Sisterhood Everlasting (Sisterhood 5)

For the first time Alice looked up at her. “Not too bad. Pretty good,” she said.

“It’s supposed to be a great school,” Lena said. “And hard. Harder than Bethesda, I’m sure.”

“Yes. It is.” There was a glimmer of pride in Alice’s face as she stood and drifted toward the table where Lena sat. “He’s working a lot harder than he’s worked before and getting Bs. He got an A in physics. He was proud of that.”

Lena shook her head ruefully. “I remember physics. I didn’t get an A.”

Alice rested her hip against the table tentatively. “It’s a different ball game at this school. Nicky pulled two all-nighters before his American history exam.”

“Wow,” Lena said.

Alice laughed and shook her head. “Not like you girls, sunbathing on our roof all afternoon before your history exams …” Alice stopped herself. Her face got complicated and her eyes began to fill. She looked down at her hand and began to twist her ring around.

Lena heard the gnashing gears of the dread machine starting up again and she wished she could silence them. But this time, for once, it wasn’t her gears making all the noise. The volume of Alice’s dread drowned Lena’s out. It made Lena more empathetic, a little bolder.

We’ll just have to feel our way through this, she thought.

Perry didn’t have the money to lend her. Bridget knew because she called and asked him.

“I wish I could,” he told her. “We’ve got credit card debt and we can barely scrape the rent together this month. Ask me again in July when I’m done with school and have a job, and I’ll give you whatever I have.”

She called her father twice and got impatient. He never answered his phone, and she had no good way for him to call her back whenever he got around to it, so she didn’t bother leaving messages.

She sucked it up, took a bus to San Francisco, and marched into Eric’s office. She’d worn clean clothes for the occasion. She’d failed at brushing her hair, which was heading precariously toward dreadlocks, but at least she had tied it back neatly. When she’d hugged Sheila and made her goodbyes after nearly three weeks at the Sea Star Inn, Sheila had held her at arm’s length and given her an approving once-over. “My, you clean up nice.”

Eric was surprised to see her, so surprised that his face registered joy and relief before anything else. He immediately wrapped her in his arms. “I’m so glad to see you,” he said. “I’m so glad you’re all right.”

When they sat down together, there were tears in their eyes, but no recriminations. “I’ve been a wreck about you.”

“I’m sorry,” she said. She was moved by his love for her, even after what she’d done. She was aching over the things she wasn’t telling him. “I’m sorry I just left like that. I’m sorry I haven’t called. I’m sorry for why I’m here.”

He took her hand and studied her fingers one at a time. He had a knowing look, but not a damning one. He was sorry for her. He knew her history. He knew what this had done to her. “Why are you here?”

“I’m not staying. I came because I need to borrow money.”

He nodded. She expected him to ask why and what for, but he held back. She almost wished he would ask and demand and blame, because then maybe she could feel angry at him instead of this terrible missing.

“How much?”

She hadn’t even thought this far. “I guess …” She calculated. How much did it cost to get to Australia? She could buy a one-way ticket if it came to that and figure out the rest later. “A thousand? Eight hundred might be all right.”

“Okay.” His face was not only handsome, but a part of her. He had sweat circles under his arms and a splotch of ink on his fingers. “Will you walk with me to the bank?”

“Of course.”

He put his arm around her shoulders as they walked, and they fell into a comfortable step together. It felt sad and good to be with him.

She waited in the bank’s lobby while he went to a window and spoke with a teller. He came back to her and handed her an envelope.

She looked down so he wouldn’t see the emotion in her face. “Thanks,” she said. “I don’t deserve it.”

“Are you going right away?”

She stared at his slightly wrinkled pants, his scuffed office shoes. She was tempted to stay. They could walk to Chinatown and get dim sum together. They could slip into the bathroom and make love.

With a pang, Bridget thought of Tabitha. She put a hand to her abdomen. She could tell him. She could tell him the whole thing. Could she do that? She tried to think of one or two starting words, and she felt her vision closing in as though she might faint. She felt the agonizing restlessness in her joints and a tingling like an attack of red ants on the bottoms of her feet.

She couldn’t. “Yes, I am leaving right away,” she said. She leaned in and kissed him on the lips. There was obvious passion in it, even after all this. If she stayed near him too much longer, she wouldn’t be able to go, and she knew she couldn’t stay.

She walked away down Pine Street, toward Powell. Her chest ached. She meant not to look back, but she couldn’t help it. She turned and he was standing there, watching her go. He didn’t wave or smile. He looked sad. When she turned a second time he was gone.

She didn’t open the envelope until she’d gotten to the bus station and needed to pay for her ticket. He hadn’t given her the thousand dollars she’d asked for—he’d given her ten thousand.

Lena’s parents didn’t torture her with questions or advice, as she had dreaded. They took her out for dinner to the Lebanese Taverna, ordered seven plates of food and a bottle of wine, and talked about the troubling state of Greece’s economy.

“It’s not going to be easy, selling a house in this market,” her father said.

Lena allowed her mind to take a slow walk up the hill to her grandparents’ house. She had to see how much it hurt before she went inside.

Lena cleared her throat. “The tourist places will be okay. If any place will survive this, it’s Santorini.”

Ari nodded. “That’s what I said too.”

“I’ve got to go over,” her father said resignedly. He looked exhausted at having uttered the sentence. “We can’t just let the place sit there moldering for another year.”

Lena thought of Kostos sitting on the ground, surrounded by tools and bits of hardware, taking apart the hinges of the back door. There was pleasure in the image to balance out the pain. She nodded.

“He’s canceled the trip twice already,” Ari said.

“I had a case go to trial.”

Lena nodded sympathetically. But she knew it wasn’t the case going to trial that gave her father the haggard look. She imagined how it would be for him, confronting his parents’ world, their clothes, their smells, and confronting the guilt for having left them so completely and so long ago, always vowing that there would be a time when the office got calm and he would go for a good long visit, maybe even a sabbatical, but never doing it.

Her dad wouldn’t talk about any of that. He’d talk about the case that went to trial or nothing at all. Was it too late not to be like him?

Lena thought of the two sealed letters stuck between the pages of her sketchbook. With an accelerating heartbeat she thought of her project.

“If you want, I could go,” she said.

Her father turned to her as though she’d disappeared and resurfaced in her chair with a new face on. “What do you mean?”

“I could go and take care of selling the house.”

“By yourself?”

He said it as though she were still twelve.

“Of course.”

A look of eagerness and relief was mixing into his cramped features. “Do you think you can?”

“I do. I know the house. I know the island reasonably well. I don’t think you need to be a native or a lawyer to figure out how to sell a house.”

“You do need to speak Greek,” her mother pointed out.

Her father rai

sed his hand. “Not necessarily. Everybody is speaking English there these days.”

“You wouldn’t want to get cheated or manipulated. It’s helpful to be able to read all the paperwork,” her mother cautioned.

Her father had now seized on this and he wasn’t going to let it go. Lena didn’t even get the chance to mention that she did, in fact, speak pretty good Greek these days. He was suddenly so flushed with the prospect of not having to go himself, he’d probably have sent Bubbles, the neighbors’ cat, over to do it.

“Lena can fax the paperwork or send it electronically. I can look over everything. Anyway, I’m not expecting to get top dollar for the place.”

He probably would have authorized Bubbles to sell the house for any offer over five euros and a willingness to take it furnished.

Her mother was considerably less enthusiastic. “Lena, are you sure it’s a place you want to go back to right away?” she asked with honest concern.