Sisterhood Everlasting

by Ann Brashares

  “What’s going to happen to it?”

  “My father says he’s going to sell it. But that will require him coming here and putting it in order and sorting through all the old things.”

  He nodded. “I hate to think of this house belonging to anyone else.” When he’d finished reassembling the faucet he looked up. “You could do it.”

  “Do what?”

  “Get the house fixed up.”

  “I could?”

  He nodded. “I could help you.”

  The storm cloud crackled below her. She blinked away tears. “But I have to go back.”

  “Why?”

  It wasn’t even that she was scared. Maybe she would have stayed. She looked at him in the eyes. “The burial.”

  His face was pained. “Oh.” He nodded slowly. “Of course. When?”

  “Tomorrow. I go back tomorrow. The burial is the next day. Thursday.” She was still of no mind to keep track of the days, but she remembered how Alice Rollins kept saying Thursday. In her mind Thursday had nothing to do with Tibby, but it was one of the few fixed points on her horizon.

  He opened his mouth as though he was going to say something, but he didn’t. He wrung out the sponge in the sink and began wiping down the counters.

  She went to the bathroom to wash her face and blow her nose, and when she came back, Kostos, star financier, was taking apart the hinges of the back door that would no longer open.

  Bridget’s body was in pure revolt and her mind had nothing further to say about it. It had nothing to say about anything. She thought nothing, had nothing, belonged to nothing, owned nothing. Except her bike.

  She went back the second day to retrieve it, when she was sure Eric would be at work. She wondered for the miles she walked back to the apartment how she would get it without the key to unlock the door to the garage. That was where she’d stored her bike the day she’d left for Greece.

  She felt a pang. She’d been so happy at that moment right before Greece, imagining that her life would be coming together, not falling apart. She pushed the memory away.

  Eric kept the garage key on his key chain. Bridget barely ever used it. She never used the car and preferred to lock her bike on the front porch for quick access. Could she jimmy the lock? Could she climb through a window? She was remarkably good at both of those things.

  But when she got there, she found the garage door swung open, almost as if Eric had left it that way for her. There was her bike in the corner.

  Her mind stayed mostly quiet, and it was better that way. She wheeled her bike out and all the way to Sixteenth Street before she got on. She wasn’t as glad to see it as she’d thought she would be. It didn’t feel so much like it was hers. The silk flowers looked stupid. She didn’t know why she had ever liked them.

  She rode up through Pacific Heights, punishing her restless muscles on the most precipitous hills, and then down to the Presidio. She turned north and stopped at Fort Point long enough to unwind the flowers from her bars and basket. She stood on a wall and threw the silk flowers into the greedy water. It could have those too.

  Kostos thought maybe a walk would help, and Lena thought maybe he was right. Maybe she would be better at moving than staying still.

  When she stepped out the front door the sunshine was so strong her shoulders stooped under the force of it. She squinted and blinked, trying to adjust her eyes and her pores to the onslaught.

  She glanced down the road to Kostos’s grandparents’ house. She was still slightly afraid of them from the time she’d made a spectacle of herself the first summer. It was many years ago, granted, but she had an acute memory for her mistakes. She’d imagined she would at least stop by and say hello. She’d imagined she would talk with Rena a little about her grandmother. She’d even packed a little gift for them, and a note from her mother. But then, early that first morning, all previous notions had been scattered or obliterated.

  “Are you staying with them?” she asked, gesturing to the house. It was so close, she remembered thinking that first summer, that if she’d tripped and rolled, and the Dounases’ door happened to be open, she would have rolled right into the living room of Kostos’s house.

  “No. I always see them when I come, but I have my own place.”

  She tried to picture it. “You still have the apartment in Fira?” she asked. She remembered that when he’d been married to Mariana, that was where they had lived.

  He looked puzzled at first, and then seemed to realize what place she meant. “No, no.” His expression told her it would have been impossible for her to be more wrong. “A few years ago I bought a place opposite Oia, overlooking the Caldera.”

  “Your own house?”

  He looked vaguely uncomfortable. “A weekend house. A vacation house.”

  “Can you go on vacation at home?”

  That didn’t assuage his discomfort. She backed off. She hadn’t meant to ask him any of those stupid questions.

  They walked up the hill instead of down. It didn’t matter; either way was fraught.

  As they climbed she talked to herself rather than to him. She chastised herself for her dim-witted confusion—thinking he still lived with his grandparents, forgetting who he actually was now. It was because she couldn’t contemplate having the will or the means to buy a house for yourself—especially not in a place you weren’t even living. Lena barely had the courage or cash to buy a toaster oven. What small amount of money she had she spent on rent and food. Even when she managed to stash away some savings, she tended not to acquire or accumulate anything besides photos, keepsakes, and sketchbooks. That was normal for college students, especially art students, and for people who refused to let time move forward.

  But Kostos was long past that. He was over thirty years old. He had a hugely powerful job. He’d been on the cover of a magazine, for God’s sake. Lena had trapped herself in time, but only in her delicate delusions was he trapped there too.

  Going uphill was fraught because at the top of the hill, on the plateau, was the little grove they’d shared in a variety of moods, including shame, lust, betrayal, and forgiveness. If he led her there, she was worried she might find herself down in the heart of the storm.

  But he didn’t. Instead he led her to a parched stretch of rock, and they sat on a precipice overlooking the water.

  This was the view she’d been avoiding, and as her eyes blurred into the blue horizon she understood why. Something moved in her brain, maybe something opened or something shut. The horizon wobbled and spread and the tears rolled over her cheeks. Her breath caught and her shoulders shook.

  She found her head tipping against his shoulder and vaguely she felt his arm come around her. The water seemed to dissolve her. Maybe it was the salt in her tears melting her, turning her inside out like a slug. She didn’t fight it. She couldn’t have anyway.

  She remembered crying like this in Bee’s arms, and it had been over Kostos. She remembered crying like this in her mother’s arms a different time, and it was also over Kostos. And now here were Kostos’s arms around her as she cried over Tibby and their whole lost life.

  Who would have imagined that he, the source of all fret, would turn out to be a source of comfort? She’d built him up so far and high, it was hard to imagine he was right here with her at such a time. It seemed like a hallucination, but not one to be poked at or questioned, so she let it be.

  She cried for a long time. Or so she guessed by the changing of the light. Kostos was a patient man. It was his nature, as true to him as his polite manners, his guilt, his oversized accountability. The guilt was for her.

  She’d cried over a broken heart before. She knew what that felt like, and it didn’t feel like this. Her heart felt not so much broken as just … empty. It felt like she was an outline, empty in the middle. The outline cried senselessly for the absent middle. The past cried for the present that was nothing. Tibby was too deeply incorporated within her for Lena to go on without her.

  “I lose
everything here,” she said.

  He couldn’t really know what she meant, but he thought it over carefully nonetheless.

  “Maybe you gain things too,” he said.

  “Maybe I do,” she said. She considered that and shook her head. “Nothing I get to keep.”

  Bridget indulged one of her old desires. Sometime around midnight—she wasn’t sure what time it was anymore—she locked her bike to a lamppost and unrolled her sleeping bag on a bench in Dolores Park. She stretched out on her back, her head resting on her pack, and looked up through the branches of a familiar tree to the disjointed pieces of the sky.

  She tried to lie low, not to alert her friends, because they might tell Eric—the Tall Mexican in the Suit, as they referred to him—and he would worry about her descending immediately into homelessness. But she discovered as it got later and colder that though this group talked up sleeping outside, most of them seemed to get absorbed into nearby churches and shelters long before dawn. In the darkest hours it got very quiet.

  She was nearly asleep when she felt something nearby. She opened her eyes and saw nothing, so she closed them again. A few more minutes passed and her breathing evened out. And then suddenly there was a shadow over her face and she felt her pack pulled from under her head.

  There was one benefit to having a body so charged with agony and adrenaline. She got her hands on her pack almost instantaneously and yanked it back.

  Her eyes took a little longer to adjust. It was a man with a knit hat and a beard.

  “Get off my pack,” she growled at him.

  “I’ve got a knife,” he said menacingly.

  She pulled on her pack even harder. She didn’t care if he had a knife. Let him have a knife. Let him kill her with his knife. That would be fine, but he wasn’t taking her stuff.

  She was up on her feet, towering. She was taller than he was and a lot angrier. She’d given nearly everything she had to the people in this park, but she’d done it on her own terms. She wouldn’t do it on his.

  With more strength than she knew she possessed she wrenched the pack out of his hands. He came at her, trying to tackle her, but she was balanced and strong. She clutched her pack in one arm and with the other punched him as hard as she could in the jaw. It hurt her hand, but it hurt his jaw too, she knew. In surprise he put his hand to his face and she punched him again in the ear.

  If he had a knife, she never saw it. He turned and walked away. He seemed to know she was crazier than he was. She was tempted to follow him and hit him again. He might have been a felon or a junkie, but he had more to live for than she did.

  “Fuck off,” she spat at him.

  Her hand hurt. She hugged her pack. She didn’t want to give anything away anymore.

  Lena and Kostos sat on the couch that night. First they were sitting up on opposite ends, then they turned to each other, she cross-legged. His nice shoes came off, and eventually, as it got late, they each leaned back, symmetrically resting on pillows propped against the arms of the couch, their knees bent and feet not quite touching. The conversation flowed and stopped and started as it would, a third thing in the room, not quite controlled by either of them, but mostly benevolent.

  She began to doze off, and when she woke she realized she’d stretched out her legs and he’d taken her large feet on his lap. They were not her best part.

  “Do you have any idea how much that letter meant?” she found herself asking him. It must have tied in with a dream she’d been having. She wondered why she said it, unguarded as it was, and not connected to anything. But why not say it? What was there to hold on to anymore? This was her hallucination and she could say what she wanted in it.

  He held her feet. He was puzzled. “What letter?”

  What letter. Was there any other letter? God, how small her life had become. It was probably one of five he had written that week. She took a breath. “The letter you wrote to me after Valia died.”

  He nodded. “I loved her like she was my own grandmother. I walk up this street and I miss her every time.”

  “She loved you too. You know that. She was so proud of you. She felt like everybody abandoned this place. We all made homes in other places, and you, the hero of Oia, always came back.”

  He shrugged and shook his head. There was almost no blaming with him. “Everybody leaves here. Except the tourists. The Germans. They stay.”

  She smiled. It was probably a smile. “I couldn’t understand my own feelings about Valia until I read your letter, and then I could.”

  “That makes me glad to know,” he said. He considered, his eyes down. “I disappointed her, though.”

  “Valia?”

  “Yes.”

  “Impossible.”

  “I did.”

  “In what way?”

  His face had turned inward and complicated, and she found herself unsure about wanting to follow him in. He rarely paused to search for words as he was doing now. He glanced down and then looked up at her. He smiled, but not easily. “I didn’t marry her granddaughter.”

  Lena’s caution seemed to slow her thoughts—she could almost watch them going by like words on a very slow ticker tape. Kostos didn’t marry Valia’s granddaughter. Lena was Valia’s granddaughter—one of her granddaughters, most likely the one he meant. Kostos didn’t marry her, was what he meant. Kostos was supposed to marry her, Lena, and he hadn’t.

  Lena looked up at him in alarm. She hadn’t thought he would ever say that out loud. She was too far gone to process the impact of these words and also too far gone to make any attempt to hide from them.

  No, he hadn’t married her, had he? He had married somebody else. He had divorced somebody else. He had gone on with his life, clearly not held back by any of it. You couldn’t let a grumpy grandmother—somebody else’s grumpy grandmother—tell you whom to marry.

  Kostos’s eyes were cast slightly down, but not focused on anything. She sensed he was looking at Valia in his mind’s eye. “Before she died she asked me why. And I couldn’t explain it to her satisfaction, but I told her I loved you, and she said, ‘What good does that do me?’ ”

  Kostos looked up, refocusing his eyes on Lena.

  He smiled, trying to lighten the mood, but her face was stricken, she knew. She didn’t have the wherewithal to compose it in another way.

  He looked regretful, sorry for her. “It was all a long time ago.”

  She didn’t know what to say. She gaped at him like a gutted fish.

  “So much has changed since then,” he added quickly. He didn’t want her dangling on the hook.

  She nodded. She couldn’t seem to speak. She sat up and withdrew her feet.

  “I’m sorry I brought it up,” he said.

  Lena wanted to say so many things. She wanted to close this abyss, to cover it graciously, to make him feel okay, cross over it carefully, to get to the other side and keep on walking.

  She also wanted to dive into it and ask him whether his love was only in the past tense anymore. A part of her wanted to tell him she still loved him, and that even though this love was hopeless and long over, it still consumed her year after year. It was a tangled hair-ball of feelings and she couldn’t pull forth any one strand.

  “I’m sorry,” he said again. “You don’t have to say anything.”

  He got up off the couch and went into the kitchen. Lena hugged her knees. She wondered if she was having a stroke, if the entire speaking apparatus of her brain had flooded and shut down.

  He came back with a loaf of bread and cheese, two apples, and a bottle of red wine. He carefully sliced the bread, cut into an apple. He poured the wine, letting the strange air in the room begin to settle back toward normal.

  She held the glass and balanced a plate on her knees. “Thank you,” she choked out.

  He lifted his glass. “To friendship,” he said.

  She nodded and lifted her glass in return. She worked on a smile. Even that would help.

  They chewed and sipped in silenc
e for a few minutes.

  “You know what I’d like to do?” he said.

  She shook her head.

  “I’d like to write you a letter about Tibby. I’d like to write something that could help, I really would.” He looked almost tearful. “But I don’t know what it would say.”

  She was moved by the sympathy in his face. It took her a while to pick her words. “I don’t know what it would say either.”

  He nodded. His face expressed something like defeat, and she hated for him to feel that way. He’d spoken to three local bureaucrats on her behalf. He’d fixed her eggs and tea, bread and wine. He’d repaired the kitchen faucet and the back door, and had even cleaned out the cabinets when she wasn’t looking. He’d lain with her for hours on the couch. He’d held her feet.

  Who knew why? Who knew what—other than guilt and a sense of responsibility toward Valia—made him do it? But strange as it was, Kostos, her customary causer of sadness, had given her enormous comfort.

  She swallowed the bread she was chewing and cleared her throat. “Your being here is kind of like the letter,” she said.

  Lena could hear the wind outside late that night. It sounded like the beginnings of a storm. She could almost feel the anticipation of it on her skin.

  It was well after midnight, and she had expected that at some point Kostos would go back to his alleged vacation house, which she knew had to offer accommodations more comfortable than her grandparents’ old couch. But he didn’t. He lay with her, or mostly with her feet, sipping wine, occasionally talking, and eventually dozing.

  Tonight we make strange bedfellows, she thought. Her loss, his guilt. Her insecurity, his good manners. Usually these things kept them apart, but tonight they brought them together.

  Was there an attraction anymore? There had been, fiercely, before. But she was too distant from herself, too sad and empty and confused to know anymore. What, besides sympathy, did he feel for her now? He was large and dashing and glamorous, moving through time with ease, where she felt stunted and small and stuck, a stick figure of pity with large feet.

  She could imagine how it seemed to him. If you couldn’t bring yourself to marry the sad granddaughter, you could at least take pity on her.