Forever in Blue: The Fourth Summer of the Sisterhood (Sisterhood 4)

She let big parts of days, whole days, go by without thinking of him. How could she let herself do that? Well, she was occupied with her floor, of course. But more worryingly, whenever she was around Peter, she let herself forget about Eric. That was wrong.

Almost since the day Eric had left for Mexico, she had been unable to picture his face. It was puzzling. She could sort of see the outline of his head, the general shape of his hair, but the middle was a blur. Why was that? She could picture people she didn’t care about. She could easily picture the fat-faced bursar at school. She could picture her roommate Aisha’s older sister, who had visited once. Why couldn’t she picture her own boyfriend? Why couldn’t she hold Eric in her mind when he was not with her? She knew intellectually that she loved him, but she couldn’t find a way to feel it just now.

And why not? Why couldn’t she reconstruct feelings that were so powerful when she was in his presence?

Because he wasn’t in her presence.

Was there something wrong with her heart? Was it failing to function? Did nothing get to her?

She thought of Peter and felt her heart kick up. No, it was working. It was working all too well.

But it was a limited heart, she realized, a literal heart that seemed to beat only in the present tense. Like desert air, it couldn’t hold on to heat once the sun was gone. Like a sluice, it seemed to work in one direction—forward, not back.

What would she write to Eric? What would she say? Would he detect that her tone was forced or evasive? Was he jealous? Was he fallible?

A guy named Martin came out of the office as she stood up to go in. “Don’t bother,” he said. “The satellite system is down.”

“No e-mail at all?” she asked.

He shook his head.

Guiltily, she felt happy to have the excuse rather than sad to have the problem. She passed Peter on her way out. “Is the hookup still down?” he asked her.

She nodded. “I hadn’t realized.”

“Since this morning,” he said. “We’re cut off, I’m afraid.”

On her way through the lab she checked the mortuary section. “How’s my girl Clytemnestra?” she asked the main biologist, Anton.

He seemed to enjoy the fly-by visits from Bridget. “We’ve got all of her. We’re doing some good work.”

“Like what?” she asked breezily.

“How old she was, what she ate, how she died.”

“Really. How did she die?”

“In childbirth.”

Bridget felt her face changing. “You can tell that?”

“Not with certainty. But it’s likely.”

She nodded. “How old was she?”

“Probably around nineteen or twenty.”

Bridget’s step was heavier as she left the lab than when she’d entered. She found herself wondering whether Clytemnestra’s baby had lived. What if they found a tiny skeleton as well? Would they call the fearless Bridget over for that?

Bridget bowed her head low passing the gravesite. Clytemnestra was thousands of years old, but it occurred to Bridget that she would always be nineteen or twenty.

Oh, Lordy, Bee.

I’ve got a lot of stuff to tell you. I think your e-mails might not be getting through. I can’t write it in this letter, but call me soon, okay?

Have fun with these here Pants and don’t do anything I wouldn’t do. Which should severely limit your options. But, ahem, may include one thing you might not THINK you could do but which I might in fact be capable of doing or even have done. Hint, hint.

Did I just write that sentence?

Love you,

Tibby

“Maybe not this weekend,” Tibby found herself saying to Brian over the phone.

“I could come just for Sunday.”

“I have to work on Sunday. And also, I have to get my stuff ready for classes starting on Monday.”

“Oh. Right.”

She could hear Brian walking around his room. She knew the tread of his shoes, the creaky sound of the floor, and the particular ratio of carpet to wood.

“I could just come for the night on Wednesday,” he suggested.

Why couldn’t Brian see that he should let it go for a while? Why was he so obtuse?

“Midweek isn’t good,” she pronounced. If he was going to be obtuse, she wasn’t going to bother with intricate excuses.

“Next weekend, then.”

“Maybe.”

She heard him pacing. “Tibby?”

“Yeah?”

“The thing we were really worried about…”

He wanted her to interrupt him, to put words in the blank, but she did not oblige.

“You said before…you’re not…worried anymore?”

“No. I told you. I think it’s okay.”

She’d been so joyful at this news on Sunday. Why couldn’t she let him be a part of it? She was stingy with the bad news and even stingier with the good.

She hung up the phone and sat on her floor, wondering. Why was she annoyed at him? Her period was full force; she was no longer afraid of pregnancy. No foul, no fault. (Or how did that go?) Why couldn’t she go back to feeling happy? She’d thought the single red spot on her underwear would put everything back to right, but it hadn’t. Why not?

It was as though something inside Tibby had gotten turned in the wrong direction.

The uncertainty in his voice, the number of times he called, his desperate desire for reassurance. Why did this bother her so much?

But strangely, this question she meant to ask was undermined by a deeper question she didn’t mean to ask: Why hadn’t it bothered her before?

Leo appeared, as a good model should, at exactly the designated hour of nine o’clock.

Lena opened the door to her tiny dorm room and let him in. She’d been sitting on her bed in her quiet room for the preceding twenty minutes, hands sweating, mind blank. r />

She could not hide her nervousness. There was no point.

“You ready?” he asked. Was his voice pitched slightly higher than usual?

“I think so,” she squeaked. She gestured toward her French easel, upon which was perched her freshly gessoed eighteen-by-twenty-four-inch canvas. Her palette was ready. Her paints were assembled.

With him inside it, her room was almost comically small. How, exactly, was this going to work? How could she get far enough away to see more than three inches of his rib cage? She hadn’t thought this through very well. (She couldn’t even manage to think about it.)

“Should I be…on the bed?” he asked. He was uncertain too. His uncertainty made her both more terrified and slightly more in control. Somebody had to steer the ship.

“I thought…yes. Only—”

“Yeah, you can’t exactly—”

“Yeah, it’s pretty close.”

“What if I…”

He tried lying across the bed a few different ways, clothes blessedly on. Each time she found herself staring directly, and at close range, into his crotch.

Somewhere deep inside, Lena knew this was funny, but so panicked was she, she could no more access a laugh than if she were in the middle of a plane crash.

He seemed to recognize this. He sat up. “What about a seated pose?” he said.

He tried a few of those.

Lena backed up as far as she could. With his help she moved her dresser and sat with her back pressed against the wall. She shook her head. “I think this only works if we cut a hole in the wall and I paint you from Dana Trower’s room.”

He shrugged. “Dana might not go for it.”

Was it too soon to give up? They’d given it the old summer-school try. Maybe they could just go have another iced coffee.

“I think I know the answer,” he said.

Iced coffee? She cleared her throat. “What’s that?”

“Foreshortening.”

“Yeah?”