The moment he got out of the car she mowed him down. She clobbered him on the grass and rolled him around. This was perhaps the downside of a tall girlfriend. He laughed as she kissed him all over the face. She stuck her hands under his shirt. His joy was unstinting, even after all this.
At last she let him sit up. Eventually she even let him stand and look around. “This place is beautiful. Where are we?”
“This is the farm Brian and Tibby bought before she died.” She shook her head, letting some of the sadness in, keeping most of it out for now. “I have so much to tell you.”
“Please tell me.”
She led him toward the icehouse. She would have wanted to introduce him to Bailey first, but Bailey was napping, so she led him directly through the tiny house to her porch. This was where she thought such a talk should take place.
They sat down on the creaky daybed. “I will tell you everything, and it will take a while. But first I have to tell you one thing that won’t.”
“Okay.” He looked a little nervous and unbelievably dear to her. She’d thought she knew how much she missed him starting after she’d hung up the phone last night, but looking at him now, she realized she’d missed him even more than that.
“Okay.” She was nervous too. “Okay, the thing is …”
He looked terrified. She prayed he wouldn’t look more terrified after she finally got the news out. She touched the ends of her hair, wishing it weren’t in disastrous condition. She squeezed her eyes shut. She swallowed down a vast amount of saliva. “I am, we are, having a baby.”
“What?” For a moment his face was unreadable, and then it all started to open up. “What?”
“I’m pregnant. Around twenty weeks, I think. More, even. It must have happened the night before I went to Greece.” She was talking quickly.
He seemed to be following her lips as though he were hard of hearing and not quite getting all of it. “You are pregnant?”
“If I stand, you can sort of see it.” She demonstrated and put his hand to her belly.
He seemed to regard her belly and his hand as though they were both deeply unfamiliar.
“That ring I had on my cervix must have worn out and I forgot to get a new one. That’s what the nurse thought happened.”
“The nurse?”
“At Planned Parenthood. In Sacramento. That’s where I found out.”
Eric nodded slowly. He was staring not at her stomach, but at her face.
“I’m sorry I didn’t tell you before this. I really am. I should have, but I couldn’t. I was scared and I didn’t know what to do.” She felt teary and suddenly unsure of him. “Even now it’s not too late to … not do it,” she said quickly. No, that wasn’t true. It was far too late for her not to do it. “Or I guess I should say, I won’t put any pressure on you to be part of it if you don’t feel—I mean, I would understand if you aren’t ready for something like this—”
The way he watched her face, he knew her. He knew this hadn’t been easy. She realized he was being careful. So careful he barely swallowed, barely moved. He was easier with his feelings, but he was like any other person in not wanting to see them get destroyed. “How do you feel about it?” he asked soberly.
“I feel like we are its parents.”
“And is this something you are sure you want?”
Tears had been building up and she let them fall. “Yes. It really is.” She couldn’t remember not wanting it. The person who hadn’t wanted it was a stranger. “I’ve had a while to think about this, and I admit I didn’t take to it right away. But I know, I know it’s what I want.” She wiped her eyes and gathered her hair in a bunch. “The question is, is this something you want?”
He moved toward her on the creaky daybed. He put his arms around her waist and pulled her onto his lap. He pressed her hard against his chest. He put his face in her neck.
“This is something I want,” he said, and she could hear the emotion in his voice. “This is something I’ve always wanted.”
When Lena stepped off the plane from London in JFK airport in New York City, the first face she saw was his. He’d somehow managed to talk, bribe, or wrestle his way all the way up to the gate to wait for her.
She saw Kostos walking toward her in long slow-motion strides, his gray tweed coat flapping open. His eyes were steady on her face. He wasn’t smiling, but he didn’t look sorry. He looked serious, like a serious man would look doing a serious thing.
Here we go. She walked toward him and he toward her, as far as he could come, into the throng of the departing passengers and past the gate attendant, who seemed to be annoyed with him and calling out to him. But he didn’t say anything back or even turn his head. He kept his eyes on her and she didn’t look away. She didn’t feel self-conscious or nervous. She didn’t need to smile or ask silently for reassurance. She was sure.
She didn’t see any of the people around her as she went. She saw the determination in his face and she felt it too. She found herself thinking, Well, this is it, and knew she was walking into the rest of her life without another pause or question or even a glance to either side. I choose you, she thought. Come what may, you are what I choose.
She didn’t stop until he was right in front of her. They just stood there staring at each other for a moment. She wasn’t sure what happened after that. He put his arms around her, she put hers around him, she was up off her feet and he was squeezing her against him as hard as he could have without knocking the wind out of her.
People streamed around them and the gate attendant continued carping at them and he put her back on her feet and they kissed like they had been waiting to do that and only that for a dozen years.
At some time after the people were gone and the gate attendant had given up and moved to straightening the desk, they broke apart and looked at each other again.
He took her hand and they started walking toward the baggage claim. They didn’t say anything to each other. They swung their held hands like little kids, like they believed anything could happen, like they might take off soaring into the air. All the things you wanted to happen could happen. Why not?
She looked over at him and he was smiling. How she loved the British Airways terminal.
“Hey,” he said. “It’s someday.” He said the last word in Greek.
Country roads,
take me home.
—John Denver
Carmen crept along the bewildering roads in a rented Ford Focus certain she was lost. She’d flown from New Orleans to New York the night before last and stayed long enough to meet Jones at their loft and tell him she didn’t want to get married. “Not now, or not ever?” he’d asked.
“Not ever,” she’d said as gently as she could manage. She wasn’t sure if he was more disappointed by that or by the earlier revelation that she’d come home from New Orleans four days prematurely and without a contract.
He wasn’t so bitter, really, except when he told her he was keeping the loft. He seemed to think she was going to fight him over it, but she said fine. She hadn’t wanted to stay in it anyway. She had never loved it the way he had, and even the third of the rent she paid was honestly more than she could afford.
He sat on the bed for the first hour and watched her pack. He told her she was making a big mistake, and she nodded even though she knew she wasn’t. He told her single girls over thirty in New York City never found husbands, even if they were beautiful, and she nodded, though she found it frankly insulting. He told her magnanimously that he wouldn’t let this tarnish any working relationship they might have, and she nodded even though she didn’t believe him.
She packed one big suitcase to last a couple of weeks and arranged to have the rest of her stuff boxed up and sent to her mom and David’s house. There was nothing keeping her in New York until August, when her show resumed, and that was assuming she got picked up again.
She spent the night in a comfortably untrendy hotel in Midtown and rented the car in the morning.
It was a strange feeling, driving out of town with her suitcase in the back. She had no apartment, no fiancé, and no idea where she was going. Really no idea. She’d veered off the map, which was supposed to take her to an unknown place in rural Pennsylvania.
Tibby’s note had said she wanted Carmen to meet someone. What was that about? Who could Tibby want her to meet at this point? She hoped it wasn’t some kind of blind-date situation. That would be seriously uncomfortable. Granted, Tibby hadn’t liked Jones any better than Lena or Bee had liked him, but still.
Damn. She pulled over and studied the map. Why was she trying to get to Belvidere, Pennsylvania? Why was being on the right road to get there any less lost than being on the wrong road to get there?
But she turned herself around and persevered anyway. The evidence gave her no reason to believe she even knew who Tibby had been during the last two years, but she still trusted her. She couldn’t help it. And if nothing else, the landscape was quite beautiful, with forests and farms and valleys glowing with the yellow-green of early spring.
A little past noon she turned into a driveway. She saw the street number on the white fence post. She eased up the lane very slowly, taking in the pretty clapboard farmhouse, the shaded yard, and the handful of buildings surrounding it, including a classic red barn.
She stopped the car and peered over the wheel. She was debating whether to walk up to the farmhouse and knock on the door, when the very door swung open and a tall, thin man with a baby in his arms walked out of it. Her brain was trying to process the identity of these people, when she turned her head and a figure came running out of the barn and suddenly became Bridget. In a dreamlike way, Carmen turned her head again and watched the man with the baby become Brian. She was too surprised to get out of the car until Bridget flung open her door and pulled her out.
It was a completely strange place and yet here was the first familiar thing she’d felt in months. Bee put her arms around Carmen and held her for a long time, so artlessly it felt like nothing had changed. For all the stumbling and dreading Carmen had done over the first words, there was nothing she needed to say.
“Where are we?” she asked.
Brian was standing a few feet from her when Bridget pulled away. Carmen went to embrace him, but stopped and stared at the little girl in his arms for a long moment. She had the strangest feeling. She knew this face, but she hadn’t seen it in a long time.
“This is Bailey,” Brian said.
Tibby had a baby. Carmen was too awed to speak.
“There’s so much to tell you,” Bridget said excitedly.
It was like a dream you might have after death in which lost people came back to life, your friends loved you again no matter what you had done, and your failures were unaccountably forgiven.
Bridget grabbed Carmen’s hand, as naturally and tenderly as the old Bee would have, and pulled her toward a yellow cottage just beyond the house.
“Brian says Lena should be coming today too.”
Lena was a person who understood happiness through sadness, and because of it, the happiness that unfolded that day was robust.
The discovery of Bailey, a little girl plucked out of her memory, was all the more extraordinary because of her mother’s loss. You gave us a way to keep loving you, Tib. You must know this child will never be without mothers. Bailey’s face was so evocative and so beautiful, Lena had to turn her head away.
Soon after she and Kostos had arrived, Lena had taken a few moments sitting on the grass with Bridget and Carmen to confirm what she already knew from Tibby’s last letter. Painful as the facts of it were, they made sense to her. Each one took its sensible place in the tragedy, and the joy of their reunion was all the lovelier in light of its sadness.
And then there was Kostos. Out of the soil of more than a dozen years of disappointment, joy bloomed in every single thing she and Kostos did together, in every dumb thing. Sitting next to him in the car on the drive up, buying him a cup of coffee at the gas station (learning how he liked it for a thousand future times), sharing a Milky Way, getting lost on the back roads, her spilling her water bottle on her lap, him mopping at her skirt with two napkins.
There was sexiness in everything that passed between them: her putting change in his hand for the toll, him pushing her hair aside to see the map better. Every time he looked at her. Every time she looked at him.
And then there was that particular look they gave each other when they saw the queen-size bed made up and waiting in the magnificent barn loft intended for them. Every year of not having each other added something to that look.
How could they possibly wait? Kostos spun her into the bathroom and clutched her for a heated moment before they heard Bailey’s feet slapping across the wooden floor.
Tibby had given them the child’s dream of love, having all your needs met without having to ask, without even knowing what they were.
Lena recognized in each moment of that day, maybe in her happiness more than anyone’s, the hand of an artist. Tibby had spent the last fifteen years learning to write a script, and this was her gift to them, her masterpiece.
As Lena walked across the farmyard with Kostos to join the group for a spaghetti dinner in the big house, she looked up at the stars and gave Tibby thanks. She didn’t have to throw her thoughts far to know they reached her.
What was the best part? That was what Carmen asked herself as she lay on the yielding mattress that smelled like new, in a bedroom of the pristine cottage Brian insisted, crazily enough, belonged to her.
The best part was seeing Bee and Lena and knowing they were going to be okay. It was meeting Bailey for the first time, understanding without needing anyone to say it who she was. It was watching Lena and Kostos walking toward her holding hands. It was Lena’s happiness. It was Bee’s pregnancy and witnessing her and Eric’s obvious joy in it.
The saddest part, undoubtedly, was learning the truth about Tibby. The saddest thing was learning what she’d gone through. But maybe it was finally the happiest thing too, knowing she’d loved them all along, that they hadn’t failed her, knowing their time wasn’t over, that they’d lived the life they thought they had.
But as Carmen lay there, letting the thoughts breed and grow in her head, she pushed her fear aside and allowed the two things, the sadness and happiness, to mix. Tibby’s suffering had been outside of their friendship, outside of their control. It didn’t represent a failure of their bond. But Tibby had kept it from them, and that represented a different kind of failure. She hadn’t let them in at that darkest juncture in her life. They couldn’t have prevented any of it, but they could have given her comfort and they hadn’t. Why hadn’t they? Why hadn’t she let them?
Because we aren’t built for leaving, Carmen realized. Tibby hadn’t known how to leave them. There was no precedent. Maybe she hadn’t thought they could handle it. Maybe we couldn’t.
Carmen remembered the dream Tibby had once had that her great-grandma Felicia had gotten their Traveling Pants taxidermied as a graduation present. And she remembered Tibby describing her horror in the dream. But they have to be able to move! she’d screamed. Carmen wondered if they had forgotten that somewhere along the way. You had to let them move. Maybe you even had to let them go.
There were daffodils in a glass on the bedside table, and a few well-made pieces of furniture throughout the three small bedrooms of the house and the downstairs rooms. “You can add the rest yourself,” Brian told her. “I just wanted you to have a few of the basics, you know, to get you started.”
Carmen had looked at him in puzzlement and disbelief.
“I mean, you don’t have to add anything,” he’d added quickly. “It’s up to you. You can do whatever you like with it. It’s a place that will be here for you whenever you want it.”
It was hard to fathom that this was her little place, mind-blowing to think of all that Tibby must have considered. Tibby had tried her best to make it easier on them.
Carmen felt the
tears slide onto the pillow as she lay in this bed with the window open and the chirping coming from both grass and trees, with Bridget and Eric in the little house across the yard, and Lena and Kostos in the barn, and Brian and Bailey in the house next door. What a joyful context. How different from the Vietnamese restaurant, newspaper stand, and lighting store she was used to.
She remembered so well Tibby’s distress the summer they left for college, troubling over the notion of home. What would hold them together? Where would it ever be again?
Carmen did feel strangely, for the first time in her adult life, like she was home.
Could I revive within me
Her symphony and song,
To such a deep delight
’twould win me
That with music loud
and long
I would build that dome
in air.
—Samuel Coleridge
Epilogue
You’ll be happy to know, we did conduct the last pants ritual that Tibby had assembled for us in Greece but that we never got to have. I, Carmen, the last to arrive, was the one to suggest it. It seemed like the right thing to do, and I have always been a sucker for a ceremony.
On a much bleaker day in early November, Lena had carried the suitcase from Santorini to her parents’ house in Bethesda. Just a couple of days earlier, she’d asked her mom to ship it up to the farm.
We snuck away from the group, which had now grown to include Tibby’s parents and Nicky and Katherine staying in the farmhouse with Brian and Bailey. We decided to hold our ceremony in the loft of the barn, because with its shiny wooden floors and tall open space, it reminded us the most of Gilda’s, the aerobics studio where our mothers met and where the old ritual had always taken place. The absence of the pants, the incorporeal presence of Tibby, didn’t make it any less effective.
We stinted on no part of it. Not the candles nor the Pop-Tarts nor the Cheetos nor the tears. Bridget sang her lungs out along with Gloria Estefan. Tibby would have laughed over that. We held hands. Teenage Tibby tended to balk at that, but I knew she would want it now.