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

She closed her door and sat on her bed and waited patiently for the noise to start. Within forty-five minutes it did. First Lena heard the front door slam. Then she heard the pounding on the steps and the slam of Effie’s bedroom door.

She knew better than to relax. Minutes after Effie’s door slammed the first time it slammed again, and then Lena’s own door flew open.

“I cannot believe her!” Effie’s face was red and her eyes were smeared with black. It had to have been an ambush of sorts, because Effie had an almost unerring instinct for when to wear waterproof mascara.

Lena deliberated with herself as to how much knowledge to convey. She decided to be quiet. When it came to Effie, quiet usually worked best.

“Why did she tell me it was over? I gave her the chance! Why did she lie?” Effie’s gestures were big with indignation.

Lena tucked her hands under her.

“Brian is an idiot! Why would he go back to her? After what she did? She doesn’t care about him! She doesn’t love him!”

Lena opened her mouth even though she shouldn’t have. “How do you know that, Ef?” Instantly she regretted the mistake.

“What?” Effie came in closer, bearing down. “Are you saying she does?”

Lena kept her voice low and uncommitted. “Don’t you think it’s possible?”

“No! It’s not! Do you know how she treated him?” She shook her hands emphatically. “You don’t treat someone like that if you love them!”

Lena felt her own face warming. Oh, but sometimes you do.

“Lena? Lena!”

Lena looked up.

“You are siding with her, aren’t you? I knew this would happen! You are taking Tibby’s side, even after what she did!”

“Effie, no—”

“You are! Just admit it. Tibby lied to me, she treated Brian like crap, she betrayed me even after I went to New York to get her permission, and you are still siding with her against your own sister!”

“No, Effie—” This had taken a wrong turn. The path to manicures had been forsaken.

“It’s true!” Effie was really crying now, and Lena’s heart felt frail. These were not histrionic tears, but sad, uncontrollable ones.

And Lena knew they had gotten to a deeper, harder thing, even harder than losing the boy you thought you loved.

“You always do that! You do! You always have. You know that?”

Lena felt the dull ache in her throat. “Effie—”

“You do. You do, Lena. I am your only sister, but you always choose them over me.”

“Effie.” Lena stood up to try to comfort her or touch her or even block her way, but it was too late. Sobbing, Effie fled.

Lena wished for a hearty door slam, but that wasn’t what she got. Her door swayed quietly so that she could still hear her sister’s tears. She minded them more than all the shouts and slams put together.

She tried to go to Effie’s room a while later, but Effie wouldn’t answer. The next day, Effie wouldn’t open her door at all.

Lena left for a few hours in the late afternoon, and when she came back, Effie’s door was still shut. She still would not answer.

Lena spent most of the evening hours quietly in her room, wondering whether she’d done the wrong thing. Had she really chosen Tibby over Effie? It didn’t feel that simple. In a way that was almost more troubling, she felt like she’d chosen one way of being over another. She’d chosen Tibby’s agony over Effie’s joy. In a weird way, she’d chosen herself.

Before Bridget left home she went to the pet store and came home with a rabbit and a hutch.

“It’s for you,” she said to Perry, presenting it to him in the backyard.

He was startled and he didn’t want to accept it at first, but as he held the little creature she could see his mind changing.

He began to get excited as they set up the hutch under the dogwood tree. He held the rabbit in his arms and fed it a stalk of wilted celery.

“I’ll have to get a water bottle,” he noted to himself and to her. “And carrots and lettuce and stuff.”

“You can borrow my bike if you want,” she said.

He nodded. How nice he looked with a little sun on his face.

She would come back home again in the next few weeks. She promised herself she would. And in the meantime Perry would have the company of this warm-blooded and furry thing. A reason to get out of his room and out of the house. Something to take care of, something that needed him. Something to nuzzle his neck and crawl down his shirt, to get him back into the practice of loving another soul.

She suspected that what he really needed were antidepressants, but until she could rally herself for that effort, a baby bunny rabbit was the next best thing.

He named it Barnacle. She had no idea why.

“She’s got to come out eventually, right?” Lena said to her mother the next morning in the kitchen.

“Effie?” her mom said.

“Yeah. Have you seen her?”

“She left early this morning. Daddy drove her to the airport.”

“What? You are kidding me! Where did she go?”

“She went to Greece.”

Lena was stunned. “She went already?”

“She called Grandma last night and asked if she could stay in Oia for the week. Grandma was delighted. She wants Effie to help her paint her house. Your father changed the ticket on the computer.”

How had she missed all of this? “She left this morning?”

“Yes.”

Lena scratched violently at a bug bite on her wrist. She needed to think for a minute. “Did she seem okay?”

Her mother gave the first sign of knowledge. “Depends on what you mean by okay.”

“Will she talk to me if I call her?”

“Maybe you should give her a few days.”

Lena felt stricken. “That bad, huh?” She kept her eyes down.

“Lena, honey, she feels betrayed,” her mother said, perching on a tall kitchen stool. Ari rarely gave in to a true sit.

Lena put her arms on the counter. “Brian didn’t love her, Mom. She was going to have to notice that eventually.”

“I think you’re right. And I think Brian basically told her that as gently as he could,” Ari said.

“You do?”

“I do. But I don’t think it’s Brian’s love she’s missing.”

Lena had thought she’d be needed here at home. Now she wasn’t. She couldn’t reach Effie on the phone to make anything right, and she was too guilty and fitful to hang around sidestepping conversations with her father about her plans for the future.

So she came up with an even crazier idea.

She fooled with the phone in her father’s office until she managed to get Tibby and Bee on at the same time. Within two minutes she’d presented her crazy idea and they’d both agreed to it.

Once she secured the borrowing of her mother’s car, she went upstairs to pack her bag.

“Hey, Mom?”

“Yeah?”

“Have you seen the Traveling Pants?” Lena went down to the kitchen to ask the question rather than just shout it.

>   “No. I don’t think so.”

“I thought they were in my room.” She began to feel a touch of nervousness. “Was anybody in here cleaning or doing laundry yesterday?” She trusted her mother and the regular housekeeper, Joan, not to do anything insane, but once in a while there was a substitute.

“No. Joan was here on Friday. That’s it. Are you sure you had them? That you brought them from school?”

“Yeah. I’ll go back and look more,” Lena said, darting back up the steps to her room. She checked everywhere, even hopeless places like her bottom drawers and a trunk she hadn’t opened in months.

She knew she had brought them home for Tibby to wear to the party. Tibby had worn them and then given them back. She had given them back, right?

Lena thought she had, but there was enough doubt to provide modest comfort for the moment.

Opening night arrived, and Carmen’s stomach somehow climbed into her neck. She might have thrown it up, but luckily, it stayed attached.

There were photographers, critics, hundreds of people. Andrew was trying to protect her. She could feel that. He held her hand and walked her around backstage.

Jonathan kissed her and pulled her hair.

“Lovely.” Ian nodded at her decked out in her flowers. He kissed her head and she thought she might cry.

Could she do this? Did she know how? She tried to swallow her stomach back down to her stomach again.

From where she sat backstage, she listened to the first act and let the trance begin. She heard the words more clearly than she ever had before. She heard more in each word, more in each combination of words, and exponentially more in each line of words.

These were real performers. Her heart swelled to know them. They had given so much in five weeks of rehearsals, she would have thought they’d given everything. But now she knew that they had saved something for this.

During intermission she peeked out at the theater, watching it refill. When it was almost full and the lights blinked on and off, she saw three people file in through the center door and her breath caught. Time lapsed as they walked down the center aisle: three teenage girls all in a row.