Sisterhood Everlasting (Sisterhood 5)

“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.