She walked up and down the streets in the blazing afternoon sun, trying to retrace her steps. Again the world seemed to have stopped and started anew. First there was the world that had Tibby and the Septembers in it, a fundamental center to her life and a source of deepest comfort. In a single moment that world had ended and a new one had started without them. A sadder world had started with just Eric and a mattress on the floor, but she’d left that behind too.
And so had opened the world in which she was itinerant, filthy, and pregnant but had a bike. And apparently now even that world had come to an end.
She stumbled upon her broken lock lying on the sidewalk a dozen yards from Planned Parenthood. So that was what happened to her bike.
She didn’t even stop for it. She kept walking. She pointed her body west and just kept going. She wondered if she could join one of the lower orders, like shrimp or termites, which were not burdened with consciousness.
By the following afternoon, her pack was too heavy and the sun felt too hot. Even the lower orders felt pain. Bridget stuck out her thumb. With her hair blowing around behind her, even messy as it was, she knew it wouldn’t take long to get a ride. She let the first two cars that slowed go by. The third had a man and a woman in it. She got in the backseat.
“Where are you headed?” the driver asked. He was in his late forties, probably, with a neatly trimmed goatee and a Hawaiian shirt.
“Where are you headed?” she asked.
“Sonoma.”
“That sounds fine.”
The wife turned around. She had frizzy light brown hair and a look of motherly concern. “Where do you live?”
Even with the mind of a termite, Bridget knew not to set off the alarms of kind, concerned people who were giving her a lift. “San Francisco,” she said.
“Do you want us to drop you there?” the woman asked.
“No thanks. I’m on vacation,” Bridget said.
“So are we,” the man said. “I’m Tom and this is my wife, Cheryl.”
“Sunny,” she said. “Nice to meet you. Thanks for the ride.”
Bridget parted ways with Tom and Cheryl at a gas station off Route 80, a bit south of Sonoma. She walked in the direction of the setting sun. By the time it dunked into the ocean, she’d made it all the way to Petaluma. She sat on a bench outside a bank and wondered about Eric’s cousin Anna and her wedding. It was the day after tomorrow, she thought. Or would have been the day after tomorrow. Anna belonged to the old world, along with Bridget’s bike and her empty uterus and her sanity. She wondered if Anna was even getting married anymore.
Bridget bought a slice of pizza on her way out of town and walked westward in the dark. Cars zoomed by and she figured one of them might kill her.
Over the next blur of days she slept in state parks, ate at diners and from vending machines, and slowly made her way as far west as she could, and that was the Pacific Ocean at Point Reyes. Her arms were dark red from sunburn, and her hair was dirty and matted, but she couldn’t feel anything anymore. She’d descended down through shrimp and termites to an even lower order, a thing without a central nervous system. Maybe a germ, an amoeba, blue-green algae.
She’d gotten to the ocean, but she couldn’t stop walking, so she turned south. She spent her days sleeping and walking from Inverness to Dogtown to Bolinas to Stinson Beach. You could go a long way in this direction. You could go all the way down to Mexico. She pictured herself walking through Half Moon Bay, Big Sur, San Luis Obispo, Redondo Beach, Ensenada, all the way out to Cabo at the tip of Baja, and even though she couldn’t feel anything she started to cry. It was an involuntary thing her body did, like the sweat that rolled down her back. She cried for a mile or so, and then she stopped and sat down.
At Stinson Beach she threw her pack on the sand. She realized she did feel something after all, but it wasn’t sad. It was angry. She was pissed. The more she thought about it, the angrier she felt. She was furious at the stupid bed. She was furious at Eric for getting it and thinking she would like it.
She was furious at her uterus. She was in no position to be dealing with anything, not even herself. Didn’t it know that? This captain was letting her ship go down, she didn’t care who was on board.
She was furious at her bike for getting stolen. She was furious at the lock for failing. She was furious at her dad for getting rid of her old bike without even asking her. She was furious at him for getting rid of all their stuff, even her mom’s shoes, when he sold their house and moved into an apartment.
She thought of her mom’s shoes and how they’d been keeping them for so many years. They were a size and a half too small for Bridget, and she probably wouldn’t have worn them anyway, but you couldn’t just throw them away.
The churn of anger got rougher. How could her mom have just left them with all those shoes, not knowing what they were supposed to do with them? Or her clothes? Or her gardenias, every one of which slowly died in a dark room? All the stuff Marly left behind—what did she think was supposed to happen to it? Did she even care? Did she think the world ended when she decided to leave it?
And Bridget was mad at Tibby. She was furious at Tibby. She kicked the sand into a shower that got into her eyes and mouth and hair. “How could you do that?” she screamed at the ocean. “I wouldn’t do that to you!”
She fell onto the sand and lay there without moving. Hours passed and she didn’t bother getting her sleeping bag. She lay on her back looking at the sky.
Hadn’t Tibby loved her at all?
If one synchronized swimmer drowns,
do all the rest
have to drown too?
—Steven Wright
Some people said the first month was the worst. Others said it was really the first three months. Grief was like a newborn, and the first three months were hard as hell, but by six months you’d recognized defeat, shifted your life around, and made room for it.
As Lena walked along the river in Providence, shivering in a wool coat long overdue for retirement, she felt like she was going in the wrong direction. She grieved about as well as she did everything else, backward and badly.
The first month hadn’t been the worst. She’d been horrified, blinking and confused, like she’d been whacked in the back of the head by a shovel, but she hadn’t really believed Tibby was gone. This December morning fell somewhere after the middle of the second month, and by now she believed it. Nature abhorred a vacuum, and in that empty space, the nothing in the middle of her, had come to settle a black, drab something.
Each day that passed took her further from the time when Tibby was alive and made her incrementally more dead. Each day that passed buried deeper Lena’s old ideas about the world.
That morning she’d woken up feeling sorry for Carmen. It was a feeling she kept out, but her early-morning mind was half dreaming and vulnerable, and somehow the sympathy had gotten in. It was a flickering image of Carmen’s damned iPhone that had gotten to Lena. Every time Carmen looked at her phone there was that old picture coming to life of the four of them as toddlers peeking over the back of a sofa, looking like a miniature girl band. Carmen looked at it five hundred times a day. How could she take it?
As Lena cried for Carmen and the picture on her phone, she knew why she tried so hard all the time not to feel sorry for Carmen and Bee. Because it was the same as feeling sorry for herself, and if she allowed that, the surge of it would carry her away.
At this rate she couldn’t imagine what she would be like at six months. She would be a black shriveled ball. Blacker and more shriveled, with hopes buried too deep ever to come out. Her life wouldn’t have shifted to make room for her grief, it would simply have shriveled and surrendered.
These days she walked a lot. Often along the river without really seeing the river. Somewhere she possessed the idea that if she was moving, the saddest images couldn’t settle on her as heavily. It didn’t really work. But being still was intolerable.
Her fingers ached with red col
d as she put her key in the lock. They hurt all the time, but she lost track of them and failed to replace her lost mittens. The lesser pains like the ones in her fingers and toes vied for attention, but like fifth- and sixth-born children in a very large family, they didn’t get much of it. It was the firstborn pain and the most recently born pain you tended to think of.
There were messages on her phone. She was down to two regular check-ins, by her mother and Effie, not Carmen anymore, and their messages had grown more pitying and patronizing, if that was possible. She didn’t want to listen to the messages. She let them pile up.
In her tiny apartment she sat down at her desk, still in her coat. She crossed her arms and looked up at the ceiling. She didn’t like to look at anything. On the walls were the photographs, the ones she hadn’t taken down or hidden away. There were the drawings, all from a different time, reminding her of ways she used to feel but couldn’t anymore. There was nothing she wanted to feel or taste or see or even imagine.
She jiggled the mouse of her big, lumbering desktop computer, watched it wake, and subjected herself to her own version of Carmen’s phone, her daily punishment. Bright on the big screen was one of the few pictures she hadn’t flipped over or put away: the four of them on the day they graduated from high school. There they were with those thick, oily rented gowns, holding or tossing those weird hats. Surrounding them were all their family members, their nearest and dearest. The picture represented her whole life at a moment when it had seemed biggest, most complete, most hopeful. Her arm was around Tibby, clutching her ardently and without reserve, her face so animated and free in its joy she couldn’t even recognize it as her own.
There had been a break, a rupture in the seam of her identity, and it happened sometime after that. She wasn’t the same person she used to be. She looked at the faces in the picture, from Tibby to Bee to Carmen and back to Tibby.
Those were the people who made her something, and without them she was different. She’d held on to them and to that old self tenaciously, though. She clung to it, celebrated it, worshipped it even, instead of constructing a new grown-up life for herself. For years she’d been eating the cold crumbs left over from a great feast, living on them as though they could last her forever.
But what was that great feast? It was the idea of their friendship, their shared strength, their unconditional love for one another, their support, their security, their honesty and the freedom it seemed to promise. It was an idea big enough to sustain her through years of poverty.
Now it was unquestionably gone. And deeper questions gnawed at her. Had it really been such a feast? Had it ever been real? How could this have happened if it had been? How could Tibby have kept so much from them? If the strength and support had been real, how could Tibby have given up? How could they have let her? How could they have let her get so far away from them?
There was a clear and dreaded answer to all these questions: If it had been real, they couldn’t have. She couldn’t have. It hadn’t been real.
Lena hadn’t been eating leftovers from a feast; she hadn’t been eating at all. She’d been starving, and so devoted to her delusions she’d become incapable of feeding herself in the most basic way.
She eyed the letter Tibby had left for her. It stood perched on her desk, day after day. She studied Tibby’s writing, just Lena’s name on the front, and a note to open it after December 15 on the back, but it had no more secrets to tell her. She’d looked at it too often, too long, too fearfully for it to say any more. I could open it now, she told herself, and instantly recoiled at the thought, as she always did. Later was the time she would open it, never now. Tibby wanted her to open it after December 15. She didn’t specify how long after.
The phone rang and jolted her from her thoughts. She stared at it without even considering the idea of sticking out her hand and picking it up. After a few seconds, she poked the button and the message began playing. She hadn’t realized it was Christmas Eve until her robot-voiced message machine told her the date.
“Len, it’s me. I’m on the train right now, because you are not allowed to spend Christmas alone. I’m passing through … I don’t know, New Haven? I think that was the last stop. I said in the last message I’d be at your place by one, but it looks more like one thirty. Call me back and let me know you got this.”
Lena felt as if she were choking on her tongue. Effie was on her way. She was coming here to keep her company for Christmas, and that was about the last thing Lena wanted.
She should have known she couldn’t get away without acknowledging Christmas. Her parents had finally let the matter drop after badgering her endlessly about coming home to Bethesda, but she should have known she hadn’t heard the last of it.
Why hadn’t she listened to her messages? If she had she could have caught Effie while she was still safely in New York, not racing past New Haven. She could have somehow talked her into staying there or doing something else. Now Effie was coming here, and what was Lena supposed to do?
She knew Effie all too well. Effie was going to pester her with questions and confidences and take her out to dinner and make a big fuss about exchanging presents and sleep in her bed with her. Effie wouldn’t leave her alone. She would crawl into Lena’s precious quiet like a tapeworm.
Lena put her face in her hands. Should she call Effie right away? Before she entered the state of Rhode Island? Lena racked her brain for excuses to make Effie turn around and go back home. Leprosy? Bedbugs? No heat or hot water?
No, Effie was on the move. She couldn’t be turned away. Lena suspected that her parents were a big part of the impetus for this visit and probably the ones financing it. If Lena wasn’t careful, Effie would book them a hotel room with massages and manicures all around.
There was only one thing Lena could do. She could be so arduously, painfully boring that Effie would leave the next day. And that, at least, came naturally.
Jones decided, somewhat impulsively, that they should spend Christmas in Fresno, California. Christmas needed to be celebrated, and his parents needed to meet his fiancée before the wedding, so that was what they did.
Which was how Carmen found herself sitting at a dining room table in a modest ranch house in suburban Fresno on Christmas Eve, between the elderly Mr. and Mrs. Jones.
There was an artificial tree in the living room, a fruitcake on the kitchen counter, but as they sat down to dinner, Carmen was surprised by how little ceremony there was. There were no prayers or toasts, they just started eating. They didn’t even remember to turn the TV off.
“I can’t hear what he’s saying,” Mr. Jones said with some irritation after he’d eaten most of his ham.
Carmen wasn’t sure Jones was saying much of anything, but she jumped out of her chair to turn the volume down on the television so they could all hear it in case he did.
“No. The other way,” Mr. Jones directed her, and she realized the person Mr. Jones couldn’t hear was the man on the TV.
“Oh. Okay. Sorry.” Carmen remembered how, as a child, she’d longed to be able to watch TV during dinner and her mother had never let her do it one time, not even when she was sick.
“Delicious,” Carmen said to Mrs. Jones, pointing at the ham.
“Thank you. I use a maple glaze.”
“Right. It’s very good.”
“I can give you the recipe if you’d like.”
“Okay. Yes. I don’t cook much these days, but I’d like to learn.” She wondered if she should have said that. She glanced over at Jones, but he was staring at the TV.
“Do you enjoy cooking?” Carmen asked, and then she felt doubly stupid at the blank look Mrs. Jones gave her. She knew how alien and spoiled she probably sounded, as if cooking were a hobby you chose or didn’t.
“Is that a lemon tree?” Carmen asked, pointing out the window.
“Yes.”
“That’s the great thing about living in California, isn’t it?” Carmen knew she was talking too fast. She suffered the
length of the pause and felt herself grow a pair of antennae in the meantime.
“I suppose it is.”
After a while Carmen shut up and let the TV take over. No wonder Jones had gone into the business.
As Carmen spread the noodle casserole around on her plate she let her mind turn to Bridget. She’d calculated the distance from Fresno to San Francisco on a map online. She imagined she might call, she’d thought about it a lot, but now that she was here she knew she wouldn’t. If she could have thought of the first sentence to say, she might have, but she couldn’t. She couldn’t ask Bee how she was. She couldn’t mention what she was up to. Every casual opening seemed intolerably phony, and the deeper conversation was impossible.
“We can spend tomorrow at the movie theater,” Jones mentioned to her later, after they’d said goodnight to his parents.
On their way upstairs to the bedrooms Carmen noticed there was a picture in the stairwell that must have been of Jones with his older brother. It was the only picture of the deceased brother she had seen so far in the house. The two boys were sitting at a picnic table, with big slices of watermelon on their plates. Jones looked about seven. Carmen paused to look at it, but Jones didn’t wait for her. He kept going up the stairs. She stared at his back and wondered if he or his parents ever talked about his brother anymore. She tried to picture such a conversation at the dinner table, with the TV going.
Carmen had often wondered how it turned out, the Jones style of mourning. Maybe now she knew.
Bridget woke on Stinson Beach sometime after the sun rose. She sat up and looked at the waves. She imagined each one coming at her, like the bar of a swinging trapeze, toward her and away, toward her and away, inviting her to come in and take hold. She could do that. She could walk right in and keep going, swinging from one wave to the next. Tibby had done it. Why not her?