Sisterhood Everlasting - Ann Brashares [101]
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