Sisterhood Everlasting

  “English?” was the first thing she asked him, disappointingly.

  “A little. No. You want to call back?” he asked her in Greek.

  “No. I need to talk to someone now,” she said, also in Greek. She didn’t realize she wasn’t speaking English until she’d spoken. She explained, in Greek apparently, about Tibby. She talked and listened for several minutes, noticing Bee’s and Carmen’s surprised eyes on her face. They hovered as she hung up the phone.

  “How did you do that?” Carmen asked her breathlessly.

  “I’ve been practicing.”

  “What did they say?” Bridget asked.

  “He said to call back if she’s missing for twenty-four hours. She’s not technically missing until then. But he took down all the information. He has her name and age and description and our number and address and everything.” She pressed her lips together. She felt suddenly tired, though nowhere near sleep. “I don’t know what else to do.”

  “We’ll wait,” Bee said.

  Nobody tried to suggest eating or sleeping. Talking was the only comfort they had.

  By the time dawn made its way through the slats of the shutters, they couldn’t think of any more stories to tell themselves about what could have happened. It had been two nights now without sleep, and the whole world had taken on an alien aspect. Carmen had long since searched the back bedroom for any note or clue as to where Tibby might have gone, though it felt wrong to open Tibby’s duffel bag.

  “There is some logical explanation,” Carmen told them. “There always is.”

  The knock at the door came around two hours past dawn.

  Though they had sat seemingly inert, two on the couch, Lena in the chair, for the last hour, they were all three on their feet and at the door almost instantly.

  It wasn’t Tibby. It was the opposite of her. It was two men in uniform, one young and one middle-aged. The older one took a step forward. “Lena Kaligaris?” he said.

  Lena raised her hand like an elementary school student. “Me,” she said.

  “You called the precinct last night,” he said to her in Greek.

  “Do you speak English?” Whatever he had to say she didn’t want to hear alone.

  “Yes. Okay.” He looked at his partner. Lena was searching for some reassuring casualness in their manner, but she didn’t see it. “You called about your friend. Tibby.” The way he said it sounded like “Teeeby.” “She did not come home?” Lena felt Bee’s hand wrap around hers.

  “No. Not yet. Is everything okay?” Her words made a faint whisper in a howl of a windstorm in her head. People like this didn’t come to your house if everything was okay.

  He glanced again at his partner. “Early this morning a fishing boat passing Finikia … they called the guard. Well. They found a body. A girl. A swimmer. A bather, you say? She must have drowned many hours before. We regret to say we think this could be your friend.”

  There was a sound that came from somewhere. Maybe Carmen. Maybe her. Lena shook her head hard. There were these thoughts, these ideas, climbing, scraping, shouting to be let in, but she wouldn’t let them. She felt Bee’s arm shaking at the end of her hand. “I don’t think so. No. I don’t think she would go swimming. I think that must be somebody else.” Her voice didn’t sound like hers, it sounded strangely like Valia’s, impermeable, stubborn, and sure. No, that drowned swimmer must belong to somebody else’s tragedy. It didn’t feel like theirs.

  “Are you, any of you, her family? What you call next of kin? If someone could come to”—the police officer took out his handkerchief and wiped his face—“to identify the body, if it is your …”

  “The body fits the description you gave on the phone,” the younger partner offered solemnly in Greek. “If this is a mistake we are very, very sorry.”

  And if it wasn’t? Lena couldn’t help choking on the thought. What was he then?

  But it was a mistake. “She wouldn’t be swimming. It’s late October. Nobody goes swimming now,” Valia’s voice insisted, coming out of Lena’s mouth.

  The older one shook his head. “The beaches are full with bathers all day. This month is very warm. The water is still not so cold but the currents are dangerous.” The perspiration dripping down his temples seemed to make the point.

  There was that scratching wriggling somewhere under Lena’s skull, like mice that couldn’t escape, and how long could she continue to ignore them?

  “We are her friends,” Bridget said. It hurt Lena’s heart to see Bee’s mouth quiver like that.

  “All just friends? Not her family?”

  Bridget shook her head slowly. It felt like a heavy penance to be wrested from her at such a time. “Just friends. Not her family.”

  Lena needed only to glance at Carmen’s face to see the childlike rebellion going on in there. Just friends? More than family! Do you have any idea who we are?

  “Do you know where is her family? She is not married? We found some clothes and a mobile phone left overnight at the beach at Ammoudi. We think they could be hers. The phone is registered to a number in Australia. We tried to call it but we spoke only to a message machine.”

  “She lives in Australia now. Her family is in the United States. She is not married,” Bridget said.

  “We are like her family,” Carmen couldn’t keep herself from adding. Lena heard the sob at the end of it. It just hung there.

  Lena shook her head hard to try to relieve the scritch-scritch-scratching at the base of her skull. “We can call her parents,” Lena said. “If that’s what you need.”

  “You want that I call?” the older officer asked deferentially.

  Lena tried to breathe. “No, I don’t want you to call. I will call.”

  This is the way the world ends

  Not with a bang

  but a whimper.

  —T. S. Eliot

  It seemed to Bridget when she thought of it later that there had been two systems operating in her mind through that long day and that they had never matched up, like two wildly spinning gears not quite close enough to fit together.

  There was the small gear spinning the minute-by-minute things—Tibby is uncomfortable, why are they making her lie on that hard table? Her head hurts. Tibby, get off there. Her orange toenail polish, the familiar freckles along her shinbones, the glint of a tiny gold stud in her nose, the wrong color of her skin. Why was she stuck in a bag? How could she stand it? Tibby was the one who’d scream when you covered her with the blanket in hide-and-seek. Do not zip that up. No, please don’t. It is so cold in here. She could get sick. Regular colds went right to pneumonia with Tibby.

  The second gear spun with the big, abstract, unfathomable things. Tibby is not really here anymore. Tibby is gone. She won’t be coming back. That is forever.

  All the places where the two gears might have fit together and pushed her understanding forward, they didn’t. They just spun apart, getting her nowhere.

  You are my friend. You are here and I need you. That was living and true. You are gone. You are not coming back. That was also true.

  Between alive and dead there was no common ground.

  Even long after, Lena wasn’t sure her mind was working that day. She did things and said things and saw things, but they bounced off her head like so many Ping-Pong balls. She knew they were terrible things, destroying her happiness by the minute, but she forgot each thing as soon as it happened. How she got to the police station, the hospital, where she sat, who drove them, what the basement of the hospital looked like, what the detective told them, and later, what Lena said to Tibby’s mother, Alice Rollins, on the phone from the precinct. And what Alice said to her.

  She forgot everything instantly, as though she had no memory apparatus at all. But in a sick-feeling way, she also knew her eyes and her ears were taking these things in and keeping them. These images and words would be there waiting for her, settling into some deeper layer that would someday resurface—maybe that night, maybe tomorrow, maybe months or y
ears from now—and make her feel crazy and scared. They would sneak into her dreams and fracture in weird ways that would make her dislike a certain kind of car she couldn’t remember having ridden in, or the particular perfume on a person she didn’t remember speaking to, or the taste of a certain cup of tea she didn’t remember drinking.

  Oh, you’ll remember them.

  She knew that memory divided into terms short and long. In the short term Lena was only aware that she was standing. Long term, she was scared that she was full of cracks and soon to fold.

  Late that night, without food or discussion, they returned to Valia’s house and trod upstairs one by one. Bridget went into the bedroom she was sharing with Tibby and tipped onto the bed like a tree cut at the base. She waited to hear the others using the bathroom, but she didn’t. There was no talking. There was no noise at all. She understood it. In midst of all the big traumas there were the small ones to avoid too. Like having to look at yourself in the mirror over the sink while you brushed your teeth, knowing what you knew.

  After a while, Bridget changed beds. She got into the one on which rested Tibby’s soft duffel bag. She got under the covers and put her arms around the bag. She could smell Tibby. It used to be she couldn’t smell Tibby’s smell in the way you couldn’t smell your own; it was too familiar. But tonight she could. This was some living part of Tibby still here, and she held on to it. There was more of Tibby with her here and now than in what she had seen in the cold basement room that day.

  Each time her mind flashed on that image for a second, a fraction of a second, it blinded her like a flashbulb, burning out the center of her mind’s eye to blackness. Already she could feel the image dividing her life into two halves. Her life leading up to today was innocence and unrealized joy for not yet having seen that image. The rest of her life would unfold as the part after she had.

  And what if the second part blotted out the first? What if the second part was all she was left with? The thousand precious images of their lives together she suddenly imagined curling up and melting in the basement furnace at the end of Citizen Kane. She knew that movie because Tibby had made her watch it the whole way through, fearing Bridget would spend her life as a film imbecile, knowing nothing but Napoleon Dynamite and The Princess Bride.

  I’m sorry, Tib. I think I did end up a film imbecile, and there’s no help for me now.

  Carmen lay in the quiet dark imagining where Tibby was, wondering how it felt to be there. It was the worst thing to think of, but she wanted to try to be brave, as it seemed horrifically brave of Tibby to be dead.

  She couldn’t fathom how Tibby could have gone to this place where they couldn’t follow her. She tried to imagine the moment it had happened and whether Tibby was scared. It was the worst thought, but she tried to follow it, no matter how much it hurt, because she didn’t want Tibby to have to be all alone. It was the only way Carmen could think of to be with her.

  Later in the night it struck Carmen as all out of order. She felt that Tibby’s leaving this life ought to have more parallels with how she had come into it. The four of them did these things together. They were born together. They grew up together. They should get married at the same time, at least roughly. They should have children together. They should complain about menopause together and judge people who got face-lifts together and be grandmothers together and all die within seventeen days together. That was how it ought to happen. Carmen felt that a mistake had been made, that an oversight had been so specifically mishandled that if it were brought to the attention of the right person, maybe it could be recalled, like a batch of bad ground beef. It was a mistake.

  But if it couldn’t be rectified, then what? They weren’t on the map anymore; they were living some other kind of life, unfamiliar and deeply inferior, for which they were unfit.

  But Carmen didn’t really believe it. She didn’t really believe Tibby belonged to death, to that big idea, to the careless world.

  She belongs to us.

  Sitting on the top stair, alone in the night, Lena realized that a fundamental layer of their happiness depended on the four of them being close to one another. Their lives were independent and full. Their friendship was only one aspect of their lives, but it seemed to give meaning to all the others.

  The most perfect bedrock of happiness was the four of them at nineteen, gathered on the ledge and staring at the place where the ocean blended into the sky on their last day in Santorini. Or the summer night when they were twenty-four and the power went out in New York City and they lay on blankets on the floor, surrounded by candles, talking all night, eating everything perishable in the fridge and freezer, including two and a half pints of ice cream. Even that last night, at Teller’s Bar on East Fifth Street, the goodbye she hadn’t known was goodbye, Lena had looked around the table with a sense of security and a feeling of joy about the future she hadn’t felt since.

  That happiness eroded when they were apart, out of sync and out of touch. It quaked the night Lena discovered Tibby had moved to Australia without even explaining it to her and she couldn’t get either Bee or Carmen on the phone to ask them what they knew.

  And now what? If happiness depended on their being together, then what could you possibly say about this day?

  And for all our inventions

  In matters of love loss,

  we’ve no recourse at all.

  —The Shins

  Lena had tried to make Tibby’s parents feel welcome when they arrived in Santorini. They did what they could. She, Bridget, and Carmen, the three of them, silent and dark, like shadows without bodies to cast them, managed to rent a car and get to the airport and wait for the plane to come down. It was an airport they had learned to loathe.

  Lena had tried to air out her grandparents’ old bedroom and had made it up with clean sheets, but the Rollinses insisted on a hotel, and that was fine. They needed to grieve alone, was what Tibby’s dad said. Lena wondered if, really, there was any choice in that. Everyone grieved alone.

  During the three black days of that trip, Alice Rollins came to the house in Oia exactly once. Once Lena met Tibby’s parents at the morgue, where she attempted to translate their desire to waive the full autopsy. The cause of death had been determined to be accidental drowning, and they wanted to get the body home to the United States as soon as possible. During the same three days, Carmen dragged Lena and Bridget to see Tibby’s hollowed-out parents at their hotel in Fira exactly once. The Rollinses had managed to find the only grim, gray-office-building hotel in a spangled holiday town that mocked them day and night with blasting cruise boats and endless vacationers getting drunk on open terraces.

  In the dreary lobby five of them drooped over cups of bitter tea. Alice’s skin looked as thin and colorless as skim milk. Tibby’s father bit at his lips savagely.

  Of the many topics they did not discuss, one was Brian. A detective at the precinct mentioned at some point after they’d claimed her body that he’d received a call from a distraught man responding to the message the detective had left at Tibby’s home phone number in Australia. He didn’t recall the man’s name—he’d written it in the file. “Not her husband. Her boyfriend,” he’d said dismissively in Greek. “But did you tell him?” Lena had asked. “Yes, I told him,” he’d responded. Between the detective’s tone and his lack of English, Lena doubted the conversation had gone easily. She felt incipient compassion for this boyfriend, who she felt sure was Brian, but she didn’t have the stamina to think it through, let alone make contact with Brian herself. She was too scared of her own feelings to take any part in his. She didn’t know whether Tibby’s parents had spoken to him. She doubted they had.

  As she watched them all, Lena felt heartless and detached—detached from herself as well as from them. They’d all fallen down the same hole and were staring at one another in a mixture of unassigned blame and disbelief that the tragedy that had sent them down here could never be undone. They were here all at once, but not together. Survival too
k self-absorption, and it made them strangers with nothing to do and no way to relate. Emergencies gave you a shape and a plot to take part in, while death was no story at all. It left you nothing.

  Lena felt cold on the surface. Cold and eerily electrified in a way that made the hair on her arms stand on end. She felt a dry snap in the air that touched the outside of her skin, and a roiling, stewing punishment waiting underneath.

  None of them really knew how to comfort one another. She guessed that every one of them felt privately like the most bereaved.

  The one time Alice came to Lena’s house was to collect Tibby’s belongings. It had to be done. Bridget had offered to bring the bags to the hotel, even to go through them with her, but Alice said no.

  Alice spent a long time in the back bedroom with the door closed while the three of them sat in a row on the couch. Now and then they heard a choke or a sob come from Alice that wasn’t much different from sounds they had made and heard among themselves.

  At last Alice came down and dumped a suitcase on the floor in the middle of the living room. “I think this is all stuff for you girls,” Alice said. Her face was splotchy. “Okay.”

  The four of them looked at it. None of them moved.

  “Okay,” Alice said again, staring at them as though they were supposed to do something. Nobody knew what it was.

  Bridget wondered at how little of Alice seemed to touch the ground by this point. She was all gaze and no traction.

  I’m sorry we’re still alive, Bridget thought. She didn’t begrudge Alice the feeling she was almost certainly having as she looked at her daughter’s friends. Plenty of times Bridget had wished every other mother dead if she could have kept hers. You love us, I know, but when it comes down to it, we are other people’s daughters.

  That was the tone of Bridget’s brain now. A diseased, philosophical lassitude she could barely recognize.