Girls in Pants - Ann Brashares [24]
“I promised. I already promised Mommy and Daddy that.”
Tibby held the pair of small feet up to her face, pressing one to each cheek, and closed her eyes. She was overcome by tenderness and relief mixed with guilt and regret. She breathed deeply and willed back the tears. She didn’t want Katherine to see any more crying.
“Brian!” Katherine shouted, with remarkable glee for a girl who had in fact crushed her skull less than eight hours earlier.
Tibby looked up. She had already felt so many things today, she couldn’t imagine feeling any more.
Brian’s face was wrenched, but he kept his expression bright as he came over to hug the noninjured parts of Katherine. “You are all in one piece, Kitty Cat,” he said. “Good job.”
Katherine beamed. “I falled out Tibby’s window.”
Brian cast the briefest of glances at Tibby, but she could read in it his protectiveness of her. “That’s what I heard.”
Tibby wondered how he’d heard. It was so like him just to come over to the hospital.
Tibby let Katherine’s feet go as Brian looked at her in his particular way—projecting all the things he was thinking from his eyes to hers. He was worried about Katherine, but he was worried about Tibby, too. He wanted her to feel better, not to feel bad or responsible. He also wanted—or did she imagine this?—to convey to her that what had happened between them had really happened, that he meant what he had said to her.
She wanted something too. Just one little thing: for them to go back to how they were before.
Carmen lay on her bed thinking about Katherine, worrying about Tibby, and generally wondering things. Her mother was sleeping even though they’d finished dinner only an hour before. Once again, David had not made it home in time for dinner.
David was working on a big case. Seeing his schedule up close convinced Carmen that she did not ever want to become a lawyer. At least, not the kind David was. For a few weeks he’d come home by seven most nights for dinner, but in the last month he never came home before eleven, and even at that hour he was fielding calls on his cell phone. A few times he’d left home for the office one morning and hadn’t come home until the next morning. Then he’d taken a shower and gone back again. Carmen had always suspected that people who worked that hard secretly didn’t want to come home, but she knew that wasn’t true of David. He was desperate to be home with Christina. He adored her. Carmen could see that he felt genuinely guilty and sad for every dinner he missed. And that was pretty much all of them.
According to Christina, he was working on a “big deal.” One gigantic company gobbling up a different gigantic company, as Carmen understood it. And all David wanted to do was finish this “big deal” before the baby came. Which was why he worked twenty hours a day.
Carmen studied her ceiling, dotted with the glowing constellation stickers she’d excitedly arranged there when she was eight. There should be a law disallowing eight-year-olds from decorating their rooms, especially where stickers were involved. Why had her eight-year-old self saddled her seventeen-year-old self with so many dumb decals and see-through unicorn window appliqués? They were impossible to get off.
The truth was, she continued to have a soft spot for the glowing stars, but tonight they made the ceiling seem closer rather than farther away.
Thinking about her eight-year-old self reminded her of her four-year-old self, who was responsible for packing her closet with so many beautified (er, mangled) dolls. And that reminded her of her baby self, who had also inhabited this very room. And that, of course, reminded her of babies again.
She wanted to leave a hole when she left for college. That was selfish, maybe, but she did. She wanted to step out of the picture of her old life and leave a big, generous cutout waiting for her return. Giving her the chance, at least, to come back.
But now it felt like the minute she stepped out of her life, it was going to close up around her as if she’d never been there at all. The picture would re-form almost