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

“You don’t have to do that, Tibby.”

“But I want to. I will.”

“Let’s see how it goes.”

“Okay,” she said, unnerved by his reserve, his reasonableness.

She realized he was right when he said that they couldn’t go back. For better or worse, it would be different now. Innocence was not one of the things you could get back.

“Maybe we can trade off,” he said.

Eric had probably hoped for a dinner alone in a restaurant where they could laugh and kiss and play romantic under-the-table foot games to their hearts’ content. Instead, he got underheated pesto, a distractedly made salad, and a lot of awkward silence from Bridget’s two poorly socialized family members.

He might have thought he’d get to sleep in a bed in a nice suburban house, but he got a scratchy couch in a falling-down house occupied mostly by ghosts.

He tolerated all of it bravely, and his reward did come when she tiptoed downstairs and led him by the hand into her room and shut the door quietly behind her. She knew her brother and father were happily ensconced in their headphones, and this one time it made her glad.

She sat him down on her bed and he groaned with delight as she hitched up her nightgown and sat on his lap, wrapping her tan legs around him. She kissed him long and deep, tangling him up in her web of limbs and fingers and soft hair.

“Why did you come back early?”

“For this,” he whispered.

“No, really.”

“Really.”

“Really?”

“I missed you.”

“Did you?”

“A lot.”

She hugged him harder.

“I thought of you everywhere all the time. On the beach. On the soccer field. In the water. Lying in bed I really thought of you.”

His expression was so shameless she laughed. “I mean it, Bee. Every girl I saw I wished was you.”

She looked at him with wonder. He was so much better at this than she was! She felt suddenly sad for herself and happy for him. Or rather, the opposite: She felt happy for herself, getting someone as wonderful as him, and sad for him, getting someone as wretched as her.

“Did you miss me?” he asked.

She looked at him thoughtfully. She didn’t want to lie. She had some complicated things to tell him and she wasn’t yet sure how. “When you told me you were going to Mexico, I wasn’t sure what it meant,” she said slowly. “I wasn’t sure if it meant you wanted to…go our own ways for a while.”

Each one of his features seemed to grow solemn in turn. “Did you really think that?”

“I wasn’t sure what to think.”

“Do you think that now?”

“No.” She knew her answer right away.

He put his hands on either side of her face. “I never thought of going separate ways. I never wanted that. The way I looked at it was, when you’re meant to be, what’s a summer?”

She felt the ache in her throat. He didn’t question his love. Why had she?

“So does that mean you didn’t miss me?” he asked.

“I didn’t realize how much until the end,” she said.

“And the beginning and the middle?”

She rubbed her cheek thoughtfully. “I think I was missing the idea of missing,” she said. “But I think I might have figured it out now.”

He let her pull his T-shirt over his head. He let her kiss him. He obliged when she pulled at the waist of his boxers, and he seemed eager to get her out of her nightgown. He was going to trust her and she was going to be worthy of it.

It was maybe strange to want to make love to your boyfriend in your old bedroom after such a summer. But it was undoubtedly what she wanted.

Maybe it was her need to connect old and new. Maybe it was her desire to put a happy memory, an act of love, into this house that had seen so few of them.

Carmen wore Perdita’s flowers in her hair and she kept quiet. She spoke when she was onstage and otherwise she floated around in the state of a dream. For three days, she didn’t look at her script.

The hardest part was the few hours in the middle of the night spent in her room. It was hard to be impervious to Julia’s overtures. It was perhaps harder to be impervious to Julia’s silent rage.

You don’t want me to be happy, she said to herself to ward off Julia’s poisonous spirit.

She wore her costume. She mused on the warmth of her skin and the sensation of new textures against it. She listened to Leontes. She listened to Polixenes and Autolycus and Paulina. She bathed her brain in luxurious language and mostly forgot about thinking.

She said her lines, but she did not look at Andrew and he said nothing to her. We’re trusting me to figure this out, she knew.

In the morning Eric had to leave, he said. Maybe he just wanted to leave. But he promised Bridget he’d meet her in Providence in a few days. That was a relief. She wanted to practice being better at missing him, but not quite yet.

Before she left home she had a number of things to take care of. The last was retrieving the boxes of stuff she had shoved into the basement in her apoplexy of cleaning the day before.

She sensed that her dad and Perry were happy with some of her alterations, but she didn’t want to go overboard. If Perry needed to keep his Lord of the Rings calendar from 2003, then so be it.

She walked down to the basement and hauled up the boxes one at a time. Going down for the last load, she finally thought to turn on the light to make sure she wasn’t forgetting anything.

Her eyes caught on a shelf holding a series of neatly placed boxes. She didn’t remember them—neither the shelves nor the boxes. How long had it been since she’d looked around down here? She walked over to study them more carefully.

Each of the boxes was labeled with a name and a year or, in a few cases, a span of years. The writing was all capitals, but she recognized it as her father’s.

In a state of breathlessness she took down Bridget from 1993. Was it kindergarten? Maybe first grade? Inside, carefully stacked and piled, were artworks, clay pieces, efforts at writing and tracing. There were pictures, some with notes on the back in her mother’s handwriting. There was a card from Greta. A necklace she remembered beading. There was a photograph of her with Tibby and Lena and Carmen. There was a crayon drawing she’d made of Perry with a tiny head, holding a newt.

She took down the box that said Marly, 1985–1990. There were pictures from her parents’ wedding, her mother’s journals, pictures her mother had drawn, the beginning of a baby book for her twins. Bridget never knew that her mother had drawn pictures.

She took down another of her boxes, Bridget 1994. Here were many more photographs of the Septembers. Here was the first of her soccer trophies. Bridget picked up a tiny cardboard box, the kind you got when you bought a piece of jewelry. She shook it, and she knew without looking what it was. She remembered the celebration of little teeth tucked under her pillow, expecting money and usually getting it.

She put it back without opening it. She put the boxes back in place on their shelves and sat down on the dusty floor.

She thought about the vast amount of work her father had put into saving these things, the care with which he had preserved every single object. Out of sight, but still here. Her mother was here too. They didn’t live big, maybe. But they lived.

She put her arms around her knees and hugged herself and let herself cry.

Lena extended her time in Bethesda by a few days because she sensed she might be needed there. Effie was leaving for a ten-day trip to Europe the following week, but until then, Lena sensed her sister might need some girly distraction. Lena was mentally preparing herself for round-the-clock manicures, pedicures, and home facials. One nice thing about Effie: There were few reversals in her life that a manicure couldn’t fix.

Lena had the idea of calling Leo and telling him where she was and why. But when she actually got him on the phone she decided not to. He was happy to hear f

rom her and eager to tell her about a new painting he had started, but he didn’t need to know where she was or when she’d see him. That wasn’t the way it would go between them. She knew that and she wasn’t sorry.

Was she? Honesty required that she ask that question of herself a second time. No, she wasn’t, she decided, trailing her hand over her bedspread, still looking at the phone. She would be happy to see him again. She admired him, she was attracted to him. But she wasn’t sorry to let it go. The interlude in Leo’s bed had been exciting and it had been clarifying for her, but even as it had unfolded she had sensed it was more like the end of the story than the beginning.

Lena went by Tibby’s and Bee’s houses that afternoon to say good-bye. Not long after she returned, she heard a knock at the door and Brian’s voice downstairs and understood that he and Effie had gone for a walk.