Sisterhood Everlasting (Sisterhood 5)

“Hello?” came a voice from the next stall over.

“Nothing. Sorry,” Lena said, half undressed and fully discombobulated.

The red dress was hitched up on one side and twisted when she came out of the stall. In the mirror she saw that her hair was sticking up in back. There were dark circles under her eyes. The black tights did not look good at all. She thought despondently of the nickname she’d had in high school, Aphrodite. What the hell happened to you? she wondered.

She went back into the stall and banged around until she’d gotten the tights off and the ballet flats back on. She looked down at her bare legs. They were pale, but at least she’d shaved them the day before. How cold was London in February? She looked down again. Her skin was already mottled and goose pimply. I am terrible at this, she thought.

She brushed her hair. She put on mascara and lipstick. She tried to put on eye shadow, but it made her look like she’d been in a fist-fight. She washed it off and tried again. By the third time, she gave up on the eye shadow. She put on gold hoop earrings.

After several dozen people had come and gone, babies had cried and been changed, and a toilet had overflowed, Lena gazed unhappily at the final product. She reached into her bag and took out the envelope with the precious address.

I should call first, she thought. But she didn’t have the number, and according to a live, living London operator it was indeed unlisted. She felt idiotically grateful talking to a real voice on the other end of the London telephone.

It was weird to just show up at his address. But it was weird to do this in the first place. It was weird for Tibby to have written Kostos a letter. It was weird for Lena to travel thousands of miles to deliver it in person when she didn’t even know what was in it. But this was her project, and she was doing it, God help her, in a red dress.

She pictured Tibby’s face as it looked in the graduation picture that haunted her every day from her computer screen. I wish I could have loved you better than this, Lena thought, but this is what I’ve got.

Don’t wear fear

or nobody will know you’re there

You’re there.

—Cat Stevens

London was cold in February. That wasn’t surprising. Lena sat in the back of the train with her threadbare wool coat wrapped around her. She practically ran, regretting the decision to ditch the tights, from the train station to the Underground.

She had mapped this route carefully several days before and checked it over many times since. It involved the airport train to the Underground, and a few bursts of walking in between.

Kostos lived in a place called Eaton Square, off the King’s Road. When he’d lived in London long before, after the summer they’d met, he’d lived in a place called Brixton, over a pub and diagonally across from a place called the Speedy Noodle. She remembered so distinctly the feeling in her chest when she saw a letter come through the mail slot with the address written on it in Kostos’s neat-for-a-boy handwriting. She remembered so distinctly the feeling of writing that address out carefully on one envelope after another.

Brixton Hill, Lambeth. That was the start of a poem for her. It captured a feeling. Eaton Square, less so. It was newer to her, and time and memory helped bestow poetry. It was a little colder-sounding, she thought, less evocative. It had its power, though. How many times had she stared at the address, trying to picture it, trying to picture the Kostos who lived there and the moods and ranges of the place?

She spent a few moments orienting herself after she emerged from the Tube stop called Sloane Square. She walked the wrong way a couple of times before she found a street name that seemed right.

She found the street and a row of houses with relevant numbers that appeared to be going in the right direction.

Fourteen, sixteen, eighteen. She stopped and checked the map she had printed out. His house was apparently five numbers farther down a row of stunningly posh and handsome town houses. Did that mean he lived in one of these?

She slowed her pace. Eaton Square was seeming colder by the minute. Her legs were not simply cold, but numb. She checked her map and then the address as he’d written it on the envelope again.

She tentatively walked past another house and another, wondering if these were the kinds of buildings that were divided into flats. They were awfully big to belong to one owner, weren’t they? If they were flats, she hoped Kostos’s name would be indicated on the buzzer or mailbox or something.

She carried on very slowly, as though a powerful wind were pressing against her, until she reached number twenty-eight. She looked up at it. It was a sort of glowing white limestone with a portico, and ornamental trees on either side of a grand and glossy black door.

She scanned the area around the door for a panel of buzzers, but there was just one, an elegant button set in a polished brass plate. There weren’t numerous mailboxes, there was one, also brass. Was this his front door; were these his perfect little trees, his upstairs windows? Could she really walk those three steps up to his door and push that button?

Her feeling of intimidation had melted away in his presence in Oia, but now it was back in force. He was a rich and successful man. He lived in a mansion in the middle of London. He had lunch with the treasury minister. What was Tibby thinking, sending him this letter? What was Lena thinking, delivering it?

In fact, what in the world was she doing here? There was no sense in which she belonged. She felt like she’d been Photoshopped into the scene. The whole enterprise struck her as childish, akin to passing notes in seventh grade.

She looked up at the house again. It was six forty-five London time. There were lights on. He was probably home.

She glanced again at the mailbox. Could she just leave it there? How strictly did Tibby intend the “in person”?

She walked up the first stair. She put her hand in her bag and took out the letter. She took another step. She looked at the mailbox. She took another step and carefully eased it open. Without breathing she put the letter inside and turned around. She walked down the three steps and stopped.

No, she couldn’t do this. What if she’d made a mistake? What if he didn’t live here anymore? And more importantly, she’d come all the way here to deliver a goddamned letter in person and she was going to deliver a letter in person.

Tibby was trying to get her not to be a chicken, obviously, and Lena wasn’t going to go and subvert Tibby after all this. What did she have to lose anymore?

Lena turned around and walked back up the steps. She plucked the envelope out of the mailbox and pushed the doorbell before she could think another thought.

Her heart was throbbing. She pictured Kostos only three months before, lying on the couch across from her, his arms around her ankles.

She could do this. It didn’t matter that his house was gigantic and he had multibillion-dollar deals to make. He cared about her. He’d loved her once—so much that he’d bought her a ring and thought he wanted to marry her. Granted, he’d thrown the ring into the Caldera and sworn against her name, but she had been important once.

She held on to the image of his sleepy face on her grandparents’ couch as she waited for the door to open.

The door opened, but it wasn’t his face that appeared. It was the face of a dark-haired woman in a black cocktail dress and heels. It was a beautiful face wearing dark pink lipstick, made up for a night out. Maybe this wasn’t where Kostos lived anymore.

Lena had to reach down to find her voice. “Is this the residence of Kostos Dounas?” she asked. She was shivering inside her coat.

“Yes, it is. Can I help you?”

The woman’s face appeared suspicious to Lena, and not welcoming. Lena looked down at the envelope in her hand. “I have something for him,” she said faintly.

The woman put out her hand. “I can take it.”

Lena looked at the white manicured hand with the glinting sapphire ring on the th

ird finger. She looked again at the letter, addressed in Tibby’s handwriting. This was far worse than the mailbox. She knew this was not what Tibby had intended.

“Is he here, by any chance?” Lena asked timidly.

The woman sized her up, and Lena felt unbelievably cold and self-conscious. “Are you a friend of his?” she asked.

“Yes. An old friend,” Lena answered courageously.

The woman seemed to be considering. She took in Lena’s old coat and her bare legs. She took a step back and turned toward the stairs. “Darling, you have a caller,” she shouted merrily, as though Lena were no more than a puzzling, weirdly dressed joke to her.

Lena stood frozen. Why hadn’t she thought of this? Of course he was “darling.” Of course. He wasn’t a student, living with four roommates in a flat across from the Speedy Noodle, writing longing letters to Lena. He was a powerful man living in a big glittering house in a fancy neighborhood, the darling of a woman with a sapphire ring and a mean stare.

Lena crossed her arms, clutching herself protectively, and finally permitted herself an unsettling and obvious question: Was this woman his wife?

Kostos hadn’t said he was married when they were in Santorini together, but what was the need? He was being nice to her, pitying her out of devotion to her dead grandparents, and besides, she hadn’t asked him one single question about his life. It wasn’t like he’d been hiding anything. The idea that she was any longer a potential match probably hadn’t occurred to him.

Lena’s eyes sought the stairs behind the woman, because she saw some movement there. She watched in a strangely serene state of self-punishment as Kostos walked down the grand staircase. He was also dressed for an evening out, but his shirt was not yet buttoned to the top and his tie was not yet tied. His hair was still wet, presumably from a shower.

She caught the whole picture, the stunning yet mean woman standing inside the door, the glorious Kostos descending the stairs, the glowing interior of this gorgeous house of theirs, the mass of pink lilies on the hall table. Click. She got it all in a single frame, and the picture of it all together was devastating.