Sisterhood Everlasting

by Ann Brashares

  Carmen felt as flattered as she had ever been in her life. More flattered than when Bobbi Brown told her she had good bones. “It’s okay, I can hold her for a bit longer,” Carmen offered. It wasn’t like she had a lot of other things to do.

  “You … no mind?” the father asked.

  “No, not at all,” Carmen said. She took the baby and bounced her a bit more. She arranged the baby’s dress and diaper and smoothed her hair. “You are a very pretty girl,” Carmen told her. She turned to the father. “What’s her name?”

  “Clara,” he said.

  “Oh. That’s beautiful,” Carmen replied.

  As she talked to the baby, she wondered why she wasn’t talking to them in Spanish. And moreover, why the father didn’t know she was Latin. Although her hair was highlighted and her accent was as polished as that of any New York actress, she still expected people to know what she was. Wasn’t it obvious?

  When she was with Jones, she felt it was obvious. Here he is with his Latin girlfriend, she would think. Jones is cool, he’s going to marry his Puerto Rican girlfriend, she would imagine his friends and colleagues thinking. And for his benefit, she tried to tamp it down. She didn’t gab and hoot with her mother in Spanish the way she used to. She kept her hair ironed and small. She kept her grandmother and various aunts and uncles and cousins at arm’s length to keep him feeling comfortable, to keep the Puerto Ricans picturesque.

  She remembered her agent and her manager saying on so many occasions: Now, we don’t want to pigeonhole you. You can play anything. Let’s not go the Latin route. That can be limiting. She remembered her publicist turning down a feature in Latina magazine. Let’s see what else we get. It could rule out other things, she’d explained.

  And now she wondered, what had happened to her? What would Big Carmen think? Had she tamped herself down so far, she wasn’t even who she was anymore?

  Clara pulled her hair gleefully and Carmen spent a while trying to extract each strand from Clara’s sticky fist. When Clara started to turn up the volume, the father offered a bottle to Carmen, and Carmen gratefully took it. She settled Clara into her lap and tried to figure out how to best administer a bottle. Clara seemed to know what to do, but she allowed Carmen to feel competent nonetheless. She offered Carmen a couple of smiles around the nipple of the bottle. You could see the smile in Clara’s eyes most markedly, and Carmen found it pretty sweet, the baby’s basic desire to connect. Do we all start out like that? she wondered.

  Carmen reclined her chair and relaxed into the sucking sounds. Clara’s body got heavy and the bottle lolled to the side. She twitched a few times, and Carmen realized she had fallen asleep. Gently she took the bottle and put it on the empty seat beside her. She tucked the stray parts of Clara in, and covered them both with her blanket. Carmen turned her head to look out the window, at spring rushing on.

  She thought of many things. Mainly she thought of Pennsylvania, and April 2, and the things she most regretted. But Clara was asleep on her chest. Clara trusted her enough to cede consciousness right on top of Carmen’s heart. However terrible Carmen was, she took solace from that.

  “Doxie, it’s Lena,” Lena said into her cellphone.

  “Lena, where are you?”

  “I’m at the airport.”

  “Where are you going? Oh, my dear.” She stopped and made a funny noise. “Are you going?”

  “I’m going.”

  “It’s not the time yet, is it?”

  “I don’t want to wait anymore. I can’t. I’m going to find him in London.”

  “You’re flying to London?”

  “I sold a painting to my mother’s friend. It goes with her couch.”

  “You sound like a different girl, my dear one.”

  Lena’s fingers were shaking when she made the next call. Even in her rush of impulse this was hard.

  She went immediately to Carmen’s voice mail without a single ring. She hadn’t expected that from Carmen, who manned her phone more devotedly than anyone she knew.

  Lena didn’t know what to do. She finally had something to say, but no Carmen to say it to. The thing she needed to say was not the kind of thing you left on a voice mail message, but she couldn’t help it.

  “Carmen, it’s Lena. I found something out. Tibby didn’t kill herself.” She heard a sob escape her throat. “She didn’t want to die. There was something wrong with her. She knew she was going to die, but not because she wanted to. I don’t know what really happened or how you explain it, but there was something she said in her letter that made me know, know, it is true.”

  Lena realized she was crying openly as she talked, right in the middle of gate D7. “She’s still gone, I know, and maybe it doesn’t change anything.” She wiped her nose with her hand. “But it changes everything.”

  Somewhere between Gastonia, North Carolina, and Spartanburg, South Carolina, Carmen gave Clara back to her father, and her big brother wandered over. She could tell he’d been jealous for a couple of hours that the dumb baby had made a friend and he hadn’t. She could read him like a book, and it made her wonder how far she had progressed in her life that she was perfectly in sync with the emotions of a three-year-old.

  He introduced himself as Pablo on the way to the dinette. He put up his hand to hold hers as naturally as he walked. It didn’t mean anything to him, but it meant something to her.

  She looked down at his up-reaching arm and she could remember, almost in her muscles, the holding-hands era of her life. Reaching up to hold her mother’s hand. Her teacher’s. She could picture herself with Bee holding hands, Bee always yanking her around the yard, but holding on to her nonetheless. She could feel the sensation of holding Tibby’s hand, which was small and squirmy. And Lena you were usually dragging. Lena was slow and distractible when it came time to get anywhere, including the ice cream truck. But they held hands anyway, sometimes three or four of them in a chain, even when it tied them down. Why was that? And when did it stop? First grade, maybe? At some point it had seemed babyish. She had probably been the last one to stop.

  Pablo begged for a Snickers bar and Carmen was about to get him two, but then she stopped at the memory of how it had been with her around his age when she had a bellyful of candy. Halloweens, Christmases, and Easters were a catalog of frantic behavior followed by tears. She could picture herself crying over her pink Easter basket every single time.

  She sat him on the counter and studied the menu. “Have you ever had apples and cheese?” she whispered to him in Spanish, as if it were an international secret.

  He shook his head, interested.

  “Separately they are good, but together, in one bite, they are so good they shouldn’t be allowed.”

  This, he liked.

  “Do you want me to show you?” She looked around, as though concerned somebody might catch them.

  His eyebrows were raised. He nodded.

  She bought two apples and a pack of cheese and crackers and grabbed a plastic knife. They settled at a table together, him standing on the seat across from her, bent over the table to watch her every move. She cut the apple into small, neat pieces. She saw him eyeing them hungrily.

  “Okay, but you can’t eat any yet, because that would just be apple,” she instructed him in Spanish. She cut the orange cheddar cheese into squares. “Do what I do,” she told him. She stacked a piece of cheese on a piece of apple, and he did the same. She held it up to her mouth. “Are you ready?”

  He was smiling excitedly. Kids were such suckers for a little bit of ceremony. She remembered that about herself too. She’d get taken in by anything.

  “Okay.” She popped hers into her mouth and he did the same. He was so excited, she wasn’t sure he was tasting anything. He was riveted on her reaction. She closed her eyes and nodded, savoring it. He did the same.

  “Good, huh?” she asked in English

  “Gooooooood.”

  They ate about ten more each, stacking them in different ways, into sandwiches, into to
wers. He wanted to bring the last bits back to his father. “Is it allowed?” he asked her in Spanish.

  “Sí,” she said.

  His father ate them gratefully, and with a lot of instruction from Pablo. He seemed to understand it was a bite worthy of an international secret.

  Carmen sat back down and watched Pablo telling his father about the whole episode, getting it all out of order. And the father listened with admirable patience. He took it in without demanding that the facts add up. Carmen’s mother had been like that, when Carmen was little.

  She wondered about Pablo’s father. He was probably not much older than she was—maybe in his early thirties—but he seemed like an adult. It seemed liked he had crossed a chasm that she hadn’t.

  Jones was almost forty. Had he crossed that chasm? She thought not. Maybe it was fatherhood. Maybe it was becoming a parent, which Jones had vowed not to do.

  Carmen sat back and looked out the window. Occasionally she stole glances at the little family across the aisle.

  Clara napped and Pablo sat peacefully on the floor, playing for at least an hour with his father’s shoelaces. Carmen felt proud that she hadn’t just bought him the two Snickers bars.

  There was something pretty different between the last time Lena had come to number twenty-eight Eaton Square and this time. The difference was that this time she was crazy.

  This time she wasn’t freaked out or crushed when the fiancée/girlfriend Harriet answered the door. Lena had Bapi’s lion cuff links in the front pocket of her jeans and she was ready for anything. Kostos could have slammed the door in her face three times in a row, and she still would have rung again and said her piece. She’d come more than halfway; she would be damned if she didn’t do her part. At least I tried, she could say.

  Harriet looked different this time. She was wearing jeans and flat shoes and she looked like a normal person. Not a totally normal person—she had twice as much makeup on as Lena had worn to her senior prom—but closer.

  Harriet looked at Lena with vague recognition. Lena knew she looked different this time too. She was also dressed in jeans. Her hair was pulled back, her shirt was black, she felt like an adult. Last time she had worn fear. And this time she was crazy.

  “Is Kostos home?” she asked politely.

  There was nothing friendly about Harriet. “Did you come here before?”

  No fear. “Yes. A couple months ago.”

  The shape of Harriet’s eyes was changing and she seemed to be growing larger in stature. “What is your name?”

  Lena cleared her throat. “Lena Kaligaris.”

  “Why did you come here?”

  “To find Kostos.”

  “He’s not here.” Harriet took a step forward, but Lena didn’t step back.

  “Do you know when he’ll be back?”

  Harriet looked like she was debating between shutting the door in Lena’s face and replying to the question. There was something in Harriet’s expression Lena recognized as curiosity. The sick kind of curiosity you hated yourself for having. “I have no idea when he’ll be back here. Possibly never.”

  “This isn’t his house?”

  “It’s his house, but he doesn’t live in it any longer. He moved out. I thought you of all people would know that.”

  Lena wouldn’t shrink. She would stay right here. “I didn’t know that.”

  “Aren’t you the girl he wrote all the letters to, Lena Kaligaris? I’m fairly certain you are. You’re the one who made the drawings he had all over his fucking desk and stuck to his mirror. That would be you, wouldn’t it?”

  “That would likely be me,” Lena said, unintimidated, without sarcasm. Who really knew? Maybe Kostos had other pen pals. She’d had worse disappointments.

  Harriet gave a mirthless laugh. “He said they were ‘friendly’ letters. Funny. You don’t stay up until two or three every morning writing ‘friendly’ letters. I thought he’d run off to you a month ago.”

  Lena looked down and shook her head. “He didn’t.”

  “Well, good luck finding him. Give him my regards. He’s a strange man, you know. He’s never really with you. My grandmother warned me about shagging a man who doesn’t want to marry you at all, and I should have listened. But I landed quite a good house, didn’t I?”

  “You have been my friend,”

  replied Charlotte.

  “That in itself

  is a tremendous thing.”

  —E. B. White

  It wasn’t her farm in rural Pennsylvania.

  Except for being an old acquaintance, bystander, and unofficial babysitter, Bridget had no claim on it. But after thirty-two hours of cross-planetary travel with a sweaty toddler sticking to her body, after nearly five months—arguably two-plus years—in complete limbo, she stepped across the willow-shaded front yard and felt as if she were walking home.

  She hadn’t known she liked old farmhouses on twenty-seven acres of lawns and fields and forests, with converted barns, guest cottages, root cellars, and icehouses. She had never longed for any of those things. But as she swooped around the place with Bailey on her hip, she discovered that perhaps, in some way, she did.

  Maybe because the whole thing was blooming before her eyes on the most perfect early spring day that had ever been. Maybe because it was the place that Tibby had found and planned to call home. Maybe because of the little soul making headway in her uterus, who was becoming an oddly joyful source of companionship to her.

  “We could have animals here,” Bridget told Bailey, peering into the dark stalls on the lower story of the barn. “It’s like Charlotte’s Web. We could get pigs and sheep and donkeys. And horses.” She was a little suspicious of herself as far as what she meant by “we.”

  “And get …” Bailey paused to put her words in order. “A ’pider.”

  “I bet we’ve already got spiders here,” Bridget said, pointing out the spangly webs at the corners of the stalls as though they’d won the lottery twice. She carried Bailey across the shady central yard, around which the clapboard buildings were clustered.

  “We could put a vegetable garden right there. We could grow tomatoes and strawberries and pumpkins.”

  “Bannas?”

  “Not necessarily bananas, but we could buy those.”

  Brian was in the mostly empty kitchen, trying to scrape together a snack for Bailey. Bridget put Bailey down on the counter.

  “Did you buy this?” she asked Brian.

  “This house? This farm, you mean?”

  “Yes.”

  “Yes.”

  “This whole thing?”

  “Tibby fell in love with it in the pictures.”

  “Wow.” It wasn’t that it was so fancy. Bridget knew it hadn’t cost millions of dollars or anything, but still.

  “And since I got the programming finished, we won’t have to sell it.” His face looked a little bit lighter than it had.

  “Good news,” she said. She had the sense that Brian was trying to thank her, and she felt thanked.

  She’d always known he was exceedingly smart with computers. She’d heard a couple of rumors that his company was getting off the ground, but she hadn’t paid attention to them. “What kind of program is it?” She didn’t know why she hadn’t thought to ask before.

  “A game. A simulation game.” Brian dug in his pocket and handed her some keys. “I haven’t been inside the icehouse yet. I’ve only seen pictures. You want to tell me what you think?”

  She left Bailey and ventured across the grass. The icehouse was the last of the structures, sitting at the edge of the woods about twenty yards from the main house. As she got close, she discovered there was a little stream running along the far side of it.

  It was a miniature house, white clapboard like the farmhouse, and sort of vertical. She got ready with the keys, but she found the door unlocked, so she pushed it open.

  She stood in the doorway, astonished and slightly puzzled. She felt like she’d seen it before, or maybe dre
amed it. The ground floor was two simple square rooms, one big and one small. The big one had an open kitchen on one side of it, and the small room glowed with the light of a clerestory. The upstairs was a loft reached by a ladder. Standing below, she could see it was high and white and open, with sloping walls and a skylight. You could see through it to green branches and pieces of sky overhead.

  She climbed up the ladder and then back down. She wandered into the smaller room on the first floor and discovered another door. She opened it and gazed through. There was a tiny rustic screen porch sticking into the woods and cantilevered over the stream. She stepped onto it in a state of near-disbelief. She’d never imagined that any enclosed space could be so appealing. There was an old iron daybed against one wall. If you went to the edge and looked down, the water was rushing right under your feet. She couldn’t quite get over it, the smell of the woods, the sound of the stream, the quality of the light. It was almost painfully perfect.

  Feeling slightly dazed, she walked back to the kitchen of the farmhouse and handed Brian the keys. He didn’t take them.

  “How is it?” he asked.

  “It is perfect,” she said, a little breathlessly.

  “That’s what Tibby thought you would say.”

  When the train stopped in Toccoa, just past the Georgia state line, they lost Coach Attendant Kevin and got Coach Attendant Lee. Coach Attendant Lee had a paramilitary flavor about him, Carmen decided; he immediately started asking everybody for their IDs.

  Carmen produced her driver’s license, which was in fact still valid. Lee stared at it and her ticket for a long time. He turned his eyes on her as though she had something to hide. I’ll let you go this time, his eyes seemed to be saying as he moved across the aisle.

  Carmen listened only vaguely at first as the father of the family across the aisle tried to follow the words of the fast-talking Lee. He went into his wallet and found his driver’s license. He went into his suitcase to retrieve his passport. Carmen could see that it wasn’t a U.S. passport, but she wasn’t sure what it was.