Girls in Pants - Ann Brashares [72]
Furthermore, he had an excellent profile. Not a Ryan Hennessey profile exactly—Win’s nose was a tiny bit crooked, and his upper lip went out a little farther than his bottom one. But on him, it worked. It was fun how you could get away with watching someone when they drove. He concentrated on the road, and she braved a full look at him.
They barely knew each other, and yet they always had a project together. It was the opposite of most of her romantic relationships, which were all form and no content. Carmen was infamous for writing out talking points to use with the boys she dated. She never searched for things to say to Win.
“You’re close to your mother, huh?” he asked her thoughtfully.
“Yes.” It was the Good Carmen answer instead of the Whole Carmen answer. “What about you?”
“I’m close to both my parents,” he said. “I’m the only one, so it gets intense sometimes.”
“Me too,” Carmen chimed in. Then she remembered. “Until today, I guess.”
“Pretty strange, becoming a sister at the age of…how old are you?”
“Seventeen,” Carmen said.
“Seventeen,” he echoed.
“Almost eighteen. And you?” she asked. These were questions they could have gotten out of the way on an awkward date two months ago, but somehow they hadn’t.
“Nineteen.”
“And yeah, it is strange. Stranger than I can say.”
“I had a sibling for a short while.” He tried to say it lightly and conversationally, but it didn’t come out that way.
“What do you mean?” Carmen wanted to know, but she didn’t want to demand anything. “I mean, if you want to tell me.”
“I had a little brother. He was born when I was five and he died just before I turned six.”
“Oh.” Carmen’s tears were so near the surface these days, even a fourteen-year-old tragedy concerning a person she didn’t really know called them up. “I’m so sorry.”
“It was a long time ago. But he is part of my identity, you know?”
She didn’t know, but she could try to guess. She nodded.
“I still think about him sometimes. I dream about him too. I try to remember what he looked like. It’s hard to remember, though, either because of time or because of strong feelings. I sometimes think the stronger you feel about someone, the harder it is to picture their face when you are away from them.”
Carmen’s tears were falling now, and she tried to hide them from Win. He would interpret her tears as belonging to Good Carmen. He would think she was crying selflessly, for him and his family’s pain. Whereas Bad Carmen was crying because Win had spent a lifetime missing a baby who’d been lost, and she’d spent a summer resenting a baby who hadn’t yet come.
Tibby was learning something about her future. She was learning that it would not include having children. Not unless she adopted some.
Christina was in hell, and Tibby could barely watch it. With each contraction—and they seemed like they were coming all the time now—Christina seemed to lose some of herself. When she came down she was less focused, less coherent, less recognizable. Tibby glanced at the printout. One line followed the baby’s heartbeat and the other followed the quaking of Christina’s uterus. It reminded Tibby of a seismogram. Christina had gone from a five on the Richter scale to about a twenty. If Christina’s stomach were California, then California would be under the ocean by now.
Tibby tried calling her mother again, but there was no answer. Alice would know all about this stuff. She would know how to help. She was punching in Carmen’s cell number when a nurse appeared in her face.
“You have to put that away,” she snapped, pointing at Tibby’s cell phone. “It interferes with the equipment. You could get thrown out of here.”
Tibby considered that possibility with a certain amount of longing.
“Can you give her some medicine or something?” Tibby asked Lauren when she popped her head in. Tibby was afraid of this much pain. She didn’t know how to get close to it.
Lauren came over and put her hands on Christina’s shoulders. “You doing okay, honey?