Bee was especially accommodating. She was practically a Bee museum. Her faded lavender T-shirt had been gathering snags and extra stitches since ninth grade. Her yellow hair was long and messy as ever, the flow of it interrupted by skinny braids here and there that reminded Lena of Bee’s cornrow phase in sixth grade. She dragged along the shiny airport floor the same worn-out Israeli clogs she’d bought with Lena on a jaunt along Eighth Street the summer after college. Lena amply forgave her for the drooping blue socks, which she’d shamelessly stolen from Lena on the last trip to Greece.
Well, Carmen did show some signs of change, even in the two months since Lena had seen her: her highlights were slightly lighter, her jeans slightly tighter, her eyebrows slightly thinner. But she was the makeover queen, so what would you expect? With Carmen they were always the same category of cosmetic changes that did nothing to mask the eager animation of her face. Change was the weather with Carmen. It would be weird if she stayed the same.
Tibby would be waiting for them at the airport in Fira. “She texted me that she got there yesterday morning. She opened up the house,” Lena told them excitedly, though they already knew, because she’d texted them too.
Lena settled into a bouncing stride between Carmen and Bridget, unabashedly clutching their hands through the long terminal. She had a magazine under her arm, candy in her bag, and an unaccustomed feeling of robust hunger in her stomach. She was looking forward to her life with brazen joy, and that was a gift she almost never gave herself. She looked forward to every single piece of it, from the airplane food to flying through the night under shared blankets, to Carmen’s sleep-sputtering (God help you if you called it snoring) in her ear, to the first sight of the Caldera from the air.
Most of all she looked forward to seeing Tibby when they landed. With an ache she pictured Tibby’s freckled, heart-shaped face, lost to her for almost two years. The last time she’d seen it, it was framed in the door of their old neighborhood bar on East Fifth Street, where the four of them had met to celebrate Carmen’s first getting cast on Criminal Court. Tibby had been looking over her shoulder, a final glimpse as she said goodbye. Lena hadn’t known it was goodbye at the time, but maybe Tibby had. Tibby had always been awkward about showy rituals. And she wouldn’t have wanted to take anything away from Carmen’s big night. But within a week Brian had gotten some tremendous opportunity and the two of them were rushing off to Australia. Just for a few months, Tibby had thought at the time. But it had been two long years, and even Lena’s lizard brain could sense that expanse, now that their reunion was so close. Seeing Tibby would make her joy complete.
Lena was good at convincing herself of things, and dangerously good at thinking she could be herself without these friends of hers. As the three of them yapped contentedly all the way to the gate, through the lengthy boarding process, onto the plane with its blankets and pillows that gave it the atmosphere of an international slumber party, she felt her face opening into expressions she’d forgotten how to make. Lena remembered herself in all the old familiar things they said. She existed in her friends; there she was. All the parts of herself she’d forgotten. She knew herself best when she was with them.
Blinking in the artificial morning light with her weary, late-night eyes, Carmen could read the same tired bewilderment on her friends’ faces. Their plane had carried a big bellyful of America, which had dissipated the moment they stepped into this bustling, overheated little airport.
“Are we late, do you think?” Lena asked.
Bee squinted at the board showing arrivals. “Are we early?”
“I’m not sure my phone has the right time,” Carmen said, studying it.
Carmen had geared herself up for seeing Tibby first thing off the plane. They had all calibrated their patience to that moment and no further. So after ten minutes of swinging heads and darting eyes and thudding under ribs, Carmen was fairly sure that Tibby had not yet arrived at the gate, and the excitement started to wear on them.
“Maybe she’s at the baggage claim.”
“Yeah. Probably.”
“These things are always confusing.”
“Maybe that’s Tibby.” Bridget pointed to a corpulent middle-aged woman in a blue head scarf.
Carmen laughed. “Well, it has been a while.”
Carmen’s eyes were still darting. She studied every face through the glass wall of the arrivals area. She wished she had not been so vain as to pack away her distance glasses.
“Let’s go to baggage claim.”
“She’ll be there.”
They moved as a tired six-legged creature toward the sign that said Baggage Claim, all of them scanning the crowd for a freckled, wiry, much-missed American.
The smell of cigarette smoke was strong, and the amount of sunshine in the airport felt out of step with the notion of nighttime still lagging in their bodies. It had seemed a lot more important to talk through the flight than sleep. At the time it had. Carmen felt a slight sick feeling of exhaustion starting in the bottom of her stomach.
They stood in the baggage claim. They were so busy scanning for Tibby they kept forgetting about their bags. Bee’s army-surplus duffel went around the belt multiple times unclaimed.
They could barely pass a sentence between them, so eager were they to catch sight of her. She was just … there. Just behind that pillar. Just walking through those double doors. She was so close, Carmen could practically bring her to life with the effort of her mind. Any second. Every face was, for a flash, Tibby’s face.
Finally they retrieved the bags and sat on them in the middle of the room. To Carmen it felt like they were stalled out ten feet from the finish line of a marathon. Everything had gone smoothly until now. They’d accepted their medals. They’d bathed in the congratulations. They’d donned those silly tinfoil blankets. You weren’t allowed to stop here.
“Something got messed up,” Bridget said. “The time, the date, something.”
“She might have gotten lost on the way to the airport,” Carmen offered.
“It’s not easy getting around this island,” Lena said. “Just getting down from Oia is a challenge. She probably didn’t leave enough time. She’s probably getting taken to the cleaners by some crooked cabbie as we speak.”
“Did you check your phone?” Bridget asked. Carmen had never expected Bee to say those words.
“It doesn’t work here. I told you that.”
“She’s probably trying to call us,” Lena said.
Bridget nodded. “We’ll just wait here.”
“Until she comes,” Lena said.
The three of them might have stayed there sitting on their suitcases until darkness fell, had not a porter respectfully ushered them out of the airport and to the curb around midday. The baggage handlers and airport officials were eager to get a meal. People went home for lunch here. There wasn’t another flight coming in for two hours.
“If we go back to Lena’s, though, I’m worried we’ll pass her on the way,” Carmen said to the porter, who gave no sign that he understood English.
Lena tried to translate, but that just made Carmen feel stupid. It wasn’t a thing you said to be heard or understood. It was a thing you said to say.
In disarray they packed all their stuff and themselves into a taxi. Lena said a few words in Greek. Carmen felt misgivings about leaving. This was where they were supposed to meet. She remembered the direction always given to them as children: “Just stay in one place; we’ll find you.”
Bridget seemed to understand Carmen’s mind. “Don’t worry. She’s probably at your grandparents’ house wondering where the hell we are. She couldn’t get to the airport for whatever reason. She’d figure we’d come to the house. She’ll be there. Where else would she be?”
Lena nodded and then Carmen joined in the nodding, but for the long, expensive taxi ride they remained mostly silent.
They walked and dragged the last uphill stretch to the house. The road was too narrow and too steep for a full
-size vehicle. By the time they were halfway up the hill, Bridget was carrying all three bags.
“Who needs a mule,” Carmen said.
Lena tried the handle on the weathered egg-yolk-colored door, in case Tibby was inside, but it was locked.
“Hello?” Lena called, unlocking and pushing open the door. The three of them stood sun-drunk and huffing in the dark of the shuttered house. “Hello?”
“Tibby?” Carmen shouted in such a loud voice it made Lena wince.
Lena opened a shutter and Bridget put down the bags. Slowly Carmen’s eyes took in the familiar contours. “Anybody home?” she called.
“I don’t think she’s here.”
“We should’ve stayed in the airport,” Carmen bleated wearily. “What if she’s there?” The more tired she felt, the worse she was at keeping her moods to herself.
“She may be stuck somewhere in between,” Lena pointed out in a reasonable voice, “but she’ll find her way back here eventually.” She waded deeper into the house. “And look, she was definitely here earlier. Look at these flowers!” She opened another couple of shutters. The girls had all been trained by her voluble grandmother not to open them willy-nilly, that a house here was essentially a fortress against the sun.
There were pink roses on the dining room table and white ones on the coffee table and in the small kitchen. A large bowl on the counter was piled with fruits and vegetables.
“She went shopping,” Carmen said. There were two loaves of bread atop the short fridge, and milk, cheese, butter, eggs, and bottles of water inside of it. She peered into a white bakery box and found a fancy cake.
Carmen felt her tired eyes welling at all the little offerings. The hand of Tibby so close and yet not here.
“I bet she’ll be back any minute,” she heard Lena saying as she headed up the stairs.
In the bedrooms Carmen found more pink and white roses in teacups and jam jars. They’d already decided it would be Bridget and Tibby in one room and Lena and Carmen in the other and no one in Valia and Bapi’s old room, because that would be creepy. Tibby knew Lena loved the front room with the views of the Caldera, and so she had left her two bags in the back bedroom. Also out of deference to Lena, Tibby had left her stuff pretty tidy, though she was a known slob.
Carmen heard Lena calling Tibby’s cellphone from the house line downstairs. “She’s not picking up. I’m just getting her message,” Lena called out in a general way. “I wonder if her phone works here.”
Carmen wandered in a circle around the little room. Seeing Tibby’s familiar things made her presence so acute, she half expected her to jump out from under the bed. The angle of Tibby’s discarded shoes instantly bridged two lost years. You could build a whole Tibby from that alone. Nothing had changed, really.
The rest of them had big feet, from Lena’s nine and a halfs to Carmen’s eight and a halfs to Bridget’s somewhere in between. Three of them could always share shoes in a pinch. But Tibby’s sixes looked like child shoes in comparison. They could never share shoes with Tibby. She wore these chunky, grommety, attitudinal shoes all the time, but they were too small to really make the point.
The particular scent of Tibby brought more tears to her eyes. Neither a sweet, perfumy smell nor a bad foot odor–ish smell, just a smell that conveyed Tibby about as uniquely as anything could. With the tears came a rushing feeling of missing her, the helpless sadness of not seeing her. Carmen hadn’t realized she’d been forcibly holding the sadness in. Now she let it overcome her.
Lena always described how she dreaded and mourned things before they even happened. Carmen was beginning to suspect that she was permitting herself to mourn this long separation only now that it was over.
Fate is not an eagle, it creeps like a rat.
—Elizabeth Bowen
Bridget pictured them as the three ants trapped in an amber bead of a necklace Tibby’s great-grandma Felicia had worn. It was odd the things that stuck with you. Bridget couldn’t remember most of her birthdays, her mother’s last day, her father’s current address, her college graduation, but how frequently she thought of those three damned insects stuck in a necklace belonging to Tibby’s ancient ancestor who happened to have been bananas.
It was dark. It was dinnertime and Tibby still hadn’t turned up. They didn’t want to eat anything or do anything or even say anything until Tibby got there. The three of them sat paralyzed in the living room. Bridget had the eerie sensation that their state of suspension was the culmination of nearly two years spent like that.
There were four of them. There were always four of them. It seemed, as it had always seemed, disloyal to allow any aspect of their friendship to progress without all of them present. No way could they start their magical week before Tibby appeared.
Lena was looking agitated. “Could she have gotten lost? The roads are really treacherous. I hope she wasn’t driving.”
“Lenny, she’s twenty-nine years old. She can handle herself. She’s the second-best driver of us, and even if she did get into some mishap it couldn’t be serious.”
Lena was nodding.
“She’s dependable with the seat belt, and you can barely go ten miles an hour on these roads.”
Lena, still nodding, wandered back to the kitchen to check again that there was a dial tone on the phone. It was a quirk of her father’s that he left the phone on in an empty house. Indeed, there was a dial tone, just as there had been a dial tone half an hour before. “She might not have this number,” Lena murmured.
“Probably not,” Carmen said from her stiff perch on the couch. Bridget could read Carmen’s anxiety by the way her collarbones stuck out.
Bridget cocked an ear. “Len, do not call her again. When she sees the number of times you called, she’s going to think you are psychotic.”
“I’m not. I mean I wasn’t,” Lena said, floating back to the living room. “I was just checking.”
Carmen picked at her fingernails. “Judging from the stuff in the kitchen, it seems like she made plans for dinner. Whatever happened, she’s going to figure out a way to get back here in time for dinner, right?”
By nine o’clock the wind had come up, and the mystery was turning rancid.
“They eat dinner really late here,” Carmen noted.
“Maybe she ran off with a handsome Greek.” Bridget was trying to be funny, but not even she found herself to be.
Between nine and ten, they barely moved. Bridget got up twice, once to look out the window into darkness and once to open the door. She looked up and down the windy, empty street, hoping this would be the moment that Tibby would come around the bend.
“I wish there was someone we could call,” Lena said.
“Do you think her parents might know anything?” Carmen asked.
Lena shook her head. “Anyway, it’s around four in the morning there.”
“What about Brian?” Bridget asked.
Carmen looked up. “Do you have a number for him?”
Bridget shook her head, as did Lena. They only had Tibby’s cellphone number, no landline in Australia where they might find him. “I wonder where he is?”
“Australia, I assume. He’s not here.”
Lena looked thoughtful. “What do we even know about them anymore? Do we know they’re together? I know they moved to Australia together, but do we know for sure what’s happened since? She hasn’t mentioned him in a long time.”
Bridget shrugged. Her legs were aching from holding them in one position for too long. “Tibby would have told us if they broke up.”
“She hasn’t mentioned much of anything in a long time.”
Bridget nodded. This was a conversation they’d had many versions of before. “I wish I knew why all the mystery.” In the light of the present, unsettling mystery, it seemed especially strange—unacceptable, really—not to know these things. How could they have gone around knowing so little? How could they have let that stand?
“This doesn’t happen by accident. Ther
e’s got to be some reason for her being out of touch,” Lena said.
Carmen crossed and uncrossed her legs. “She sent out emails. We’ve all gotten a few. What do you expect when she lives halfway around the world? Anyway, she obviously wants to be together now.”
Bridget shook her head, annoyed at herself for letting this go, for not spending enough time badgering Tibby. For not just getting on a plane and going to Australia if that was what it took. “When she turns up here, we’re going to sit the poor girl down and get some answers before we let her out of our sight.”
Carmen’s arms were crossed and her bones stuck out. “She’s just been busy, like all of us. Brian has been utterly, totally in love with Tibby since she was fifteen, and she’s the same way about him. There’s no way they broke up. Who besides us would she talk to about it? There’s no way she could go through something that big without us knowing.”
“Something is wrong,” Bridget said. They’d waited implicitly until midnight to say so. They’d waited for Bee to be the one to say it.
Lena’s hands were on her neck. “What should we do? Call the police? The consulate?” She’d been thinking of it since the sky turned dark. Her mind flashed back to the hundreds of signs they’d made when they were looking for their lost pants ten years before, and she felt like she was choking.
This island was a fucking sinkhole. It had lost most of itself under the ocean, for God’s sake. It was a terrible place for losing things.
Bridget got up and started to pace. “I feel like going out and looking for her,” she said.
“I think call the consulate first,” Carmen said to Lena.
Lena found the number in one of her grandparents’ ancient directories but couldn’t get a live voice on the phone.
Carmen’s face was serious. “The police?”
Lena found the number of the local precinct number and called it. Her heart was mashing around and her head was grasping for the way to say anything in Greek. The phone rang many times before a man picked it up.