Sisterhood Everlasting (Sisterhood 5)

When Jones woke to a car alarm in the middle of the night, he looked at Carmen staring wide-eyed at the ceiling.

“What’s the matter?” he asked.

“Tibby wants me to go to someplace in Pennsylvania on April second. If I go to New Orleans, I won’t be able to get back in time.”

“If you go to New Orleans?” He didn’t even question the notion of how Tibby could ask her to go someplace.

“Yeah, if I go.”

“You have to go.”

“I don’t have to go.”

Jones lifted his head and propped it on his hand, looking at her in disbelief. “It would be career suicide not to. I mean, think of it. How would your reps feel? Do you think you’ll be getting any more calls like this again?”

Carmen clamped her molars together. She could have these childish run-ins with Jones all she liked, but she could hear herself on the phone with her mother in the morning. Her mother would be saying, “You don’t have to go,” and Carmen would be saying, “It would be career suicide, Mom. What would my reps think?”

“Work’s not the only thing in life,” Carmen said petulantly.

“Of course it’s not. But this is a once-in-a-career opportunity, and what would you be missing it for? What do you think you are going to find in Pennsylvania? You’re not going to find Tibby, if that’s what you’re hoping for.”

Carmen turned on her pillow to face away from him. She stuffed her arms under her pillow. She didn’t want to admit to herself that she was even more afraid of Pennsylvania than she was of New Orleans. She didn’t want him to see her cry anymore.

“You can go to Pennsylvania after you get back,” he added in a softer voice. “After the wedding. Tibby wouldn’t expect you to miss a casting meeting with one of the top directors in the world. She wouldn’t want to get in the way of your wedding.” He touched Carmen’s shoulder blade. “These are important things. She would understand.”

Tibby would understand what was important. Carmen agreed with that part. Tibby always understood. But as she struggled to see Tibby’s face in her mind, Carmen also knew what was important, and it wasn’t either of the things he said.

I’ll let you be in my dreams

if I can be in yours.

—Bob Dylan

Bridget woke the next morning to the sound of crying. She realized that there were tears on her face and there was panic in her chest but that the sobs didn’t belong to her. She couldn’t remember where she was. She gaped at the ceiling, trying to remember. Her mind spun through a series of beds in Mission apartments, at Perry and Violet’s place, at the Sea Star Inn. She had to sit up and look around before her mind finally and fully joined her body in Australia. The sobs were Bailey’s, coming from downstairs. She could hear Brian’s soothing voice, trying to comfort her.

Bridget dressed quickly. When she arrived in the kitchen, Bailey was still clutching the glass jar where the lightning bugs had been and sobbing. Brian cast Bridget a drowning look.

Bailey sat in her high chair, holding up the jar so Bridget could see it, but she was incapable of forming any words. After Bridget had released the bugs the night before, she’d put some grass back into the jar and returned it to Bailey’s crib.

Bridget pulled a chair close. “The bugs went away?” she said.

Bailey nodded. The look on her face rent Bridget’s heart and she began questioning everything she had done. She tried to identify the moment when she’d done the worst wrong. It often happened without clear warning. Was it the moment of abandon when she’d begun grabbing living things from the sky? Was the worst wrong opening the jar and letting them go? Had she sided with bugs against a child? Was the worst wrong returning the empty jar to Bailey’s arms?

“We don’t know how they escaped, but they did,” Brian said. “They flew away.” Bridget couldn’t tell if there was a note of accusation in his voice.

Bailey nodded.

“I told her they’re happy in the sky,” Brian continued, “but she’s still feeling sad.”

Bailey was listening carefully. The sobs had stopped, but her face was still stricken, wet with tears and her runny nose.

“I’m sorry they went away,” Bridget said. She understood Bailey wasn’t looking for an explanation. Bailey didn’t need Bridget to tell her they hadn’t gotten out by themselves, and that if she’d left them in there they would have died. She put her hands out and lifted Bailey from her chair.

She wordlessly took the jar from Bailey’s hands and put it on the counter. She folded Bailey into her side, held her firmly with one arm and stroked her head with the other as she walked back and forth across the kitchen. After two or three laps, Bailey gave the weight of her head to Bridget’s shoulder.

Brian sent her a grateful look and tiptoed back to his office. Bridget didn’t stop walking. She moved from stroking Bailey’s head to stroking her back. She made the laps bigger.

Bailey wiped off her nose on Bridget’s shirt, and Bridget felt strangely grateful for it. Bridget felt the violent hitch in Bailey’s breathing begin to smooth out. After some time Bailey put her thumb in her mouth and got heavier.

When the loop grew to include the entire ground floor of the house and the front porch, Bridget began to understand the deeper thing Bailey was crying for. She wondered about the words Brian might have used. They probably involved going away and maybe even being in the sky, and Bridget was sure they were bewildering to Bailey and signaled nothing more than pure loss.

Bridget went out to the porch and lowered onto a wicker chair in the soft shade. She continued to rub Bailey’s back as she felt Bailey’s body settle deeply into hers.

She’d thought Bailey had fallen asleep until Bailey sat up on her lap. She took her thumb out of her mouth and formulated a question.

“Catch a-a-a-again?”

Bridget sighed. She was greatly tempted to tell Bailey they would catch more tonight. They could easily catch a dozen in their jar. They could catch them every night if they wanted to.

But Bridget thought again about the moment of worst wrong, such an unassuming juncture that she often swanned right past it. There was no way she was putting them through that again.

“They are always in the sky. In the summertime you can see them,” Bridget said quietly. “Everywhere you go.”

Bailey lay back down on her again, and Bridget resumed stroking her back.

Bridget had imagined it was better if the thing you loved just disappeared. But maybe Bailey would have been better off if she could have seen and known what happened. Either way, she and Bailey were the same. They were both broken in the same place.

I know how you feel, Bridget thought. And it wasn’t just Tibby. She had lost her mother too.

The day Lena returned from Greece to nothing and no one, there was a letter waiting for her. She knew instantly who it was from by the way her name looked in the particular way he wrote it. It had been forwarded from her parents’ address.

Dear Lena, it began in his beloved handwriting. You said not to call, so I decided to write.

The momentary ecstasy at seeing her name in his writing again was quickly replaced by a pang of dread.

With a girded heart she scanned the letter for the explanations and mollification regarding Harriet. On the phone he’d said they weren’t married, but that was kind of a cop-out. He and Harriet lived together in an extravagant house and Harriet wore a big fat sapphire on her marriage finger. You didn’t do that if you weren’t planning to get married. At least, a girl like Harriet didn’t; Lena felt pretty sure of that.

Lena looked through the neat lines for the apologetic language, the stilted sorrow for the ending of her hopes, such as they were, and the exhortation for friendship in the future. He’d say that they were like family, that he really cared for her and blah, blah, blah. This was exactly the conversation she didn’t want to have and the one he was surely eager for. But when she paused her brain and actually read the words, she saw that they were nothing

like that.

As I walked along the river on my way home from work yesterday, I had a memory of Tibby, and I wanted to tell it to you.

Do you remember that August, almost ten years ago, when you and your friends came to Santorini to look for your lost pants? Bridget saw me first on a street in the village and recognized me, I think. But it was Tibby who chased me down. I don’t know if they even told you about it.