Sisterhood Everlasting

  She thought back to something Effie had told her once long ago when it came to taking a risk on Kostos. You have to have some faith, Effie had said.

  But Effie hadn’t meant faith in Kostos, Lena realized. Not faith that Kostos would be there to meet her and throw his arms around her and want her more than anyone else. Effie meant faith in herself. Faith that even if he didn’t come, she would be all right. She had to have faith not just in trying, but in failing. Was she strong enough to fail? Was she strong enough not to?

  “I’ll give you a hundred bucks if you can make this phone work in the next ten minutes,” Carmen thundered at the pimply young man in the phone store two blocks from Penn Station.

  “We close in five minutes, ma’am,” the pimply young man answered.

  Carmen glared at him. Where was the ambition? Where was the greed? This country was going down the tubes if this kid was any indication. “I’ll give you a hundred bucks if you can make it work in the next five minutes,” she said slowly.

  He looked scared of her. He was no Daisy. His Adam’s apple bobbed. “I could try.”

  “Please try.” Was she going to have to tell him about being on TV? She didn’t want to, but that sometimes worked on guys like him.

  He turned her phone on. He pushed a couple of buttons and then the home key. “I don’t see anything wrong with it,” he said.

  “Are you serious?”

  He pointed it at her. She snatched it from him.

  “You don’t have to pay me the hundred bucks,” he said magnanimously.

  “Thanks,” she snapped, walking out the door.

  She managed to buy her train ticket on her credit card without incident. There were no roomettes available, she discovered, but there was a car called the dinette where she could eat.

  She passed by the newsstand and looked at the fashion magazines. She didn’t need them. Her phone was working, she’d be fine. She could read the script, she could make calls. She could write emails and plan her wedding. She could play that game where you landed the airplanes. With a functioning phone in her hand she felt her confidence slowly returning.

  She got on the train with time to spare. She put her head back and closed her eyes. It was hard to believe she’d had all these reversals without telling Jones about any of them. He was always the one she complained to first. He understood her bumbling and faltering. He seemed to expect it.

  Carmen felt happy to have two seats to herself on the dark train. She was happy that there was no one in the seats directly across from her or behind her. If she could keep her phone charged then maybe this wouldn’t be so bad.

  She dozed a little until Newark, when the train stopped and more people got on. She put her big purse on the seat next to her. She watched a trickle of people come down the aisle, most of them, thankfully, passing her by. Finally a small group straggled up next to her. It was a man with a small boy and a baby. He was eyeing the seats directly across the aisle from her. Please don’t sit there, she thought. She overheard the man talking in Spanish to his son.

  Her heart sank as they settled in. She listened to the boy chirp excitedly to his father. Oh, God. How long before the baby woke up and started screaming? She wondered if she could get her seat reassigned. This was really the last thing she needed.

  Eight days remained before the fateful meeting was meant to take place, five days before Lena was meant to open Tibby’s last letter, and there was something Lena was doing, hour after hour, day after day, and it didn’t feel right. She’d done it in her studio apartment and she’d done it alone and with far too much ease. It was the grueling habit she meant to overturn, and yet she had no choice but to do more of it: it was waiting.

  But what else could she do? She felt unusually fitful, jumpy, and impulsive, yet she was stuck in a holding pattern and didn’t know what to do other than fret and fret and fret and wait.

  Many times she thought of reading back over the twenty precious letters Kostos had written, but something stopped her. I don’t want to turn those into memories, like everything else with him. She didn’t want them enshrined as further exhibits in the Lena and Kostos memorial museum. Maybe they would end up there, but she wanted them to stay real for at least a while longer.

  She stared at Tibby’s sealed envelope and had the strangest idea. What if she opened it right now? What if she didn’t wait?

  Could I just do that?

  She felt a weird gonging in her head. She ripped the envelope open so fast she almost shredded the letter inside.

  My dearest Lena,

  I know I’ve made a blunt and probably unwelcome maneuver to wrest control of your life from you. And I know that you’ll know that, misguided as it may be, it’s out of love.

  You don’t have time, Len. That is the most bitter and the most beautiful piece of advice I can offer. If you don’t have what you want now, you don’t have what you want.

  I know you’ve always hated an either-or decision. You always want to choose Option C, as you call it, the third way, which too often, my sweet Lenny, means no way at all. And here I am demanding A or B.

  I’ll be honest and tell you I want you to choose A. I feel like I understand Kostos. I don’t think he’s forgotten you. I think he’s waiting too. He’s holding back, because he knows if he comes to you he’ll scare you off. And if he comes to you, there will always be doubt. You have to come half the way. I didn’t think anybody could comprehend you and love you as well as we Septembers do, Lenny, but Kostos impresses me.

  If you choose B, I promise to leave you alone, not to haunt you with further letters or demands. I promise I’ll leave Kostos alone too. (And really, what choice do I have?) There will be no doubt or disappointment from me wherever I am. You can free yourself of that notion. Because you will have chosen your path and not put it off any longer, and that’s all I really want.

  Maybe you think you’ll be entitled to more happiness later by forgoing all of it now, but it doesn’t work that way. Happiness takes as much practice as unhappiness does. It’s by living that you live more. By waiting you wait more. Every waiting day makes your life a little less. Every lonely day makes you a little smaller. Every day you put off your life makes you less capable of living it. Sorry to pontificate, my friend, but my body is giving out and that’s where my head is today.

  (I admit to a secret wish that you’ll open this letter before the date on the back.)

  Live for me, my friend Lenny, because I can’t anymore, and God, how I wish I could.

  Two things happened over the next hour that made Carmen want to wrench open her window and jump off the train to her doom.

  First was the crying. Just when Carmen had reclined her chair as far as it would go, gotten herself a pillow and a blanket from Coach Attendant Kevin, as his name tag said, and closed her eyes to rest, it started. First it was little barks a few seconds apart. They got closer and closer together until they turned into full-on crying.

  You’ve got to be kidding, she thought. She cast a narrow-eyed look at the man, presumably the baby’s father. Now that she thought of it, where was the mother of this group? Had she come on with them? Maybe she was in the bathroom and when she got back she could make the baby be quiet.

  The second thing was the phone. Once Carmen was awake on account of the crying and there seemed no hope of going to sleep, on account of the crying, she grabbed her phone. But when she tried to wake it up it stayed black. It’s all right, don’t panic, she counseled herself. It was a slightly temperamental phone, was all. She held down the home button for a while. Still black. Okay, it was the charge. She unwound the charger and thankfully found an outlet. She plugged it in and waited. Sometimes this could take a minute or two. She knew the stubborn biorhythms of these phones better than the ones of her own body.

  At last it lived. The little waiting circle spun and then the screen lit up. And when she saw the icon on the screen, the fear began, like the beat of a slow drum against the horror-movie sound track of the screa
ming baby.

  There glowed the dreaded icon that instructed you to plug your phone into your iTunes mother ship or you were screwed. Well, she had no iTunes to plug into. The mother ship was sitting in the living room of her loft, giant-screened and cutting-edge and of no help to anyone. This daughter-phone was not so independent as she liked to pretend.

  Carmen turned it off and turned it on again with no feeling of hope whatsoever. Same icon.

  “Shit,” Carmen muttered. She would have felt guilty about cursing near children, but they were the ones who should have felt guilty. “Shit,” she said again. Her mind raced for possible solutions. Whom could she whine to? Whom could she bribe? Whom could she charm?

  No one. She was down to zeroes and ones, and they really didn’t care about her. She loved her phone, but her phone did not love her back.

  She thought of Tibby with a feeling of pique. Some gift this was. And then she felt horrified. How could she be irritated at Tibby, who was dead?

  She realized she was sweating. Her heart was pounding. She couldn’t call anyone! She couldn’t text anyone! She couldn’t read the script! She needed desperately to call Jones and tell him she couldn’t call him.

  She looked up at the ceiling. She looked out at the darkness, at the billows of dark steamy pollution, at the grim lights of industrial New Jersey or Delaware or wherever she was. She couldn’t spend thirty-two more hours on this train with no one to talk to and nothing to do. She couldn’t.

  You can’t kill yourself over a phone, a sane voice in her head pointed out. Oh, yes, you can, a less sane voice answered.

  She laid her head back on her pillow and tried to breathe deeply. She tried to steady her heart. Every little trick she had for self-comfort hit a wall. Call her mother? No. Check the weather? No. Update her Facebook status? No. Google her rivals? No. Find her horoscope? No.

  Like a drug addict, she felt the itches and the tremors that made her want to claw her own skin. Like a drug addict, she found herself grasping at any fix no matter how self-destructive: she could get off in Baltimore and buy a new phone—who cared if she missed her meeting! She could offer a thousand dollars to anyone on the train who would sell her theirs! Better, she could steal one! Who cared that it wouldn’t have her mail or her contacts? Who cared that the only numbers she knew by heart were Lena’s, Bee’s, and Tibby’s?

  Like a drug addict, Carmen felt waves of nausea and despair throughout the night. She might have seen hallucinations of spiders, she wasn’t sure.

  At some point in her misery, she realized that the baby had gone quiet and the mother still hadn’t come back.

  Not knowing

  when the dawn will come

  I open every door.

  —Emily Dickinson

  Throughout the early morning Carmen got several cups of coffee from the dinette. She flipped through the awful train magazine.

  She spent a little time talking to Coach Attendant Kevin, who was from a town called Goose Creek, just west of Charleston, but had not heard of the street where her father lived.

  Carmen went back to the dinette and got some walnuts in a bag. She begged the lady behind the counter, Inez, for reading material, but Inez had nothing. She had a pack of cards. Finally, Inez rooted through her own bag and handed Carmen the very issue of People magazine that Carmen had spent a full ninety minutes reading on the way to the airport.

  Carmen trudged back to her seat. She had never in her adult life gone this long without checking her email, Facebook, or Twitter or making a call.

  What had people done before they had phones? It was a serious question. She needed to know. What had she herself done, before she had a phone? She remembered the long car rides to Bethany Beach or the really long car rides to Fort Myers, Florida, to see her great-aunt and great-uncle. What had she done? She hadn’t read—not even magazines. It made her carsick.

  Carmen knew what she’d done. It seemed hard to fathom right now, but she did know. The younger, phone-free Carmen had looked out the window and thought about things.

  Carmen wondered about that. She was too tired to be huffy and indignant any longer, so she wondered about it honestly. Did she even have thoughts anymore?

  She looked out the window. She tried to think of where in the world she was. She thought she’d heard the conductor announce a stop in North Carolina not too long ago. She observed how the trees were getting fuzzier and greener as they went. In New York, the trees were still mostly gaunt and bare, but here, they were budding and blossoming like mad. As the train rumbled south they plunged into spring, passing through whole weeks in a matter of hours.

  It made her feel a little homesick, because of the blossoms, the cherries and dogwoods and magnolias and those pink ones, whatever they were called. These were the flowers that burst out all over her old neighborhood growing up, that would drop into her hair like spring snow. They probably had them in New York too, maybe in the park, but she never saw any.

  If the train was in North Carolina now, then South Carolina would be next. That gave her a pang of nostalgia too. If she’d been in a plane and flown over these places, she wouldn’t have thought a single thing of it, but now she was going to be passing through the state where her dad had lived since she was six. It was the place she’d visited, fantasized about, been disappointed in, and grown up some in. It was the place where she’d met her stepbrother, Paul. And his sister, Krista, too, but Paul loomed larger here. He gave the whole state the stalwart suffering feeling that he had, even though she knew he didn’t mean to. It was the place where Lydia and her dad had gotten married and where Lydia had been sick and died. It seemed sad to go through the state and not reach out to any of them.

  When she heard the baby shout she looked up. She felt an ache in her throat, and wondered if she felt sadder about Lydia than she’d realized, or if the phone carried a contagion of sadness sent over from Tibby.

  The baby wasn’t crying, for once, but smiling and trying to say something. They were wordlike utterances that weren’t actually words. The baby was a girl, Carmen observed. She had olive skin and very large dark eyes. Her hair made shiny delicate dark curls. But you wait, Carmen thought. My hair looked like that too when I was your age.

  Carmen observed that the mother of the family had not, in fact, been in the bathroom for the last ten hours as she had thought, but was apparently not on the train at all. Carmen looked at the rumpled father and took pity on him. It was awfully bold of him to take two small children on this ride by himself. Had you no other options? she couldn’t help wondering.

  And Carmen couldn’t stop herself from staring at them a little. Rumpled though he was, the father had a certain dignity you rarely saw in parents of young children. He wore dark twill pants and a faded jean jacket over a gray T-shirt. Carmen had noticed as she’d padded around the aisles that everybody’s shoes had come off by this point, but his hadn’t. He wore pointed brown leather shoes. They were well worn but elegant. The kind that well-dressed businessmen wore.

  She could tell he wasn’t Puerto Rican. She assumed he was Mexican, for some reason, but he was rather tall for a Mexican. She wished he would say something, so she would be able to guess from his accent. She hadn’t been paying attention before, and now she felt immensely curious.

  He had straight, longish, slightly feathery black hair. She thought of Ralph Macchio in the original Karate Kid, and then she felt the need to suppress a giggle. She’d had a huge crush on Ralph Macchio. The next thing she thought of was Jones and his shaved head.

  The father looked over at her, seeming to sense she was looking at them. She smiled, a peace offering of sorts for all the mean looks and cursing during her phone-withdrawal phase. His face altered slightly, but she didn’t think you could call it smiling.

  In her mind she begged the little boy to say something to his father, and at last he did. He told his father he had to go to the bathroom. She couldn’t tell anything from the boy’s accent, so she waited eagerly for the father’s res
ponse, but the father was remarkably economical with words, she’d noticed. He simply nodded. He was like the Latin version of Paul. But when he stood up he did something quite surprising. He turned directly to Carmen.

  “Excuse me. You could—could you … take for me … the baby?” His English faltered appealingly and she realized he had absolutely no idea she was a Spanish speaker.

  She was too surprised to do anything but accept the baby. He figured she was a woman, maybe a mother herself. He figured she’d know what to do. He didn’t realize she was an actress.

  “We come back soon,” he told her, leading the wriggling, dancing boy to the bathroom at the front of the car.

  So Carmen held the baby. She was anxious at first. She tried to think back to her early days with Ryan. But truth be told, she’d been eighteen at the time, and hadn’t exactly gone out of her way to hold him. Tibby, his godmother, had probably held him three times for every one time Carmen had.

  Carmen tried to bring the baby into her body a little, not hold her out as if she were a disease. She rested the baby’s considerable diaper on her lap. The baby stared at her with her giant eyes. She didn’t express a point of view, she just stared.

  “Hi, sweet pea,” Carmen said. She smiled, and to her gratification, the baby smiled back. She bounced her a few times. The baby smiled bigger. Carmen had to wonder: Who else in the world would make friends with you so quickly?

  “Hey, poopie,” Carmen said in a cooing voice.

  The baby took this as a compliment and smiled more. She tried to grab Carmen’s face in her hand, but Carmen pulled back.

  Carmen was just explaining to the baby about hair, when the father and brother returned.

  The father gave Carmen a real smile this time. He took the baby from her gratefully, but the baby appeared not to want to go. She leaned and reached for Carmen as she got pulled away. She started to make the barking sound.