Sisterhood Everlasting

  What was she so scared of? She couldn’t even frame it. She didn’t want to have to talk about what happened. She didn’t want to have to acknowledge the impenetrably dark thing that they three—maybe only they three—knew and could not say. It isn’t just that she drowned.

  Carmen didn’t want to have to digest it any further. She couldn’t.

  The third plan was just to write out their addresses and stick the damned things in the mail, but even that proved too hard. She pictured their reactions when they got them. You are seriously going ahead with this? What would they think of her? They would think she’d had a lobotomy. That would be their kindest reaction.

  What if she didn’t invite them? That would be insane.

  She tried to imagine the feeling of walking down the aisle, seeing their faces in the crowd as she and Jones took their vows, just two more random spectators. If only she could think of them that way. But she couldn’t. She couldn’t imagine them and not imagine their honesty along with them. They knew her better than anyone.

  She tried to imagine the feeling of walking down the aisle without seeing their faces at all, and she simply couldn’t do it.

  Without them, her life was a farce. With them her life was a farce. Carmen sighed and put her head down on the cold table. Her life was a farce.

  Kostos’s return letter came in an extraordinarily brisk three days. It had many parts, all of them funny or sad, none of them having anything to do with his girlfriend/fiancée named Harriet.

  I dreamed of your lost city last night. Isn’t that strange. You gave me a dream. Thanks for it. It was lovely and serene and I saw some people I’ve really been missing, not all of them dead.

  Any scuba diving allowed? Any transubstantiation in one direction or the other? Can you at least just go down and say hi?

  Once again, Lena finished reading it, took out a piece of paper, and wrote him back. As she wrote to him, he didn’t seem to her so much a corporeal presence, a confusingly desirable and disappointing man, but as a kindred consciousness floating out there alongside hers.

  I put on Valia’s housedress today. The one with the pink and purple squares. You probably remember it; she wore it all the time.

  I don’t know why I did it. Maybe because there’s a cold, gloomy rain outside. It’s not a good fit, exactly, but it’s made me strangely happy. I feel like it’s still got some Oia sunshine in it, as well as Valia’s indomitable energy. You know I’ve always been superstitious about clothing. Now I don’t want to take it off. I’m going to wear it to teach figure painting today.

  Under the part in her letter about the housedress, Lena took out her colored pencils and made a drawing of Valia wearing it along with her absurd pink plastic house shoes. She placed Valia in the loosely sketched doorway of her house with one hand on her hip.

  Lena became completely absorbed in the drawing, remembering and articulating every subtlety of Valia’s fierce morning stance and her sleepy, wrinkly expression. There had been a running rivalry between Valia and her best friend, Rena Dounas, Kostos’s grandmother, over which of them woke up earlier and made the first appearance in the morning.

  “I have been up for hours!” Lena wrote as the caption.

  Kostos’s response came quickly.

  I am torn between laughter and awe when I look at—or even think of—the extraordinary picture you made. It is sitting on my desk. You capture the seventy-year relationship between our two grandmothers in one image.

  Why, you must be an artist.

  You’ll see I’ve enclosed my own slight creation, not to be compared to yours. It’s a deck hinge, in case you weren’t able to identify it immediately.

  I was in Oia this past weekend, and made a fish dinner for my grandparents. My grandfather took ambivalent note of my cooking skills and studied my hands with disapprobation. He has a deep respect for men with rough hands, and I could see he thought I was going soft.

  So I went back to the forge for old time’s sake, and perhaps to restore myself a little in his eyes or mine. The forge is hardly used anymore. Bapi has been retired for ten years. It took me senseless hours to get it going, and senseless more to make the small, shabby thing here enclosed. But I took my blackened hands to the office with pride this morning.

  You may not have much urgent use for a deck hinge. And it’s not a very good one, to boot. But short of enclosing an excellent fish dinner, which I didn’t think would travel well, it’s the best thing I could make for now.

  In ten days’ time, Lena realized she was getting and sending a letter almost every day.

  Thank you for the deck hinge. From the moment I get my first fishing vessel, it will be in constant use.

  Honestly, Lena didn’t know what she had been doing with her life before the letters started. They filled her mind and the hours of her day almost completely.

  Kostos, she decided, had more hours in his day than she had, probably at least five or six more. His letters were longer, more interesting, and cleverer than hers, and somehow he also managed to hold an important job and have a life.

  Lena was teaching a total of four classes a week and spending time with no one but Eudoxia for an hour once a week. She’d had no desire to go into the studio and paint since October.

  But more and more she was adding little drawings and designs to her letters. She made a sketch of her grandfather’s famous white-tasseled shoes. She drew a picture of a fishing boat, the kind that docked in Ammoudi, with an inset drawing of a magnified deck hinge. She made a watercolor of an olive tree and let it dry by the window before she folded it up to send.

  There were so many things she wasn’t saying. There were so many memories pertaining to him and them in each of these images, many of them sad. Those were the only feelings, the only subject, that didn’t go into her letters.

  Kostos left them out too. Probably without the same careful intention; he might not have been wallowing in those memories at all. But whatever the reason, he didn’t talk about love, good or bad, and that was a relief. Nor did he ever mention his fiancée/girlfriend. And that was a bigger relief.

  Maybe this was the kind of relationship Lena and Kostos were meant for: abstract, contextual, but not intimate. She thought of Markos, the man her father had played tennis with every Saturday morning for the past twenty years. It was like a million other friendships in that it went along without their ever needing to talk about themselves or, God forbid, their relationship. Her father hadn’t found out Markos had gotten divorced until two years after it happened.

  I think you and I are the last two letter writers on earth, she’d written to Kostos a few days before. Neither of them was suited to phone conversations or jotty emails employing only lowercase letters. But clearly they had found their métier.

  It was a strange joy to get to know him again, to reveal herself honestly again, without all the heat.

  She looked up from the current letter, on which she’d spent two hours making a delicate border of olive leaves. It would be hard to say there was no love in these letters.

  “You have been an unbelievable help to me. To both of us. I don’t even know how to tell you.”

  Almost three weeks had passed, and Brian was sitting at the kitchen table with a bottle of beer after having put Bailey to sleep. It was rare that he and Bridget had a moment to talk. He worked late and she went to bed early. He was working with a team in California and a team in Kolkata, he said, so he kept odd hours. Maybe they were avoiding each other.

  “You don’t need to tell me,” Bridget said, mashing up ripe bananas in a bowl. She’d discovered that Bailey would eat anything that involved bananas, so she’d made up a recipe for whole-wheat banana muffins. Eric would like these, she found herself thinking.

  “I don’t know how to thank you.”

  “You don’t need to thank me.” She mixed the dry ingredients together and got the eggs out of the refrigerator.

  “A package came for you today. Did you see it?”

  ?
??I got it,” Bridget said. She’d ordered a pile of books for Bailey. Bailey loved books about dogs and monsters, so she’d ordered all the ones she’d remembered loving, mostly from reading them at Tibby’s house: Good Dog, Carl; Martha Speaks; Harry the Dirty Dog; The Monster Bed; Marvin and the Monster. She’d also ordered the entire Schoolhouse Rock collection on DVD.

  She poured the batter into the muffin tin, imagining Tibby buying the muffin tin. “How’s the project going?”

  “It’s going. I have maybe another week and a half of work. I have to send it out before the move.”

  He was silent and she knew he wanted her to stay. “Do you want me to stay?” she asked.

  “Can you?”

  “Yes.” She didn’t say she couldn’t imagine leaving.

  She noticed he’d brought home a huge pile of flattened cardboard boxes when he’d made a run to the supermarket that afternoon. “I can help you move if you want.” She was really, really good at moving.

  “Are you sure? You don’t have somewhere else you need to be?”

  Bridget shook her head. She had never been big on posturing or pretending she had anything she didn’t.

  She knew Brian probably wondered what had happened to her life, what had happened with Eric, why she didn’t call anybody. But he didn’t ask. The air was packed with the things they didn’t ask each other.

  “I wish I could repay you.”

  “You don’t need to repay me.” If she could have found a way to say it, she would have been honest and told him she wasn’t doing it for him or Bailey or even Tibby as much as she seemed to be doing it for herself.

  But by the time she’d finished cleaning up from the muffins, she’d thought of a payment she would exact. She would venture a question.

  “Hey, Brian?” she asked.

  “Yes.”

  She wouldn’t risk opening the sky on him as she had at first. What happened to you two? Why were you hiding from everyone who loved you? Why didn’t you tell us about your daughter? She’d ask him something specific and relatively easy.

  “Were you and Tibby married?”

  He looked up at her in some surprise. It was an easy one, but a breach of their tacit agreement nonetheless. His eyes were wary. Was she a fellow fugitive, as he’d come to hope, or really a spy after all? “No,” he said.

  He must have sensed her disappointment as she picked up her water glass and started for the door.

  “We were planning to get married as soon as we got back to the States,” he said. “Tibby wanted to wait to do it with her folks and the three of you.”

  Bridget floated back toward the table.

  “But that didn’t happen, of course.” He seemed to be trying to fend off a lot of things with his “of course.” A gulf was opening, and neither seemed to know how to close it.

  “That’s delayed me taking Bailey back,” he added, more businesslike. “She was born here. Because we weren’t married yet, there were some legal issues about guardianship to nail down before I could take her out of the country.”

  Bridget nodded.

  “She hasn’t met her grandparents yet, you know?” There was an almost undetectable crack in his voice.

  Bridget had wondered about that. She nodded again.

  “Or Nicky or Katherine. Or Carmen and Lena.”

  Bridget thought it was brave of him to say all the names of the missing in a row. “Right,” she said.

  “But now it’s all settled. So that’s the next thing, I guess.” It was a wearying prospect. She could see it in his face.

  “Right,” she said again.

  They were silent after that. She took the muffins out of the oven and left one on a plate for him. She’d wait until a couple of days to ask any more questions by way of payment.

  After more than three weeks of obsessive letter-writing and at least twenty letters on each side, Lena got one from Kostos that ended in an absolutely breathtaking and unexpected way.

  The second-best part of my day is writing a letter to you. The first-best part is receiving one from you. And all day long I think, “But wouldn’t it be lovely just to wake up together in the same bed?”

  For the first time Lena didn’t know what to write. Her head sizzled with a shock that killed every idea. She couldn’t do so much as take out a piece of paper and lay it on her desk. She walked around with a roaring lawn mower in her chest.

  The feelings were too noisy, moving too fast to be understood. So much for Markos the tennis partner. There was excitement and fear and a hundred other strands that she couldn’t untangle.

  She attempted to search the Internet for information about Harriet, knowing only her address and first name, and found nothing. She felt stupid.

  Two days later another letter came from him and it was short. Lena tore it open before she lost courage. Her heart raced with hope. What was the hope?

  It was one page, five words.

  My mistake. Won’t happen again.

  That wasn’t the hope.

  The lawn mower stopped. All the noise and energy drained out of her. She felt tired, all of a sudden, and nothing else. She slept through the late afternoon and night and didn’t wake up until the next morning.

  Still wearing Valia’s robe, she took out a piece of paper and wrote a question.

  Do you love Harriet?

  She stared at it for a long time, and then she threw it in the garbage.

  All morons hate it

  when you call them a moron.

  —J. D. Salinger

  Bridget and Bailey played in the creek and weeded the flower bed alongside the house. They went to the neighbors’ house to visit their cat, Springs. Bailey adored Springs but Springs did not adore Bailey, who was always trying to pick her up by the back legs.

  After lunch Bridget and Bailey lay on the couch together and Bridget read Good Dog, Carl four times in a row, in four different accents.

  Bailey fell asleep on Bridget’s chest, and Bridget closed her eyes in contentment, feeling Bailey’s body rising and falling on her breath.

  Bridget heard a song floating in from Brian’s study. It was a Beatles song she used to love, “I’ll Follow the Sun,” and with Bailey safely asleep, she let herself cry. They were tranquil tears, even philosophical ones, but deeply sad as they slid down from the corners of her eyes into her hair and ears.

  How could you have left her, Tibby?

  It was the question that poked and nicked and needled her a hundred times a day, but only now had she put it into words.

  How could you choose to spend even one day away from her?

  Bridget had thought maybe when faced with the daily tribulations of an actual child she would understand it better, what Tibby and Marly had done. But she didn’t. She understood it less. Every day she spent with Bailey the mystery grew darker.

  How could you have done it?

  And because she was not completely without shame or self-awareness, Bridget thought of the thing in her uterus, not a thing but a person, a soul, and she felt chastened. Just look what she was willing to do. Had been willing to do.

  The tears rolled on and Bailey rose and fell on her chest. Bridget cried for the leavers and the left. For the people, like herself, grimly forsaking what few precious gifts they would ever get. She cried for Bailey, for Tibby, for the resolute clump of cells making headway in her uterus, and for Marly, her poor, sad mother, who’d missed everything.

  Lena half expected that the day known as Wednesday, March 15, would not occur. It would somehow get swallowed by the calendar. The earth would give a little heave in its orbit, and Tuesday would turn into Thursday. People across the globe would miss dentist appointments and soccer matches, but they would reschedule them and life would go on.

  The time to open Tibby’s portentious letter would be gone without ever having arrived, and life in the post-disappointment era would go on unchallenged.

  Lena’s life had come down to a very few things, and on the evening of March 14, even those
were beyond her. She couldn’t take in the words on the pages of her book. She couldn’t hear the words of the songs she played. She couldn’t taste her dinner. She couldn’t fall asleep. She didn’t want to cede what slight hold she had on the world in case the appointed day might just tiptoe past without her notice. But wouldn’t that be easier, in a way?

  At midnight she crept out of bed and woke her computer. Her computer wouldn’t lie to her. If it skipped the day, it would at least let her know.

  At 12:00 a.m. it recorded Wednesday, March 15. Was it being honest with her or just conventional?

  She thought of Julius Caesar on this day. So it has come, she thought. It has come, but it has not gone.

  Should she open it now? She thought of Kostos. What time was it where he was? Later. He hadn’t already read it, had he? No, not that much later. He was probably asleep in his bed. She didn’t want to picture his bed in the likely event he wasn’t alone in it.

  She picked up the letter. She could open it—it was the proper day. But somehow her desperate-in-the-middle-of-the-night-in-her-bare-feet status would seem to follow the letter of Tibby’s law rather than the spirit. The spirit was what she was going for here.

  She brought the letter into her bed and clutched it until morning.

  At six o’clock in the morning she tried to be casual. She ate a bagel casually. She went out to the newspaper stand two blocks away and bought The New York Times. Wednesday, March 15, it said along the top. It was probably midday in London.

  As soon as she got back to her apartment, she walked directly to the letter still lying in her bed and opened it. In the envelope were two things. First was a one-page letter, folded, and second was yet another small sealed envelope with her name on the front. On the back the envelope said Please open on March 30.

  How long would this go on? She put the sealed envelope beside her on the bed, and unfolded the page to which she was now entitled. It was printed sort of like an invitation.