Sisterhood Everlasting (Sisterhood 5)

Effie didn’t say anything at first. Lena could hear her breathing. “Not everything was your fault.” Effie’s voice was shaky when she finally spoke. “You weren’t wrong about everything. I made mistakes too.”

“My mistakes were much worse, Ef. You came to help me. You brought all that stuff. You were really trying and I wasn’t. I wasn’t even giving you a chance.”

“No, you weren’t.”

“I wasn’t.”

Effie paused and Lena heard her sister blowing her nose. “That’s why I kept the extra two hundred bucks Mom and Dad gave me and bought a sweet pair of cowboy boots with it.”

“You didn’t.” Lena laughed and Effie blew her nose again.

“I’ll share them with you.”

“You know they won’t fit.”

“I bought them big. I thought of that.”

“Aw, really? That’s nice, Ef.”

“Hey, Len.”

“Uh-huh.”

“I’m sorry about the Traveling Pants. I really am.”

“I know. It’s okay.” For the first time Lena meant it when she said it. She knew that what had happened to Tibby wasn’t the pants’ fault. In fact, she realized she was grateful that their pants were out in the blue, keeping Tibby company.

They said a tearful goodbye, and Lena looked out over the hated terminal with an unexpected feeling of well-being. One thing you could say about Effie, you never felt alone when she was at the other end of your phone. She’d claimed she didn’t matter enough to help Lena, but she certainly had.

After the third beer, it was Carmen’s turn again. She had more to tell, and Roberto seemed to know it. He waited for her.

She started with the first couple of years after college, moving to New York. She led him through her succession of painful jobs: hostess, coat-check girl, waitress, telemarketer, food stylist. She told him the longest it had taken her to get fired (seven months) and the shortest (an hour and a half). She recounted the happiest times, the almost two years she’d roomed with Tibby and Bee in the hilariously crappy walk-up on Avenue C and East Eleventh Street, when Lena had slept on their floor four nights out of seven.

She felt the need to try to represent that old time, that old self. “You see, I used to be sort of … bigger.”

“You mean fatter?” he asked, like that wasn’t so hard to believe.

“No. Well, probably. But I mean I was just … more there.”

She told him about her first bit parts: saying one word in the Sex and the City movie that got edited out, saying seven words in an episode of CSI before she got whacked, getting a commercial for a prescription medicine for female hair loss that paid her rent for two years. She told him about everyone moving apart. She told him about meeting Jones and, soon after, landing her role on Criminal Court.

She paused and looked out the window. She wondered what time it was. She doubted this was the kind of night when you ever went to bed.

She told him about Lydia getting sick and then seeming to get better and getting sick again. And then she came to the part where Tibby disappeared. The part where Tibby moved again, just like always, but this time somewhere much farther away. It wasn’t Australia that was the problem, it was that she fell out of touch in a different way and it just went on and on. There was some confusion among them. Who had talked to Tibby last? Somebody must be talking to her. There were three emails in a year and they didn’t even sound like Tibby.

“We told ourselves it was okay. I don’t know why, but we thought she would get home and be our regular Tibby again. I don’t think we could process the truth of it, that she had really pulled away from us. We just waited for her to come back.” Carmen put a hand to her cheek.

And then came the tickets to Greece. The elation. Getting to the airport on the island. The three of them together, jumping out of their skins to see Tibby again. So much excitement, so much joy. A new life was starting. She could just feel it. And then. And then.

Carmen put her arms around her knees. She rested her cheek on top of her knee.

And then the call. And then the police. And then the denial, and the confusion, and finally the calls to Tibby’s parents. Nobody knew how to reach Brian anymore. And then the silence. And the discovery of the things she’d left for them. The terrible knowledge, the incomplete but also inescapable knowledge that it wasn’t all an accident. And then. And then. And then. It was a new life indeed.

She finally lifted her head to look at him. She saw that her sadness had gotten all over his face. She saw it more clearly than if she’d looked in a mirror. He put his large hands on either side of her head and pulled her into his chest. He held her tightly and it all came loose.

She passed through Hattiesburg, Mississippi, and over the Louisiana state line with her face in his chest and his arms around her. It was a mysterious thing. She clung to him as though she hadn’t first seen him two nights before, but had known him and needed him and depended on him the whole time, from the very beginning.

It was the great peculiarity of her life. The people she loved, really loved, had been with her from the start. She hadn’t added a person, not one single person, to that group since the day she was born. There was in fact the legendary picture taken a few hours after her birth, she a tiny hunched-over grub held by her mother and father and surrounded by newborn Bridget with Marly, newborn Tibby with Alice, newborn Lena with Ari. Compared to Carmen, a strapping Lena at three weeks old had looked as if she were ready to go to law school. “We had all just been hanging around, waiting for you to be born!” her mother told her the first time she remembered looking at that picture.

And you could have turned off the camera and called it a day right then and there. Carmen’s whole life. No need for further documentation.

There was a certain skill some people used when they needed to hunt and gather people to love and to love them. Well, that was not a skill Carmen had developed. Not to say she hadn’t worshipped Paul or felt real tenderness for David and Lydia. She’d had a true spark of something with a guy named Win once. But her heart was the most exclusive club in history: you had to know Carmen Lowell on the first day of her life in order to join.

It wasn’t that her heart was small. She knew that. It was big. If anything, it loved too violently, too much. But she couldn’t expand its membership. If she asked herself honestly, she’d have had to admit she didn’t really believe she could. How else could you explain Jones? Thinking she should marry Jones? What in the world kind of idea was that?

Beyond that, by agreeing to marry him she had been ready to blithely forgo a future of having children. She’d blown it off as though it were nothing. And why? Because maybe she didn’t believe she could love them either. Her heart was complete, thank you very much; signed, sealed, and closed to all new business. Why would it be any different with a baby?

And then Carmen thought of Tibby. She thought of that sick physical ache caused by the loss of her, of her heart being torn open—just lying there wrecked and open, so that no amount of talking on her phone, texting Jones, planning her wedding, or buying expensive dresses was going to close it. And maybe closing it wasn’t the idea.

Through one eye she saw the first shades of the sun peering up. Here was this strange man all around her, sifting into her very pores, and she wondered if maybe tragedy was what it took to make your heart capable of admitting a new member.

Behold

I do not give lectures

or a little charity,

When I give

I give myself.

—Walt Whitman