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

“Right. Definitely,” Carmen said. The books struck a certain chord in Carmen. She wondered why she hadn’t thought of going to the library. She, a girl who trusted herself to beg, borrow, study, and steal more than she trusted herself to be naturally good at something.

She was exhausted, but instead of going straight to sleep, she left the light on for a while and confused herself about the different kinds of verse.

The following night Julia coached her about looking through the text and beyond the text. And then Carmen read the passage Julia recommended about Leontes as self and antiself while Julia feverishly wrote something at her desk. Around midnight, when Carmen was getting ready to turn off the light, Julia presented it to her.

“Here, I marked this up for you.”

It was a half inch of photocopied pages from the script, marked up with a dizzying number of symbols and annotations.

“I wrote the meter out for you,” Julia explained. “I tried to put the beats in the way you’re supposed to.”

“Really.”

“Yeah. It seemed like you could use some help with that.”

“Okay. Yeah.”

Julia pointed to the first line and started reading it, exaggerating the rhythm.

“I get it.”

“Do you?”

“I think so.”

“Do you want to try it?”

Carmen didn’t want to try it. She didn’t really get it at all and she felt stupid and she wanted to go to sleep.

“Just try a line or two,” Julia prodded.

Carmen tried.

“No, it’s like this,” Julia said, demonstrating.

And so it went until Carmen was doubly exhausted and also had a headache.

On Sunday of that weekend, Tibby went to see Mrs. Graffman, mother of her old friend Bailey. Tibby was going back to New York by train that night, and she wanted to make some effort to see her before she left.

“Do you want to meet for coffee or something?” Tibby asked when she called.

“That’s fine. Let’s meet at the place around the corner on Highland.”

“Perfect,” Tibby said, relieved. She preferred not to go to the Graffmans’ house if she could avoid it.

Tibby had tried to visit Mrs. Graffman, or at least call, the few times she’d been home in the last year. Usually she wanted to, but today it felt more like an obligation.

Tibby gave Mrs. Graffman a brief hug at the entrance where she was waiting. They got their coffee at the counter and sat down at a tiny table by the front window.

“How’re things?” Mrs. Graffman asked. She looked relaxed in her yoga pants and slightly muddy gardening sneakers. She was more robust-looking than she’d been six months and a year ago.

Tibby considered neither the question nor her answer. “Pretty good, I guess. How about you?”

“Well, you know.”

Tibby nodded. The “you know” meant that she missed Bailey and that life was only good or remarkable in a very limited context when you’d lost your only child.

“But work is fine. I switched firms, did I tell you that?”

“I think you had just switched last time,” Tibby said.

“I redid the downstairs bathroom. Mr. Graffman is training for the Marine Corps Marathon.”

“Wow, that’s great,” Tibby said.

“We try to keep our sense of purpose, you know?”

“Yes,” said Tibby. Mrs. Graffman looked sad, but to Tibby’s relief, she didn’t look urgently sad in a way that needed tending.

“What about you, my dear?”

“Well, I’m taking this intensive screenwriting course. We’re supposed to have a full-length script done by mid-August.”

“That’s exciting.”

Suddenly Tibby realized that Mrs. Graffman was going to want to know what it was about.

“What’s it about?” she asked cheerfully, right on schedule.

Tibby sipped her coffee too fast and burned her tongue. “I’m kind of working with a bunch of different themes, still. I’m kind of gathering images, you know?” She had heard someone say that once, and she thought it sounded cool. But in the air between her and Mrs. Graffman it sounded like the fakest thing ever.

“Interesting.”

Which is another way of saying I haven’t started, Tibby should have said, but didn’t.

“And how about our friend Brian?” Mrs. Graffman asked with a smile. She was another one of Brian’s many ardent parent-aged fans.

“He’s…well. He’s good, I guess. I haven’t been seeing him as much.”

Mrs. Graffman had a question in her eyes, so Tibby kept talking so she wouldn’t get to ask it. “It’s just been so crazy, because I have a job and school and he has two jobs and we’re in different cities, and so…you know.”

“I can imagine,” Mrs. Graffman said. “But next year you’ll be together?”

“Well.” Tibby wished she could leave it at that. She wanted to go back to her tiny dorm room, hours from home, and watch TV. “I don’t know. It’s kind of tricky.”

You see, I broke up with him. And now, oddly enough, it seems that as a consequence, we are not together anymore and our future is no longer shared. How mysterious. Who would have thought?

Mrs. Graffman was too sensitive to push into places Tibby didn’t want to go. Which left them almost nothing to talk about.

“You’re coming to my parents’ party in August, right?” Tibby asked, gathering her things.

“Yes. We just got the invitation in the mail. Twenty years. Wow.”

Tibby nodded blandly. She never wanted to do the math as far as her parents’ wedding was concerned. Here was yet another blocked conversation.

Tibby realized why she found comfort in simpler, more one-sided interactions, like with, say, the TV.

Lena had forgotten about forgetting about Kostos. That was how she knew. When you remembered to forget, you were remembering. It was when you forgot to forget that you forgot.

The thing that reminded Lena about Kostos came not from any movement in her brain (which would have constituted a failure to forget) but from a knock on her door on a hot Thursday afternoon at the very end of July.

It was simple. When she saw Kostos, she remembered him.

It was after class that it happened. Lena had kicked off her flip-flops and fallen asleep on her bed in her shorts and T-shirt, her hair falling out of its ponytail. The knock came in the first deep part of sleep. She was groggy and disoriented and sweaty before she even opened the door.

When she saw the dark-haired man standing there, she only half believed that he could be Kostos. Even though he had Kostos’s face and Kostos’s feet and Kostos’s voice, she persisted in thinking that maybe he was somebody else.

Why was this man, who looked so strangely like Kostos, standing in the doorway of her dorm room? Disjointedly she thought of calling Carmen and telling her that there happened to be a guy in Rhode Island who was almost identical to Kostos.

Then she remembered what Carmen had said about when Kostos would come, and she remembered about the forgetting.

She felt suddenly jolted and afraid. Like she’d woken up in the middle of her SATs. Did that mean it could be him?

But it was impossible, because Kostos lived on a Greek island thousands of miles away. He lived in the past. He lived unreachably inside the walls of a marriage. He lived in her memory and her imagination. That was where he spent literally all of his time. He existed there, not here.

He could not be here. Here was the leftover turkey sandwich from a hurried lunch in the studio and the ratty drawstring sweatpants she’d cut into shorts, and the mosquito bite on her ankle she’d ruthlessly picked, and the charcoal drawing she’d Scotch-taped to her wall two Mondays ago. Kostos did not live here or now. She’d question her eyes and ears faster than she’d question that.

She almost told him so.

“It’s me,” he said, sensing her confusion, faltering in his certainty that she would recognize him.

Well, she did recognize him. That wasn’t the point, was it? She was hardly convinced. So what if he was me? Everyone was me. She was me. Who else was he going to be?

Just because he was Kostos and appeared at her door and said “It’s me” didn’t mean he was occupying space and time in her actual life. She thought of telling him so.