Love,
Lena
If the missing and wanting had been hard before, it was nearly unbearable now. It felt to Lena like the multitude of her thoughts and dreams and fantasies about Kostos weighed down the hours and made them go extra slowly.
She was living outside herself, living for when they could be together. That was what she had wanted so badly to avoid. But Lena realized now, maybe that was just how much love cost.
When he’d called her on Monday, she had literally caressed the phone. She would rather have listened to him breathe for an hour than hang up.
When he’d called Tuesday, she had giggled for an hour and a half, causing herself to wonder whether the real Lena was perhaps locked up in a closet somewhere with duct tape binding her mouth.
He hadn’t called Wednesday, and when he called on Friday, he didn’t sound right. His voice had a flatness she hardly recognized. “I’m afraid I may not be able to come this weekend.”
She felt suddenly dizzy. “Why not?”
“I—I may have to go back.”
“To go back where?”
“To Greece,” he said.
She gasped. “Is your bapi okay?”
He was silent for a minute. “Yes, I think he’s fine.”
“Then why? What?” She was too intense. She was hurling herself at him like a cat on a cockroach. She wished she could hold back.
“Some other business at home that came up,” he said slowly. “I’ll explain it when I know what’s going on.” He didn’t want her to ask any more.
“Is it bad? Will everything be okay?”
“I hope so.”
Her brain was fervently concocting possible explanations that wouldn’t be devastating to her.
“I have to hang up,” he said. “I wish I didn’t.”
Don’t go! she wanted to scream at him.
“I love you, Lena.”
“Bye,” she said inevitably.
He couldn’t go back to Greece! She would die! When would she ever see him again? The one thing getting her through up to now had been the thought that she only had to wait until Friday.
She hated this. The uncertainty. The powerlessness. She felt as though he had blown a gaping hole in the expected path of her life. The sidewalk now ended just a few yards ahead.
Effie stood in the doorway of her room. She had on her running shoes. “Are you okay?” she asked.
Lena shook her head. She closed her eyes hard to keep the tears inside.
Effie appeared at her side. “What is it?”
Lena shrugged. She gathered up her voice from somewhere near her ankles. “I think that being loved by Kostos is even harder than not being loved by him.”
“Your grandchildren used to come visit here, didn’t they?” Bridget asked Grandma from under her hat at breakfast.
Grandma chewed her toast. “Oh, yes. Every summer until they were almost seven. And I used to go up north to see them for six weeks every winter until they were five.”
“Why did you stop?” Bridget asked tentatively.
“Because Marly asked me not to come.”
“Why, do you think?”
Greta sighed. “Things were starting to go downhill by then. I don’t think she wanted anybody looking too closely at her life, especially not me. I had too many opinions about the children, and neither she nor Franz wanted to hear them.”
Bridget nodded. “That’s sad.”
“Oh, honey.” Greta swayed in her seat. “You can’t know how sad. Marly loved her children, but she had a hard time. She used to go to bed after she fixed them lunch, and by the time they were eight or nine, I suspect she went back to sleep after breakfast. She’d get overwhelmed halfway through sorting the laundry and leave it on the machine for days until Franz got around to it.”
Bridget pressed her palm to her cheek. The kitchen darkened as the sky outside grew overcast. She remembered her mother lying in bed through the afternoons and evenings. She remembered her mother getting upset and frustrated by the buckles of Bridget’s sandals or the tangles in her hair. Bridget had learned to be careful about spills and recycle her clothes, because they took a long time to come back from the wash.
“Why did . . . they stop coming? The kids, I mean.”
Grandma rested her elbows on the table heavily. “To tell you honestly, I think it was because I was having bitter disagreements with Franz. I knew Marly was in trouble, and I worried about her all the time. Franz didn’t want to see the things I was seeing. I told him Marly needed the help of a doctor, and he said no. I told him Marly needed medication, and he disagreed. I think he was mad at me, so he took the kids away. He told me to stop calling. To leave Marly alone. I couldn’t do it.”
Bridget noticed that Greta’s lips quivered. She patted her old lady hands fixedly.
“And I was right to worry. I was right to, because—”
Bridget stood up so fast she almost knocked her chair backward. “I’ve got to do something upstairs. Sorry, Greta. I just remembered. I better go.”
She went up the steps without looking back. In the attic the first thing she saw was the box, the one she’d been putting off. In her dreams she was Pandora. She imagined that the box was a yawning black hole between her and her childhood, and that once she opened its flaps, she would fall into it and die.
Bridget lay in bed and listened to the storm brewing outside. She fell asleep for a while, and when she woke up, she was looking at the box again. The sky was darkening. She could practically feel the barometer plunging.
She watched the wind flutter the eyelet curtains. The gray sky seemed to turn the floor gray in its image. She loved this room. She felt more at home here than in any place she’d ever been. But still there was that box. She peered out the window at the nervous landscape.
She went over to the box and opened it. Now was a good time to get it over with. She wanted to prove to herself that it wasn’t really so scary. And if she didn’t do it now, when would she do it? She had to get to the end of this story.
The top layer was mostly pictures of the happy young family. Marly and Franz with their two blond babies. In the car, at the zoo. All the usual stuff. More absorbing to her were the ones with her grandparents. Bridget squinting in the sun on her grandfather’s shoulders, grinning big next to Greta, her mouth orange and sticky from a Popsicle. She smiled at the sight of the Honey Bees’ team picture. There she was with her boy haircut and her arm clamped around Billy Kline. The middle of the box was packed with her and Perry’s various art projects, and a pile of Perry’s disintegrating comic books. She threw a lot of that stuff away.
Under that were photographs Marly must have sent to her mother in the years after they’d stopped coming to Alabama. Bridget’s and Perry’s stiff-looking school pictures from third through fifth grades. There was a hilariously dorky picture of the Septembers from the summer after fourth grade. Tibby was still missing several teeth. Bridget sported the mother lode of braces, with little rubber bands stretching across the front. Carmen had her awful, floppy version of the Jennifer Aniston hairdo. Lena looked normal, but that was Lena.
The last picture was the sad one. From the date on the back, Bridget knew it had been four months before her mother died. Bridget guessed her mother had sent it to Greta to prove to her that she was doing just fine, but if you looked at it for even a minute, the illusion fell heartbreakingly apart. Marly’s limbs were too thin. Her skin looked as though it hadn’t seen daylight in weeks. Her pose on a park bench looked totally artificial, like she’d been set up at the Sears photo studio. Her smile seemed fragile and atrophied, as though she hadn’t moved her mouth into that shape for many months.
Bridget loved the Marly who glittered and preened, but this was the woman she remembered.
Bridget got up. She was fitful. Her legs needed her to walk around. The sky was as dark as if it were night. She flicked on her light, but it didn’t respond. The storm had knocked the power out.
Bridget went
down the stairs to check on Greta. To her surprise, she found her huddled in the corner of the kitchen with a flashlight.
“Are you all right?” Bridget asked.
Greta looked shiny with sweat. “My sugar’s up. I’m having trouble doing the injection in the dark like this.”
Without thinking, Bridget strode over to help. “I’ll hold the flashlight for you,” she offered.
As she held it, she watched breathlessly as Greta readied the needle and poked it into her skin. Suddenly Bridget’s beam of light was tilting and scooting all around the room. Her hand was shaking so hard she dropped the flashlight and it banged across the floor. Her whole body was shaking. “I’m sorry,” she cried. “I’ll get it.” Instead, she lost her footing and fell onto her knees in the middle of the room.
“Honey, it’s okay. I got it,” Greta said soothingly, but it seemed to Bridget that she was saying it from a great distance.
Bridget tried to get up, but her head was all wrong, her eyes were all wrong. She couldn’t focus on anything. She felt panicked, like she had to keep moving. She burst through the side door and out into the yard. She heard Grandma’s voice calling behind her, but she couldn’t focus on it. She kept walking.
She walked through the needling rain for blocks down to the river and then walked alongside it, on her familiar path. Walking didn’t feel fast enough, so she started running. The river was up, lapping against its sides. She felt tears dribbling from her eyes, mixing with and disappearing in the rain. The rain was so heavy, and suddenly she pictured her raincoat bunched under her seat on the Triangle bus, traveling the country, leaving her out here alone.
She ran and ran, and when she couldn’t run anymore, she fell on the ground and let it catch her. She lay on the wet, muddy bank and let the memories overtake her, because she couldn’t help it anymore.
There was her mother with the needle in her skin, white-blue skin. There was the hair, long and yellow, fanned out on the floor. There was her mother’s face that didn’t move even with the screaming, all the screaming. It was Bridget’s screaming. She was screaming and her mother’s face stayed still, no matter how Bridget shook her. And she screamed and screamed until somebody came and took her away.
That was how the story went. That was how it really ended.
Sometime before sunrise, Bridget picked herself up and walked back home. She let herself in the side door and numbly walked up the steps to the bathroom. She took a long, blasting hot shower, wrapped herself in a towel, took a comb from her shelf, and walked down to the kitchen. She poured a big glass of water and sat at the table in the dark.
She was tired. She was dazed. She felt like she had died.
She heard footsteps on the stairs and then heard Grandma come into the kitchen behind her. Grandma sat down across from her at the table. She didn’t say anything.
After a while, Greta took the comb from the table and stood up. She walked behind Bridget and began combing out her wet hair, gently and slowly, pulling all the knots out from the bottom like a pro. Bridget let her head relax into her grandmother’s chest, and she let herself remember the many times Greta had done this before, always slowly, always patiently.
Bridget closed her eyes and let herself remember other things in this kitchen. Grandma fixing her bowls of cereal when she was supposed to be asleep, spooning in the cough syrup when Bridget had bronchitis, teaching her gin rummy and looking the other way when she cheated.
By the time Bridget’s hair was entirely combed and smooth, the sun had risen, casting light on the silky gold strands. Greta kissed her on top of the head.
“You know who I am, don’t you?” Bridget said in a fragile voice.
She felt Greta’s nod against her scalp.
“You’ve known for a long time?”
Another nod.
“The whole time?” Bridget asked.
“Not the first day,” Greta answered, protecting Bee from feeling sad that her scheme had failed entirely.
Bridget nodded.
“You’re my honey Bee. How could I not know?”
Bridget considered that. It made sense. “Even with my hair different?”
“You are you, however your hair is.”
“But you didn’t say anything.”
Greta lifted her shoulders and dropped them. “I figured I’d take your lead.”
Bridget nodded again. It was remarkable and true. Greta sensed what Bridget needed. She had always done that.
Crawling back in bed, with her raw skin and her smooth hair, Bridget had a feeling of comfort spreading through her insides. She’d let in the memories of a mother who couldn’t seem to love her, but in the same flood had rushed in memories of the mother who could.
Through the middle of August, Lena got up in the morning and went to bed at night. Sometimes she went to work in between. She ate once in a while too. She saw Carmen, and she listened to Carmen talk. She had a few stiff conversations with Tibby. The time Bee called she hadn’t been home. Lena was the kind of person who liked to share good news. Bad news she kept for herself.
Kostos had gone back to Greece. He hadn’t explained why. When she had asked if she’d done anything wrong, he’d gotten upset. For the first time in days his voice had lost its flatness.
“No, Lena. Of course not. Whatever happens, you didn’t do anything wrong.” His voice had been thick with emotion. “You are the best thing that ever happened in my life. Never think you did anything wrong.”
Somehow, she wasn’t reassured by that.
He had promised he would write all the time and call when he could. She knew he wouldn’t be calling much. It cost a fortune and would put a burden on his grandparents. Their house in Oia wasn’t even set up for e-mail.
It was back to the letters. The delay of gratification seemed like torture beyond anything even Kafka could have dreamed up.
I don’t know if I can do this, she thought on many occasions. But what was the alternative? Fall out of love with him? Impossible. Stop caring? Stop wishing she could be with him? She’d tried that once. She was too far gone to try it again.
“Lena, are you all right?” her mother asked her one morning at breakfast.
No! I’m not! “I’m fine,” she said.
“You look so thin. I wish you would tell me what’s going on with you.”
Lena also wished it. But it wasn’t going to happen. For a long time, especially since the Eugene debacle, they’d orbited each other at a wide distance. It wasn’t like her mother could suddenly hug her and make everything better.
Carmabelle: Tib. Saw Brian riding bike today. Almost ran over him. Looks amazing. Is handsome. Not kidding.
Tibberon: Are kidding. Or mistaken.
Carmabelle: Am not.
Tibberon: Are too.
Bridget needed a run. A long, fast one. For days she’d been hanging close to the house, padding around in Greta’s slippers and letting Grandma make her lemonade and rub her back. She’d gone a long time without a mother.
Usually when she slept twelve hours at night it meant she was falling apart, but these nights, with her quiet dreams, she felt as if she were remaking herself, putting herself together.
She washed her hair vigorously, four times in a row, watching the last of the faint brown dye go down the drain. Then she put on her running shoes.
The air was a little cooler than usual, and her breath settled into an easy rhythm right away. Her body felt light and wonderful, as if she’d cast off a very heavy, very dark blanket.
The river was still extra full from the day and night of storms. Her feet slipped a little on the muddy parts of the path, but she slowed down without breaking her stride. She could have run a million miles today, but she decided to turn back once she was five miles out. The trees were so lush and thick they drooped heavily over the river’s edge. Big-leafed magnolias towered to the sky. A thick coat of moss seemed to cover every boulder and rock.
“Hey!”
“Hey!” the voice shou
ted out a second time before she realized it was directed at her.
She slowed down and made a half turn.
It was Billy. He was waving to her from farther up the grassy bank. It made sense. She could see his house from here if she stood on her tiptoes.
He came toward her. He looked confused by her appearance.
She touched her head, remembering she hadn’t covered it. What was the point anymore?
“You look . . . different,” he said, eyeing her carefully. “Did you dye your hair?”
“No, I . . . kind of . . . undyed it.”
He looked surprised.
“I mean, this is how it usually is.”
There was something stirring in his eyes. He was grasping for something.
“You do know me, Billy,” she said.
“I do, don’t I?”
“My name isn’t Gilda.”
“No.”
“No.”
He was racking his brain, she could tell he was.
“It’s not Mia Hamm, either.”
He laughed. He studied her a little longer. “You’re Bee,” he said finally.
“I am,” she said.
He smiled, amazed, happy, bewildered. “Thank God there aren’t two girls in Burgess who can kick my ass all over the soccer field.”
“Just one,” she said.
He pointed to his forehead. “I knew I knew you.”
“I knew I knew you.”
“Yeah, well, I wasn’t going under an alias, was I?”
“No. Besides, you look exactly the same.”
“You look . . .” He considered her. “The same too,” he decided.
“Funny how that is,” she said, feeling giddy.
They started walking together along the river.
He was grabbing looks at her as they went. “Why were you using the fake name?” he asked finally.
It was a reasonable question. She wasn’t sure what the answer was anymore. “My mom died, did you know that?” So it wasn’t an answer, but it was information she wanted him to have.
He nodded. “We had a memorial service for her here. I remember thinking maybe you would come.”
The Second Summer of the Sisterhood Page 20