She glanced at the brown box by the door, waiting to be taken to the post office. She thought of Effie. She looked at her hands and watched them as they picked up the thick envelope and eased it open. She considered her actions with a distant sense of disbelief, but what else was there to do? What was there to wait for? Who else was there to be?
You thought you had the choice to stay still or move forward, but you didn’t. As long as your heart kept pumping and your blood kept flowing and your lungs kept filling, you didn’t. The pang she felt for Tibby carried something like envy. You couldn’t stand still for anything short of death, and God knew she had tried.
Moving forward was hard enough, but to do it without Tibby felt intolerable. How could she keep going when Tibby couldn’t? It wasn’t the same world without Tibby. She didn’t know how to live in it. She wasn’t sure she wanted to. But did she have a choice?
And then came the harder thoughts. Tibby had thought she had a choice and she’d chosen no. She had rejected her life. And them. And Lena. Somewhere inside Lena was the infant who couldn’t believe that Tibby would leave her on purpose.
Why? Why had she done it? Why hadn’t she told them what was happening? Why had she let it get so far? Had she wanted to hurt them as much as possible?
No. Lena couldn’t accept that. Even if it was true, she couldn’t make that idea fit. And as a consequence the world split in two and there she perched, one foot on either side of the divide, incapable of moving one way or the other. She could not accept what had happened. But what was the alternative?
Her tendency was to hide from information, because every scrap of information she’d learned so far had been ruthless.
She looked at the box by the door. She pictured Effie alone in her fancy going-out clothes on the late train on Christmas. What would become of them? She couldn’t stand still anymore.
Her hands were sweating as she opened the envelope and pulled out its contents. There was a letter, typed, covering the front and back of two pages. There were two more, smaller envelopes, sealed. One said Lena on it, and the other, bewilderingly, was labeled for Kostos.
Lenny,
Hard as it is to think of your life going along without me, I’ve forced myself to do it, but I’m too attached to you not to put myself in the picture even after I can’t be there in body.
What you leave behind is the people you loved. You leave yourself in them. I couldn’t be happier than to be in you, Len. I’d like to picture myself and see your beautiful face. If you can put up with me, that’s where I’d like to live. In you and Bee and Carmen. But for the most part, that’s where I’ve always lived.
I can’t stand not being there to goad, challenge, and annoy you, Len, so please forgive me for doing it anyway. There’s something I need you to do. You’ll see I included a pair of letters for you and Kostos. I don’t want to be needlessly mysterious, but I also want to avoid the famous Lena obstructionism. So please, please be willing to deliver the one for Kostos to him: from your hand to his hand, in person, face-to-face. It’s a lot to ask, I know. But I also know you’ll do it, because that’s the kind of person you are.
I put a date on them, and I want you to wait until then to open them. I know I’m a huge pain in the ass, and because I’m gone you feel like you have to do what I say, but I have thought this through a little.
You’ll either hate me for it or you’ll love me, but please know I did it because I love you. Whether it goes brilliantly or badly, I hope you’ll forgive my intrusions.
There’s another thing too. Would you stop by and see Alice once in a while? Not often, just every few months or so. I don’t want you to talk about anything serious or sad. And of course I’d like you to hang out with Nicky and Katherine and my dad too, but it’s Alice who might need it most.
Now instead of having one sealed letter to haunt her, Lena had two. Two sealed envelopes marked with a date in March. Instead of just herself and Tibby to hide from, she now also had Kostos.
But as much as she dreaded it, she had a project to do for Tibby. Two projects, including seeing Alice. Projects were things, like her flowing blood and her pumping heart, that would keep her going forward whether she wanted to or not.
No pen, no ink,
no table,
no room,
no time,
no quiet,
no inclination.
—James Joyce
There was something about a wedding. No matter how much you put into it, you could always put in more. There was always someone else you could call, some other question you could ask, something else you could buy. You could put every worry, every desire, every whim, every moment of your waking day into a wedding, and it was big enough to absorb them all.
And weddings were cheerful. Wedding planning was cheerful. The colors were bright and the people you talked to laughed and smiled easily. They cheerfully and laughingly took your money.
A wedding was an opportunity for control. You could present yourself and your life and your husband-to-be exactly as you chose, and there would be a million pictures to document it. For as long as you lived you could imagine that your wedding was what you really were and not just what you labored and paid to have it look like.
Control meant there were also things you could leave out of a wedding.
“Mom, do you know when Big Carmen’s going to be in Puerto Rico?” Carmen asked casually, when she called her mother from the set.
“First of March to mid-April.”
“Do you know the exact date in April? Are we talking the twelfth? The sixteenth?”
“I don’t know—more like the sixteenth. You could call her. Why?”
“I’m just trying to nail down the date for the wedding.”
“It won’t be before the sixteenth, will it?”
“Well …”
“Carmen.”
“What?”
“You are not attempting to have this wedding without Abuela, are you?” Her mother could be annoyingly perceptive on occasion.
“Well, if she’s going to be in Puerto Rico, then I’m not going to expect her to—”
“Carmen, I don’t care if your grandmother is in Timbuktu, there is no way she is missing your wedding. If she has to crawl to the church, she will be there.”
Carmen decided this wasn’t the best time to mention that it wasn’t going to be in a church. “Well, Mom.” She sounded like she was five. “What if it’s a really small wedding?”
Her mother sighed. “Even if your wedding is so small you don’t have a groom, Abuela will expect to be there. Honestly, Carmen, banish the thought. She has been talking about your wedding since the day you were born.”
Carmen slid her eyes down the long list of calls she had teed up. She huffed out her breath. “Fine.”
“Carmen?”
Carmen pressed the end call button as a new PA poked his head into the makeup trailer. “Yeah?” She couldn’t think of the guy’s name.
“They need you on set.”
“Now?” she asked grumpily, as though she were being prettied up and paid to do nothing more than plan her wedding on her iPhone.
By day Bridget weeded the unimpressive garden of the Sea Star Inn and repaired a stone wall. By night she washed glasses and plates in the cocktail lounge, where the smells were really killing her. Through all the hours she found herself thinking of Tibby. She’d kept those thoughts at bay before, but now she let them come. She remembered and wondered and conjectured.
Some days she started with the earliest memories of childhood and worked forward through high school, college. The Traveling Pants years. And then after they graduated, Tibby living in New York and waiting tables and writing her scripts. And then about nine months later, both herself and Carmen landing in New York too. She remembered the two-plus years she and Tibby and Carmen and unofficially Lena had been roommates on Avenue C. And then Tibby moved in with Brian, first to Long Island City, then to Greenpoint, then to Bedford-Stuyvesant, al
ways in search of cheaper apartments, as Tibby tried to get her screenplays bought and her films produced and Brian tried to get his software company off the ground.
About a year later, shortly after their twenty-seventh birthdays, was when Tibby disappeared. With almost no warning she moved to Australia. Bridget remembered going to surprise her at her and Brian’s ground-floor apartment in Bed-Stuy on Halloween. Bridget was in her full Indiana Jones costume, including the hat and the whip, carrying a box of caramel apples, ringing their buzzer and banging on the door, but no one was home. Finally Bridget climbed up to peer in the front window and saw that the apartment was empty.
Tibby emailed her and Carmen and Lena a short while later explaining the move. It was a project for Brian’s work. It paid really well. It would probably be only three or four months. Radical, huh? she’d written. Australia!
Tibby emailed pretty regularly for those first couple of months. Cellphone service was tricky, but she wasn’t out of touch. She sent comically sappy ecards for each of them at Christmas. But then three months had gone by. And then four and six and eight. They kept waiting for her to come home, but she didn’t. They pestered her endlessly about it. When are you coming home? That was the subject line of every email Bridget sent her. When? When? When?
Tibby’s communication fell off about four months after she’d gone, just at the time they thought she’d be coming back. There were very few emails from her after that, and the tone of them changed. Suddenly she was noncommittal about when she’d return.
It took them a couple of months to pick up on this change, to register that it wasn’t just one but all of them who’d experienced it. In June, they finally convened at a diner in New York to discuss it. They talked themselves down from crisis mode.
“She’s probably working on something big,” Carmen hypothesized. “You know how she gets when she’s in the middle of a script.”
“Maybe since she and Brian are already over there, they decided to spend the summer in the bush or diving along the Great Barrier Reef,” Bridget had suggested. “That’s what I would do. And there’s no calling or emailing from there.”
Tibby’s birthday emails in September didn’t really say anything; they were without information or intimacy. In retrospect, they were hauntingly vacant.
That was where the real troubles must have started, as best Bridget could tell. They weren’t prepared for Tibby’s departure. They didn’t know how to handle it. They couldn’t even acknowledge to themselves that it was real, that Tibby was far away. It wasn’t the physical distance; they’d managed that before. It was the fact that for the first time in their lives one of them was really, purposely, extensively out of touch. They couldn’t bring themselves to imagine it was true.
As she looked back, Bridget had the distinct sense of them all being stuck in time from that point forward. They never said it out loud, but it seemed implicitly disloyal to have fun together in Tibby’s absence, to make any big changes, to allow anything significant to happen without Tibby being part of it. They waited for Tibby to come back, spiritually if not physically, so they could resume their lives. They’d never accepted her absence. They didn’t know how to live if it wasn’t together.
That was why Bridget, why all of them, had been so thrilled and relieved about the Greece trip, why they’d thought this bewildering, isolating era of their lives was finally coming to an end. Thank God we’ll be together again. It had never been Bridget’s idea to fall apart, but they certainly had. She understood that now.
Why had Tibby done it? Why had she left like that? That was the part Bridget couldn’t understand.
Some days she worked backward, starting with the time just before the tickets for Greece came. She tried to connect those days to the days before and the days before that, to try to find some thread back to the time when she’d felt like she understood Tibby and lived a mostly rational life.
In her mind she looked for an explanation, a missing piece. Maybe Brian left Tibby and broke her heart. Maybe that was the cause of her falling out of touch. But wouldn’t she have confided her sorrows to them?
The two people Bridget would have wanted to ask were Brian himself and Alice, Tibby’s mother. What did they know? But her desire to find out was overwhelmed by her apprehension that neither of them knew what had really happened. Bridget had managed to call Alice a few nights before, but the conversation went nowhere. As far as she could tell, Alice believed Tibby had simply drowned. It was a senseless tragedy, an accident, and that was all. Maybe Tibby didn’t want anyone else to know the truth, and Bridget didn’t want to be the person to tell it.
One night Bridget borrowed Sheila’s computer and searched for Tibby’s name in Australia. It took a few rounds and refinements, but eventually her name came up, along with an address. Bridget’s hands shook as she located the address on the map. She zeroed in closer and closer, and when she got right into the middle of town, she turned the map to the satellite setting. It was a small town. A village, really. Bridget could navigate over each of the buildings and study every street. She saw the figures in the satellite images and wondered how long ago the pictures had been taken, whether one of them could be Tibby.
That was when the idea came to her. She knew what she would do. It was something she wished, with excruciating remorse, that she’d done when Tibby was alive.
It would seem cowardly to make sure Effie wasn’t going to be home the weekend Lena picked to go back to Bethesda, but Lena was pretty cowardly. She called both her mom and her dad separately to tell them she was coming and to fish around a little. Her mom might be tricky enough to push her and Effie together without their knowledge, but her dad wasn’t. He always blurted out the thing he wasn’t supposed to say and forgot to tell you the thing he was supposed to say. He wasn’t trying to make trouble, she knew. He was just bad at keeping track, and the forbidden things stayed closer to the front of his mind.
“Sweetheart, I’m so happy you came,” her mother said for the third time as Lena sat in their big, shiny kitchen and drank the tea her mother had made. The tea had more milk and honey than Lena would have put in, but it tasted good.
“I’m happy too,” Lena said. She wanted to express herself honestly without indicating that she was open to a full examination.
Anticipating this trip, Lena had expected her mother to jump down her throat at the first possible opportunity, to ask a million jarring questions, to shine her maternal klieg light on all the tender, hidden spots. But she hadn’t. She was companionably quiet. She put some groceries away.
“Did you set a time with Alice?” Ari asked after the last bag was balled up in the recycling bin.
Lena shook her head. This was the part of her weekend where the real dread kicked in. “No, I just told her I’d stop by in the afternoon.”
Her mother nodded. “Do you want me to go with you?”
Lena looked up, surprised by the offer. She had forgotten, at her age, that her mother could do something like that for her, that there was anything truly helpful her mother could do to solve her problems. She could see the strain in her mother’s face, but also the willingness, and she admired her for it.
Lena considered. “Thank you for offering. I really appreciate it. But I think I should go on my own.”
“Okay,” Ari said.
“You’ve been over?”
“A couple of times.”
Lena nodded. “I bet you brought food.”
“Loads of it.”
Lena pictured it and it made her hungry. “Spanakopita, I bet. Nicky loves that.”
“And other things.”
Her mother sat down, something she rarely did. Her expression was thoughtful. “It’s hard to know what to do.”
Lena wondered if it was too late to turn out like her mother. “At least you try,” she said. “At least you do something.”
First they sat in the kitchen while Alice attempted to make them coffee. Lena sat at the table and watched Alice search for
one thing and then another. The coffee filters. No coffee filters. She looked in a harried way in hopeless places, like in the refrigerator and under the sink. A piece of the grinder was broken. The instructions were around there somewhere. And the milk? They were just out of milk. It was a strange reversal for Lena.
“It’s okay. I didn’t really want any coffee anyway,” Lena said.
Alice was squatting on the floor, unloading the contents of the lower pantry by then. “I think we have instant.”
Lena wished she could say something to Alice to get her to relax and sit down at the table with her, but by that time Alice was on the phone to Loretta, the housekeeper they’d had for over a million years, asking where the instant coffee was, and Lena understood that Alice didn’t want to sit down at the table with her. Lena understood because she knew very well what ants-in-your-pants evasion looked like. It was what she herself did all the time.
Alice didn’t want to meet her eyes or hazard a bit of quiet creeping between them. She didn’t want a space to open where they might have to talk about Tibby and what had happened and how it had happened and how much they missed her. In fact, Alice clearly dreaded it.
Lena looked at Alice finding the yellowed instructions for the grinder on the high shelf, and in Alice she saw herself. Lena always thought she masked it so cleverly, but seeing it across the room, it struck her as tragically transparent.
Lena didn’t want to make Alice talk about anything she didn’t want to talk about—Lena of all people wouldn’t do that to her. Lena didn’t want to introduce anything hard or sad. She just wanted Alice to sit down. She just wanted Alice to know that she cared about her. Was this how it was for the people who cared about Lena? Like her mom? Like Carmen, Effie, and Bee? Like Tibby?
“How’s Nicky liking the new school?” Lena asked casually. She knew he’d switched to Maret for his junior year, leaving the public high school where they’d all gone.
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