Sisterhood Everlasting (Sisterhood 5)

Carmen gave Clara her afternoon bottle and, at Pablo’s extreme urging, let her try some bits of apple and cheese. Clara wanted to grab them more than eat them, and spit half of them out, but Pablo was undeterred.

“Good, huh?” he said to his sister in English. It was funny how he seemed to have faith in Clara’s ability to appreciate what he appreciated. It occurred to Carmen that Pablo had been where Clara was rather recently, so he took her more seriously and didn’t doubt, as the rest of them probably did, that she was an actual person.

She tried to teach Pablo go fish while Roberto carried Clara up and down the aisles of the train cars. Then they played war, which was somewhat more successful. Pablo got it wrong half the time, but he was viciously competitive. She had to keep herself from laughing at the snarly face he made every time he thought he’d won her card.

Roberto brought them back wraps and sandwiches and sodas for dinner, and Carmen gobbled hers down. She realized that it was the first time in years she hadn’t calculated the calories of something before she stuck it in her mouth. She hadn’t drunk a soda that wasn’t diet since she was about ten.

The idea that she had an audition seemed hundreds of miles away, and in fact it was. She didn’t want the train to go any faster than it was going.

She discovered that Roberto was originally from Chile, but had crept progressively northward throughout his life. He’d lived in Colombia and Costa Rica, briefly, gone to university in Mexico and stayed there until he’d met his wife four years ago, and moved to Texas to be with her.

Carmen chewed her Caesar salad wrap and wondered about his wife. What must she be like? It seemed to Carmen like an extremely exalted position, to be Roberto’s wife and the mother of these children. Carmen pictured a Supreme Court justice with the body of Salma Hayek.

She hadn’t seen Roberto with a phone. He must have one. Had his wife called him? Had he called her? Maybe when he was walking around the train. Or maybe they weren’t the kind of couple who talked all the time. Not like her and Jones.

Carmen wondered how many times Jones had tried to call and text her in the last two days. What must he be thinking? She should find a way to call him, she thought. And yet, when she pictured Jones, he seemed a thousand miles away. As in fact he was. Planes just seemed to skip you around without really taking you anywhere different. The distances felt real when you were on a train.

She watched the sun go down with Clara on her lap. She kissed Clara’s head a few dozen times, and hoped Clara’s mother wouldn’t mind. She chanted and sang every rhyme and song she could remember her mother singing to her. Most were in Spanish, and when Carmen forgot stretches of words she’d fill in nonsense words. She got busted by Mr. Law-and-Order Pablo a couple of times, who couldn’t tell her the right words though he knew she’d gone far off the script.

Eventually the train turned dark and peaceful. Carmen wasn’t sure how she would live without the sound of the clonking and rushing under her feet. It was as though she’d developed an external circulatory system with a protective heartbeat of its own.

Roberto put the baby to sleep in her car seat on the floor in front of their row. He lay Pablo out over the two seats and tucked him in with a blanket.

Carmen watched him in admiration. Roberto was really adept at this stuff. Most fathers she observed did these things a little awkwardly and almost for show, as though waiting for the mom to take over before they messed it up too badly. Her stepfather, David, was a bit like that. But Roberto looked as though he’d done every one of these maneuvers hundreds of times. Maybe he was just naturally graceful that way.

He stood in the aisle for a moment, once they were settled, then turned to Carmen. “Could I sit with you for a while?” he asked.

“Of course,” she said. She shoved her purse out of the way. She thought of her horror in the first hour of the trip that someone might sit next to her. Now she couldn’t imagine wanting anything more.

“Wait,” he said, before he sat down. “I’ll be right back.”

When he returned he was carrying two bottles of Heineken and a brownie. He settled in and she put down her tray to hold the bottles. He split the brownie and she sipped her beer and enjoyed the coziness of it all.

“So tell me about you,” he started in Spanish. “Where are you from and why do you speak Spanish like a native?”

She felt happy to talk. She told him about her mom moving from Puerto Rico when she was a teenager and her mom’s family. She told him about growing up outside D.C., in Bethesda.

She told him about the Septembers, but she told him with partial amnesia. She couldn’t make any sort of picture without them, so she stuck to the happy parts for now. Not entirely happy parts. She told him about her parents’ divorce, her dad moving away. Usually when she told that story, she told it like it had happened to somebody else, but this time she knew it had happened to her. Maybe because it had moved down a notch in the hierarchy of her tragedies. She’d take that one if it meant she could hold off the bigger ones.

She told him about her later childhood, her awkward phases, the first summer of the Traveling Pants, and finally the last. She surprised herself by how open she was. The rock through the window, her dad’s wedding, the first summer of David, her mom’s wedding. High school graduation, the birth of Ryan, the first year at Williams, the first fateful trip to Greece. She decided to stop there.

Roberto listened intently. If he thought any of it was less than consequential he made no sign of it. He had a natural sympathy about him. His face seemed to react to each turn in the plot.

When she stopped talking she saw that her bottle was empty and so was his. The brownie was long gone. She squeezed by him to go to the dinette and buy the next round. When she came back his face was still thoughtful.

She squeezed by him again and handed him his beer. “Now you,” she said. “Will you tell me about you?”

He obliged. He told her about his early memories of the tiny town in the mountains where he’d been born. He was the youngest of four, the only boy.

Carmen cut in briefly to say that she too was a youngest child, and immediately realized that in every factual sense she was lying. But Roberto didn’t hold her to it.

He explained that his parents had been hippies. They’d both been raised by educated families in Santiago, but soon after they got married decided that his father should be a farmer and his mother should be a poet, and they should live off the fruit of the land and their good minds. After a few very lean years, they finally accepted the fact that they were city folk. His father didn’t know how to be a farmer and his mother didn’t especially know how to be a poet. They went back to Santiago and eventually his father got a job in manufacturing in Bogotá. They didn’t starve after that, but nobody was terribly happy either, he told her.

He took up his parents’ discarded dreams, as children will do, he said. He wanted to be a poet. He got involved in politics, somewhat disastrously. He spent two weeks in jail and then dropped out of the whole scene. He moved to Costa Rica and learned how to surf. He got good at it, he said, which she took to mean he probably became world champion. He taught surfing to rich tourists at a fancy resort and discovered he was growing stupid. He moved to Mexico City and enrolled at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma. He studied economics and literature, got a degree, and then an advanced degree. That was where he met his wife, Teresa.

At this point his face changed. His story ended somewhat abruptly, as maybe hers had done. He looked out the window at the nearly full moon, and she looked at the side of his face, wondering. She felt she would have known if he wanted her to ask him a question, and he didn’t.

She drew her feet up under her. She heard the conductor announce a station stop in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. She thought of Bee and her grandmother Greta, who lived not so far from here. She wondered where Bee was, and she missed her as she hadn’t let herself do since the day in Greece when their world had ended.

After a long silence, Roberto started up his story again in a slightly different-sounding voice. She found herself wanting to touch him. Not in any sexual or inappropriate way. She wanted to make contact with him, offer him her support for she didn’t know what. For the tense of a verb.

Teresa was Mexican American from Texas. She was a literature student and a ceramicist.

Was, Carmen heard, was.

They got married in El Paso. He looked for a job. They lived with her parents. They had Pablo. Roberto told these parts with strangely little affect. He had wanted to move back to Mexico, where he could teach at the university, but she had thought he should become a citizen first, which he did. He had managed a carpet store. They’d had Clara.

He stopped again. She put her hand on his. There was something coming and she was scared of it. “You don’t need to tell me any more,” she said. She felt the ache in her throat, the tears rising, and she didn’t even know for what. They had moved past the happy parts. She knew where it was going.

What kind of night was this, where they needed to say everything? They’d be in New Orleans in the morning, and it felt like the last night on earth. The miles were grinding away. It felt like they needed to say it all to each other before they said goodbye. Their paths crossed for this one stretch of hours and then fate would send them hurtling apart again. It was only this chance to say it all, to win a stranger’s empathy, to earn a stranger’s absolution.

“When Clara was six weeks old, we went to Mexico City so she could meet her grandparents. Teresa went out to dinner with friends.” He stopped.

She could hear his breathing, no longer smooth. “She came home late. She was struck by a car on the Paseo de la Reforma.”

Carmen was squeezing his hand with both of hers, probably too hard. If he was brave enough to say it, then God, she would be brave enough to listen. She found it hard to look at his face. She knew the ending.

Why would a man travel thousands of miles on a train with two small children if he had a wife? He wouldn’t. His wife didn’t call him on his cellphone because she wasn’t there. Roberto made the gestures of parenthood like he’d done them thousands of times because he had done them thousands of times. There was no faking, no show, no stalling for the mom to swoop in, no mom.

He put his chin to his chest. She held his hand. He got up and walked out of the train car. She watched his back, the shape of his shoulders, the particular rhythm of his walk.

How truly strange it was that after twenty-four hours she knew him better than she knew three and a half years’ worth of Jones. She not only knew more about Roberto; she knew him. He’d shown her his seams, as Jones had never done. Maybe Jones didn’t have any.

When Roberto returned a few minutes later, it was with two more beers and a face he’d put back close to normal. He sat down next to her. He handed her a bottle and then lifted his to clink against hers. To what? she thought. To saying everything.

It was the stab of a lion cuff link in her thigh as she folded her knees onto the uncomfortable chair in the British Airways terminal that made Lena think of it. Who knew why? She didn’t let herself wait. She found the much-neglected name on her contact list and called it.

For once there was an answer. “Hello?”

“Ef?”

“Lena?”

“Yes, it’s me.”

“Hey,” Effie said. She sounded subdued and uncharacteristically guarded, but what did Lena expect?

“I’m sorry, Effie. I really am. I treated you badly. I’m sorry it’s taken me so long to say that.”