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
Because the moving truck wasn’t coming until the following day, and the only new furniture that had been delivered so far was a few mattresses, Bridget, Bailey, and Brian went to a pizza place in town for dinner.
Bailey ate three bites of pizza and a slice of pepperoni and fell asleep on Bridget’s lap. This left her and Brian with a lot of pizza and a lot of silence between them.
Bridget felt stirred
up. Maybe about the farm, about the icehouse, where Brian had told her she should put her stuff. About Tibby’s mysterious plans. About the things over time that had made less and less sense. It was cruel, perhaps, to ambush Brian over pizza and his sleeping daughter’s head, but she couldn’t keep the questions back anymore.
She was a little surprised by the one that came out first. “Why didn’t Tibby tell us she was pregnant? Why didn’t she tell us when Bailey was born?”
Brian gave her a look that was hard to decipher. Almost as if she were playing him, demanding he tell her things she should already know. “Because that was when she found out she was sick.”
“Sick.” The word seemed to spin like a coin on the table before it settled. She felt like she could see it sitting there heavily, motionless. She didn’t know what to make of it. She felt a strong intuition to go carefully. She cleared her throat. “What do you mean, sick?”
There was his grief-stricken impatience again. “I mean sick. Sick with Huntington’s. That’s when we found out.”
Bridget took a breath. She looked down at Bailey’s peaceful face and looked up again. She felt as if she were walking into a very cold, very rough ocean. She put her hair behind her ears. “What is Huntington’s?”
Brian sort of squinted at her. He must have known she wasn’t asking anything rhetorically. They stared at each other in a strange kind of standoff. Neither of them touched anything or chewed or moved.
“It’s a degenerative disease,” he finally said, as though it were obvious and she should know. “It’s what she died of.”
It would have been impossible to follow all the different thoughts to all the places they went. Her breath started feeling shallow. She could only hope to take one thought to one place at a time.
“Is that why you moved to Australia?”
Brian pushed his plate away. “We went to Australia for my job in October. We thought we’d be there for three months and come back home. In November we found out she was pregnant and started doing the tests.” His hand was shaking when he picked up his beer. “The diagnosis was confirmed before Christmas. The only positive news was that the baby didn’t carry the gene for it. I couldn’t think of having a baby then, but Tibby wouldn’t think of not having it, no matter what it did to her. But she was scared to come back to the States after that. None of it seemed real over there, but you three and her folks and home were real. She agonized over how to tell you, what to say. She couldn’t tell you three or her mom about the baby without telling about the illness. She couldn’t do either on the phone, she said. It had to be in person. She wanted you to meet the baby in person, and yet she was scared for you to see what was happening to her. I think a part of her wanted you to remember her the old way.”
Bridget clutched her trembling hands. The trembling spread down to her feet and up to her shoulders and jaw, and she clenched her teeth to keep them from chattering.
“Then it took some time to get doctors and treatment set up here in the U.S. It took a while for us to find a place to settle here.”
“She knew she was going to die,” Bridget said slowly.
“But she didn’t think it would be so soon. Not in the middle of your trip in Greece. You must know that. I was worried about her, but she was convinced she was strong enough to make the trip. She didn’t think it would be then. After Greece, after she told you all, she was flying back home to D.C. to tell her family. Bailey and I were going to meet her there. She wanted us to get married in front of all of you. We’d bought this house. We thought she would see it, at least. She was going to go into hospice after that. She was going downhill. We knew it would happen. We didn’t think it could happen so fast.” When he stopped talking he undid his fists. Bridget could see the nail marks dug into his hands.
Bridget took his hands.
He took his hands away. “You can’t imagine the time she spent making the plans and writing you the letters. I figured you knew all this.” He took a swig of beer. He let out a long breath. He seemed to will the tears back in. The standoff was starting again and she couldn’t do it. She couldn’t keep her face still. She couldn’t keep breathing right. She barely understood anything. She didn’t feel like telling him how far awry Tibby’s plans had gone, that they hadn’t even seen her alive.
He glared at her, like he didn’t want to suffer with her anymore. She didn’t know anything worth sharing. He could do it better alone. “What did you think happened?”
She thought of all the things she had thought, and all the thoughts that those thoughts engendered. It was hard to unwind them all, to unthink them.
Tibby hadn’t gone into the Caldera to end her life. Maybe she’d gone in to relive their magical swim in Ammoudi, ten years before. Maybe she’d wanted to experience that feeling, that loveliness once more. Tibby was sick and probably weaker than she knew, but she didn’t mean to die.
She looked up at Brian, finding it hard to pull his face into focus. She wasn’t going to tell him what they had thought. What they assumed. What they all thought they knew and suffered but wouldn’t say. She felt her chin trembling and pressed her lips together. “We didn’t know.”
The final chapter of Roberto’s story unwound as the children slept and the sun eased its way up out of Lake Pontchartrain. There were still the final swells, the codas to sing, before you could call it done.
He’d gotten a job managing a garage in Queens. They were living with his uncle, his mother’s brother, who was old, and Roberto was taking English classes at night. He couldn’t afford a place for them. He couldn’t afford child care. Teresa’s sister lived with her husband in Metairie and had offered to take the children until September so he’d have five months to save enough money to get on his feet.
“That’s where you’re taking them?” She was slowly absorbing the horror that he felt.
“I think it’s the worst part of all of this.”
She tried to think it through. How far a world this was from worrying about stiffing the Shaws at a benefit pre-party. This was a world that needed a few grown-ups around.
They were quiet for a while. They waited for the train to finish the long crossing of the lake and for the children to wake up. There was no night to cover them and make a space for them anymore. They might as well hasten on to the conclusion.
“And so what happened to Jones?” Roberto asked her finally.
“Oh, I’m supposed to marry him next month.”
Roberto looked surprised. “You are?”
“Yeah.” She shrugged. “I’m not really going to, though.”
“No?”
“No.”
“Does he know that?”
“Not yet. I guess I should tell him.” She picked at the rough skin around her thumbnail. In the scheme of things, calling off the wedding didn’t seem so desperately important. “Honestly, I don’t think he’ll mind that much.”
Carmen was supposed to absorb the city of New Orleans at warp speed. She was supposed to talk the talk, walk the walk, eat the food (but nothing too fattening!), see some hurricane damage, and visit at least one graveyard, according to the strict orders of her manager. And she had a script to read while she was at it.
The problem was, she couldn’t say goodbye to them. She held Clara with one arm and dragged her roller bag with the other while Pablo held on to her free pinky, and Roberto carried two giant bags, one large bag, a diaper bag, and a car seat through the train station to the RTA bus depot.
How was Roberto going to do this alone? Carmen knew he’d managed to do it for the last eight months alone, but now she was there to worry about every tiny juncture—the first bus, the second, the aluminum race car that was bound to fall out of Pablo’s pocket, Clara’s bottle! As though they could not make it another step without her. Or perhaps it was she who couldn’t without them.
They finally straggled their way to the bus depot. It was time for Carmen to leave. She couldn’t leave them, but what else could she do? She couldn’t exactl
y get on the bus and go to Metairie with them. She imagined introducing herself to Teresa’s sister, giving a big wave. “I’m just the lady they met on the train.”
She’d already given Roberto her cellphone number (should she ever get the thing going again), her address in New York (“though I probably won’t be there much longer”), even the number of the hotel in New Orleans. He’d given her his cellphone number too. She didn’t know why. There wasn’t much point to any of it. It was just another way of not saying goodbye for a little longer. He had a life to get on with. So did she.
“Hold on to your car,” she told Pablo. “Her diaper feels heavy,” she said to Roberto. “Do you think you have enough formula to get you all the way there?” She realized she was starting to cry as she said these things.
The bus came. She held on to Roberto for too long. She was going to make them miss their bus. She put her face in his collar so the kids wouldn’t see her tears. She was ashamed of herself, making it a sloppy goodbye.
Roberto kissed her forehead, he kissed her cheek. His one big hand was pressed to her back and the other one covered her ear. Now he was worried about her along with everything else. That was not what she wanted.
It was an act of will to pull herself together when she kissed Pablo and Clara the last time. An actress at her finest. I am not falling to pieces as I sniff your head. I am not losing my shit as I do this.
She stood calmly as she waved goodbye to them and they waved back through the window of the bus. They were too far away to see her shaking, weren’t they? She tried to look composed. And then the bus turned the corner.
And she dissolved.
WTF? was the thought running through her head as she sat down in the middle of the sidewalk and cried. What has become of me?
She dragged herself to the cabstand. She cried all the way to the Ritz-Carlton hotel. She left her suitcase in the lobby but didn’t go up to her room. She walked to the riverfront. She walked back and forth, she couldn’t keep track of how many times.
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