Sisterhood Everlasting

  Oh, there was local flavor aplenty. There was a riverboat, and there were people shouting and milling about and selling things. She was supposed to be taking in the sights, she knew, but she could only think about the toy car inching out of the pocket of a little boy she would probably never see again.

  Bridget slept on the bare mattress on the icehouse floor for a long night and most of a day. Sometimes she felt that her sleeping mind did better work than her waking mind.

  She had millions of dreams, it seemed to her, all starting and stopping and twisting together. There was her grandfather, and Billy from her old soccer team in Burgess, Alabama. There was her old friend Diana who lived in a fancy suburb of New York City now with her husband and two kids. She dreamed of Carmen’s kitchen in the old apartment in Bethesda and the shoes she wore to senior prom. She dreamed of getting stung by a bee. She dreamed of the lake at the old soccer camp where she and Eric took out a canoe. That had been in Pennsylvania too. She dreamed of swimming in the turquoise Baja Sea with Eric when she was still fifteen and all she wanted in the world was to make him love her.

  She dreamed of the time in Rehobeth Beach before they left for college, when she and Carmen, Tibby, and Lena had found one another at the edge of the ocean in the middle of the night and clustered and talked until morning. In her dream there was a fire in the middle of their circle, both illuminating and changing their faces.

  When she finally opened her eyes, Bailey was staring at her, her face about two inches away. “Hi, baby,” Bridget said groggily.

  “Hi, Bee.”

  She sat up and Bailey climbed onto her mattress with her. Tibby’s little girl. There was no way she could leave this child.

  She looked at the yellow light coming down through the skylight. She had no idea what time it was. “What’s up? Did your crib come?”

  “Your crib come!” Bailey said.

  “Can I see?”

  Bailey climbed off the mattress and Bridget followed her to the main house. She kept looking back over her shoulder to make sure Bridget was right there.

  For the first time, Bridget wished she had not thrown her phone into the ocean. Carmen was Carmen, Lena was Lena, she was herself, and the past had slipped back into place behind them. They hadn’t failed Tibby. They were infinitely diminished without her, but they were who they thought they were. She missed them. She needed to tell them what she knew. She needed to tell them that Bailey was in the world, brightening it by the hour. God, she missed them, how they once were.

  It was not only the crib that had arrived. After the moving truck had fully disgorged its contents, a truck from Pottery Barn arrived carrying three sofas of different sizes, a half-dozen upholstered chairs, dining tables and chairs, bureaus, bed frames, night tables. A different truck brought a bunch of carpets and lamps. She and Bailey sat on the grass cheering like spectators at a soccer game, watching it happen.

  She watched Brian directing it all, impressed. She was great at moving and leaving, but not that great at buying things, let alone putting them where they belonged.

  Some furniture began to pile up on the grass outside of the icehouse. “Do you mind?” he asked. “I’d thought I’d cover the basics.”

  “It’s your house,” Bridget said.

  “No, it’s yours.”

  “Brian, it’s not.”

  “Tibby thought it was.”

  She looked at him for resentment, but there wasn’t any. While she’d slept he’d forgiven her for her ignorance. “So can they move the stuff in?”

  “Of course,” she said.

  She and Bailey watched the men with the wide belts carry in a kitchen table, a desk, a small sofa, various chairs, a bureau, two table lamps and a floor lamp, even a headboard and frame for the bed. Once everything was in, she and Bailey climbed around on it all and played house. It seemed like great fun to both of them.

  Bridget thought back to the four-poster bed Eric had bought on the last day that had caused her such trauma. She couldn’t understand it. That person felt like a stranger to her now. She watched Bailey jumping on the high, springy bed, and she couldn’t begin to understand.

  Carmen stayed out until dark, just wandering. She was doing a poor job of taking in the external sights, maybe, but she was doing an extensive job of taking in her internal ones. After years of not thinking more than three thoughts in a row, that seemed more important.

  Finally she stopped at an Apple store and watched with ambivalence as they got her phone, Tibby’s phone, working again. Particularly when the little icons flashed on, informing her she had twenty-seven phone messages, nineteen texts, and ninety-nine new emails. She felt a pang, a moment of grateful love, for the mysterious and often busted version of Tibby’s phone.

  She didn’t check any of them. She just stuck the phone in her back pocket and kept walking. She imagined the train ride in the alternate universe where the phone had worked, where she’d called people and blabbed and answered 145 messages, all while casting nasty looks at the crying baby and the overwhelmed father across the aisle. Carmen felt like a lotus-eater who’d finally woken, looking back over long narcotic dreams.

  There was a message light blinking on the phone in her hotel room when she eventually got there. Manager? Agent? Publicist? Mother? Fiancé? She threw herself facedown on the bed and just thought for a while. She was sure getting a lot more attached to the inside of her head.

  And then it was time to get up and face the music. With trepidation she hit the message button and listened.

  “I just wanted you to know that the formula held out, the Matchbox car was not lost, the diaper was only pee, and we made it safely to Metairie.” There was a noise Roberto made that she couldn’t decipher, like a cough. “Thank you, lovely Carmen … for everything.”

  I like my body

  when it is with your body.

  It is so

  quite new a thing.

  Muscles better

  and nerves more.

  —e. e. cummings

  Brian joined Bridget on the screened porch of her little house after he put Bailey to bed. He sat on one of the new kitchen chairs he’d brought out and she sat on the creaky iron daybed. They listened to the stream under the floor.

  As the light was fading, the rain started. You could hear it drumming against the skylight and see it tapping the surface of the stream. It turned the trees into liquid green. It gave the air on the porch a texture and a taste. This little house was sunny, all right, but it was never more beautiful than in the rain.

  “I know it might not feel like it,” Brian said, “but we are rejoining the world here.”

  “Are we?”

  “Yeah.”

  “It doesn’t feel like it.”

  “It will.”

  “When?”

  “Couple of days.”

  “Really. How?”

  “You wait. You’ll see.”

  “Okay.”

  “Enjoy the quiet while you have it.” Brian sounded like he was talking to himself.

  “Okay.”

  He gave her a hug before he started back to the main house. “Oh, one other thing.” He pulled his phone out of his pocket. “You want to borrow this?”

  “Your phone?” He tossed it and she caught it. “Why?”

  “In case you want to call anybody.”

  Bridget sat on the porch with the phone for a long time, but she didn’t call anybody. She dragged the new floor lamp onto the porch with her, glad the cord reached far enough, and turned it on. She sat cross-legged on the daybed and finally opened Tibby’s other letter. She was still two days early, but she wasn’t afraid of it in the same way anymore.

  Dear Bee,

  I put an address at the bottom of this page, and I want you to go there. It’s kind of demanding of me, I know, and you don’t have to if you don’t want. It sounds crazy, because I haven’t even been to the place myself, but I feel like you belong there. I have this fantasy that you’ll see it and you’ll
want to stay. You laugh, my persistently moving friend, but there’s a little house on the property that is meant for you. Seriously. As soon as you see it, you’ll know what I mean.

  There are a couple of important things waiting for you there, if you decide to go. One of them is my daughter. She’ll be two in June. That’s a big one to drop on you, I know. I may have already told you about her in Greece. The second is Brian. He’s been through a lot.

  When I try to fall asleep at night, and I’m full of thoughts and fears for the people I love most, I have this recurring image of you holding my daughter’s hand. My fantasy is that all three of you will help grow her up, but it’s you I seem to picture in the nitty-gritty of it. Who knows why—maybe it’s just an odd fancy of mine. I know kids aren’t your thing. And yet I cling to the thought that you will teach her the way you are—your independence, your toughness, your joy. I’d love it if she got an ounce of your bravery, Bee. I really would. Maybe that’s the root of my wish. I want you to give her things I couldn’t, no matter how long I lived. I feel like she could give you something too, though I can’t quite grasp what it would be. I don’t know. Forgive the meanderings of your old pal.

  One other thing I wanted to say. As I think of you—and I do more often than you could imagine—I think of your many beautiful traits, but also your fitfulness. I’ve watched you go through dozens of jobs, apartments, phones, plants, and obsessions. You would think that such a voracious girl as yourself would have gone through dozens of boyfriends, dozens of lovers, but it occurred to me the other day that you haven’t. You’ve only had one. You told me once that Eric was your touchstone, and I’ve thought of it many times.

  It’s natural to overlook and even sacrifice the things that belong to us most easily, most gracefully. So here’s me asking you to please not make that mistake.

  Really, Carmen couldn’t say exactly what happened at the audition—er, meeting. She couldn’t honestly say if it was a complete failure or a weird kind of success.

  She knew she walked into the meeting room in a snazzy mansion in the Garden District. She recognized Grantley Arden from his picture. There were several producers and a couple of executives, about half of whom she’d met at various industry functions, usually on the arm of Jones, who would wear socks with sandals before he’d forget any of their names. Carmen couldn’t remember one of them. Arden was wearing a baseball cap and jeans while the rest wore suits. There were airy clasps and kisses all around.

  She vaguely recalled sitting down. She didn’t have the script, so somebody handed her one. She’d made a mad dash through it that morning but hadn’t learned any of the lines.

  The producers talked for a while about the concept of the film, the vision and so forth. There was a lot of hyperbole thrown around—“stunning,” “groundbreaking,” “astonishing”—but none of it really sank in. Nobody expected it to, she realized.

  Then they asked her to read a character, the floozy named Fiona. Carmen surprised herself by not skittering right over the top of the lines with all the obvious moves, as she expected to do, but walking down into them.

  Fiona was a mess, really. Carmen knew she was supposed to do it funny, but as she read the lines, one struck her as more tragic than the next. When she looked up, there were tears in her eyes. She was very emotional lately.

  There was a bit of silence. “Carmen, can you come over here for a minute?” Arden asked her. He drew her into the corner and walked her close, almost like they were in a huddle.

  “Honey, I can see your veins,” Arden said in a low voice.

  “You can?”

  “Yes, I think all of them.”

  Carmen’s hands felt a certain fluttering responsibility, but how could you cover up every vein?

  “I’m sorry,” she said. She was sure it was a breech to show up with all your veins sticking out to the “most important meeting of your life.”

  “No, don’t be sorry.”

  “Why not?” Even as she said it, she felt that what few veins perhaps weren’t showing before were probably popping out now.

  “Because that’s how it is. Unfortunately, this role is comedy. The rest of the big roles are cast. I brought you here for comedy, but the comedy I’m getting from you could tear us all to pieces. This particular audience is not ready for it, I regret to say.”

  “Okay,” she said. “I have no idea what you are talking about.”

  “I know,” he said. “That’s all right.”

  “So I guess I go, then.”

  “Yeah. I’ll call you when I’m back in New York.”

  She gave him a steady, honest look. “Why?” She was not in the mood for bullshit, it turned out.

  “Because I’ve got to do something with you,” he said. He gave her a kiss, not a fake air one but a real hard one on the side of her head, and sent her on her way. “Make sure Wanda has your cell.”

  “I don’t have a cell,” she lied.

  He stood in the hallway and watched her go. “Don’t try to cover them up,” he called after her as she walked to the elevator. “What a waste that would be.”

  Carmen knew, walking down the street away from the snazzy mansion, that she probably shouldn’t be relieved. Her reps would be crushed. Jones would blow a gasket. But she wasn’t planning to marry Jones.

  She now knew what the most important meeting of your life probably felt like, and it wasn’t this.

  The sessions with Arden and the rest of them were supposed to go on and on for days; they were supposed to want to get her on film, and she was not supposed to leave New Orleans without a contract. Oops. She’d been in there for less than fifteen minutes and now she was being sent home.

  Home. That was tricky. Where was home? Where was she going?

  And then she knew where she needed to go—to Pennsylvania, on April 2—and she felt not scared but hopeful.

  London was the place you got stranded, Lena decided. Heathrow airport was the place where you slept by the window and brushed your teeth in the restroom and felt like a complete asshole.

  She couldn’t just go back after all this, could she? It was now Thursday, and April 2, the appointed day, was Sunday. Did that mean Kostos was going to Pennsylvania? He wouldn’t have left so early, though. He was traveling somewhere else, entirely unrelated. Maybe that was it.

  By Friday morning she felt lost and sad. It was tiring, carrying a thunderbolt around this long. Sometime between the time she cried in the magazine shop and the time she threw up her lunch in the restroom, her cellphone rang.

  “Hello?”

  “Is this Lena?”

  “Yes.” All the blood in her body seemed to drain to her feet. “Who is this?”

  “It’s Kostos. I’m standing outside your apartment building. I’ve been ringing your bell for hours. Where are you?”

  She closed her eyes and put the phone down for a moment while her whole body shook, trying to stave off spasms of laughing and tears.

  “I’m in London, looking for you.”

  He was stunned to silence. “Why? Why London? Why aren’t you here? We’re supposed to meet in the States!”

  It was a raw sound she made. Maybe like laughing. He spoke of their meeting as if there had never been a question of his intent.

  “Because I couldn’t wait,” she said. “I wanted to come more than halfway.”

  Kostos was quiet for a second. His voice was full when he spoke again. “Oh, Lena. I couldn’t wait either.” He laughed. “I wanted to go all the way.”

  She was still shaking. “I want to too.” Her face was burning hot. She was laughing and shaking too much to talk.

  “I want to see you so badly. I can’t wait anymore.”

  She let out a little sobbish noise, much more like crying. She couldn’t make up her mind. She couldn’t say a single word.

  “Lena, do you want to stay still and I’ll get on the next plane and come to you? Or do you want to come to me?”

  Lena sucked back tears, and though her
voice was a mess she answered with confidence. “You stay. I’ll come to you.”

  Bridget used Brian’s phone to call Eric just after midnight, nine o’clock his time. She felt semi-delirious when he answered.

  “It’s Bee,” she said sheepishly, eagerly.

  “Where are you?”

  She was so glad to hear his voice. “I’m in Pennsylvania. Bucks County, south of a town in New Jersey called Belvidere,” she said. “I have so much to tell you.” A sob escaped her chest unexpectedly.

  “Are you okay?”

  “I’m okay. Do you think you could come here?”

  “To Pennsylvania?”

  “If you fly to New York, it’s only an hour and twenty minutes by car.”

  “When?”

  She realized she was being absurdly presumptuous. She had no business asking him for anything. He was the one who’d been left, and her misery didn’t make it any nicer for him.

  She tried to calm herself down and step into his shoes. “I know you have work. You can’t get carried away. When do you think you can come?”

  “I can get carried away,” he said. “When do you want me to come?”

  “Now? Tomorrow?”

  “Are you sure you’re okay?”

  “Yes. I have something important to tell you.”

  Eric was quiet. She couldn’t blame him. This wasn’t the same as her coming back. She’d never made it easy on him, not from the very beginning. “Bridget, is this something I’m going to like?”

  She closed her eyes. “I really hope so.”

  Eric called from the rental car to say he was an hour away, and Bridget couldn’t stand waiting. For the entire hour, she stood in the middle of the road, watching for a car she would not even recognize. She hated waiting.

  Her heart surged when she finally saw his face through the windshield. When he slowed way down to turn she screamed moronically and jumped on the hood of the car. He laughed and drove the last twenty-five feet with her sitting on the hood. It was a testament to his love that he always let her happiness sweep him along and make him happy.