For the first time Alice looked up at her. “Not too bad. Pretty good,” she said.
“It’s supposed to be a great school,” Lena said. “And hard. Harder than Bethesda, I’m sure.”
“Yes. It is.” There was a glimmer of pride in Alice’s face as she stood and drifted toward the table where Lena sat. “He’s working a lot harder than he’s worked before and getting Bs. He got an A in physics. He was proud of that.”
Lena shook her head ruefully. “I remember physics. I didn’t get an A.”
Alice rested her hip against the table tentatively. “It’s a different ball game at this school. Nicky pulled two all-nighters before his American history exam.”
“Wow,” Lena said.
Alice laughed and shook her head. “Not like you girls, sunbathing on our roof all afternoon before your history exams …” Alice stopped herself. Her face got complicated and her eyes began to fill. She looked down at her hand and began to twist her ring around.
Lena heard the gnashing gears of the dread machine starting up again and she wished she could silence them. But this time, for once, it wasn’t her gears making all the noise. The volume of Alice’s dread drowned Lena’s out. It made Lena more empathetic, a little bolder.
We’ll just have to feel our way through this, she thought.
Perry didn’t have the money to lend her. Bridget knew because she called and asked him.
“I wish I could,” he told her. “We’ve got credit card debt and we can barely scrape the rent together this month. Ask me again in July when I’m done with school and have a job, and I’ll give you whatever I have.”
She called her father twice and got impatient. He never answered his phone, and she had no good way for him to call her back whenever he got around to it, so she didn’t bother leaving messages.
She sucked it up, took a bus to San Francisco, and marched into Eric’s office. She’d worn clean clothes for the occasion. She’d failed at brushing her hair, which was heading precariously toward dreadlocks, but at least she had tied it back neatly. When she’d hugged Sheila and made her goodbyes after nearly three weeks at the Sea Star Inn, Sheila had held her at arm’s length and given her an approving once-over. “My, you clean up nice.”
Eric was surprised to see her, so surprised that his face registered joy and relief before anything else. He immediately wrapped her in his arms. “I’m so glad to see you,” he said. “I’m so glad you’re all right.”
When they sat down together, there were tears in their eyes, but no recriminations. “I’ve been a wreck about you.”
“I’m sorry,” she said. She was moved by his love for her, even after what she’d done. She was aching over the things she wasn’t telling him. “I’m sorry I just left like that. I’m sorry I haven’t called. I’m sorry for why I’m here.”
He took her hand and studied her fingers one at a time. He had a knowing look, but not a damning one. He was sorry for her. He knew her history. He knew what this had done to her. “Why are you here?”
“I’m not staying. I came because I need to borrow money.”
He nodded. She expected him to ask why and what for, but he held back. She almost wished he would ask and demand and blame, because then maybe she could feel angry at him instead of this terrible missing.
“How much?”
She hadn’t even thought this far. “I guess …” She calculated. How much did it cost to get to Australia? She could buy a one-way ticket if it came to that and figure out the rest later. “A thousand? Eight hundred might be all right.”
“Okay.” His face was not only handsome, but a part of her. He had sweat circles under his arms and a splotch of ink on his fingers. “Will you walk with me to the bank?”
“Of course.”
He put his arm around her shoulders as they walked, and they fell into a comfortable step together. It felt sad and good to be with him.
She waited in the bank’s lobby while he went to a window and spoke with a teller. He came back to her and handed her an envelope.
She looked down so he wouldn’t see the emotion in her face. “Thanks,” she said. “I don’t deserve it.”
“Are you going right away?”
She stared at his slightly wrinkled pants, his scuffed office shoes. She was tempted to stay. They could walk to Chinatown and get dim sum together. They could slip into the bathroom and make love.
With a pang, Bridget thought of Tabitha. She put a hand to her abdomen. She could tell him. She could tell him the whole thing. Could she do that? She tried to think of one or two starting words, and she felt her vision closing in as though she might faint. She felt the agonizing restlessness in her joints and a tingling like an attack of red ants on the bottoms of her feet.
She couldn’t. “Yes, I am leaving right away,” she said. She leaned in and kissed him on the lips. There was obvious passion in it, even after all this. If she stayed near him too much longer, she wouldn’t be able to go, and she knew she couldn’t stay.
She walked away down Pine Street, toward Powell. Her chest ached. She meant not to look back, but she couldn’t help it. She turned and he was standing there, watching her go. He didn’t wave or smile. He looked sad. When she turned a second time he was gone.
She didn’t open the envelope until she’d gotten to the bus station and needed to pay for her ticket. He hadn’t given her the thousand dollars she’d asked for—he’d given her ten thousand.
Lena’s parents didn’t torture her with questions or advice, as she had dreaded. They took her out for dinner to the Lebanese Taverna, ordered seven plates of food and a bottle of wine, and talked about the troubling state of Greece’s economy.
“It’s not going to be easy, selling a house in this market,” her father said.
Lena allowed her mind to take a slow walk up the hill to her grandparents’ house. She had to see how much it hurt before she went inside.
Lena cleared her throat. “The tourist places will be okay. If any place will survive this, it’s Santorini.”
Ari nodded. “That’s what I said too.”
“I’ve got to go over,” her father said resignedly. He looked exhausted at having uttered the sentence. “We can’t just let the place sit there moldering for another year.”
Lena thought of Kostos sitting on the ground, surrounded by tools and bits of hardware, taking apart the hinges of the back door. There was pleasure in the image to balance out the pain. She nodded.
“He’s canceled the trip twice already,” Ari said.
“I had a case go to trial.”
Lena nodded sympathetically. But she knew it wasn’t the case going to trial that gave her father the haggard look. She imagined how it would be for him, confronting his parents’ world, their clothes, their smells, and confronting the guilt for having left them so completely and so long ago, always vowing that there would be a time when the office got calm and he would go for a good long visit, maybe even a sabbatical, but never doing it.
Her dad wouldn’t talk about any of that. He’d talk about the case that went to trial or nothing at all. Was it too late not to be like him?
Lena thought of the two sealed letters stuck between the pages of her sketchbook. With an accelerating heartbeat she thought of her project.
“If you want, I could go,” she said.
Her father turned to her as though she’d disappeared and resurfaced in her chair with a new face on. “What do you mean?”
“I could go and take care of selling the house.”
“By yourself?”
He said it as though she were still twelve.
“Of course.”
A look of eagerness and relief was mixing into his cramped features. “Do you think you can?”
“I do. I know the house. I know the island reasonably well. I don’t think you need to be a native or a lawyer to figure out how to sell a house.”
“You do need to speak Greek,” her mother pointed out.
Her father rai
sed his hand. “Not necessarily. Everybody is speaking English there these days.”
“You wouldn’t want to get cheated or manipulated. It’s helpful to be able to read all the paperwork,” her mother cautioned.
Her father had now seized on this and he wasn’t going to let it go. Lena didn’t even get the chance to mention that she did, in fact, speak pretty good Greek these days. He was suddenly so flushed with the prospect of not having to go himself, he’d probably have sent Bubbles, the neighbors’ cat, over to do it.
“Lena can fax the paperwork or send it electronically. I can look over everything. Anyway, I’m not expecting to get top dollar for the place.”
He probably would have authorized Bubbles to sell the house for any offer over five euros and a willingness to take it furnished.
Her mother was considerably less enthusiastic. “Lena, are you sure it’s a place you want to go back to right away?” she asked with honest concern.
Her father opened his mouth to respond too, and Ari shut him up with a look.
“I know,” Lena said quickly. “I was considering that also.”
Ari put her hand on Lena’s. “Sweetheart, it’s a generous offer. It really is. But why don’t you take a little time to think it over and make sure it feels right.” She cast another stern glance at her husband, who looked like he was going to explode.
Lena nodded.
“Because selling the house could take a while, you know,” her mom added.
“Not so long,” her dad spat out.
“It’s a big job.”
“Not necessarily so big.”
“And expensive to get there, of course.”
“I’ll pay for the plane ticket,” said her father.
Lena was tempted to laugh. “I’ve actually been thinking about it for a while. This isn’t the first time it’s occurred to me.” She sat back in her chair, oddly relaxed. “It’s a place with a lot of painful memories, no question about that. But I feel like I need to do something different than what I’ve been doing. It’s not good for me to be in Providence right now.” She was surprised at her own openness and hoped she could leave it where she wanted to.
Her parents looked surprised too. Instead of jumping in with queries they waited for her to say more, so she did. “I can’t keep avoiding it. I need to do something, and the idea of this feels all right.”
Ari nodded. She looked as though she had fifty questions and a hundred comments, but she didn’t say any of them, and Lena was grateful that she held back.
Lena thought of herself as Alice, turning the kitchen inside out so as not to have to engage, and her mother just wishing she would relax and sit down.
Her father clapped his hands together. “I think it sounds like a great idea,” he said.
I had seen birth and death,
But had thought they were different.
—T. S. Eliot
There was a list 119 items long of the things Carmen was doing. There was a list one item long of the things she wasn’t doing. And it was the second list she thought of more.
She’d put the envelope Tibby had left for her unopened in her underwear drawer. At first it was so she would see it there, and then she tried to cover it so she wouldn’t see it there, but it turned out her underwear was too flimsy to cover anything.
Sometimes she held the envelope, felt its weight, shook it, tried to guess its contents. Sometimes she studied Tibby’s writing and wondered if she’d been in a hurry when she’d addressed it. Sometimes she carried it with her from place to place. The one thing she didn’t do with it was open it.
Until the night she came home from drinks with her publicist, having had a gin and tonic and two glasses of wine on an empty stomach.
She’d eaten so little for three days in a row, she felt fierce and impermeable. She hadn’t said or thought anything substantial in over a week, so she felt shallow. And Jones wasn’t home, so she felt sort of like an adult. She felt like nothing could hurt her. Or she felt like nothing could hurt her for a few more drunken minutes, at least.
She got the envelope out of her underwear drawer and pulled it open. Hit me with your best shot, she thought, so shallow she could only think in Pat Benatar lyrics. She dumped the contents out on the bed.
To her amazement an iPhone dropped out. She looked it over quickly. It was the newest kind, with the biggest memory, the fastest processing, the better camera with video. It was exactly the one she’d been yearning to get but hadn’t, because she wasn’t eligible for an upgrade yet and it cost six hundred bucks. Here she’d been girding to have her heart broken more and instead she got an iPhone.
There was a brief note with it.
Carma,
Brian got this for me and I have no use for it, but I thought you might.
Love,
Tibby
That was it? That was too easy. There was another note folded up in the envelope. She opened it.
Carmen,
I’m keeping this short, my dearest Carma Carmeena, because I can’t make the feelings I have for you fit on this page, I can’t even try, so I’m just going to ask you one thing. Will you come to the address written below on or soon after April 2? Of course you don’t have to if you don’t want to. I know you’re really busy. But it’s less than an hour and a half from NYC. Come if you can, because there’s someone I want you to meet.
Love,
Tibby
Carmen looked in the envelope for something else, but there was nothing. There was nothing to wallow in, nothing to cry over. She was so hyped up and drunk and hungry and prepared to cry she put her head down on the bed and cried anyway.
Bridget had used one of the kiosks at SFO airport to buy the cheapest plane ticket to Sydney, Australia.
She got a flight out early the next morning. She looked down at the last bit of coast as it disappeared into seven thousand miles of water. Checking out her window every few hours of daylight made her wonder whether the earth was really made of anything besides water. She didn’t know what she’d find where she was going. She didn’t even know what she was looking for. It was a long way to go for nothing. But it felt good to be moving hundreds of miles an hour, thousands of feet up in the air.
She remembered again that juncture of uncertainty starting around age twenty-five, after they’d had to give up the apartment on Avenue C, where she’d been happy. That was one place she could remember that she hadn’t wanted to leave.
Tibby had moved in with Brian. Carmen had gotten her fancy agent and started getting real parts. Lena had gotten promoted to a teaching gig that kept her in Providence five days a week. Eric had graduated from NYU law school and gotten a job that kept him busy twelve hours a day. And what had Bridget been doing? Moving from one temporary living situation to another, walking dogs for money, working for a city landscape company in good weather, learning how to dance on Rollerblades from a dazzlingly crazy man in Central Park—nothing that was remunerative or ambitious, anything that kept her outside.
Leaving that apartment had clearly been a moment to grow up, but had she looked at her options and thought them all through? Had she searched for a job or a living situation that would suit her needs? Nope. She’d managed to amble from couch to floor, from apartment to apartment, from one impulse to the next for a year and a half, before she hopped on a plane and moved across the country. When in doubt, keep moving.
She looked down at the ocean. She’d thought going across a continent was something. But going across the planet—now you were talking.
She got a train from the airport to the central station in Sydney and took CityRail two hours south to the town of Bowral, New South Wales. It was a pretty town with cafés, shops, a couple of art galleries. It was less alien than she’d expected it to be, having come across the planet for it. Maybe because she’d studied it so long on the screen of the computer in Sheila’s office at the Sea Star Inn.
The address matched a bungalow not unlike Perry and Violet’s, but the in
verse, other-side-of-the-world version. Where Perry’s was purply gray, this one was butter yellow. Where Perry’s was held close by a matching house on either side, this one was surrounded by its own little meadow. Perry’s tiny backyard was bordered by a line of old dark-leaved eucalyptus trees. Spreading behind this one were young woods, topped by a cloud of green so green it seemed to pulse. The pink late-day light slanted differently here, the shadows spread differently under her feet.
Had Tibby lived here? Vacationed here? For a short time? A long time? Was this the place she’d lived most recently or had she left it long before?
It was opposite world, turned upside down. The toilets flushed the other way, the guy on the train had told her, and you just had to see Bowral’s famous spring tulips—in September. Fall was spring, winter was summer, gray was yellow, night was morning. Maybe death was life. Maybe Tibby was here.
Bridget floated along the concrete walk. She was tired and disoriented. There was nothing that could surprise her, nothing she wouldn’t let happen.
She noticed a car parked in the driveway behind the house. She walked up a few steps to the shaded porch. The screen was closed, but the door was open. She knocked on the wooden trim. She heard a voice talking from the back of the house. She opened the screen door a couple of feet.
“Hello?” she called. She felt yet another old version of the world ending, a new one opening up.
She saw him walking toward her down the hallway. The sun was setting behind the house, making a silhouette of him against the back windows, so she could make out his shape but not his features at first. The gait was both familiar and strange. It took until his face was within a couple of yards for her to know it was him.
“Bee,” he said.
He came out onto the porch, barefoot and also disoriented. She put her arms around him, and he felt thinner and more brittle than she’d expected him to.
“Tibby said you would find us,” Brian said as they came apart. “But I didn’t think you’d come all the way down here.”
Before Bridget could formulate a question, another shape emerged from the back of the house, a very small one. Bridget was mesmerized by it as it came into focus.