She stopped the car and peered over the wheel. She was debating whether to walk up to the farmhouse and knock on the door, when the very door swung open and a tall, thin man with a baby in his arms walked out of it. Her brain was trying to process the identity of these people, when she turned her head and a figure came running out of the barn and suddenly became Bridget. In a dreamlike way, Carmen turned her head again and watched the man with the baby become Brian. She was too surprised to get out of the car until Bridget flung open her door and pulled her out.
It was a completely strange place and yet here was the first familiar thing she’d felt in months. Bee put her arms around Carmen and held her for a long time, so artlessly it felt like nothing had changed. For all the stumbling and dreading Carmen had done over the first words, there was nothing she needed to say.
“Where are we?” she asked.
Brian was standing a few feet from her when Bridget pulled away. Carmen went to embrace him, but stopped and stared at the little girl in his arms for a long moment. She had the strangest feeling. She knew this face, but she hadn’t seen it in a long time.
“This is Bailey,” Brian said.
Tibby had a baby. Carmen was too awed to speak.
“There’s so much to tell you,” Bridget said excitedly.
It was like a dream you might have after death in which lost people came back to life, your friends loved you again no matter what you had done, and your failures were unaccountably forgiven.
Bridget grabbed Carmen’s hand, as naturally and tenderly as the old Bee would have, and pulled her toward a yellow cottage just beyond the house.
“Brian says Lena should be coming today too.”
Lena was a person who understood happiness through sadness, and because of it, the happiness that unfolded that day was robust.
The discovery of Bailey, a little girl plucked out of her memory, was all the more extraordinary because of her mother’s loss. You gave us a way to keep loving you, Tib. You must know this child will never be without mothers. Bailey’s face was so evocative and so beautiful, Lena had to turn her head away.
Soon after she and Kostos had arrived, Lena had taken a few moments sitting on the grass with Bridget and Carmen to confirm what she already knew from Tibby’s last letter. Painful as the facts of it were, they made sense to her. Each one took its sensible place in the tragedy, and the joy of their reunion was all the lovelier in light of its sadness.
And then there was Kostos. Out of the soil of more than a dozen years of disappointment, joy bloomed in every single thing she and Kostos did together, in every dumb thing. Sitting next to him in the car on the drive up, buying him a cup of coffee at the gas station (learning how he liked it for a thousand future times), sharing a Milky Way, getting lost on the back roads, her spilling her water bottle on her lap, him mopping at her skirt with two napkins.
There was sexiness in everything that passed between them: her putting change in his hand for the toll, him pushing her hair aside to see the map better. Every time he looked at her. Every time she looked at him.
And then there was that particular look they gave each other when they saw the queen-size bed made up and waiting in the magnificent barn loft intended for them. Every year of not having each other added something to that look.
How could they possibly wait? Kostos spun her into the bathroom and clutched her for a heated moment before they heard Bailey’s feet slapping across the wooden floor.
Tibby had given them the child’s dream of love, having all your needs met without having to ask, without even knowing what they were.
Lena recognized in each moment of that day, maybe in her happiness more than anyone’s, the hand of an artist. Tibby had spent the last fifteen years learning to write a script, and this was her gift to them, her masterpiece.
As Lena walked across the farmyard with Kostos to join the group for a spaghetti dinner in the big house, she looked up at the stars and gave Tibby thanks. She didn’t have to throw her thoughts far to know they reached her.
What was the best part? That was what Carmen asked herself as she lay on the yielding mattress that smelled like new, in a bedroom of the pristine cottage Brian insisted, crazily enough, belonged to her.
The best part was seeing Bee and Lena and knowing they were going to be okay. It was meeting Bailey for the first time, understanding without needing anyone to say it who she was. It was watching Lena and Kostos walking toward her holding hands. It was Lena’s happiness. It was Bee’s pregnancy and witnessing her and Eric’s obvious joy in it.
The saddest part, undoubtedly, was learning the truth about Tibby. The saddest thing was learning what she’d gone through. But maybe it was finally the happiest thing too, knowing she’d loved them all along, that they hadn’t failed her, knowing their time wasn’t over, that they’d lived the life they thought they had.
But as Carmen lay there, letting the thoughts breed and grow in her head, she pushed her fear aside and allowed the two things, the sadness and happiness, to mix. Tibby’s suffering had been outside of their friendship, outside of their control. It didn’t represent a failure of their bond. But Tibby had kept it from them, and that represented a different kind of failure. She hadn’t let them in at that darkest juncture in her life. They couldn’t have prevented any of it, but they could have given her comfort and they hadn’t. Why hadn’t they? Why hadn’t she let them?
Because we aren’t built for leaving, Carmen realized. Tibby hadn’t known how to leave them. There was no precedent. Maybe she hadn’t thought they could handle it. Maybe we couldn’t.
Carmen remembered the dream Tibby had once had that her great-grandma Felicia had gotten their Traveling Pants taxidermied as a graduation present. And she remembered Tibby describing her horror in the dream. But they have to be able to move! she’d screamed. Carmen wondered if they had forgotten that somewhere along the way. You had to let them move. Maybe you even had to let them go.
There were daffodils in a glass on the bedside table, and a few well-made pieces of furniture throughout the three small bedrooms of the house and the downstairs rooms. “You can add the rest yourself,” Brian told her. “I just wanted you to have a few of the basics, you know, to get you started.”
Carmen had looked at him in puzzlement and disbelief.
“I mean, you don’t have to add anything,” he’d added quickly. “It’s up to you. You can do whatever you like with it. It’s a place that will be here for you whenever you want it.”
It was hard to fathom that this was her little place, mind-blowing to think of all that Tibby must have considered. Tibby had tried her best to make it easier on them.
Carmen felt the
tears slide onto the pillow as she lay in this bed with the window open and the chirping coming from both grass and trees, with Bridget and Eric in the little house across the yard, and Lena and Kostos in the barn, and Brian and Bailey in the house next door. What a joyful context. How different from the Vietnamese restaurant, newspaper stand, and lighting store she was used to.
She remembered so well Tibby’s distress the summer they left for college, troubling over the notion of home. What would hold them together? Where would it ever be again?
Carmen did feel strangely, for the first time in her adult life, like she was home.
Could I revive within me
Her symphony and song,
To such a deep delight
’twould win me
That with music loud
and long
I would build that dome
in air.
—Samuel Coleridge
Epilogue
You’ll be happy to know, we did conduct the last pants ritual that Tibby had assembled for us in Greece but that we never got to have. I, Carmen, the last to arrive, was the one to suggest it. It seemed like the right thing to do, and I have always been a sucker for a ceremony.
On a much bleaker day in early November, Lena had carried the suitcase from Santorini to her parents’ house in Bethesda. Just a couple of days earlier, she’d asked her mom to ship it up to the farm.
We snuck away from the group, which had now grown to include Tibby’s parents and Nicky and Katherine staying in the farmhouse with Brian and Bailey. We decided to hold our ceremony in the loft of the barn, because with its shiny wooden floors and tall open space, it reminded us the most of Gilda’s, the aerobics studio where our mothers met and where the old ritual had always taken place. The absence of the pants, the incorporeal presence of Tibby, didn’t make it any less effective.
We stinted on no part of it. Not the candles nor the Pop-Tarts nor the Cheetos nor the tears. Bridget sang her lungs out along with Gloria Estefan. Tibby would have laughed over that. We held hands. Teenage Tibby tended to balk at that, but I knew she would want it now.