Sisterhood Everlasting (Sisterhood 5)

She glanced at the brown box by the door, waiting to be taken to the post office. She thought of Effie. She looked at her hands and watched them as they picked up the thick envelope and eased it open. She considered her actions with a distant sense of disbelief, but what else was there to do? What was there to wait for? Who else was there to be?

You thought you had the choice to stay still or move forward, but you didn’t. As long as your heart kept pumping and your blood kept flowing and your lungs kept filling, you didn’t. The pang she felt for Tibby carried something like envy. You couldn’t stand still for anything short of death, and God knew she had tried.

Moving forward was hard enough, but to do it without Tibby felt intolerable. How could she keep going when Tibby couldn’t? It wasn’t the same world without Tibby. She didn’t know how to live in it. She wasn’t sure she wanted to. But did she have a choice?

And then came the harder thoughts. Tibby had thought she had a choice and she’d chosen no. She had rejected her life. And them. And Lena. Somewhere inside Lena was the infant who couldn’t believe that Tibby would leave her on purpose.

Why? Why had she done it? Why hadn’t she told them what was happening? Why had she let it get so far? Had she wanted to hurt them as much as possible?

No. Lena couldn’t accept that. Even if it was true, she couldn’t make that idea fit. And as a consequence the world split in two and there she perched, one foot on either side of the divide, incapable of moving one way or the other. She could not accept what had happened. But what was the alternative?

Her tendency was to hide from information, because every scrap of information she’d learned so far had been ruthless.

She looked at the box by the door. She pictured Effie alone in her fancy going-out clothes on the late train on Christmas. What would become of them? She couldn’t stand still anymore.

Her hands were sweating as she opened the envelope and pulled out its contents. There was a letter, typed, covering the front and back of two pages. There were two more, smaller envelopes, sealed. One said Lena on it, and the other, bewilderingly, was labeled for Kostos.

Lenny,

Hard as it is to think of your life going along without me, I’ve forced myself to do it, but I’m too attached to you not to put myself in the picture even after I can’t be there in body.

What you leave behind is the people you loved. You leave yourself in them. I couldn’t be happier than to be in you, Len. I’d like to picture myself and see your beautiful face. If you can put up with me, that’s where I’d like to live. In you and Bee and Carmen. But for the most part, that’s where I’ve always lived.

I can’t stand not being there to goad, challenge, and annoy you, Len, so please forgive me for doing it anyway. There’s something I need you to do. You’ll see I included a pair of letters for you and Kostos. I don’t want to be needlessly mysterious, but I also want to avoid the famous Lena obstructionism. So please, please be willing to deliver the one for Kostos to him: from your hand to his hand, in person, face-to-face. It’s a lot to ask, I know. But I also know you’ll do it, because that’s the kind of person you are.

I put a date on them, and I want you to wait until then to open them. I know I’m a huge pain in the ass, and because I’m gone you feel like you have to do what I say, but I have thought this through a little.

You’ll either hate me for it or you’ll love me, but please know I did it because I love you. Whether it goes brilliantly or badly, I hope you’ll forgive my intrusions.

There’s another thing too. Would you stop by and see Alice once in a while? Not often, just every few months or so. I don’t want you to talk about anything serious or sad. And of course I’d like you to hang out with Nicky and Katherine and my dad too, but it’s Alice who might need it most.

Now instead of having one sealed letter to haunt her, Lena had two. Two sealed envelopes marked with a date in March. Instead of just herself and Tibby to hide from, she now also had Kostos.

But as much as she dreaded it, she had a project to do for Tibby. Two projects, including seeing Alice. Projects were things, like her flowing blood and her pumping heart, that would keep her going forward whether she wanted to or not.

No pen, no ink,

no table,

no room,

no time,

no quiet,

no inclination.

—James Joyce

There was something about a wedding. No matter how much you put into it, you could always put in more. There was always someone else you could call, some other question you could ask, something else you could buy. You could put every worry, every desire, every whim, every moment of your waking day into a wedding, and it was big enough to absorb them all.

And weddings were cheerful. Wedding planning was cheerful. The colors were bright and the people you talked to laughed and smiled easily. They cheerfully and laughingly took your money.

A wedding was an opportunity for control. You could present yourself and your life and your husband-to-be exactly as you chose, and there would be a million pictures to document it. For as long as you lived you could imagine that your wedding was what you really were and not just what you labored and paid to have it look like.

Control meant there were also things you could leave out of a wedding.

“Mom, do you know when Big Carmen’s going to be in Puerto Rico?” Carmen asked casually, when she called her mother from the set.

“First of March to mid-April.”

“Do you know the exact date in April? Are we talking the twelfth? The sixteenth?”

“I don’t know—more like the sixteenth. You could call her. Why?”

“I’m just trying to nail down the date for the wedding.”

“It won’t be before the sixteenth, will it?”

“Well …”

“Carmen.”

“What?”

“You are not attempting to have this wedding without Abuela, are you?” Her mother could be annoyingly perceptive on occasion.

“Well, if she’s going to be in Puerto Rico, then I’m not going to expect her to—”

“Carmen, I don’t care if your grandmother is in Timbuktu, there is no way she is missing your wedding. If she has to crawl to the church, she will be there.”

Carmen decided this wasn’t the best time to mention that it wasn’t going to be in a church. “Well, Mom.” She sounded like she was five. “What if it’s a really small wedding?”

Her mother sighed. “Even if your wedding is so small you don’t have a groom, Abuela will expect to be there. Honestly, Carmen, banish the thought. She has been talking about your wedding since the day you were born.”

Carmen slid her eyes down the long list of calls she had teed up. She huffed out her breath. “Fine.”

“Carmen?”

Carmen pressed the end call button as a new PA poked his head into the makeup trailer. “Yeah?” She couldn’t think of the guy’s name.

“They need you on set.”

“Now?” she asked grumpily, as though she were being prettied up and paid to do nothing more than plan her wedding on her iPhone.

By day Bridget weeded the unimpressive garden of the Sea Star Inn and repaired a stone wall. By night she washed glasses and plates in the cocktail lounge, where the smells were really killing her. Through all the hours she found herself thinking of Tibby. She’d kept those thoughts at bay before, but now she let them come. She remembered and wondered and conjectured.

Some days she started with the earliest memories of childhood and worked forward through high school, college. The Traveling Pants years. And then after they graduated, Tibby living in New York and waiting tables and writing her scripts. And then about nine months later, both herself and Carmen landing in New York too. She remembered the two-plus years she and Tibby and Carmen and unofficially Lena had been roommates on Avenue C. And then Tibby moved in with Brian, first to Long Island City, then to Greenpoint, then to Bedford-Stuyvesant, al

ways in search of cheaper apartments, as Tibby tried to get her screenplays bought and her films produced and Brian tried to get his software company off the ground.