —Larry McMurtry

  Carmen lay on her mother’s bed after the burial and let her mother rub her back, the way she’d done through all the many tragedies of Carmen’s childhood. Carmen found herself longing for those tragedies, when a back rub and a long cry on her mother’s pillow would do the trick, instead of this one, when nothing seemed to help.

  At least the burial was over and she didn’t have to dread it anymore. It had been small and grim, just a handful of shattered people standing in the gray November air: Tibby’s family, Carmen and her mother, Lena and her parents. Vaguely Carmen wondered about Brian, what he knew and where he was. She wondered many things, but she didn’t pursue the information. She was terrified by what little she knew; she didn’t want to find out any more. That was wrong of her, maybe, but she didn’t have the energy to make it right.

  They muttered prayers standing on hard grass, but nobody tried to do any real eulogizing. Only the minister spoke of Tibby, and he kept calling her Tabitha. They’d plan a proper memorial service for the spring, Alice said. It was too shocking, too soon, too rushed, too confusing to attempt more than burying the body that was supposedly Tibby that came off an airplane. In the spring, Alice said, they’d know what to do. Alice had given them relentless permission not to come, but only Bridget had taken it. “I’ll come in the spring,” Bridget had said woodenly, and Carmen had known it would hurt Bee worse not to be there, but she hadn’t been able to bridge the gap to tell her so.

  Carmen had thought that when the burial was over there would be some relief, but there wasn’t. Before, she had been able to aim the terrible feelings at the burial, so where was she supposed to aim them now? What was she supposed to do? She couldn’t haul this misery around through her normal life. She couldn’t fit it through the door of her loft. But what other life did she have?

  She could stay here, curled up in the dark on her mother’s bed.

  But she couldn’t. The skin of her back had begun to feel irritated under her mother’s hand. Her whole body felt uncomfortable. The pressure in Carmen’s chest forced her to sit up.

  Christina withdrew her hand and she looked at Carmen sorrowfully. She knew she wasn’t helping. Her face was full of compassion, but Carmen could see that her mother was spooked and uncertain too.

  Not even you can reach me here, Carmen thought.

  Perry and Violet were too quiet. They talked quietly. They ate quietly. When they played music it was quiet.

  Bridget was loud. She stomped around loudly, wanting to drown out her loud thoughts, but it didn’t work. By the second week she couldn’t take it anymore. She left them a note and set off on her bike in the dark toward Sacramento.

  She saw the neon lights of a pool bar on the outskirts of the city and pulled her bike into the parking lot. She locked her bike, heaved her pack onto her shoulder, and walked in. Now, this was loud.

  She pulled her hair from its elastic and shook it out before she went up to the bar. She smiled at the fifty-some-year-old bartender and lifted her pack. “Do you think you could keep this back there for me?” she asked him sweetly. She smiled, and whatever reservation he had seemed to dissipate.

  “Just this once,” he said, and swung it under the bar. “What can I get you, sweetheart?”

  “I’ll take a Bud,” she said. She didn’t drink very often, and when she did, she wasn’t prissy about it. She thought of Carmen and her white wine spritzers.

  It was far from her last drink of the evening, but it was the last one she paid for. The guy who sent over the next two beers looked like he was barely out of high school. When he came over to ask her to dance he had an insistent look on his face and she didn’t like it. “No thanks,” she said with no coyness whatsoever.

  He looked more irritated than hurt. “Come on, girl. I bought you two beers.”

  “And I thanked you for the beers. You didn’t buy me.”

  She left him at the bar and went over to the area with the pool tables. It was crowded and the music was loud.

  A waitress materialized with a tray and a bottle of beer on it. “This is from the gentleman over by the jukebox,” she said, giving Bridget a little wink.

  Bridget looked in the direction she pointed. The guy tipped his hat to her. He had tanned skin, straight dark hair down to his shoulders, and a worn cowboy hat. He wore a plaid shirt rolled up at the sleeves, revealing tattoos on both forearms. She walked over to him. “Hey, thanks.”

  “With pleasure.” He studied her with obvious interest. “Can I talk you into a game of pool, beautiful?”

  He was entirely relaxed and confident in the asking. He wasn’t old, probably in his midthirties, but his skin was weathered in a way that made her think he probably worked at a local farm or ranch. Where the collar of his shirt was unbuttoned, she could see another tattoo winding up from his chest. She wondered what it was a picture of.

  “Sure thing.”

  By the speed with which a table cleared when he made his intentions known, Bridget guessed he was a regular here and a serious player.

  He saw Bridget pausing over the array of cues. “Is this a game or a lesson?”

  Bridget feigned innocence. “Do you need me to show you how to play?”

  He laughed, and it was a great big laugh. It was the first thing Bridget had enjoyed in many days.

  She stuck out her hand. “My name is Bridget,” she said.

  He shook it, mildly surprised by her sudden formality. “Travis,” he said.

  “Travis,” she repeated. “I like to know the name of my opponent before I beat him.”

  Travis bought Bridget two more beers while she beat him three games in a row. She was getting giddy. Giddy from drinking, giddy from winning, giddy from the crowd that had gathered around the table, giddy at the
way Travis looked at her.

  She was so giddy she lost the fourth game. She laughed as he got the whole bar involved in his victory lap.

  He was obviously a local guy and well loved. He was as good a player as she was, if not better. But she’d taken advantage of his initial surprise and disorientation to win the first games. She was naturally gifted, and she’d played a shameful number of hours while getting Cs at Brown and in the first aimless years after she’d graduated.

  “What do you say we team up?” he suggested. “We’ll hold this table all night.”

  Their first opponents were two serious older Mexicans, and they gave them a long fight. When Bridget nailed the final shot, the entire population of the bar erupted. Travis picked her up off her feet and kissed her on the lips.

  He might have expected her to pull away first, but she didn’t. The kiss lengthened and deepened as the cheering of the spectators faded. Bridget felt the blood pounding in her head, rushing down into her abdomen. She felt the beer sloshing around behind her eyes and she could barely remember what had broken her heart two and a half weeks ago. She could almost forget that the burial had taken place and she hadn’t been there.

  They didn’t hold the table all night. They were far more interested in each other than pool after that. They couldn’t keep their hands off each other. She clutched another beer as Travis led her outside. If she kept drinking and he kept kissing her, she could keep the sadness away longer.

  He took her around to the side of the bar, where it was dark and quiet. He took off his hat and dropped it on the grass. He took her in his arms and pushed her against the wall. He kissed her like she hadn’t been kissed in a long time and she was breathless. The feeling was so strong she could lose herself in it.

  She felt his hands on her back, then under her shirt. His hands came around the front. He pulled open her bra and then her shirt and she startled. It had been a long time since she’d had unfamiliar hands on her skin.