Girls in Pants - Ann Brashares [62]
Ari looked at her, pained and tired, but with tenderness, too.
Couldn’t Ari see that Valia wasn’t the only one suffering? Carmen had never seen Ari so tense, and Mr. Kaligaris hadn’t always been as angry and rigid as he was now. Couldn’t Ari see the toll it took not only on her, but also on her daughters?
Carmen knew she wouldn’t have been able to have this conversation if Mr. Kaligaris were here. But she trusted Ari to love her. Ultimately she trusted Ari to read her good intentions and, hopefully, the truth.
“Carmen, sweetheart, I’m not saying you aren’t right. I appreciate what you’re trying to do. But it’s complicated. Really, how can Valia go back to that house she shared with Bapi for fifty-seven years? How could she tolerate the pain of living there without him? Sometimes change is the right thing.”
Carmen couldn’t help looking sour. She was no friend of change. “I know that. I know being back in her house on the island will make her sad. Of course she’ll be sad. But that’s her home. That’s her life. She can handle being sad. I’m sure of that. What she can’t handle is being here.”
There was that law of life, so cruel and so just, that one must grow or else pay more for remaining the same.
—Norman Mailer
Tibby couldn’t fall asleep. She sat in her bed and looked out the window at the hazardous apple tree. The apples were growing plump and red now. How had she never even tried one?
She associated them with having fallen, that was part of it. She could viscerally recall the smell of the oversweet, rotting, fermenting apples from seasons past that fell without ever being picked. That smell and the sight of the marauding worms and beetles nauseated her. She loathed the apples wounded on the ground, but she had never thought to pick one from a branch.
The tree seemed to be considering her just as she considered it. She felt its judgment. It wasn’t judging her for leaving the window open. That wasn’t her crime. Her crimes were deeper and more numerous: She wasn’t big enough to love Katherine as Katherine deserved. She wasn’t brave enough to love Brian as he deserved. She wasn’t strong enough to keep the things she loved alive (Bailey, Mimi), nor was she wise enough to grasp the meaning of their deaths.
Tibby was good at hiding. It was the one thing she knew how to do. She was good at sealing herself in a little box and waiting it out. But waiting for what? What was she waiting for?
She thought she’d learned a lesson from Katherine’s fall out the window. The lesson was: Don’t open, don’t climb, don’t reach, and you will not fall. But it was the wrong lesson! She had learned the wrong lesson!
The real lesson embodied in Katherine’s three-year-old frame was the opposite: Try, reach, want, and you may fall. But even if you do, you might be okay anyway.
Flexing her feet under the covers, Tibby thought of a corollary to this lesson: If you don’t try, you save nothing, because you might as well be dead.
Time passed for Bridget in the strangest way, a little forward, a little back. She was vaguely aware of Katie and Allison returning to the cabin. They probably assumed she was asleep, but that didn’t stop them from flipping on the light and gabbing noisily and turning on music. She suspected they’d been partying with the other remaining staff. They smelled like it, anyway.
Sometime after that, Eric returned. He sized up the situation with Katie and Allison. He was furious. “Can’t you see that Bee is sick? Why are you making all this noise? What the hell’s wrong with you?”
Even through her haze, Bridget could tell this was not a side of Eric she’d seen before.
“Dude. Back off,” Katie snapped. “Why are you barging into our cabin and telling us what to do?” She was too drunk to yield her ground,